New Year's Eve

This time, as the year's last day scrapes up against its successor, I can't get past the word scrape, with its trail of blood and skin.

I have left both behind in 2018.  And a lot more: my last birth, the last time I'll hold another being so gingerly, a degree or two of mental acuity, waves of regret.

I'm starting to feel my life closing up on me, which is what makes the exercise of bidding farewell to one year and greeting another so doleful this time around.  I am reluctant to sum up my accomplishments,  because I am afraid they are dwindling.  I am reluctant to spell out my hopes, because I'm having trouble summoning them.

It has been alright, heretofore, to stagger from year to year under the weight of my responsibilities; now,  I'm beginning to think I've been frittering my life away, and that I will waste, similarly, the decade or two I have left compos mentis.

(Autocorrect insists upon "composure mantis," which I'm sure I'll become soon enough.)

The person I want to talk to about this is my father, and he is, for that purpose and many other purposes, gone.

2019: Maybe it's the year to ask for nothing, to demand nothing of myself or the world. To observe as I can, remember what I can, be as I have to be.

Dwindle

Never having been pretty, I am not finding my recession into the invisibility of middle age to be particularly troubling.  I have wrinkles- so what?  I've had other imperfections longer.  People look past me- so what?  They always did.

But my mind is also dimming, and I am struggling with this decline even more than I imagined I might.  Smarts have been the bedrock of who I am.  And I hadn't even realized the extent to which my intelligence gifted me with competence and confidence.  For years, I have believed that I could do almost anything I put my mind to- from working as a feature writer on zero experience, to penning a romance novel, to leading workshops.  I have believed I could do anything because, in large part, I could.

I have read that the brain changes of Alzheimer's begin in one's thirties.  I feel them.

When I was running meetings at the coop in my twenties, calling on individuals in the order in which they had raised their hands, I used to be able to track a mental roll of twenty or more names.  Now I'm lucky if I can remember three digits in a row.  I can't recall the name of that eighth reindeer (Google reveals that it's Comet), or whether or not my good friend discovered the sex of her baby in advance the first time around, or the name of the acquaintance who recently committed suicide.  I fish for words when I write, and when I go back to edit, I discover humiliation: missing articles, bungled verbs, iffy comparisons.

This Christmas, I mailed my in-laws' presents to myself.

In short, I can no longer be relied upon.  And I have always, always been able to rely on myself.

I accept this because I must, because there is no other option than acceptance.

But it is painful.  Who am I without my intelligence?  No one I particularly care for.  I suppose the challenge will lie in coming to do so.

2018 in BOOKS!

This was the year I ducked Proust.

Ducking Proust makes one only slightly less insufferable than reading Proust, so I suppose my dodge  falls somewhere between a black mark and a minor point of pride.

I did intend to read Proust.  I had a fabulous plan, undertaken in 2016, of marching through one volume In Search of Lost Time per year, thus gilding my slog into middle age with a snail's trail of self-satisfaction.

I did try.  I tend to turn to Proust on airplanes: his sumptuous spirals of self-indulgence pair well with airline peanuts.  But I didn't fly as much this year. And when I did, there were so many other things to read!

Goodreads tells me I read 50 books I'll admit to this year (and counting).  I hated a greater share than usual, but I loved more of them, too.  Winnowing the 50 to a handful was unexpectedly painful, like returning your tray table to its upright and locked position.  You've been flying!  Then, all in a rush, the clouds retract and the sky slinks back into itself; the earth slaps your ass and your cell phone wails.

But never mind; here are the books!

Surprise!

In I am, I am, I am, Maggie O'Farrelll chronicles her 17 brushes with death.  I expected snorey literary navel gazing.  I got something utterly alien yet wildly convincing, like a curse word you didn't know you needed.

Short fiction is ALIVE!

A zombie shuffling from its grave, short fiction devoured me this year.  I really do hate short fiction.  It's like being served half a can of tomato juice when you know nobody else will drink the other half.  But two of my very favorite books this year were short story collections, Lauren Groff's stunning Florida and Curtis Sittenfeld's You Think It, I'll Say It.  These are full cans of juice, my friends. FULL CANS OF JUICE.

Soulmates!

I didn't know I had a soulmate!  He is Jay Fitger, professional Crabby Old Man (English professor) and the hero (villain) of Julie Schumacher's epistolary novel Dear Committee Members, which is told entirely through letters of recommendation.  For sheer pleasure, this one took (was?) the cake.

Work!

So I read two really excellent novels about work this year.  One was Aja Gabel's string quartet novel, The Ensemble, which I almost didn't read because I work in music, and working in a field tends to inure you to its beauty, or at least to its poetry. You need ignorance for poetry, and nothing burns off the ineffable faster than filing a Schedule C.  The writing about music in this one wasn't as bad as writing about music usually is, and the novel's treatment of time- more specifically the evolution and devolution of working and romantic relationships over time- feels bang-on.  I also loved Allegra Goodman's The Chalk Artist, which concerns itself deeply with interplay between work and identity, and is much better than I just made it sound.

You must read this!

If you haven't read Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, you should.  Right now.  Trust me, Proust will wait.

Saturday

Saturdays are for snoozing and schlepping, but also for the staging of pocket-sized rebellions.

It begins with the 5:40 AM alarm, which I do not set.  The absence of this alarm makes my morning a spitball, a wandering pitch I must keep in view.  Sometimes I wake up at 4:00 and read novels in bed.  Sometimes I wake up at 7:00 and roll back over until 7:15.  And sometimes I wake up precisely at 5:40 AM, my brief flicker of insurrection drowned in the dark sea of routine.  (Add one baby and there's no telling.)

My next mutiny comes when I divagate from my usual running route.  (Yes, I still run; I am unable or unwilling to mount any serious challenge to the incumbency of exercise.). I still begin by running South on Oakland.  But then (SHOCKER), instead of turning West on Zephyr,  I continue South, following Oakland all the way down to where it fetches up agains the train tracks.

For a block or two, no more, I run parallel to the tracks, and this is it, my treat, because I have loved train tracks for at least decade, and there is something about being in motion alongside the possibility of motion, the long secret snake of journeys past and future, that is almost unbearably sweet.

Today I saw a train.  Only four cars, but they thundered so satisfyingly, steaming and screeching, a blue, train-shaped silence in their wake.

Six Words

Slipper season.  Too cold to wake.

The Heart Is a Scheming Traitor

Before I had my second child, one of the anchors of my "pro only child" list was the fact that, if I limited myself the child I already had, I could enjoy the relief of a hard demarcation, a resolute squashing of the lid onto that particular Tupperware container of my life.

(You know you were tired of book and door metaphors.)

Now that I have a second child, and am at liberty to luxuriate in the closure of receptacles, I am, naturally, besieged by regret.

Fun times.

Saturday Morning

Your husband and your son making pancakes in the kitchen; the baby asleep; a novel on your knees.  The sky lapping up against the walls of your house.

In It

I am having so much trouble reacclimatizing to full-time work.  I don't remember this much trouble the first time around....I think with my son, parenting was more stressful than work, whereas this time around, it's the reverse.

