Is That All There Is?

Being a mother and working from home were never on my shortlist.

Beard and I have a wedding anniversary on Monday.
We'll be married for seven years that day.
It's strange, like my birthday, I remember counting down the days until the supposed day of celebration, and then when it arrived, nothing about my life was suspended in excitement. The baby was still colicky. The sleep was still very hard to come by. The boobs were still on call, and the plans to go out for one drink with my friends ended getting pitched out the window because of said colicky baby. I ended up nursing him to sleep while sitting on our porch with two girlfriends at hand. I drank a thumb's worth of wine, and I didn't even finish it, because I was too tired.

Usually, on our anniversary, I get Beard something horror related and nerdy, like tickets to Rock and Shock (sssshhhhh), and he gets me flowers, and something weird (like a ring that looks like a giant silver book), and we go out to dinner somewhere nearby, have one or two drinks, talk about how much we like each other, and then come home and well...have a respectable evening.

Ahem.


As we approach our anniversary this year, there's a lot about it that feels different. Not only have we been married for 7 years, but we've been together for a grand total of 10, which feels pretty momentous. Also, we have a baby, who fortuitously will be 9 months old exactly on the date of our anniversary which, whomp whomp is a Monday.

In view of my super embarrassing mama meltdown two weeks ago, I don't think it's wise to plan some extravagant event, like a party, a night at a hotel in Boston, or any of the other super rad ideas I could come up with. But I don't want the date to come and go with zero fanfare because I have this deep dark fear that when you become a parent you stop celebrating your life and your achievements and only celebrate your child's. It's one of the many reasons I didn't want kids  for so long, that inevitable loss of self, and with it all of the pleasures for which I (hedonist extraordinaire) live.

I know it's taboo. As parents, we aren't supposed to say things like, "I miss the old me", or "A Saturday night where I don't have to worry about a baby would sure be a relief". Even more verboten is the expression of such ideas as, "I don't want my kid to stop me from feeling good about myself as a writer, artist, lover, partner, friend, etc" "I don't want parenting to stop me from being the best version of myself and then expect me to bargain that it's okay because I'm living vicariously through my child." No thank you. Also, that way madness lies. That's where retired ballerinas nurture injury and eating disorders in their own progeny or former career women place unrealistic expectations on their own children's performances in school and sport to live out their competitive instincts.

I don't want that.
I want pixie dust and education and nature and curiosity and joy.

But I want that for me and for Baz.

I'd also really like to spend an evening with my husband by ourselves instead of playing,
"Hold the baby while I do the dishes."
"Okay now you hold the baby while I go pee"
"Okay now you hold the baby while I go outside and summon godzilla".

I don't have the right answer yet, and that's what kills me.
All the things I worry about, the stuff I cheat myself out of or simply find too hard, I hate the idea that I'll look back on it all in the not so distant future and think,  "Why was I such a wuss? I should have just gone ahead and done the thing!"

Except that when I tried to do the thing two weeks ago, I folded like a card table.
Unfortunately, I think I'm not going to come up with the right answer. The smart money says, Beard will say, "It's no big deal sweetie. Let's just get some Chinese food, and hang out as a family."
And I will say "Sure."
Because it is the easy answer. Because I am too tired, too hungry, too worn out from trying to work while a 9 month old gnaws on my shoulder, or tears out my hair, or screams for hours on end, and I just don't have it in me to fight.


Even if I would be fighting for myself.

Just a Number

This year I turned thirty four.

It's an age I tried not to think about for a long time. I remember sometime, somewhere, maybe high school, maybe just in the vast existence of female-ness in the united states, I learned that women thirty five and older are no longer considered "young".
There was a lot infused into that label too.
I was well into my twenties when the insanely underrated film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang came out but I remember seeing Michelle Monegan's character, gorgeous, confident, total package, correcting Robert Downey Jr's grammar in an LA bar, suddenly distracted by a foxy looking blonde with sinister eyeliner in the corner. I'm paraphrasing here, but she basically derides the woman to Jr by saying something along the lines of "I can't believe she's thirty five and still trying to make it as an actress in hollywood."
Of course Jr unblinkingly replies with, "And how old are you?"
Monegan bats her eyelashes coquettishly and sips at her drink before responding. "I'm thirty four. I'm a baby."

