Time for you and time for me

I am sitting down to write this post in a completely quiet house. The only thing on, besides major appliances, is my computer. No fan for white noise. No classical music or kids radio station. No crackle of the baby monitor. Not even the almost-inaudible sighs of a sleeping baby. I am alone in my house.

I've had a dozen ideas of what to write about since my last post in July, but none of them have happened. I get up in the morning and don't stop working at things until bed, but still only manage to maintain. The house stays orderly for the most part. We have a little food to eat. Nettie is clean and cared for and even entertained some of the time. But beyond that, things don't happen.

It's kind of like living in a fog. Not the murkiness of the first six weeks with a newborn - that was dark and dreamlike, hardly real. This has begun to feel more like a permanent, habitual haze. My head starts buzzing the minute I wake up to feed Nettie in the morning. It buzzes all day, thinking of all the things I want to do besides feed and do laundry and feed and clean up and feed. And it stays buzzing when I try to go to bed after the 9:00 p.m. feeding, thinking of all those things that of course I didn't get done that day. At 1:00 a.m. I wake up to feed and then lay back down to buzz through my list again. There are so many things I want to get done. Things to clean, of course. Things to pick or preserve or cook. Things to wash. Things to make, things to felt, things to write. I've had the start to a poem spinning around in my brain for two weeks, but like my grocery list, it hasn't made it onto the notepad. I just let it buzz around in my head, keeping me up at night.

This evening Nettie decided she didn't want to eat from the left side, which she does from time to time. She doesn't prefer that side; who knows why. After the third attempt ended in frustrated tears on both sides, Dave took her to visit Grandma for a bit. And so I find myself alone in my house for the first time in months.

Within minutes of their leaving, I felt the fog that has settled in my brain clearing a little and I could see how to let some things go. I stopped fussing at the pile of dishes on the counter and let the dust mop sit where I left it yesterday. I put on the kettle and sat down and started typing. They'll be back in a few minutes and she'll be hungry and all the little cleaning jobs I wanted to get to will still need done tonight, but right now, with the setting sun coming in my studio window, even my crazy-messy worktable looks kind of beautiful. Kind of.

My life is more chaotic than it has ever been. And I don't believe I'm going to learn to enjoy chaos. I love control and order just as much as I ever have. But I realize now, in my temporarily quiet house, with only my cat to demand anything of me for the next thirty minutes, that I can handle the chaos. I just need occasional relief.

While I was trying not to enter full-blown hysterics tonight, Dave suggested I just get out of the house, go for a walk. My mom had suggested the same thing a few minutes earlier: get out, go do something. I found myself echoing to him what I told her: everything I want to do right now is here, in this house. I took Nettie for a walk today. I don't need to take that same walk again. I want to do some work in my house. I want some time in my studio. What I didn't realize, until Dave left with Nettie, is that I needed some time BY MYSELF. I needed the silence of an empty house. I needed to know that for some amount of time, however brief, no one would make any demands of me. Nettie doesn't need me to smile when she spins her toy. Dave doesn't need me to show him where the mustard seeds are.

During college, I volunteered for a semester at the local YWCA. I helped with a "respite care" program that was held on Friday nights for low-income mothers who couldn't afford babysitters. I couldn't appreciate at the time what a valuable service that was for those women. Or the use of a word like respite. Such a serious word.  Implying a break from something unpleasant, even suffering or distress. I probably still can't really appreciate how much most of those women needed a respite, as they were working mothers, single parents, and had more than one child. But I do understand the use of that word now. Respite. Not so over-blown after all.

I don't mean to imply that being a mother is tortuous or unbearably difficult. It's just that there is no "off" setting. Moms are always on. (Dads, too; I don'tmean to discriminate by using the m-word.) And it can get overwhelming, trying to be the mom you want your child to have. Sometimes you just need to be the not-momma-self. With no one to observe you. You need a moment to breathe.

Because the sometimes-crushing responsibility of motherhood (or parenthood) is undoubtedly centered in feeding and clothing and caring for a small, nearly-helpless, and often-demanding person. But sometimes the hardest thing isn't getting up for the 1:00 a.m. feeding. It's finding the humor to laugh with my baby about her "little piggies" and read her favorite book for the hundredth time when all I want to do is go in the studio and work on my latest creative idea.

For me, the crisis comes on Saturday when I've waited all week for this day that my partner is "giving" me to do what I've wanted to do since Sunday. And somehow it's 4:00 already and all I've managed to do is restart the computer and sit with an embroidery hoop in my hands for a few minutes, and in between I've fed and done laundry and put away the jars of tomatoes and some garden produce and done some dishes and gone for a walk with Nettie and put her down for two naps and changed diapers and a dozen other little things that frittered away the day. Nothing has gone terribly wrong. No one has actively prevented me from "having" this day. But I've lost it. Somehow it has slipped though my fingers and now my baby has decided that she would rather not eat from my left side. That the left side is sub-par fare and she'd rather go hungry than finish on the left side, so yeah: you can go ahead and pump that side, Mom, because there is no way I'm going to take whatever snake oil you're trying to peddle from that boobie. Gross.

