Home on the Range

I haven't been writing a lot here lately, or doing much of anything it seems. This past weekend I figured out why. And it wasn't a good time.

I changed the tagline on my blog last night, adding the phrase at the end, "and sometimes more specifically, motherhood." This is because the meaning of life seems to have stealthily boiled itself down to this in recent months.

I did not expect this. Having a baby at 36 for me meant that I had a full and established life and many fulfilling self-identities. Writer, feminist, domestic violence advocate, wife, loyal friend to many...These things were all me, or at least who I tried to be. Dare I say I actually felt pretty well-adjusted after many years of being what I considered very out of balance. Welcoming Noah into my life felt truly like a holy blessing, as I think I had felt somewhere deep inside me that this would never be possible for me. As my pregnancy progressed (and the hormone-induced sickness receded), I became more and more excited and confident. And it has been a wonderful eight-and-a-half months since Noah was born.

So why, then, in the past few weeks, did I turn sour on myself? I began having more complaints about work, and at home became more grumbly with my husband and more listless about my own writing projects. I still felt joy at being with Noah, but everything else seemed to be blanching out. I was starting to feel and act negatively toward myself because of all these hard feelings that were surfacing about seeming minutiae (compared to the monumentally fabulous Noah) that have piled up over months and months. It continued it that vein, until this past Sunday, when I had just had it, and shut down. I didn't want to talk with anyone, including my husband, and felt miserable. I didn't feel I could even call a friend.

Finally late on Sunday night - late being 8:15 p.m. in the new land of Mommy time - I called my best friend. I told him I hadn't called before because I didn't have any energy to give or to listen to him and that didn't seem fair. I heard myself talking in a very small little girl-sounding voice, slow and almost a whisper, which made me recognize I just don't get vulnerable all that often anymore. That made me very sad and I cried and said how lonely and isolated I felt. I said I did't feel I had the right to complain about anything when I had this wonderful baby, a patient and loving husband, live in a great home, have a flexible job, relative financial stability...It must be me that was the problem here. Oh those old demons. And Kevin, my dearest friend, slowly said the following: "Katie, you are entitled to the full range of emotions every day, no matter what is going on, just like everyone else." I felt the anchor go down and stick in the mud. Yes, of course. I knew once that was true, but had forgotten it. In all of the loving and feeding and diapering and playing and reading and kissing and cuddling and peek-a-boo-ing, I had utterly forgotten it.

Then we talked about how being a mother for me is easy and hard. What I find easy is seeing and understanding Noah's needs. It feels very natural to tune into his sounds, facial expressions, gestures, cries. And given that he is big and smiling, I think what my husband and I are doing with him is working very well overall. What is hard, is that it is every second of every minute of every hour of every day. Unless Noah is with Matthew, my highest thoughts are of his safety, comfort, and happiness. All the time. And it has to be that way - Noah is so vulnerable and new and deserves my best efforts to give him a good start in life. Anything else feels selfish.

I started to feel a little bit better, saying these things, until Noah cried upstairs 15 minutes into the call, and I had to hang up, stuff my feelings back down, and go take care of him. The next morning I still felt lousy and emotionally hung over and it went like this. Matthew leaving for work: Don't I get a kiss? Me: No, I don't want to do that anymore.

Ouch.

Throughout the course of that day, I took many steps. I called a friend who works in the field at another organization in Maine and talked through my recent work concerns and this mothering mess. Then an acquaintance called and gently pushed through my resistance to kindness and we planned an afternoon visit that day for our babies to meet each other and us to talk. Then that night the woman who married my husband and I called, and I let go and talked openly.

That was so big, to let go. When I went into labor one of the most challenging moments was when I was having hard contractions but had not been checked to see if I was progressing, and so all I knew was that I was not dilated much at all - maybe 1 centimeter. I couldn't believe that these contractions didn't count, because they were so painful and strong. The previous 18 hours I had more mild contractions at home that I was most comfortable dealing with in a side-lying position. So that's what I was trying again and it was not working at all. Matthew asked what I needed and I said I had no idea. I felt panic. For a moment I clung to the idea that I should be lying down because that should start working any second. I quickly broke that train of thought because it was simply too painful to stay that way, and got up to try something else.

So I get it. It's too painful in the long run to recognize Noah's needs and not my own as well. It's not an either-or. A friend of mine who was a judge at the time mailed me a card to welcome Noah a while back and it read, "Parenting is not a sprint but a marathon." I loved the idea at the time - now I'm starting to get it. While I've read as often as anyone else the articles in every parenting magazine published about "taking time for yourself," I didn't understand how that would become real for me. I knew how to do that. Self-care in the past meant treating myself to lunch with a girlfriend or splurging on a pedicure. Now I need time just to feel my feelings, to create my opinions, to make small plans for myself, to maintain some sense of all that I am now. I want Noah to know all that I am, and I want him to know that he gets to be all that he is too.

Monday night over dinner my husband and I talked some of this over. He made the astute observation that I could also be grieving for my old life and identity(ies), even while I embrace this new one - a whole topic for another day. This shift to being a mother is so profound I think I'm just starting to take it in emotionally. But in those two days, I know I made some headway toward being a mother and bringing forward some of the other important parts of me at the same time. At the end of it I felt peaceful, like I'd come home.