That scene stuck with me. Not only because she was just so fucking cool in it, but because it epitomizes the obsession with youth and beauty and the value of women as a cultural norm. Even while she is kind of acknowledging the ludicrous system, she's also buying into it, big time, and that's how I see oh I don't know, EVERY SINGLE INTELLIGENT WOMAN I KNOW RESPONDING TO IT.
It's not cool to acknowledge that getting older scares you unless you're twenty two and it's basically hilarious to everyone except you. It is however, cool to acknowledge that you are getting older, but you bear none of the trappings of your age. For example, you not only look a solid decade younger than what it says on your drivers license, but you know all the current media and pop and news obsessions without being too invested in any of them. You're tech savvy but not tech dependent, and you constantly joke about how behind the times you are while on the most current updated version of the the "app du jour".
You are painstakingly aware of the most recent hairstyles and fashion trends, but you always twist them to your own personal style, which you've obviously established since you're almost thirty? just turned thirty? thirty-ish? Hahaha, you laugh with a toss of your no-gray unless it's applied by a salon and only in a balayage ombre effect hair, as you deftly avoid the question.

You've probably noticed, like me that there's a great deal of bad news floating around. War, starvation, animal torture, massacres, violence, and horrifically backwards prejudice and injustice to name just a few. In response to this almost daily barrage of negativity, the social media controlled by the little guy is all about positivity and inclusion and love.

There's body positivity, LGBTQ activism and rights, race equality newsfeeds, motherhood support groups, and all kinds of sites, grams, and the like devoted to embracing everyone's differences and encouraging us to love ourselves for our individuality and our quirks or "flaws" which, back when I was in high school, would have gotten you laughed at and ostracized.
There's even a movement for childless, single women to be allowed to not think of themselves as broken! Whddayaknow!?

It's all very well and good, but where is the inclusion for the aging children of the 80's, who, while technically defined as Millennials, carry with them a great deal of the overbearing, unrelenting ageism of that era.
We're too young to identify with the Generation X'ers who are, in their forties, suddenly realizing they don't give a damn what the kids think of their Green Day patches and their sagging nose rings, but we're too old (and frankly too educated) to buy into the bubblegum, hyper positive, pastel everything twenty somethings.

I realized the other day that instagram is the last social media app I downloaded to my phone, and it might be the last one I download for good. I have no interest in Snapchat (or, Jeez even Snapchat's kind of old, what is everyone on right now? Vine is dead...What's next?), Pokemon Go, or whatever everyone's communicating on right now.
I realized about four years ago, when I cancelled my cable and just surrendered to the voluptuous library of netflix that I would no longer have any idea what the Kardashians were doing, nor would I know whether Justin Bieber or Drake had a new album, or who the next big thing was and why they were so big.

It was the best, most grown up decision I have made in my thirties.

I realized I never liked pop music, but I had been force-fed it, along with a diet of commercials and brand placement to the point where I had a vast repertoire of music, celebrities, television shows, and pretend-a-news taking up valuable real estate in my brain.

About six months ago, at my office, I overheard a couple of people discussing a reality program I had never heard of called "Naked Dating" or something. After a second or two I had to clap my hands over my mouth to keep from hooting in disbelief. A television show, where people go out on blind dates NAKED?! What humiliation porn is this? I have nightmares like that!

I see how I am out of the loop in a lot of things just by making that decision.
I don't watch television when it first comes out. And guess what? With some graceful social media sidestepping, I don't see the spoilers, and so when I order seven discs of Game of Thrones, I wallow in it just as happily two or three years behind you who breathlessly kept up with every episode as it came to HBO.

I am also getting more confident in my thirties. I'm confident that I've lived enough and learned enough to back up my choices. I don't balk when people question a decision I've made because I didn't make that decision based on either the thing that my best friend told me she was doing, or what that news segment on E television told me EVERYONE is doing now.

I don't listen to podcasts.
Yeah.
I know.
But I am a visual learner, and I cannot pay attention to talk radio or audiobooks either, so why even bother? I tried a couple of times, and about seven minutes into whatever I was listening to, I was always thinking about something else, or wishing I was reading.

I'm okay with it.

And I guess I have to get okay with thirty five and up too.
Because it's coming.
The big thing that I keep reminding myself in my ageism soaked brain is that someday, I will look back at my thirties and they will seem how my late teens and early twenties seem to me now: a precious time that I was at my physical and mental best that I wasted fretting about what was going to happen next.

I know there is a lot of pressure to buy a house at my age, to start a family if I haven't, to start saving for retirement, upgrade my wardrobe, get healthy, etc etc, but the truth is, I still have a lot of time ahead of me, and that includes time spent making a whole host of mistakes.

