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Fell off the blogging wagon, but actually I have written a couple of poems in the last couple weeks. I’m mostly logging onto the blog to let it be known that I saw 20 minutes of The Royal Tenenbaums last night and basically haven’t stopped crying since. I’m 31, which helps that makes sense, and also removes all sense from it. The supplementary note to this note is that I also took a “Which Tenenbaum Are You?” buzzquiz and it confirmed my belief that Richie is my fictional self. The end!
I am sitting by myself at a table in the Public House, drinking champagne. It’s 8:30pm and two members of a long and established line of Public House fruit flies is hovering around my glass. One is skinny; the other, fat.
I’m trying to take the advice of the writers I know, and write for godssake. I haven’t experienced writer’s block like the block that comes after not writing for two years and realizing at the end of it that I’m completely at a loss. I have never in my life been at a loss when it comes to writing. And when I say things like that, I sound like such a whiny kid. Which I am. Life is horrible. Wonderful, yes; and horrible. We pretend to accept this paradox, we pretend to understand its shape and movement, but then the tornado or asshole comes through our life and we whine. Like Job. Unable to imagine (though we hope, still) future happiness. Maybe I should speak for myself: I pretended to accept this paradox, and then a tornado came through my life. I’m sucking at recalibration.
And I can’t write about postpartum depression or rough marital issues without a thought balloon hovering over my head with “This is common. This is boring to other people.” in it.
Something in me would rather write about the line of faces at the bar—thirtysomethings with limp hair and thick-rimmed glasses, one is drawing sketches in a tiny moleskine notebook, looking pleased. This is what I’m missing. I’m jealous of this guy.
I miss pleasure in my work. A sense that I’m creating something good. That particular sense is why I kept a somewhat still center in my late teens and early adulthood, I think. I made things that seemed to benefit both me and others.
Hanging out with a toddler—while infinitely more rewarding (at least to PPD/PPA moms like I was) than hanging out with an infant—lacks a certain je ne sais pas. Maybe I have fun, maybe I enjoy significant parts of it, maybe I can theoretically grasp that I’m doing a form of creative work by being deeply involved in a child’s formative years. But mostly I hate that I’m not doing a good job, being too internally chaotic, too angry and too lazy and too unhappy and too impatient. And I’m having to come to grips with the fact that I thought I would be a writer, headed to obscure but rewarding success in the world of literature and litmags, boozy release parties, elevated conversation, learned circles, wildly artistic and not necessarily dissipated habits. My habits are basically the worst and most boring they’ve ever been. Though it does feel like things are changing.
Again, I sound like such a whiny kid—but maybe this is what life is: continually running into detours and rerouting and roadblocks and deciding, each time, whether to pull over or keep going. And I think the odd things is, while I’ve met detours and roadblocks before, I’ve never considered just pulling over and parking it, before. The possibility that I could actually give up on this thing that I thought my life was for (not to put too fine a point on it) gives me pause. It’s horrifying. And it turns me to stone. And I continue to not write. And my life continues to become what it is becoming.
Maybe early motherhood is rocky for everyone. Maybe motherhood, for women through the millenia, is, itself, a kind of eternal reckoning of the soul: What do I do, now? In societies that valued motherhood above all for women, it was probably less fraught, I’m guessing. On the other hand, maybe it’s a personality thing: I wanted to do a job that doesn’t jive with [early] motherhood, and which has a form of expiration date on it. The longer I’m out of the market, the worse my resume looks, and the less confidence I have about jumping back in.
That’s it for today.
So farm work today consisted of four hours of hand-weeding the strawberries (I think there’s 800 feet of them, to give you an idea) in dry, brick-hard dirt. It was blissful though, because I’m gaining myself back after a long time of (it feels like) having been (by necessity!) a different person. I didn’t have to talk to anyone or get interrupted the entire time. And I got to have pop tarts on the drive back to the Parent’s Day Out to pick up the baby. And then she had had a great day, better than Monday, which had at that time been her best day ever at the PDO. Apparently she didn’t cry ONCE today, and didn’t want to be held the whole time, and ran around and played hard all morning. So when I got her home, she nursed for a minute and then crashed. Which means—yes—I get to take a shower. Plenty of days this doesn’t happen. I’m buoyant with gratitude for basically everything that has happened today. Hence the cheery blog post title.
So now, in the ~15-30 minutes before she wakes up, I’m all achy and sore and clean and happy, and all I want to do is talk about this house we just bought. (((applause)))
Thanks. Thank you. Yes, we did it. Marshall made all the money, and I took care of all the baby, and no one died, and life goes on, and we suddenly get to mark a YUGE item off our Long-Term Goals list. Ok *my* Long-Term Goals list, because Marshall doesn’t do that kind of thing. But—I do. I do so much. Omg. This house, with its red brickness, cute shapeness, fireplaceness (such fireplaceness, wow), and whole acre of level, beautiful land ready for garden and chickens and three people from Chicago Avenue to come stand in it and take deep breaths—this house, be purchased.