They're back now and Nettie will be ready to eat when she wakes up and I'll finish this post later, fill in the parts I didn't get to tonight. I'll buzz it around in my brain and maybe tomorrow morning I'll finish it over a cup of tea, if Nettie decides to take a nice nap.

...........................................................

Since I haven't found time to write my poem yet, I'll share one of T.S. Eliot's that speaks to me these days. From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:"

  And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate; 
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

[...]

 For I have known them all already, known them all;
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

I doubt that my reading is exactly what Eliot intended. This is usually read as a poem about a middle-aged man who has grown complacent, who thinks he has plenty of life to mete out in coffee spoons and banality. For me, it's a reminder that there is a time for everything that needs to be done. I just need to take a deep breath and decide what to hold and what to jettison. There is nothing on my "to-do" list that can't wait until tomorrow.  Except Nettie. She can't wait, and she isn't. I can only have Nettie the way she is today for this day. Tomorrow she will have changed just a little, grown.

My days are full of small things right now, the mundane tasks that go into taking care of the biggest thing that has ever happened to me. My days are measured in feedings and diapers and little piggies and Dr. Seuss. And I think I can be okay with that. As long as I get an hour or two to myself once in a while. So that when I get into bed at night, instead of thinking about my list, I can focus on what really matters.

Baby Steps

In my family, we quote the movie What About Bob? like scripture.  Bill Murray's neurotic, hypochondriacal, starved-for-connections character "Bob" likes to say that he's "baby-stepping." Meaning that he's taking tiny steps towards getting better. Bob's been diagnosed with a host of psychological problems by dozens of different doctors, but what it really boils down to is that he's afraid. Paralyzed by fear. So he has to remind himself to "baby-step" towards the things that he fears.

I feel like that's where I am lately. A few weeks back, my facebook feed began filling up with these really sad posts. Updates on people battling cancer or other serious health issues. The ones that really got to me were about children with cancer. Or more specifically, children who did have cancer but have recently passed away. After ending up in tears several afternoons, I considered trying to unfollow the people who were sharing these particular posts...it's embarrassing and selfish, I know - trying to shield myself from the reality that these children and families were facing. Instead I've been trying to take deep breaths and baby step.

Scenarios like these were a significant part of our considerations when Dave and I were trying to decide whether to go ahead and start a family. We're both pretty intense realists, (okay, really we're terrible pessimists), so planning for catastrophe is way too often a part of our discussion. Because statistically, the worst-case-scenario is not going to happen. Not to 99 percent of us. And with odds like that, most people feel pretty confident and carefree. Plus, as everyone likes to remind worriers, "the things you worry about never happen." Which is true, if you're a normal person and you only worry about a few things. But if you are a serial worrier and worry about everything, sooner or later one of them probably will happen. Which is justification enough for the serial worrier to continue feeding her neurosis. 

"Children don't come with a manual," people like to quip, which is true and admittedly, unfortunate. But harder still is the fact that they don't come with a warranty. There is absolutely no guarantee that the child you receive will have any of the features you hope for. Intelligence, looks, drive, talent and abilities, health, long life. None of these is a given.

All through my pregnancy I worked to open myself to these unknowns, especially to the possibility that my baby would not be "fine." That she might be among the very small percentage of babies who is not healthy and thriving. I wanted to be able to face that possibility and still feel that I could go on, that I could be one of those "warrior parents" you see on TV or read about in a Facebook post. They find themselves in the worst-case-scenario and they meet it with strength and resilience and this fierce, brave, love.

I thought I was there. I thought I could be a warrior mom if it came to that. I knew my love was fierce, so I felt brave. And then Nettie came. And she's been so healthy and bright and content.  So I stopped holding my breath and opened my heart wider and just let her fill it up, even into the edges and corners where little pockets of darkness and fear were left.

But it turns out that my fierce love is the cowardly kind. The self-interested kind that starts to waver and shrink when confronted with the possibility of pain and loss.  I saw those little children whose health and happy, carefree lives had been taken and decided that I wanted the warranty after all. I needed to know that would never happen to Nettie, to our family, or how could I go on loving her more and more, getting more and more attached?  Every day I was making myself more and more vulnerable to the pain and loss that might be waiting.

That kind of fearful love is circular. It goes out a little way but then we pull it back in. It's given, but only with strings attached.  And it's a self-defeating circle, one that wears us out and prevents us from really loving wholly and unselfishly. We run that ever-tightening path of what-ifs until it's smooth and packed and familiar.  But we always end up where we started, and that path gets lonelier and lonelier. 

Brave, whole-hearted love demands that we step out, away from ourselves, and that we keep moving forward. There is no set end-point, no map, and no guarantee. So technically, anything could happen. The worst could happen. But so could the best, and if I can't open my heart to both possibilities, I'll miss out on all the joyful moments that will be part of my daughter's life, however long or short, easy or difficult it is.

So I'm baby-stepping. I'm doing my work, taking small steps towards opening my heart and mind to all the possibility that each day holds, so that when my daughter laughs with joy in her eyes and her voice, I can be right there with her, fully present and grateful for that moment.