I have yet to regret doing anything in the order I have done it so far.
I got married at twenty seven and waited six years before having a kid. I waited a decade after graduating from college to get my master's, and I no longer buy clothing at Forever 21.

I collect postcards because I love physical representations of the traveling I and my friends have done.

I don't wear a ton of make up, but I can do a decent eyeliner wing if I need to, and I recently figured out how to do it while holding a twenty two lb baby on my hip, so that's impressive.

I am thirty four and a half, and I could stare down the barrel of thirty five, and that ascension to the next age bracket on the census, but I'd rather look at the many age brackets I have ahead of me, and think about what I can do now, so that when I am in the one furthest to the right, I look back at all the others and admire all the insanely awesome cool things I did in my thirties, forties, and fifties, and adjust my nosering proudly as I check off the box marked 60+ and wink to my herrband next to me as I say, "Sixty-four? I'm a baby."

The Letter I Can't Post

Dear Mum,

Yesterday, I was trying to explain to Dad that I had been crippled by an anxiety attack on Friday night for the first time in years. He, along with Bob, and the one other close friend who knows about this, all said I sounded like I was experiencing some postpartum depression and that my hormones were out of whack and I probably needed therapy.

He also said that I was wasting my time if I wasn't talking to you about it because, as my mother, you would be the person who knew best what I was going through.

The problem is, I can't talk to you about it, and not because I don't think you would understand, because I know you would, but because you can't make it better, and that will hurt you.

You see, it's not postpartum depression. It's not hormones. It's not the anxiety of the new mother that's overwhelming me.

It's all the fucking imminent death.

Granny getting really sick was very scary. I was surprised by how upset it made me, and I realized it's because I promised her she'd get to meet her great grandson, and I have yet to fulfill that promise.
Similarly, it was scary because when I talked to you about it, you told me how things were with her, watching her struggle and fight and get angry and be ready, and I listened to how you, a child, were preparing yourself for the loss of your parent. I listened as you told me about how your uncle had died while you were with your mother, and I heard the tears in your voice because it was too much to think about.

I listened, and I heard how tired you were, and how resigned you are, and how, no matter how prepared you make yourself for death, when it's in the room with you, there is no being ready.

I listened to you, and I thought about Dad.
How I will someday, someday much sooner than I am ready for, be in your position. I will be watching my parent struggle and fight and get angry and then acquiesce as his body finally fails.
I will prepare myself, and then I will still be taken by surprise by how much it hurts, the loss, when it happens.

I can't talk to you about this because he's your husband.
And losing him is going to hurt you so much too. It is unfair of me to place my loss above yours, because neither outweighs the other. They both suck.
And they both incapacitate us to comfort the other.

I feel so helpless.
And I think that's why I fell apart on Friday.
I keep losing people.

I lost myself when I had the baby.
I don't know who this person is, but I mourn the girl I used to be. I have faith that this new version of myself will be better in many ways than she was, but I don't know her yet, and I am sad. I miss the old me even though I would not trade her for him any day.

I lost Sarah (my sister) for some reason this Spring. She doesn't want anything to do with me or the baby. After depending on me for three years when she first moved here, after I helped her get a job, get a place to live, after I did nothing but give her soft landing after soft landing while she went through hard times, she has completely abandoned me during the time I am in the most need. She promised me she would be here when I needed her after the baby was born.
And she broke that promise.

Then, when I got angry, hurt, and upset enough to confront her about it, she acted as though I were mad. She accused me of infantilizing her and blowing things out of proportion. She never once apologized. She still hasn't. She hasn't made any effort to even see the baby again. It hurts me every day that my own sister doesn't want to be a part of my son's life.

Alex is lost, but in a different way. She's been eaten by another movie. She works and works, and she texts and sometimes calls, and tries to invite me to things that I can't go to, but it's not for lack of trying. I can't be mad at her because she clearly wants to be part of my life. She wants to be around the baby. She tells me she misses us all the time. It just sucks that we haven't seen her in four months.

Granny is going to be gone soon, and I don't know if I'll get to introduce her to her great grandson like I promised. I feel horrible about it. I am rushing to print out passport renewal forms. I may have a plan to get to Canada by the end of October. I refuse to go down without a fight. There at leasr is something I can do.

Dad is sick.
We don't know how much longer we have left with him.
It could be eight more years.
It could be three.

I am drowning in loss.
Every day I look at the baby and I grow more sad that someday I will have to leave him alone in this world too. I see how you are experiencing Granny's decline, and I feel how I will miss Dad, and I see my child and I want to protect him from this pain.
I can't.

