Loose Ends and a Watering Can

Arlo and Matthew are asleep, and Noah is off with a friend at Vacation Bible School for the evening.  I am not ready to sleep.  I could work, knock a few shows off the recordings, write in my journal.  But I have a lonely, restless feeling, one that definitely needs a little attention, a little managing.

Sometimes I have these moments when I wonder what it will be like when my children are grown, and it is just my husband and me again.  We've had so little time together.  We met and married quickly, in less than a year.  We had Noah a year and a half after that.  He was our focus for the next 6 years, and then Arlo joined us a year and a half ago - so we started again.  Life is incredibly busy with two children, no matter how I simplify our home and our schedule.  Matthew and I have never been away overnight together since we had Noah.  We haven't been out on even a dinner date since Arlo was born. 

When I met Matthew, it was like everyone I'd previously dated or lived with suddenly clustered together as common experiences, and he was in a different box all by himself.  It was more like I recognized him than was introduced to him.  And like me, he had been through some relationships which felt like fighting battles.  We were both sure of what we saw in the other, and we joined hands and jumped, wholeheartedly.

But, as must so often be the case, we bring our battles along with us.  Next year we will be married 10 years, and our boys will be 8 and 2.  So much behind with them, and still a long way to go.  My children are the best thing about my life.  In my life before Matthew I didn't dare to imagine being a mom in any detail, and couldn't possibly have accurately imagined it anyway.  And now it is my life, the biggest and most meaningful part of my day-to-day.

And I miss my husband so much.  At the same time, sometimes I feel like I don't know what I'm missing, because I've learned more deeply about him the hard way - sleep-deprived, with small children needing and wanting, needing and wanting, as we try to need and want alongside them.  Something has had to give, and it has been our needs and wants a lot of the time, at least as they relate to time with each other.  Time to talk, to laugh, to console, to get to know.  We've done the best we could.  Sometimes I think we should be farther along as a couple, somehow doing this better, whatever that means, since it has been 10 years.  And sometimes I think, we've given that time to them, our sweet little people, and given it more than willingly.  We wouldn't have had it any other way.  And so how much could I really even know about my husband?  Still, 10 years is a long time to be with someone.

I wish I could talk with other couples, about marriage.  About what they do to keep going, to keep the faith, to shore up the crumbling bridges.  It's clear that the fighting battles paradigm does not a peaceful marriage make.  Tonight it doesn't feel like it's full of mistakes or hardships, it's just that I wish my friend was here, downstairs, feeling companionable, and like so many moments when we are dividing labor, working our jobs, caring for our children in different directions, I am missing him instead, passing him in the fog of the days, watching him from a very long way off.  

I wrote a poem once a long time ago, before I knew Matthew, and I am thinking of it tonight:

Mummified

You are something I cannot touch

and I cannot be touched.

There is a barbed wire fence around my head.

My hair a tangle of snarls and burrs in it,

my fingers scarred from ancient attempts

at cutting the wire.

A tornado engulfs my body.

It is impossible to focus on the whirling mass

of dust and molecules that make me up

from the neck down.

So I stand isolated

head locked up like a jewelry box

body a binary star in motion

and you an onlooker

with no eyes.

We are hopeless you and I

no power to touch

no power to see

only lost in our own heads

to imagine what it is

we keep bumping up against.

Maybe that poem is more hopeless than it needs to be, or maybe I just needed a little space to let that part of me breathe so I can go on to tell my lonely, restless self that not being seen tonight, in this moment, is not the worst thing that could happen.  I am a lucky woman.  There is no way around it.  A very fortunate woman.  Tonight, this quiet prayer finds the seed there still, gratitude in the dusty soil, and this finger pointing up to the light.

Sproing!

I know that Spring has come to Maine when I find myself driving behind a huge tractor towing the sharpest, spikiest, most unidentifiable piece of farm equipment I've ever seen, and it's all over the road.  Taking a break from practicing the training I am about to deliver, I try to determine how many jobs this piece of equipment can fulfill.  I am still coming up with ideas when it finally careens off the road into a driveway.