It makes me sad.  I don't want to be a stay-at-home parent, but on many days I barely see my daughter.  And when I do, for an hour or two in the evenings, she's tired and glazed.

I miss having slack time.  Not feeling like every moment is stretched thin.

Scraps

I have so much more empathy for my parents now than I did before I had children. Too late, I feel the weight of the things they did for me, the heaviness of ringing a dinner bell and packing a lunch and schlepping me here and there and everywhere.

***

Going back to work full time, my days have a headlong, breakneck quality, as if I'm tied to the back of a stampeding horse. Those few moments I do have downtime, I feel confused and unsteady, as if, after so many hours in the saddle, I've lost the knack of walking on solid ground.

***

I hate the hands into which our country is fallen, but I'm tired of expressing outrage about it, because I can't see how stoking my own pain and sorrow and anger does any practical good.  We've fetishized outrage, on the right and, to a lesser but no less pernicious extent, the left, and it's made us sick.

***

Spring died in utero.  Fall is rotting on the vine.  The Game of Thrones tagline should be Summer Is Coming.

There

I wonder sometimes if you can long for something so ardently, and for such an extended period of time, that the longing becomes part of your everyday self, a vein of discontent threading your days.

I would so love to live where I was born, and it is more than likely that I never will.   That desire, unfulfilled, is with me always, so that I can never go anywhere without some part of me wishing I were elsewhere.

The love of place, stymied, is not unlike a haunting.  Flashes of the place I love visit me at least once a day, bubbling up from wherever they've been hiding, expanding until they burst.  

If I moved back, would I cease to be possessed?  Sometimes I think yes; sometimes I think no.  Most of the time, I know it doesn't matter.  

Six Words

Six hard boiled eggs becoming themselves.

Anxiety

Work seems to have tipped me over the edge into a vortex of anxiety, and that anxiety has kicked up some voilent and debilitating insomnia, which has in turn rendered me spectacularly and endemically anxious.  At least I'll probably lose weight?

Now I'm struggling against a cycle in which I'm terrified not to sleep, so I watch myself trying, so I don't sleep, etc.

But honestly I think this began as dread of the kind of busy I've been for the past few years, then busy in which there is no mental space to write or think, and in which I react to any interruption or thieving of my time with the viciousness of a cornered ferret.  (Why are vicious and viscous so close in spelling?  It's like a booby trap for tired writers.)

In heading back to my speech job, plus another child, I worry I'm headed there again, and it appears to have tipped me over a particularly nasty edge.

Nevertheless, life goes on.  

Suit Up

I'm back to work full time next week.  I've been back part time for about six weeks, and, truth be told, it's lovely.  I wish everyone had the means to work 20 or 25 hours a week- it's the sweet spot in which I feel most like a human being.  But few people are able to afford that kind of schedule. And, alas, I'm not one of them, at least not long-term.

 So Hi Ho, Hi Ho, etc.  I remember how strapped for time I felt in the spring (and, to be honest, for at least half a decade prior), and anticipate how strapped I'll feel soon. Being short on time makes me jealous of it, and exceptionally angry at people and tasks who take up mine.  That's not the happiest place to live, though it is (I speak from experience) better than having nothing to do.

Back on the horse.

Om Nom Nom

I have fallen in love.  The object of my affection is, I'll grant you, a trifle more cerulean than my usual crushes.  He's got more fur and fewer pronouns.  His sock puppet physique and lurching gait  distinguish him in the panoply of my unrequited tendres.

Oh, Cookie Monster.  It's you.  

As a child, I found Cookie Monster terrifying.  I much preferred Big Bird, whose dutiful monologues mirrored my own conscientiousness, or Bert and Ernie, whose gentle yet unremitting conflict, as eternal as the tangling of night and day, echoed my family life.

Cookie monster's untrammeled appetite disturbed me.  His frenzy was too close to my experience of childhood, the way feelings like sadness and fear and especially rage would devour me, roaring and gobbling, until there were only crumbs.

As a preschooler, you struggle to control your emotions.  As an adult, loss of control is a luxury you cannot afford.

I think this is why, as I approach middle age, I find Cookie Monster thrilling.  He arrives.  He eats.  He vamooses.  His life is a paean to unchecked desire at a time when my own life, as working parent of small children, is a giant to-do list.  Cookie monster does not interrogate or modulate or dissemble or temper or reflect.  He does not take deep breaths or put on his game face or do what he has to do. He simply shows up and eats all the cookies. It's dynamite!

In my real life, I'm on a diet.  No cookies or alcohol or sweets of any kind as I attempt to shed post-pregnancy weight.  But in my heart- oh, in my heart, I'm devouring.

Grind

I've learned I'm grinding my teeth at night.  The behavior has consequences- the tension in my jaw radiates down my neck and back and up into my forehead, and apparently my teeth are slowly being destroyed.

I'd get more worked up about this if I weren't generally hurtling toward death and debility at an ever-increasing rate.

Still, I wish there were some way we could excise the parts of ourselves that do us no good, cutting away the rot so the rest could heal. 

Oof

You really can't ever rest.  Yesterday was puke and mold and wet carpet and snot, and this will cost me worry and cash, outlays I don't particularly wish to afford.

On the other hand, the sky is a deep, autumnal blue.

Weather

Rain coming, buckets and basins and bathtubs full.  I vacillate, as I always do, between excitement and dread.  There's a piquancy to experiencing adverse weather from within the shelter of human habitation- it's a manageable thrill like, a mystery novel or a defanged snake.  But there's also the grind of being penned in with small and busy children when all you want to do is adjourn to bed with coffee and a book.

Someday.

Six Words

One of the last slow days.

Keys

I spent a good two hours looking for my keys today.

This is how my life drains away.

Whoosh

I number among the small wounds of adulthood its purposelessness.  Your youth is a high-speed train ride, a terrifying hurtle through country you don't understand toward a destination of which you've only seen mock-ups, dioramas of what might be.   But in adulthood, you have arrived.

Inevitably, in the manner of destinations, it is not what you imagined.  But this is a secondary affront. 

The real loss is motion, the way the world rushed by, your sense of yourself on your way.

Shots

It's a lousy business: watching your kid get hurt, knowing it's coming, and knowing you've permitted it.  I understand the beneficence that is vaccination, but it doesn't shield me from the pain of subjecting my child to pain. 

Labor Day

This is the part of summer in which you come to believe the earth has stopped turning.  It took long enough, billions of years of revolving, a time scale so vast that the year, as a unit of measurement, seems presumptuous, like telling the Queen of England to step up to the yardstick before she can ride the throne.

But it's happened at long last, in just these past few weeks, the ancient gyre of our planet shuddering to a stop, heat like a record stuck in its groove.

We go out walking, my son and my daughter and I.  Sweat gilds us, dampens our clothes, makes  laundry piles bloom. My daughter in her moist onesie probably shouldn't be out in this weather; we take her anyway, and the heat swaddles her to sleep.  My son complains, but desultorily; he's still the age at which it feels so good to move, all other considerations are chimeric, dissolving as he strides.