The thing that makes life so sweet is its most bitter counterpart.

I know you are probably best equipped to talk to me about all of this, but in truth it feels cruel to bring it all to you and ask you to make it better.
Not only is that not something you can do, but not being able to do it will make you feel like you are failing me somehow, and the last thing I want to do is make you feel worse.

I already know how this powerlessness is the kind of thing that makes us scream.
We are better when we have tasks to do that make us feel effective.
There is no mess to clean up, no event to organize, no, at this moment, there is nothing to do but wait.

And the waiting is killing me.
And I can't tell you that.

Do you know where your bruises come from?

I don't.

I wake up every morning with blue marks on my legs that look like the ominous shadows of fingerling potatoes, bullet tip sized green irises on my arms, the centers of the eyes of impact, now bloodshot and firm to the touch in my jelly like flesh.

The daily humiliations of having my hair ripped out by tiny, lovable, chubby fists: the flop of extra skin from the pregnancy that still hangs from my abdomen some 37 weeks after the babe entered the world; the unrecognizable nips on the end of these new, incredibly important tits I own, as long as a fingertip and as pink and unfeeling as a pencil eraser except when nipped by newly budding teeth, when they blossom with crimson crescent tooth marks, accompanied with sharp intakes of breath, and my resounding cry of "no!"

Now these daily tribulations are added to with the discovery that I am receiving beatings of which I am unaware. I must be, or else where would these shadows on my shins be coming from?

So too are these shadows in my brain. These uncomfortable blooms of suspicion and misery, that like these small indigo spots on my skin, show up after some unobserved, small act of violence.

Is this postpartum depression?

I have recently decided to leave facebook for a while.
I always feel so lame saying things like that (as though anyone should care that I am no longer participating in a meaningless system of message boards and overproduced note passing).
To me, the site had always been a source of life news from those friends I couldn't imagine calling and catching up with, but whose lives had briefly intersected with mine, and so I wanted to know how they were doing, what color they had decided to paint their bathrooms, and how many bowls of rice crispies they could eat at four in the morning.
And up until recently, that was great.
Even as I watched the site itself metamorphose into a weird bot. The "personalized" ads stolen from my amazon wish list, or the tailored clickbait in the margins harvesting vocabulary from my own statuses, were not enough to deter me. This is the future, I would shrug, and carry on, blissfully ignorant that my brain was not only being harvested, but implanted as well.

I'll make no arguments against the fact that tragedy is constantly happening somewhere.
It always has been.
As a child, my father received three daily newspapers (five on Sundays!), and he almost always snarfed his dinner down so he could get to the television and watch the six thirty news.
He was a journalist though, so it made sense to me that he wanted to be abreast of global news and events. I used to join him for as long as I could stand it, my head resting in the crook of his elbow, my eyes trained on the gritty, pixelated images of Princess Diana visiting AIDS victims in Africa, or Boris Yeltsin visiting troops in Russia. I usually had to leave at the ten minute mark because it just got too sad.
There was too much hunger and starvation, too much violence and destruction. It seemed like every other country in the world was at war, and in the U.S. and Canada, there were more urban examples of warfare, like pipe bombs, school shootings, serial child abduction, murder, and rape.
I turned away from the news, and in my head, I called myself a coward.
A real adult would be able to face the truth, I thought sullenly.
A grown up sees the world in all its misery, and accepts it, acknowledges what is beyond her control, and then helps the best she can, and goes to bed knowing she did her best and sleeps the sleep of the just. A coward can't stomach the actuality of the world. She runs away before they show the image of the crime scene. She hides in books and fairy tales. She listens to the radio because somehow, listening to terrible things is easier than watching them, and she goes to sleep at night fretting that she isn't making anything better at all.

Now as an adult in my own time period, I don't have cable or a subscription to a single newspaper, but  I have a facebook page and a twitter account, and I have twenty four hour access to global catastrophes whether I want it or not.

Only I didn't notice before.
Somehow, I was able to read the daily bits and pieces, and let them go.
Then I became a mother, and -out of nowhere- everything stuck.

That picture of the Syrian child covered in dust and blood after a bombing, sitting shell shocked in the back of an ambulance? It showed up in my newsfeed seven times in 24 hours posted by seven different people. Just when I'd managed to get the poor child's stunned eyes out of my mind, there he was again, looking hopelessly out into a world that for him moments before made sense and was now unrecognizable, his entire life shattered in a matter of seconds over a disagreement between people he had never met, and doesn't understand.