Everything is coming out all over, as we all lurch into Spring.  I can't believe it is mid-May.  I feel like it must mean something, but I can't remember or think of what it is.  That is part of the discombobulation.  The field around our house went from dead to lush green in less than a week.  Yet we've also lit a few fires in the woodstove in the past several days because of the cold temperatures.

Arlo began sleeping a big chunk of time at night (6-7 hours) about a month or so back, so I am coming out of the longest, most sleep-deprived time of my life.  This is its own herky-jerky, false-start sort of experience.  I feel a renewed connection with him, spontaneous joy, and delight bubbling up at lots of moments throughout any given day.  I simultaneously feel like, "Where have I been?  What the Hell happened?"  Whether it was exhaustion or depression or both over this winter, who knows - I was blurry, many times unable to put sentences together, and overall so underwater that I wasn't even missing being able to talk anyway.  I read an article the other day that described the first year for moms of sleepless babies as the "Dark Time," and while I wouldn't have dared describe it that way when I was in it, looking back it sure does smell bleak and foggy to me now.

I have been out weeding the flower garden for a half hour a day for the past week.  I do not remember weeding the garden a single time last summer - I think my stepson did it for me finally at the end of the summer.  Strangely, the flowers are somehow blooming, despite being embedded in a strangling carpet of witch grass.  And as with the rest of my life, I am trying to bring it all back into the fold, slowly, 15 minutes at a time here and there.  It's baby steps, but at least I am on my feet again, right?

There were a lot of days over the winter when I didn't feel like getting up because I was so tired I couldn't imagine navigating the day ahead, and going to bed at night was no better because I knew I wouldn't sleep two hours in a row.  Now it is the exception when Arlo wakes for the first time before 2 or 3 in the morning, and he always sleeps again until 6 or 6:30.  Through this winter I attended to my consulting projects, washed and folded endless loads of laundry, tried new recipes, and made a few, but not many, phone calls.  But mostly what I recall, is being cold, and very, very tired.

So Arlo is changing as the world awakens, and it all is moving forward, growing, and showing itself.  It's a wild world, and as the mountain passes open, the water rushes everywhere, trying to join with other water.  The newspaper is full of enhanced craziness, but mostly I am paying attention to the others I see stretching and squinting into the light too, looking to connect again.  It's so nice to be among the living, something it is easy to forget in the dark of winter in Maine.  Today as Arlo and I filled the birdbath together, we stopped to watch two Canadian geese fly and honk overhead.  "Dat!  Dat!" He said.  I wholeheartedly agree.

Sometimes Parenting is NOT About Multitasking

After what feels like months of filling every moment of every day, so that even the very end of day before bedtime is crammed with piles of laundry, and brushing my teeth and getting my pajamas on feels like one more chore, today it feels much stiller.  Arlo is sick, and wants me to hold him.  Which I have done since 6:00 this morning when he woke up, after a long night of me sleeping next to his feverish hot potato body.

He has largely slept, in that lethargic, eye rolling way, waking to cry for a minute, before he slumps back into a hot sleep again.  And so I have typed some work, watched a mini-marathon of t.v. shows on my computer, did a few conference calls.  And here I am writing for pleasure, as he sleeps on in my arms.  But it has been one thing at a time, often one-handed one thing at a time, but this rather than three or more things at a time, when I would normally make lunch for myself, for Arlo, wash the breakfast dishes, sweep and mop the floor, pay our bills, and answer the phone, while work whistled to me from my office.  None of that today though, just one at a time, with a big baby on me, heating my lap right through his clothes and the blanket he is wrapped up in.