We seek shade.  Shade is our drug, our sweet, sweet high.  We crisscross the street for it, changing our route.  New to eternity, the sun is not kind.  It dogs us through the neighborhood.  It barks and bites.

September: the whole world holding its breath.

Weekend (Long): Redux

On the other hand, there was a moment this morning in which one child lay grizzling happily while the other child helped me extract a startling variety of objects from underneath his bed, and was so thrilled by the physical act of this, in the wedging of his small body under the mattress until he became, to the watcher, little more than a pair of wriggling legs, that he continued until we'd amassed a small army of forgotten toys -two lost bus passengers, a wooden stove, a small, incomplete family of penguins, three discarded stickers- while outside the window, despite the morning heat, the sky turned infinitesimally bluer, darkening one jot further toward September's slate, and I thought: 

OK.

Weekend (long)

Nothing strikes fear into a parent's heart like hearing your daycare is closed for a long weekend.  Having to entertain a preschooler for days at a time while sustaining the life of an infant, attempting to accomplish work, and keeping the household afloat amidst the tide of chaos is like running a marathon along a fault line.

I'm on Day Two.  I feel like long weekends used to be a good thing?

Mirror

I'm heavier than I've ever been, by a whole lot.  I gained substantial weight when pregnant, far more than the recommend amount; being pregnant seems to turbocharge my appetite.  I'd also been toward the top of my own weight range when I started.  I've lost 28 pounds since my daughter was born, and I'm now the same weight I was when I was nine months pregnant with my son.  In order to the very heaviest part of my normal range, I still have to lose 25 pounds.

This is daunting and distressing, especially because I love to eat.  It's also my first glimpse at having the person in the mirror look startlingly different from the person in my mind.  My image of myself simply doesn't match what I see, and that's jarring.

I do recognize that this phenomenon will only increase as I age.  Does any ninety-year-old carry around a ninety-year-old image of herself?

Eh

Why is infancy so much easier this time around?  I mean, it's still a slog, but it's a slog we carry on kind of absent-mindedly in the background of several other slogs.

It has to be that, the first time around, I wanted to do it right.

All pretentious to righteously correct parenting having been long since beaten out of me, I approach this baby in the spirit of trying to do things mostly OK.  

Neighbors

Maybe because I've been home so much more, I've been more deliberate about being friendly to our neighbors.  It's a curious relationship, being a neighbor.  You don't choose your neighbors, except insofar as you've been able to choose the location of your residence and that location's rung on our increasingly segregated socio-economic ladder.

But it's different from other unchosen relationships.  You don't have the web of obligation that binds you to your family.  You don't have the need to accomplish tasks that lashes you to your work colleagues.  But you do have the strange intimacy that comes from forced proximity.

I know when the neighbors across the street leave for work and when they return. I know the neighbor next door likes to work on classic cars in his backyard while playing jazz.  I know that the neighbor three doors down puts on cartoons every day after work, and retrieves the paper with his shirt off.

You know mundane details of their lives, and they know mundane details of yours- yet you may not even know their last names.

One of my neighbors knocked on my door yesterday.  Jeannie, from across the street and one door over.  "Is your last name XXX?" she said.  We'd been expecting a digital piano, and it had been delivered to her house by mistake.  She knew my first name because I'd introduced myself once; we're always out  at the same time in the early morning, she walking her dog and me walking... myself.

"Bring friends," she said. "It's heavy."

It was more than heavy.  It was 125 pounds.  My husband and I stashed the kids in the house and entered the relationship armageddon of trying to move something that was far too heavy for us.

Which is when the neighbors across the street drove up (5:45, per the usual).  "What do you have there?" said Dave, whose last name I only learned last week.

He helped us finish dragging the thing up the lawn and into our house.  It had felt odd to ascend my neighbor's porch, and now it felt odd to have my neighbor enter the house, like a violation of some kind of neighborly code: pretend you don't see; pretend you don't know.

I'm thinking about the neighbors over to say thank you.  It will feel awkward, as if we're crossing an invisible threshold.  Maybe we are.

Mushrooms

There are five white toadstools in the front yard.  At first there was one. Then that one died. Now there are five more, possibly its spawn.  I know this because I am a parent.

I 'm not kidding.  Knowing how many mushrooms there are, noticing the routes of busses and the phases of the moon and the shapes of leaves, is one of the unexpectedly sweet parts of parenthood, a sop you get thrown to dull its varied and abundant gut punches.

You foreground parts of your world that had long ago faded to a background hum, because noticing is a prize, a scrap of juicy meat you can drag back to your den and stuff in the mouth of your child.  And if you pay attention, the world is delicious.

Quiet

There's really no quiet in my neighborhood.  It's one of the fistful of things I don't like about where we live; fortunately there are a couple handfuls more of things I do.

But the lack of quiet is probably my sharpest regret, and it was a surprise, because I was I was careful to choose a home at least half a mile from a highway, blocks from a major street, far from railroad tracks, and outside the residential stains oozing from universities. (Too much time in college towns gave me a healthy fear of undergraduates; my realtor thought I was nuts.)

But we're on a hill, and, in many wind conditions, the hum from the highway six tenths of a mile to the north carries.  So does the racket from the main drag a few blocks west, and the train tracks one mile south.  And although we're ten miles at least from the airport, we're under a flight path, and so, mornings and evenings, the planes bleat by like a herd of deep-voiced sheep.  My preschool-aged son is delighted, and his delight is also noisy.

And of course: neighbors.  I may have escaped the undergraduates, but I have not escaped humanity in general, and humans produce noise.  Car doors closing, kids yelping, the occasional saxophone riff from my neighbor who likes jazz.  Some of the neighbors own dogs, and while I am of the opinion that dogs should be seen and not heard, and should keep to themselves, more like cats, and in fact should probably just be cats instead- my opinion falls on deaf (floppy) ears.

All this to say that the occasional bit of quiet is piercing, a hypodermic shooting straight into your veins.

This morning, Sunday, 5:00 AM: turning a slow circle on the sidewalk before bending to pick up the paper.  Still dark and still hot, even in this coolest corner of morning, but, just for a moment, quiet.

The neighbor's AC rumbles on and I head inside.

All Hail

My husband has made a small tabletop shrine to St. Bartholomew using a flashlight and a three-inch-tall plastic disciple action figure.  I have no idea what my life even is anymore.

Scandal

A scandal broke yesterday about someone in my past.  A #timesup, #metoo conflagration, with multiple victims coming forward.  I knew many of them, and had even talked, in passing, to some of them about what came to light.

Thus I have no doubt the allegations are, at least to a greater extent, true.  And I'm grappling with that.  I knew about some chunk of what came to light, but I'd somehow failed to categorize it for what it was: sexual harassment and abuse of power.  I'd thought it was unfortunate, and definitely wrong, but ultimately it was something you simply rolled your eyes at and dealt with.

Partly this was because I didn't know everything.  But what else was holding me back?