Newsclips about the earhtquake in Italy started playing before I knew what they were, slideshowing me images of people being pulled out of ruined buildings and rubble. Their bodies mangled, their hair matted with plaster and stone dust. Text scrolled across the screen explaining that an eight month old boy and his 7 year old brother were found dead in their home after the steeple of a church collapsed on it.

An article began circulating talking about the planet and its inevitable, accelerated path to destruction. I couldn't bear to read it, just the tagline gave me nightmares.

And I started discovering fear, like those bruises, the day after, showed up in my mind with the same mysterious origins. I had forgotten all the articles, all the photographs, but they had left an impression, and the shape of the tragedies was showing up in my sudden fear of strangers, and traveling, and long car rides, and crowded places, and my mistrust of unwashed fruit, mosquito bites, certain fabrics, and brands of shampoo. I used to be one of those people who dropped her potato chip on the floor, picked it up, dusted it off, and ate it without a care in the world. Now I stared at my bathroom ceiling wondering if a bomb would collapse it on top of us where should I place the baby's seat so that he would receive the least of the damage?

So I am turning away.
I am taking a break.
I am calling it a media detox.
And I am perfectly fine with admitting that I am a coward.
I AM TERRIFIED.

But I cannot teach my child to live his life in fear.
And I am afraid that I am starting to live mine that way.
Because I am afraid.
I am too much afraid.
And I still don't know where the bruises come from.


 

Eschews Issues

Since becoming a Mother, my anxiety has been a big problem.

I watch Baz noshing away at the boob. His eyes droop. He gets all sleepy and milk drunk. Then boom, his lips fall away from me, and his breathing gets slow and steady. He sleeps, beautifully. Wonderfully. Blissfully ignorant of any such thing as stress.

I think about how his biggest sources of worry are when I put him down, or when I leave the room. He gets upset because he doesn't know where his milk bar has gone, and I represent food and sleep and safety, and I imagine that's pretty stressful for a baby, but as soon as I pick him up again, or throw him on the nip, he calms down. Resolution accessed. He is happy and content, the stress of a moment earlier completely forgotten.

This.
This is what I need to do.

As an adult...
I should clarify.
As an adult with a history of control issues, anxiety, and some compulsion problems, I am incapable of letting go of things. My constant goal is to be in the moment, to dwell in the now, and I used to be better at that when I had a day job. Nothing keeps you present like minute to minute problem solving. At the end of the day, maybe I'd be exhausted, or I'd be angry about something that happened, but ultimately, the reason I had to leave my job was because my employers were severely anxious, and while I strove not to be ruled by those thoughts and feelings, they took it to mean I wasn't as invested in my work if I wasn't having a meltdown about every little thing.
It wasn't a healthy expectation, and I was so relieved when I left.

Anxiety and stress are like plaque buildup. If you don't find a way to brush them off at the end of the day, they build up and eat into your soul. If you let them run riot, you need to call in a professional to help you fix the holes because you're no longer capable of doing it on your own with the little tools you have.

Cosmically, I know Mercury is in retrograde, and we are entering a solar eclipse season. The moon is waning, and there's a fuckload of weird, transitional, uprooting, seachange type energy running through us little animals right now. I look around and I see everyone reexamining their progress, their achievements, their goals. Some people are making big commitments, getting married, moving, starting new jobs and the like. Some people are falling into bad habits and comforting unhealthy rituals because they do not feel they have the ability to change their lives, or they feel they are not in control of the changes occurring in their lives.

I know this.
And I know which category I fall into.

DOES THIS MAKE IT ANY EASIER?
Fuck no!

For me, my ability to control my environment ties directly to money and food.
Hello.
As a kid, some of the biggest and worst things that happened to our family were money related, and completely beyond my control.
I think a lot of kids who grew up poor(ish) become adults for whom budgeting and monetary organization is very important. We never feel secure. We can have 401Ks, retirement savings, back up plans for our back up plans, and we still feel like it could all be stolen away from us at any moment. In small doses, this is healthy. If you let it seep into your every waking thought, not so much.
When I began controlling food, it was a way of controlling my environment too at a time that I felt I had no control over my body, my relationships, or my life.
It's amazing to me that here I am, 15 years later, and I am still tempted to fall back into those habits when things feel like they're spiraling away from me.