Recently I was saying to my husband that I am afraid at times that Arlo doesn't like me very much.  A more accurate statement at the time probably would have been that I don't like me very much, and that parenting at this juncture feels especially hard, which is how Matthew responded.  Hard and busy, not my favorite combination because the time for reflection, for regrouping, is usually between the time Arlo falls asleep for a nap and when I walk to my computer to work.  A matter of seconds, if any time at all.  Put one thing down and pick up another.  Put one down, and pick one up.  Put down, pick up.  Round and round I often go like a whirling dervish, except with a lot less grace than the actual dervishes, if you've ever seen them.

But today, Arlo is very close to me.  On me.  Needing me.  Every time he opens his eyes he needs me to say that he's going to be alright.  He asks, every time, with his tired, sick eyes, with his little hands clutching me.  With his cry.  And so today Mommy lets a lot of the other voices fall away, and I hold Arlo and pick away at this and that, one thing at a time.  The cacophony stills.  It is so rare for a day to be one-note right now, and being with a sick child (who is not too sick) is a strange kind of quiet.  It is a worried quiet, a sad quiet, and also a restful one.

Long Winter Disease

I, and everyone I know, has had it with this particular Maine winter.  It came on too strong, too fast in December, gave us a cold, powerless Christmas, cold and more cold to follow, and for my little family, weekly if not daily furnace troubles that continue as we now navigate a complaint against our furnace manufacturer.

Among the many other things I cannot bear any longer, is carrying over the item week after week on my TO DO list in my calendar book.  "Blog."  "Blog."  "Blog."  Maybe if I'd underlined it, or put it in all capitals, or said "Please blog," or "I'll give you $10 if you blog today," then I would have done it sooner.  Done it every three days, or even once a month.  But it has somehow been easier to carry it along on my TO DO list, feeling sluggier and sluggier about my meek writer identity.

I have, however, done some mommy blog reading in the last several months, but one day last month they all started to come across to me as somehow formulaic.  It might have been the same day as our last snowstorm, when my days began feeling formulaic too.  But the blogs, post after post of how bittersweet is motherhood, how wild the latest multitasking cacophony, how downright crazy are the expectations on mothers, and the various responses from martyr, to cheerful participant, to grim co-anchor.  Tedious is the word that comes to mind as I think over these blogs, as completely uncharitable as that sounds towards the authors and mothers in general.  I have been particularly disheartened by a few mommy blogs I've read that include flamboyant cursing in every sentence.  I'm struck by how unfunny these posts are, but sadly am not sure why, either because these mothers are trying so hard, or because I don't have the energy to laugh with them.  Let's face it, I'm really fed up with myself.

That is the major symptom of long winter disease, by the way - a feeling of general joylessness, resulting in related symptoms of snappish relating, dragging feet, and overall impatience with the present moment coupled with the feeling that there is no better moment to go to.  Another major symptom I experience is tired parenting.  There is no other phrase for it that I can come up with.  Tired people doing tired parenting.  And it's not much fun for parents or kids - I can't recommend it.

So I am thus flailing about, beginning March unlike a lion.  If I muster energy on a given day it somehow gets sucked into questioning - my marriage, my friendships, my parenting, my housecleaning.  My clothes.  If I do not have energy, then I am slightly better able to let go of all of this and focus on taking care of Arlo (read: tired parenting), doing some consulting work, mopping the kitchen floor, and playing a board game at the counter with Noah when he gets home from school.  Long winter disease wreaks the most havoc with my life in these weeks when the normal moments of attending to the little things, the things that anchor me, provide me meaning and direction, and often such joy, become a stream of irritating, buzzing mosquitoes.  An endless pile of bricks to stack.  A recurring dream of an emergency but I can't dial the rotary phone for help.  You get the idea.  Please, Mother Nature, mother me and bring on the melting and the mud, so I can go out and play again. 

A Mother Getting By

The other day, the only way I got through the grocery store with Arlo was to let him suck on my braid.  By the time I got to the checkout, my hair and shoulder were drenched with baby drool, and he was still gripped to my pigtail like it was the rope that would save him from pirhanas.  The cashier politely ignored my glazed eyes.

But we had food.