I must reckon with the fact that, at least partially, it was because the victims were men.

And I must reckon with the fact that, at least partially, it was because the perpetrator's influence in my own life was positive.  More than that- wholly and substantially positive.  The perpetrator was someone who believed in my musicianship, encouraged me, and advocated for me.  He played a small part in helping me become who I am.

We are more than the worst of ourselves.  But when does the worst of ourselves overgrow the rest?

Oops

I forgot to write yesterday! To be honest, I have no memory of yesterday morning, when I would have intended to write.  Each day has oozed into into the one before, leaving a slimy trail of time like a snail's track.

This morning, though, something shifted.  I'd left the windows open last night, and when I woke, the comforter was actually managing to live up to its name.  The air was new, blue, and chilly; it nosed over the sill and hunted around the bed; the air conditioner played dead.

Outside, everything is still a virulent green.  The roses of Sharon riot.  My baby is still a very small baby.  But I felt it, this morning: the tilt of the world on its pin.

Six Words

Up at 4:00 AM.  Brief hush.

Boom

At 6:00 AM, the house erupts in wakefulness.  Baby squalling and pooping, four-year-old agitating and jabbering and coughing.  Everyone needing breakfast at once, and, to top it off, the sky throbbing with helicopters, strange, insectoid creatures wheeling over our house on their way to a nearby fire.

Monday, Monday.

Essie B.

For no reason and every reason, I'm thinking about my grandmother today.  My maternal grandmother was a woman with a knack for sourness.  

I suppose it's hereditary.  

I used to dread her visits.  Our whole family did.  She would huff through the door and stump through the house, trailing an oily slick of disappointment.  She was disappointed with us, disappointed with our day-to-day accommodations of her presence, disappointed with the betrayals of old age.  But most of all, she was disappointed with a life that had failed to render the entitlements to which she felt she'd been born.  Raised as an orange-grove heiress in Florida but reaching middle age's finishing line as a divorced working woman, she'd planned for one life and found herself living another.

Being something of a connoisseur of disappointment, I would bait hers, flourishing fabricated details of my own life like a bullfighter waving her cape.  When she asked me what I weighed, I rounded up ten pounds.  When she asked me if I had many friends, I whittled my number to zero.  It was petty- but pettiness was our shared coin, our means of transacting the business of being together.

When she died, her funeral was stocked with people who expounded on her virtues.  How she was funny, or encouraging, or a good listener.  She'd helped one woman decide to go to back to school.  She'd hosted sparkling parties for her friends.  She'd made them laugh.

I often forget: We are, each of us, more than the worst of ourselves.  

Crunch

I'm writing this as one child sleeps upstairs and one child perches fifteen feet to my left, alternating laps of cheerio inhalation with sprints of intensive monkey role play.  There are monkey noises, some freeform preschool rap, the clink of spoon against bowl, brief expostulations of "MOMMY!!! WATCH THIS!!!"

This is what passes for peace in this season.

I wonder if I really will "miss this," per the pronouncements of the universe's grandparent-aged contingent.  I mean, I probably will, if only because the nostalgia is like a deep fryer, rendering palatable anything raised from its bath.  But is this really the crispiest, tastiest, most unctuously delicious time in my life, as the grandfolk imply?

And if it is, would I be the better for realizing what I'm biting into?

Oh

This is it.  This is my life.

Whine

I used to wonder why parents gave in to badly behaved children.  I worked with kids, so I knew these parents were shooting themselves in the gut.  Show any sign of weakness and kids are on you like jackals.  Or, put more dispassionately, if you reinforce a behavior, you get a whole lot more of it.  

Now I understand.  It's a dose issue.  Eight hours of kid a day is one thing; 24 hours of kid is... three times that thing.  You have the potential to get ground down.  Add in exhaustion and distraction, water heater explosions and poop, and sometimes you crumble.

I'm still pretty good about not rewarding bad behavior, but my empathy has broadened; never a bad thing. 

Rain

It's hard not to be cravenly in love with the sound of the rain, even though, in adulthood, rain is an inconvenience- a hurdle or even a danger.  Will the basement flood again?  Will my flight manage to take off? Will I have to wedge my car onto the shoulder of the highway and sit frozen under thundering sheets of wet hoping other drivers won't be foolhardy enough to rear end me?

Rain, like snow, slowly converts from wonder to chore over the course of your lifespan.  It's the final stage in the hydrologic cycle, the one no one talks about: condensation-precipitation-infiltration-irritation.

But that sound!  Right now the rain is gentle and the wind is null, so it's a light tapping, a polyrhythm beaten against the lip of the window and the line of the roof and the flat of the ground and my skin when I sneak out for the paper.

Because I'm a fool, I've opened the window, so the sound has filled up the house.  Love may not be envious or boastful or rude, but it is slightly damp.

Puke

One of us ate a lot of bad hamburger and was up all night puking.  The rest of us ate comparatively less hamburger and are on puke watch.

Does one ever get inured to life's unceasing waves of crisis? Small, moderate, large- they keep rolling in.

Sunrise

I thought the things we remember were supposed to be emotionally laden, shot through with fear or ecstasy,:what Virginia Woolf called "moments of being."  And sure, I've got memories of "being" my way through my children's births, winning things, hearing bad news, etc. etc.  But I also have all these sense memories of the mundane.

Why would I have retained running under that particular I-64 overpass in Richmond, VA?  What good does it do me to be able to revisit, with a clarity so exquisite it is almost painful, that one time I drove down Curry Pike in Bloomington, Indiana?   Or past a cheese mart in northeastern Ohio?  How about that random stadium in Cincinnati?

I don't understand the presence of these places in my mind, but I am not ungrateful.  It is reassuring, somehow, that memory isn't only a plot junkie, that it is capricious and perverse and, in the end, unknowable.  I find it oddly comforting that this particular sunrise might end up being as much a part of my remembered life as my first kiss or my son's first smile.

Half-hearted, today.  Clouds and a fine, humid tension to the air; cicadas and muted birds. Only a little pink to the sky, quickly wiped away.

All By Myself

I am not going to be alone in my house until October.

For someone who believes being alone is to be savored, to be swirled and sipped and nursed like expensive whiskey, this is a very long time.

Solitude is among the signal sacrifices of childrearing, and I expected to lose some, but I hadn't quite mapped out the extent of my deprivation until yesterday.  My daughter will go to daycare when she's three months old, and until then, she or she and my husband or she and my son or she and my husband and my son will always be with me in the house.

It's true that, since this is my second tour of infancy, my standards have lowered, and that being with my daughter in the house, and no one else, feels far closer to being alone than being with my son did when he was an infant.  This isn't because my daughter is less demanding than he was (she's very slightly more obstreperous).  It's because the first infant takes up enormous psychological space, catalyzing anxiety and bombarding identity, whereas by the time the second rolls around you mostly just treat her as a sentient alarm clock.

Plus you've garnered some additional experience living with toddlers and preschoolers, and infants seem quite restful in comparison.

These are exaggerations, but there's truth in every exaggeration, the spear of wood at the heart of the popsicle.