Because having a baby means you must control every environment constantly. This is for your baby's well being and health. It also means you must be okay with having no control over what that environment may contain at any given moment (which completely undoes your previous conception of what environmental control means to begin with).
At any given moment the baby needs to be fed, contained, comforted, and cleaned.
At any given moment those needs are brought into perilous rotation by the baby.
We go from screaming from teething and needing to be cuddled, to pushing away because we need to move, play, and crawl. We go from howling for food to writing from the discomfort of a wet diaper to long, languorous sobbing out of pure exhaustion, and all of this can be contained within an hour.

As an anxious human who has had a couple of moments of mistakes (I left him on a hotel bed for a moment to grab the diaper bag and he rolled off and hit the floor like a starfish, another time, as I peed with him crawling over my lap, I didn't notice he had grabbed the toothpaste tube and had it in his mouth until he had a minty fresh mouthful). I know mothers experience these trials and mistakes all the time, but I cannot forgive myself for them.

I currently do not have a job. I do some occasional freelance work, but as of right now, I am experiencing a little dry spell, and the frustration I feel about not contributing to the household makes me want to be extra awesome at mothering our child.

Except it's really fucking hard right now.
I miss writing.
I haven't been able to, since the baby graduated from "sure I'll sleep on you for four hours while you type, Mum"..to.."I must constantly be moving toward things that will kill me and/or be engaged otherwise screaming, also sometimes screaming anyway".
I am not getting decent sleep due to teething, sleep training, and growth spurts.
I have very little left in my emotional reserves to back up the psychological and spiritual reactions I am having to the lack of control I have over my life.

Does this make sense?
Can anyone else relate?
Last night, after logging in to facebook, where I was greeted by yet another article about how the planet is doomed and we're leaving our children a broken, unfit world to inherit, I had a bit of a breakdown.

I can't do this, I thought.
I can't keep ingesting this casual negativity and just carry on.
I keep internalizing all of this guilt, all of this horrible stuff. Cops shooting defenseless people. Monsters shooting up schools and theatres. Earthquakes. Floods. Religious zealots murdering en masse. Complete hypocrites attempting to control the consumer rates by making people simultaneously hate and love their bodies and crave products to make themselves worthy of love.

All interrupted by constant videos of people melting chocolate and cheese all over everything and then declaring how much better they feel about themselves for devouring it while guiltlessly wearing a crop top.

I can't do it anymore.
I'm so fucking over being told what I should value and what I should strive for.


Yesterday, in line to buy a coffee, with the baby strapped to my chest, a woman cut in front of me. She placed an enormous order, and then was looking for exact change in her purse.
I had been staring laser death rays into her back the whole time we were in the shop. How dare she cut in front of me? How dare she be so rude? How dare she be so selfish? So unthinking?
And then I realized that I had a quarter which could totally help her out.
And I realized that if I smugly held it in my hand and thought about how haha now she has to break a dollar she doesn't want to break, it sets off a chain reaction of how she'll be in a bad mood and maybe go out and treat someone even worse than she normally would because of the inconvenience.
So I offered her the coin, and she was so grateful and thanked me a bunch of times, and tipped the barista three bucks (which he totally deserved), and then she went on her merry way, and maybe she held the door open for someone later because she was in a better mood, or maybe next time she's in a coffee shop she will let someone go ahead of her.

I will probably never see her again, but you know what?
I feel better because I did the good thing.

Being bombarded with negativity is not making it easy to do the right thing.
It is encouraging me to be selfish and frightened and to hide.
It is making me lazy and full of excuses.

I am taking an active role in being positive and turning my reactions to the world into good ones, and it starts with me limiting the amount of horror I ingest on a daily basis.

So I'll see you over here, in the thoughtful space, but no longer will I participate in the negative hate orgy that I see on social media.

And that is something i can control.

Are You ready for a New Sensation?

Right now life is weird.


I have a six week break from teaching my Saturday writing classes, during which I scooped up some contracting work, that has stalled out because my project director vanished to the UK and left me no direction for what to do in her absence. lolz.

So all of a sudden, I am staring down a solid seven days of JUST BABY.

This is no new news.
Essentially the first three and a half months of this year were JUST BABY, and I was in much worse shape by April than I am now. I mean, he and I were still very new to one another. We sorta know each other now. We  might even sorta like each other now.

But as time goes on, those "things we do in a pinch because we don't know how else to get the job done and can figure it out later" things are becoming glaring issues, and with nothing to plan or organize, my happy little obsessive brain likes to run them all on a loop from the moment I open my eyes to the moment I shut them.