As I worked feverishly on a consulting project deadline after getting Arlo to bed one night, I heard a wail rise from upstairs.  Running up, I met Noah at the bedroom door.  He told me that he was terrified of a cartoon creature in a book he was reading.  "I can't get over it," he said matter-of-factly.  "I have to sleep in your bed."  So Arlo, me, and Noah, slept sandwiched together on my side of our king-sized bed, until deep in the night when Noah was peacefully heavy and I could drag him back into his twin bed a few feet away.

But he woke happy.

The eighth time I called my internet service provider to learn that a technician had actually been to my house, had checked a wire outside and repaired a "sync issue," but hadn't bothered to knock on the door to determine whether my computer actually could connect to the internet, which it couldn't, I thought my head might split open as I calmly said, "It must be something other than a sync issue then.  I'm glad to hear at least that isn't the problem," having no idea what a sync issue is.  "Can you please send a technician to come inside my house?"

But my internet works again.

So many days I ask myself, "What else can I possibly simplify?"  My schedule, my life, my home, my business.  Selling three of our five vehicles.  Giving away the old lawn mower.  Regifting, consigning, Goodwill-ing.  Forgoing a vegetable garden this year.  Putting away calendars so there are less pages to flip, or daily blocks to rotate each morning.  Eliminating idiosyncratic feeding systems for the cats.  Trying to make it easier to focus on Noah and Arlo and keep afloat.  

My dear aunt Barbara often reminds me, as a mom of two grown boys who have families of their own now, that having two children can get wild.  It is always good to hear this, as I have a hard time supporting myself when I think about one of the doctors in our local practice, who raised five children, or my mother-in-law, who also had five.  Having two children at the heart of my life has turned every day into an adventure in meeting needs, getting food, creating fun, supporting good health.  The simple truth is that there is nothing simple about it.  I cannot simultaneously go for a bike ride with Noah and lie down with Arlo for him to take a nap, no matter how skilled I am at multitasking.  And this moment, like most of the waking ones, takes active negotiation.  Do this poorly, and there will be another issue to negotiate shortly.  

Sometimes I imagine myself as a waterlogged fish.  Overwhelmed in my preferred environment.  Confused, because being out of the bowl isn't an option.  Partly afraid of drowning.  Loving the water.  It just doesn't make sense.  It must just be like this, being a fish?  Even with all the reality mommy media out there in the culture, it does not come easy to me to say, this is me with two children.  Often I feel instead like "Surely, we can do better."  Most of the time, though, there is rarely anything to actually do except sink or swim.   

"The truth about me is...": 15 minutes of writing on this prompt from a friend

The truth about me is that I was not nearly as patient, kind, or selfless, as I acted for much of my life.  The truth is that a desperate grasping extended through me from my childhood origins, drawing to me so many who also only expected darkness in their lives.  I think by generous fate and no small effort of my own, my own light was not put out by that cloud, and so the hopeful ones have come along too, but often they have bored me or passed me by, not lighting the torch of my misery enough to keep me interested in their presence.

The truth about me is that I have lived many sad years.  Bright and sunny on the outside, deeply doubting and unable to console myself on my deepest levels.  Doubting love, feeling it to be an empty promise.  And yet, throwing myself at it again and again, blindly seeing neither the object of my latest affection, nor myself. 

The truth about me now is that since turning 40 I have discovered compassion for myself.  Choosing a life partner and bearing children has pointed me to the inarguable existence of my own desires and dreams, my own solid path apart from where I came.  I think I understand now that it takes some living to get here, to what I’m coming to think of as the Good Stuff.  When some of the old voices stop mumbling in my ears and I can hear my truer thoughts.  Much like it takes writing a lot of sad clown poems to get to one that sings instead of shuffling along, hoping to be good enough, it has taken some living for me to decide that it is more worth it to know myself than to remain loyal to others’ ideas of me, or who they need me to be.