Still, I miss being genuinely alone.  No one looking at me, no one looking to me, no interruptions dangling over me  like miniature swords of Damocles.  I don't require much.  A room, a window, a glass of water.

Nightmare

I struggled out of a nightmare this morning at 4:45 AM.

When I was little, this was a fairly regular occurrence.  My nightmares were peopled with clowns and volcanos and monsters and murderers, and when I'd wake, it always took me a few moments to winnow what was real from the vast dark fields of what wasn't.

In my late thirties, my nightmares are apparently about being micromanaged by supervisors.

And it takes me even more time to thresh the true from the might-be.

Joe

The NY Times has a cover article today about how our world is beginning to boil.  The climate is shifting faster than we thought; we'll suffer the consequences sooner than we thought.  Our children will begin to kill each other.

It seems like a particularly inopportune time to be raising a baby.

Of course, we humans are skilled at ignoring unpalatable truths, because as soon as we are born we begin to hurtle toward death.  We grow and thrive entirely within the shadow of our own ends, and forgetting this fact is among the most critical of our tasks.

Ergo, this morning: I read the article, turned over the paper, and went to get some coffee.  I will die, and my daughter will die, and our deaths will contain some measure of horror, but we'll probably last through today's cup.

OPEN!

We've become a 24-hour family.  Full service!  For all your feeding and toiling and entertainment needs! Come on by!  Someone is always up!  

This is a slight exaggeration.  There are minutes or even hours when every creature in the house is sleeping, with the possible exception of the cat, who may only be pretending to sleep while plotting unknowable adventures, and is a mystery even to himself.  

But between the baby, who keeps the hours of a video-game-addicted methamphetamine addict,  and the child, who rises at 5:00 AM to play (at least from what I can divine on the video monitor) a happy-meal-sized game of hungry hungry hippos, there is not much down time.  Add in the chronological peregrinations of the adults who must attend these temporally deranged creatures, and moments of peace are scarce.

I miss them.  My most vivid fantasy right now is to be left alone in the house.

Again

Today I am doing the same things I did yesterday, with small variations.  My life has devolved into a piece by Phillip Glass.  I have even written about this topic before, which goes to show how little fresh meat there is these days.  Every morning: gnawing on the bones.

Vote

I love voting, despite the depressing ballot box results of the recent past.  There's a thrill to civic duty that never quite goes away, no matter that the duty itself consists of trundling into squeaky-floored school gyms or mouldering church basements and either standing in line irritably, or not standing in line while burbling in righteous irritation about what said lack of line denotes about your neighbors' civic dutifulness.

The actual event speeds by- you tick some boxes, stew in mild shame over not having done enough homework to weigh in on the eye-crossing, LSAT-like county charter amendments, click confirm and listen to the pleasant whir of the machine befor shuffling over to receive your benediction- the "I VOTED" sticker you'll slap on the back of your kid.

Then it's out into the summer rain, a short trudge home, some coffee- a citizen of the world.

Leave

I've got five weeks of unpaid leave left until I go back to the most traditional of my part-time jobs, but it started back last week, and since then I've been fielding a barrage of emails, phone calls, and texts, including on weekends.

It's a bit of a perfect storm: new boss, clueless replacement, general chaos...but still, it dawns on me that it might have just been easier to go back to work than to take time off, because each week I miss is going to cost me considerably in terms of the unpaid time I'm having to put in, the stress fielding and thinking about the crazy.... not to mention whatever I'll need to do to undo damage on the back end.

File under: poisoned apples.

Sick

My preschooler is sick.  Which means my infant will almost certainly get sick.  Which could be serious.  It's like watching a tree fall on us in slow motion.

Size

Next to my infant, my son looks gigantic, a Brobdingnagian representative of some mutant race.  His eyes are so big!  His hands are so facile!  He generates syntax!

The funny thing is that, prior to the infant's arrival, I was sure my son was small.  He is, in fact, small.  And he's also measurably small for his age, skulking at the bottom of the growth curve; this fact numbers among the vast constellations of things about which I worry, a galaxy that also includes climate change and nuclear disaster and Alzheimer's and the bathing of babies and whether or not that plant I can't identify in the backyard is poison ivy.

But compared to the infant, my son is monumental.  I have trouble believing he was ever as small as the baby, even though I know he was, because I was technically (if only partially mentally) there.  I have even more trouble believing that his personality, his whole lollpping, silly, cautious, ingratiating self, fit inside a being as small as he must have been.

It makes me think that the baby's future self must be lurking inside her grizzling shell as well.  That if I could only get past her pink and wriggling limbs, her furious blankness of face, I'd be able to see her personality lying tightly coiled inside her like a tapeworm.

Barriers

Baby is almost one month old, and yesterday I had the thought: Only eleven months to go on the prison sentence!

That I can entertain thoughts like these even as I'm yanked off my feet by the undertow of powerful grief for the loss of babyhood and delicious infant snuggles- well, that's what raising a kid seems to be about.

But it does get easier after a year or so, and even easier after that, at least in the sense that you, the chief cook and bottle washer, have fewer bottles to wash.  

Leaving the house: case in point.  

When we leave the house with my four-year-old, we take my four-year-old. 

When we leave the house with my infant, we take my infant. And a diaper bag stocked with at least five diapers, a pack of wipes, ready-to-eat formula, nipples and/or bottles for same, a portable changing bad, hand sanitizer, a blanket to shade the infant from the sun, an extra outfit in case of blowouts, a pacifier, a giant bucket carseat, and the ragged scraps of my sanity.

Eleven months.

Free Food!

I am only slightly exaggerating when I assert that the best part of having a child is free food.  I really, really like free food.  I like free food even more than I dislike cooking, if such a thing is possible.  And free food when you are possessed of a baby and assorted other beings dependent on you for sustenance is the best kind of free food, in that, like Lassie when you've fallen into the well, it arrives as deliverance.  

Plus it's often either homemade or delicious or both.  And it comes right to your door. And people tend to throw in things like pie.  Hosannah to the lasagna!  Etc.

(As an aside, my own career delivering free food is on hiatus: the last delivery I made, to a friend who'd had her first baby, included fancy artisan soup (see: failure to cook). Approximately six hours later, long past the dinner hour, the local grocery where I'd bought the soup issued a recall notice due to improper canning procedures. My friend and her husband and their new baby then spent the remainder of the night downing emetics at a local emergency room.  Since which time, I've been casserole-shy.)

Did I have a second child to score more free food?  No comment.  

But the only times in our lives in which food appears on the doorstep are births and deaths and grave illnesses, and of the three, birth seems preferable. This is almost certainly last child, so when next free food visits my life, I'll be in some kind of terminal pain.  

I don't look forward to that.  But at least there will be pie.

Biceps to Spare

My son is under the mistaken impression that predatory man in the story of Beauty and the Beast is named "GaStorm."  When I attempt to correct him, he's insistent.

"Mommy!  It's GaStorm!  Not Gaston.  You know, like Jackson Storm."