Having a baby is kind of like having a lovable bomb dropped in the middle of your life. The first 90 days are all just fall out and survival. You're cleaning up things and trying to make your house resemble the house it was before the baby dropped. It's impossible. The explosion continues to happen, and you are running on adrenaline for much longer than adrenaline is meant to last.
You start pitching tents, rigging bedding, people come by to help with basic necessities like eating, bathing, and putting on pants. You want to depend on them, but you can't, and you know you need to figure out how to do this on your own now anyway.

You jerry-rig a lot.
Maybe your kid has colic at five weeks.
Maybe it's so bad that you can't be in the bedroom with the baby where his crib is all set up beautiful and tidy with a moon nightlight that actually follows the phases of the real moon. Your husband has to work forty-five hours a week, and you feel bad about him going in on four hours sleep and five plus hours of screaming infant, so you pack up and move to the small room off of the kitchen which houses the couch, the tv, and the closet with the vacuum in it.
You throw down a small fortress of pillows and you breastfeed until four in the morning when the baby finally stops writhing and howling and you both nod off for a couple of hours.

It's the most uninterrupted sleep you've had since he was born, so you do it again the next night.
The colic continues to be awful. Even on good nights you're getting three, maybe four hours of sleep, piecemeal, and it's not to be depended on. You go to the doctor a bunch, and they can't figure it out. They prescribe antacids, you cut coffee, then dairy, then peanuts out of your diet.

After ten weeks of this horseshit, you cut wheat out of your diet, and the colic is miraculously on the decline.
Two weeks later, you and the baby get six (count them!) six uninterrupted hours of sleep on the floor of the tv room.
You wake up feeling like Snow Fucking White. You're pretty sure if you throw open the windows, birds are going to fly in and help dress you. You do. They don't. You don't care. Coffee tastes sweeter. The baby is in a great mood. You've been converted. You want to do everything the exact same way you did it the night before so you can get another solid six hours of sleep again.

You do this for a few weeks.

Suddenly the baby is five months old.

You've been sleeping on the floor of a tiny room for 18 weeks. You don't know how it got this far.
But you have a routine.
Your back doesn't like it, but you're not in constant pain, and the sleep is so precious.

You decide to try sleep training because it feels weird to still be not in the lovely bedroom with the lovely nightlight.

It goes horribly. Screaming, no sleep, fighting with husband.
You resign yourself to the floor.
Your classes have begun anyway, and you have to be able to function.

The baby bomb clean up continues around you.
You begin to get the house cleaned up from the initial blast. Y
ou figure out cooking and grocery shopping, errands and social activity.
You start reading to the baby.
You start the baby on solid food.
The baby is cutting teeth!
The baby is trying to crawl!
The baby whips his head around when he hears his name!
Then one day you wake up and it's been almost nine months since you had the baby.
He's been outside of you for as long as he was growing inside, which is mind-blowing.
What's more mind-blowing?
You're still sleeping on the floor.
The small protestations your back made a couple of months back are now full fledged caterwauls, and the cushions of the couch are flattened. The baby doesn't know how to sleep by himself, and you and your mate have not shared a bed in so long it's embarrassing to mention.

This is how terrible shit happens.
Every day, a little bit at a time, until you suddenly realize you've done irreversible damage.



I am a full grown woman who has always taken responsibility for her actions.
I am the first to admit when I fuck up, and so here I am, I did it. I threw together something temporary for a good night's sleep and then I didn't want to let go of what sleep I was getting, so I kept it up, then it became habitual, easy, and all of a sudden, it's the norm.

Now I am faced with the horrendous task of sleeptraining a child who doesn't understand why he's being taken away from his mama.

And all I can think is:
I need a new bomb...

Seize the Cake

My Dad is dying.

To be fair, everyone's Dad is dying. We're all dying. Some of us just a little quicker and assuredly than others.

My Dad got his marching orders last December, right before my son was born.
So he didn't tell us for about five months.
He has been diagnosed with Pulmonary Fibrosis, a lung disease that slowly transforms your healthy lung tissue into scar tissue which eventually seizes their ability to function.
Average lifespan from diagnosis is five years maximum.
My Dad is pretty healthy.
He may live longer.
He may also get hit by a rogue meteorite tomorrow, but most likely he will enjoy a slow decline in lung function for the next few years, followed by a rapid period during which all the inhalers, drugs, and oxygen tanks the hospitals can throw at him will only prolong the inevitable.
One day, my father will asphyxiate.
He will run out of breath.

I can only hope that it is at home, in fairly decent shape, preferably after a truly epic meal surrounded by those of us who love him the most.