 
The truth about me is that I was as I needed to be then, as I am now.  My younger self lived a certain kind of truth, albeit one that looks more dangerous and confused to me from my current vantage point.  This self that is becoming what might be called middle-age still gets confused, but I have a clearer sense of what brings me peace and happiness – and it is not the excitement of the race.  The race away from everything that scared me, the race toward the unavailable.  Top speed, in a dark room, racing.  The truth about me is that I am slowing down beautifully, and feel the confidence of walking intentionally, able to name some of the things that I want, and don’t, and the grace in the things I have.  The truth about me is showing itself, singing as she comes.

The Best Mommy Blog that Never Was

I have been doing a lot of writing lately, not that anyone would ever know it, because the last three blog posts I've begun have been interrupted.  Going back to a writing about current events in the world or my home is almost impossible at this point, because things are moving so fast around here that news quickly becomes old.  And then, the limited time I have to come to my desk often ends up being spent deleting comments from hackers who have nothing better to do than plaster whacko gobbledy-gook all over the internet.  

Weeks past the Boston Marathon bombings, I am unable to revive my started post about that, and all the mother thoughts I had about the two young brothers primarily responsible.  I found much of the commentary out there deeply unsatisfying, in everything from parenting blogs online to articles in "The Nation," but I suppose when I compare most writers to Annie Lamott, who can knock my socks off with a Facebook post, those others don't really stand a chance.  I think "The Onion" hit the nail on the head in its beautifully profane article about that particular week, which also boasted a dead anti-gun violence bill in Congress two days after the bombing: http://www.theonion.com/articles/jesus-this-week,32105/

So today, a day in which I've already been able to both shower and floss my teeth, I know the stars are in some alignment that cannot be ignored and I better attempt to write.  And yet, my initial thoughts are swirls and whirls of things undone.  Previous blog posts.  Another batch of cookies for Teacher Appreciation Week.  A consulting project or two.  Updating the quotes on the right side of my blog.  And I'm sure there's a diaper in the works in the other room.  My older son Noah has been home sick from school for three days with a fever that just won't die down, so I've been having board game marathons with him while simultaneously working on two consulting projects and taking care of Arlo, who let's just say is not a napper in the same way Noah was.  He takes cat naps that are itty bitty compared to Noah's 4-hour sleep marathons as a baby.  These are the kind of naps that leave me sighing with joy at his peacefulness and my freedom one second and then sighing like a holy martyr as I give up the expectation of a little down time when I peek at him and his huge blue eyes are staring quietly up at me.

But he does have beautiful blue eyes, and it feels slightly blasphemous to complain about anything about parenting when I wanted him so badly, and tried for so long, and suffered such a miserable pregnancy to bring him into the world.  And got him all the same, at 43 years old.  Those beautiful clear blue eyes hold the answers to my prayers and are completely worth it.  When I look at Arlo I have a sense of what I have done, that we can move through almost anything toward what we want most, if we are clear that we want it.  He and Noah are so obviously worth the interruption of just about anything else in my life.

I often think about a local woman who owned a dry cleaning business nearby that closed down a couple of years ago.  I used to bring Noah in, and she would come out and exclaim about how beautiful he was.  She had raised boys of her own, and said how much she missed the time when they were little.  She was a beautiful petite woman who always dressed like she was going on a date, not like she was going to run the dry cleaning place, and I always left knowing that these are the best years of my life, when Noah and now Arlo are here with me.

That doesn't take away from the fact that I've been up at 4 a.m. the past three mornings, or that there are many things in my life that I also care about that are going undone, which at any given moment can really make me go batsh*t crazy.  But these important things are happening.  My children.  To my great satisfaction.  A wise person reminded me recently that making a decision to do anything by definition means another thing goes undone.  And that this is a painful or at least difficult part of life, and growing up.  And having a family, certainly.  Making choices.  But you know what?  Sometimes I still delude myself with thoughts of being a famous writer someday, who will get that way by some kind of shortcut or late-run burst, since my day-in, day-out commitment has been to a career in anti-violence work and in more recent years, my children.  My boys make me realize that anything is possible, so why not this dream too?