Jackson Storm, as far as I can gather, is a sentient and possibly disturbed vehicle from a shambolic Disney or Pixar dynasty called Cars.  My son hasn't seen the films, but school is a cultural Petri dish, and what grows, it seems, is anthropomorphized Hyundais.

I'm a stickler for accuracy, but I sympathize.  For what is my kid engaged in if not the noblest of human endeavors: wedging the crampons of what we know into the cliff of what we don't, rocketing our small scraps of knowledge into the vast galaxies of our ignorance?

I let GaStorm ride.  He's got more elan than Gaston, and I harbor a vague hope he knows how to drive stick.

Ambiguous Loss

Can I tell you how unutterably difficult it is to have lost my father?  Lost is at once the right word and the wrong word- he's still here, physically, but mentally he is not the man who raised me. For a long time, in the early stages, I was able to see flashes of that man; as things progress, I see less and less. I feel bad for not loving him completely as he is now, but I miss him terribly as he was: the single person in my life, past and present, who was always and unequivocally in my corner, forever and profoundly on my side. 

I miss you, Dad.  

4:41 AM.

Give baby a bottle.  Burp baby.  Be spit up upon, voluminously.  Drag spit-up weighted onesie off baby. Swaddle baby, poorly.  Put baby in bassinet.  Pray baby sleeps.  Change own spit-up covered clothes.  Must remember to do laundry today.  Corral old bottles.  Bolt breakfast.  Clean up breakfast. Assemble pump parts.  Pump.  Retrieve bottle washing basing.  Dissesemble bottles and pump parts and formula pitcher.  Handwash everything. Wash bottle washing basin.  Litter box at defcon tone level of needing scooping.  Procrastinate dealing with cat litter.  Pick trash up off floor.  Load dishwasher.  Run dishwasher.  Must remember to unlaod dishwasher.  Retrieve paper, which is not supposed to be coming.  Eyeball medical bills.  Must remember to pay some medical bills and call to dispute the one that needs to be disputed in order to get hold on insurance account lifted.  Must remember to sweep floor.   Must remember to make more formula.  And buy more powder.  Also almost out of milk.  Need more diapers downstairs.  Must grocery shop TODAY.  Why are there no vegetables in the house.  Can't remember if I can recycle number 5 plastics or what.  Maybe just toss entire non-functioning bottle of cleaning spray and damn the earth?  Also NOTE: bathtub has not been cleaned since the Obama administration.  Must figure out how to open window to get spider webs out.  Is there water coming in behind this wall?  How to waterproof basement?  Get lawn guy to pull forest in backyard SOMEHOW.  Must make contact w. daycare provider re: baby placement.  Must send in bug spray for older son.  Did I send thank you email re: fluffy bunny?  Maybe try to work on book review today.   Must make more neighborhood friends.   Must try to exercise before preschooler wakes up.  Or baby, God forbid.  Headache. When will I practice?

Plod

The thing no one tells you about adulthood is how much of it you spend doing things you don't want to do.  That, in fact, doing things you don't want to do is the very marrow of adulthood; that a life stage that appeared, when you were a child, to be a vast expanse of cabana parties, french-fry eating, and novel swilling actually consists of you dragging your sagging carcass though a series of sorry activities you'd rather do never, and pretending to do it cheerfully.

Waking up with babies: case in point.  TSA lines.  Required trainings about topics of minimal interest.  Soliciting contractor bids.  Losing beloved teachers. Watching your parents disintegrate.  Flights aboard diverted planes.

Windows

It's cooled down enough to open the windows at night.  My husband does it; by the time the temperature dips below the temperature on the indoor thermostat, I've tunneled too far into sleep to care. But when I wake in the very early morning to take over baby duty, nearly every window in the house gapes and the is house riddled with cool air.

You notice things, when the windows are open.  The stridency of the birds, for instance.  At dawn they are like Trump supporters at a MAGA rally, shouting the same thing over and over and over.  The absence of the highway's hum.  The surprising comings and goings of your neighbors, some unknown party crawling out of bed at 4:00 AM on a Saturday to slam the car door and murmur into the cool.

The paperboy, who is not a boy at all, arrives early in the 5:00 AM hour: the grumble of a slow-moving, poorly-maintained vehicle accompanied by a slightly ominous series of repetitive pops, papers dinging sidewalks and lawns and cars.

It's borrowed time.  The house is waking up; the temperature is rising.

Squirrels

Squirrels are so brainlessly agile.  On my walk this morning (stolen,  too short), one of them leapt three feet sideways from a low branch to a garden stake, weightless as an astronaut, seemingly released from obligations to pesky things like gravity and physics.

It was, in the manner of squirrels, after a bird feeder.

For several years during my middle childhood, my father waged drawn-out, futile war over the bird feeder he'd erected in our back yard.  He'd wanted songbirds.  Instead he got fat, upside-down squirrels, clinging by their toes to crosspieces, vampiric, noses deep in the seed.

He tried rearrangement.  He tried noise deterrence.  He ran at them personally, gibbering and pulling faces like a deranged clown.  He gambled on the application to the feeder of a sticky goop that, while purported to drive off squirrels, merely made the rodents' movements more precise, their journey to the bird feeder that much more balletic.

The last thing he tried was acceptance.  We fed the squirrels, and they were beautiful.

Tomatoes

Tomatoes are so terribly ephemeral.

Yes, there are tomato-shaped objects available year-round at your nearest grocery store.  These items are even called "tomatoes," and they do bear a strong visual resemblance to the real deal.

But they are not tomatoes.  Tomatoes appear in July or possibly August, the fat lip of the year, and they hang around only through the throaty part of summer, the hot-damp days and firefly nights.  Come fall, they vanish, replaced by pasty doppelgängers.

I know my summer has been too full when I've forgotten about tomatoes.  And lately, alas, that's been the case: I can't recall a summer in the last eight years in which I have not moved house or moved states or faced an insect infestation or changed jobs had a child, or sometimes several of these things at once.

This summer is a baby summer, but I did remember tomatoes yesterday, stealing out of the house to head to the farmer's market down the road.

I bought four.  They were exorbitantly expensive and not particularly prepossessing, moderate globes of yellow and pink and red.  I will eat them plain and messy, not bothering with the knife.

Grind

Imagine a worm cut in two and then cut in two and then cut in two again until your hands are filled with a heap of little worms.  This is a bit what maternity leave is like.

It's the repetition that gets to me.  Each day is the long, wriggling twin of the day that came before, and also the day that came before that, and also of tomorrow.  You get up, you feed the baby, you change the diaper, you jolly the baby to sleep, you wash the bottles, you sit for a minute or maybe get really ambitious and try to unload the dishwasher, you get up, you feed the baby, etc.  Over and over and over and over, for literal months -or if you don't go back to work, years.  It's what I imagine incarceration must be like: day day day day day day day.

I can't tell if everyone finds the repetition as grinding as I do, or if I am constitutionally ill-suited to today's version of stay-at-home mothering.  Maybe there's a way to spice up the iterations I haven't figured out yet.  Or maybe it's like gardening- something I'd dearly love to enjoy, but, despite many attempts at emotional reform and a past strewn with dead plants, continue to detest.  

