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.