There are many ways I have felt about this since I found out around the end of May.
At first, I knee jerk gasp-cried into a diaper, while the baby, naked-arsed waggled his legs in confusion on the change table below me. I may have put the tear soaked diaper on him. I don't recall. He doesn't seem the worse for it.
*shrug*
Immediately following, I decided I wanted to do something to help.
Could Dad get a lung transplant?
No, even with the new lungs, it only resets your life to the point of diagnosis granting you another five probably years, and these years will be spent in a bubble of drugs, sterility, and restricted activity to ensure you don't reject your new organs. Dad doesn't want to live like that. I don't blame him.
Drugs, there's a good idea. Aren't there any pill cocktails to treat this biz?
There are, but they're steroids, and my Dad, remarkable bastard that he is, has a spot of TB on his lung leftover from when he self inoculated against the illness as a child. Steroid use would wake the little bugger up, and then my Dad would have the ironic pleasure of dying of consumption in the 21st century.

That's pretty much it.
We met with a holistic healer, who prescribed Dad a prohibitive diet restricting him to consuming only plants and whole grains and water, but again, my dad wants to enjoy his life. He figures, what's the point of prolonging it, at the age of seventy, if it's going to be miserable?
Carpe Lagunum as it were.

or

Seize the Cake.

So we have to get right with this.
We have to get right with the idea that we are all going to die someday, perhaps soon, perhaps not, but unlike most of us, my Dad now knows exactly how he's going to go.

I want to make it better for him. I want to make it easier.
I contacted the Pulminary Fibrosis Foundation in their home city of Chicago, and they excitedly told me all the ways I could fundraise for them.

I thought really hard about it. I so want to be useful. I want to use my hands, my health, my time, my abundance of breath to do something for my Dad, but there's little incentive to having a fundraiser for a foundation that will gladly take all the money I raise and pay themselves to "raise awareness".
My dad doesn't see any of that cash. It won't help pay for his inhalers or new lungs or even research in the field.

So I am stuck with only one recourse.
Make however long we have left together wonderful.

Give him as much access and time with his grandson as he wants. Let go of the petty bullshit from our fights and disagreements, and forgive him for the big stuff he fucked up when I was a kid.
As a parent now, it's a little easier to do the latter. I'm also still his child though, so it's hard.

Amazing, isn't it? How we remember so vividly the way we felt about our parents as children?
My father was so god-like in my eyes. The smartest man, the bravest, most adventuresome, cleverest, funniest, wildest one.
He was also the one who got angry quickest, the one who had the most cutting comment when you made a mistake. His fuse was the shortest, and his punishments were long.
I remember being grounded one summer for two weeks.

I remember the sense of injustice was enormous. While he yelled at me, I could feel his breath on my face, and I burned with it as though I was being forced to wear a hair shirt. I spent the time in silence, living monastically, pledging myself to not hug my father for at least a month after my grounding was complete.

I think I forgot about that part a day or two after I regained my freedom.

There are other memories.
Roadtrips and Christmases and long family walks through the woods and on beaches. All of us sharing a block of Cadbury's fruit and nut as we sat on felled tree at the site where my parents built their dream house.

I remember my Dad springing up like a lion when Alex fell through the roof of a shed on the Australian property. We were picking pears, and I'd lifted her up there not knowing there was a hole in the corrugated tin covered over with plastic. I'd never seen my father move so quickly. He was over the fence in moments and running out of the shed with Alex wrapped up tight in his arms. His breath coming fast and hard.

When I went to college, and after, I remember the weekly phone calls with my parents. My dad was always talking about how beautiful my sister Sarah was becoming, how clever, how talented a writer. How proud he was of Alex living in Chicago and fighting for her dream of working in the movies.
I tried not to seethe with sibling jealousy. It occurs to me now, he must have spoken about me the same way to them. I would listen to him clear his throat on the phone and try to come up with my own accomplishments, my proud moments to hold up in shining comparison.

My father has always said that my emotional happiness has been my priority before anything else.
When I was younger, it sounded like a flaw, but now it's a compliment.
I see the love he has for my sisters, for me, for my baby boy, and I realize how my Dad is only now allowing himself the luxury of forgiveness and love with abandon.

In the shadow of what's to come, he is using what is left of his breath to tell us how much happiness we bring him. He says over and over all he wants is to spend as much time together as we can.

And when you begin looking at the hourglass of breaths we will take in life as running low. The stream between the two globes as thin as a thread, you realize that letting go of the frustrations and the agonies doesn't mean forgetting them, and loving someone doesn't mean that you forgive them for everything.
It just means that bringing it all up would be wasting breath.

And we don't have that luxury around here.