I claim to crave stability, but I pursued three different majors in college and my work life is startlingly varied.  Maybe I wandered into multiple careers and freelancing because I have a secret yearning for instability.  Or maybe years of career whiplash have made me a variety addict, jonesing for the next twist.

Speculation is useless, but it gives me something to do while I repeat.

Dawn

There are still those slivers of time in which everyone in the house miraculously, simultaneously sleeps, and I steal outside to make sure the world is still there.

It's dawn.  The sky is sparking in the east.  The trees steal back into the visible world, and the birds shout mine mine mine. Sometime before the sky kindled, the paperboy came and left. OK for now.

Hello!

Do you have things you want profoundly, but only in the future or the past?

I often feel this way about socializing.  I am a substantially happier person when I socialize. I'm always glad when I've done it, and I very much want to do more in future.  I'm an introvert, but a very socially oriented one; I know that life is made up of relationships encompassing and glancing, and I find time with others deeply rewarding....

....later.  Or tomorrow.  Just maybe not right this second.

Mostly I've learned to work around myself on this one, but the fatigue is a hurdle I have to clear each and every time I undertake to expand my social circle and forge new connections.

I'm actively seeking out new friendships at the moment, because while I have made some wonderful friends in St. Louis, I'd like to make more connections in my immediate neighborhood.  I know it's a good idea.  All the times in my adult life during which I've actively undertaken to make new friends (the last couple of times I've moved; the last time I had a child) have proved incredibly rewarding. Not every interaction bears fruit, but many of them do, whether that fruit is a deep and lasting friendship or just someone to tell you where to get the good cheese.  I want to do it and I know I will be glad to have done it.

In a minute.  Or two.

Fatigue

Am I the only person who lies awake for three hours in the middle of the night in anticipation that the infant will wake and force me to lie awake for three hours in the middle of the night?  Anyone?

There are parts of myself that I loathe.

Park

I've basically hung my entire life on the ability to walk to the park.

That's it; that and no more. Locomotion + green space + no intermediary vehicles.  I've mortgaged myself in any number of ways to obtain and maintain this privilege, and so I take shameless advantage of it.

The park is about half a mile, and somehow uphill both ways.  It's not a particularly prepossessing park- much of it is treeless, and the playground, which is moderately worn, seems to have been set up for daredevil ten-year-olds.  There's the aforementioned playground, a single picnic shelter, a memorial to do with fireman, a baseball diamond, and a vast green space in which dogs- my longtime nemeses- run free.

But it is my park, and, even pushing a stroller, even encumbered by an irritable four-year-old, I can put one foot in front of the other until I get there.

Porch

I am camping out on the porch.

It's a small, glassed-in room with windows on three sides.  It has a daybed, a chair, a single bookshelf, and, inexplicably, a small rocking horse.  Most crucially, I can't hear the baby from there.

We're taking shifts at night, so when I'm not on infant duty, I head to the porch.  The daybed is not particularly comfortable, but it a flat surface, and when I lie down on it I can stare out the window into a wash of green. Most often, what I do on the porch I sleep.  But sometimes, for just those few beats before exhaustion snatches me up like a hawk, I stare out at the branches of the trees.  It's the fat part of the July and they're in full regalia, draped with leaves, stuffed with birds, limned by scraps of a blue so far gone to black I almost miss its color.  When the last of the light drains away, they vanish, but I seldom make it that far.

Fuss

The baby is getting fussier.  This is something I always feared with my last baby, but despite my scrutinizing his every move for signs of colic or psychopathy or demonic possession, my last baby was a vigorously mellow dreamboat.

This one is not.  She's not a hell baby, but she's not relaxed either.  And I was tense enough with the dreamboat.

I am not good at fussy-baby parenting.   Or really baby parenting in general.  My nervous system is pretty finely strung (understatement), so if I'm up from 3-4 AM, say, trying to soothe a fussy baby, I'm unable to go back to sleep afterwards because I'm too flooded with adrenaline. And in daytime,  if I've just put a fussy baby down, I stay clenched and stiff, trying to inch past the moment like the baby is unexploded ordinance.

I know other people are better at fussy baby parenting, because they choose to have MORE THAN TWO BABIES.  GOOD GOD.  And because they claim to enjoy infants.  And because my husband is a whole lot better at it than I am.  Fussy baby down?  Go to sleep seconds later.  Fussy baby in arms?  Doze.  Fussy baby in general?  Stay cool.

I, on the other hand, am a better toddler parent.  Toddlers are much more predictable, comprehensible, and comprehending, and I have lots of practice being patient but firm with toddlers.  I understand them (because I'm secretly a toddler at heart?  I don't wanna think too much about that one).  And I know that at some level they cannot help themselves, so I don't take their garbage personally.

I wish I could change the way I feel about babies, but it feels sub-cortical.  As it is, I'm just trying to get through it.

Last Firsts

Does going through something for the last time sharpen your consciousness of it?  If nothing else, it inscribes the grooves of my anxiety more deeply- if I don't absorb this, the divine and the dull and the heart-opening and the painful, I won't get another chance to do so.

This my last child, barring accident or lobotomy or sea change.  I don't much care for infant care, particularly the bits in which you're unable to soothe a howling, wordless poop machine.  But I feel the yoke of the imperative savor every morsel of this time, merely because these moments -small body, wobbly head, clenched fists, mouth contorted with rage- are rare.

Is infrequency enough for import?

Of course, it doesn't matter what I think.  I'm already past the last first hour, that silver span of time right after birth when the infant stays quiet and you shut up, too.  We're forging forward, gathering speed.

Buzz

I don't know if it's the nature of summer, or of infant care, or of shutting down much the apparatus of your life, but the memories are swarming these days.

It's almost like someone has taken a baseball bat to their hive.  They come spilling out, haphazard, buzzing, flying in no particular pattern.  And they sting- mildly, but every one of them stings.

Flat out on the living room floor, 2:30 PM, 16 years old and playing hooky, watching the sun's bars inch across the floor.

Walking and walking and walking through the summer streets of Bloomington; finding my shirt on the grass where I'd left it the night before.

Practicing after heartbreak; the melted crayon scent of that room.

Practicing after childbirth; a clawing back.

Practicing after a wedding, finger by finger.

Walking through downtown Indianapolis long after I'd lived there, weeping.

Walking circles around a house outside of Ypsilanti.

The last time my father said much that made sense: airport; weeping.

Weeping on planes.

Practicing and weeping.

(Too much walking and practicing and crying!  I regret nothing -and everything.)

The ache of one memory gives way to the mild throb of the next.  They are intensely specific, ragingly dull, searingly pointless.    I do not invite them, but must endure their arrivals and departures.  The people in them are gone, at least as they were.  The places in them are unutterably changed.

Respire

There's a startling unevenness to infant breathing.  I know because I've watched an infant breathe, an activity that bears a not insignificant resemblance to watching paint dry, only five hundred times more fraught.  Yes, you understand that, barring disaster, the infant will keep breathing, and yet each breath, every compact or elongated or misshapen bundling of inhale with exhale, seems like an event.

It's a trick any fiction writer would envy.

I'd forgotten the unevenness, if I noticed it the first time around.  Some breaths are panting and shallow, others slow and stertorous; some are rhythmic, some are not.  There are phlegmy gasps, odd vocalizations, terrifying moments of stridor and, worse, silent hitches, during which your own breath claws its way back into your throat.

Breath evens out over time. Or you watch less.  I can't remember which.

Practice

The bruise on my arm is finally fading.  It looks like I was grabbed- like someone with strong tendons and a strong will wrapped a hand around my elbow and held me back.

In fact, it's where the first nurse struggled to insert my first IV.

I didn't want an IV.  I didn't want much of anything to do with childbirth, though, so I knew when I became pregnant that I had a certain amount of stuff I didn't want coming to me.  I'd hoped my allotment would be less and not more, but that was hee extent of my hope, because hope is my heroin, addictive and profoundly destructive and I try to keep my habits under control.

I didn't have a birth plan, which is a document so drenched in hope it may as well check itself into rehab.

I didn't expect the sequence of events that resulted in my daughter's birth, but I cannot say I was surprised by my surprise.  On my due date, I fell while on my morning walk, tripping over some minuscule unevenness in the sidewalk and landing, with significant but not overwhelming force, on my knees, elbows, and stomach.  Alone and in pain, crouched on the deserted sidewalk of a dead end street during the workday, I called my husband to come pick me up.  He arrived with my son, who had no pants or shoes, and we drove to the hospital.  I did not come out.

Because I'd fallen, my doctor advised induction.  The induction was long and painful but relatively uneventful, and the birth was long and painful but relatively uneventful, and the recovery was long and painful but relatively uneventful.

The thing that sticks with me is how many things had to be done twice.  I delivered at a teaching hospital, and later discovered that the new Residents had changed over three days before.  Every exam was inexpert; every procedure had to be redone, from routine checks to the epidural.   Even my diet was entered incorrectly-  I was a point on the learning curve, and I'd never opt to be that point again.

On the other hand, someone has to be.  In order to perform well, we must practice, and when our performance has to do with hands-on, real life procedures on other humans, other humans must be a part of that practice.  In a way, becoming a doctor must be not unlike new parenthood. You try, and try again.  You never completely understand, but you accrete understanding.  The bruises fade.

Park

We tried to take the baby to the park today.

This necessitated unearthing the stroller from the garage, where it had accumulated a light frosting of spiderweb and dirt.  We scraped this off with paper towels, tossing the blackened sheets straight into the outdoor trash, but then couldn't remember how to click the infant carrier into the stroller base.  So we half-disassembled the stroller while continuing to fail to remember.  The next ten minutes were devoted to quarreling about whose responsibility it was to remember how to interlock strollers with carriers.

So we tried the same rigamarole with our backup stroller until we realized it was the wrong brand to interface with our carrier. Next we decided to pile in the car to buy the right brand on our way to the park, which meant entering Target on a Saturday afternoon, which no one should ever do.  One hard-fought hour later, we purchased something that was not what we wanted, but which we nevertheless attempted to assemble with no tools on the outskirts of the 93 degree park.  Then we spent fifteen more minutes trying to stuff its pieces back into the trunk.  By this time the infant was pink with heat and squalling with hunger so we headed back home.

We need one more person in this marriage.  A person who assembles things.

21.25''

I have no memory of my son when he was as small as my daughter is now.  Which means that, more than likely, I will have no memory of my daughter when she is as small as she currently is- which is, really, as small as she'll ever be.

 I don't know what to make of this impending loss.  The idea of trying to seize the memory, pin its wings and make it stay, makes me sad.  But so does letting it fly.

I'll settle for half-measures- taking the pulse of the day, feeling its flutter against my skin.

One Thing

As a new parent, you are in emergency mode.  It's not the only life event that can kick on your crisis function, of course- there's death, serious illness, job loss, divorce, and all the smaller ways in which the lives we know flare up and consume themselves.

But new parenthood is a reliable flint.

The pitfalls of emergency mode are many- you drop balls and lose sleep and develop an allergy to nonessentials.  Your life narrows.  

Which is also the signal virtue of emergency mode: your life narrows.  Your days contract. Miraculously, your to-do list shrinks.

You do one thing.  Maybe you do one thing plus staying alive.  

And if you do that, you've done all you can do.

Rodeo Two

The greatest gift of second-time parenthood is that you understand you will survive.

The first time around, yeah, sure, you know intellectually that there are people who make it through parenthood alive.  People you know, and also that guy you saw on the street, and your 4th grade teacher ,and even national politicians: all of them have had children and yet, inexplicably, are still walking and talking.  So you know it's a a possibility.  But the first time around you're unable to grasp this viscerally, and so you have, within you, always that linea nigra of fear, the arrow pointing downward toward dark.

The second time you bear your survival like a shield.

The Dark Hours

And suddenly, time expands, a pupil dilating, a yawning sack.  In the morning, I wake.  A falsehood.  I am already awake.  I have been awake for hours, maybe minutes, but more likely hours- the baby is crying and I'm adrift inside every second, clinging to its spar.

Time during infancy is the most voluminous it will ever be.  And the most constricted.

This is not a new observation, but every observation, embodied, cuts.

Cusp

Cusp is an ugly word.  That merciless /k/, sticking in the throat before disgorging itself into a bland, muddy vowel, the tongue lodged in its rut.  To close, the ungainly tangle of consonants, a hiss and a spit. The worst thing is how the word hurls itself from back to front, as if loosed by an emetic.  

Time- that great ipecac.

I'm about to have a baby.

She's angling to be overdue.  My first was overdue, so this shouldn't be a surprise, but yet I'm dismayed, bemused, lost.   Babies are one of the two remaining things we must wait for, marooned amidst the rubble of our calendars with no app or screen or hapless agent to harass for an updated time of arrival.

Death is the other.

Overdue means lonely.  It means a stripped down, too-big life; my obligations strafed, my will enfeebled.  I'm ready; of course I'm not ready.  I can't bring a baby into this blackening world; it's far too late not to.  I know how I'll fall.  Just not when.

Decades

Because summer is when now scrapes itself down to skin; because the late light allows you perceive, through the moment's membrane, the pumping of what was and what might have been; because the heat pins me, blanches my will-

I'm looking back through past blog entries.

I was a good writer.  I am not as adept, now.  I was a quick thinker.  I'm slower, now.  But I was also hungrier, and lonelier, and poorly housebroken.  I'm not sure who I'd rather be.

Forgetting is how we keep on.

1/27/2018

G: Sun
P: I exercise daily
C: We're all just trying to get by

1/15/2018

G: My child's easy joy
P: Sometimes setting aside what I want
C: My covetous heart

1/1/2018

Gratitude: Friends
Pride: Maintaining blog as social media tool
Compassion:Anyone out in this cold