The yard is going to be the focus of our spring and early summer. We’re hoping we can do a medium-sized kitchen renovation late summer or early fall, and get the chimneys swept, and maybe do something about our furniture, but yard (and refinishing the floors real quick) is current focus. Too large a thing to write about in this post, because it already has a long introduction and my main goal was really to write about paint colors, but more later.
So paint colors. The T R E N D , besides using all caps and setting spaces between letters, is white. White white white white. It looks very cool in magazines, and even plenty of O N – T R E N D houses I’ve been in, but Marshall and I are kind of proud and kind of embarrassed (ok I’m talking about myself w/that last descriptor) that we need color. This house we’ve been renting, which has not been that bad but has at times been ridiculous and bad, is 100% beige walls and white trim. I love white trim, but beige does nothing for me. I guess the point of excessively neutral walls is to let objects be dominant, but we barely have any objects. I have chairs I’m going to recover, but obviously not for a while, and even our art is pretty understated. So once we realized that, the question became, well what colors then.
Photos not same size or organized in pleasing way but baby may wake up any minute, and just wanted to get everything I’m currently thinking about on the page. Greens are big for me, and I cannot for the life of me decide which green should be where. Marshall greatly desires yellow third bedroom/office. I mediumly desire teal bedroom to remind me of many happy days in my tiny teal bedroom at Grainger Avenue. And seafoam is Mary’s color.
Us on the porch being cheerful. Selfie.
Burgers tonight. Can’t articulate my love for burgers, owning a grill and having a yard, warm weather in which to all these things ahhh
Also you can see here the freshly-mown grass. Marshall slaved like a slave. He’s been dying to get our lawn mowed for weeks and today was the day. He donned ear protectors and a dust mask. Sadly I was too occupied with making curtains to look out the window at him and chuckle.
Today I made kitchen curtains from a $1 thrift store sheet. The only impressive things here are the cost and the fact that I did actually finally get something over these windows so I can be less clothed around the house if I want. Yeah our neighbor’s house is really close.
The curtains I put up in the bathroom however—I do like these.
Bathroom, I like you better now.
And this is how we know we’re old. Besides several other things. We got a rocker recliner today at Sears with some income tax return moneys. It’s for rocking the baby to sleep. Marshall’s parents have one and it puts the baby out like a light, every time. It’s almost as good as a boob! The photo turned out completely out-of-focus so I comforted myself by putting a filter on it.
So, life is hard, currently. Ha. It’s 10:30 am and I’m still wearing pajamas and robe, having left the baby fussing in her swing for 20 minutes, maybe? until she fussed herself to sleep. That might be a first. I haven’t bought “attachment parenting” wholesale, but its main beliefs and goals make sense to me, so when my baby is unhappy…I hold her. Or distract, or whatever. Most of the time, it’s a pleasure to comfort my daughter. Leaving her in her swing while I laid on the bed angrily reading Freshly Pressed blog posts was bizarre, but—can I blame sleep deprivation?—I’ve had more harpy/screamer/ragey/dissolve-in-ragey-tears moments in the past three weeks than ever before in my life. It would be cool to blame sleep deprivation. It would be pretty nice to think of myself as a patient, generous mom. Well-adjusted, with pleasant brain-space, until deprived of significant amounts of sleep for significant amounts of time.
And now the baby is awake and unhappy again, and I’m pretending I’m her personal wait-staff, rather than her therapist: after a complaint I just shift her from the swing to the playmat, smile, tell her to have fun, and come back to the computer. Etc. I really feel like writing is going to save me from blowing up my house with both of us in it, today. Soo…I’m gonna write some.
But I don’t want to talk to anybody about attachment parenting (not even my husband, who thinks I’m often too quick to jump up when the baby isn’t happy). Also don’t want to hear that all this is “normal,” which I sort of believe, and sort of don’t. It’s hard to believe mothers of four-month old babies experience rage regularly. The internet indicates that they’re all pretty much attractive and cheery and get stuff done. Some sarcasm, there, yes, but part of my brain does actually permanently believe it.
What I want to talk about is anger… I don’t really have any profound insights on it, but I wish I did.
We’re both living with anger—Marshall’s is a product of living with the chronic & chronically uncertain Meniere’s Disease, being in an early phase, unable to figure it out or how to make peace with parts of his body that are degenerating and out of his control. Feeling too young to have a chronic disease, let alone one that is hard to explain to other people, and hard to understand or predict, for himself. Mine seems to be a product of trying (and largely failing) to adjust to being a new mom, and the not-insignificant powerlessness I feel in the face of my husband’s suffering. Trying to take most night shifts with a wakeful baby (she’s bouncing in and out of her 4-month sleep regression, currently), and being alone most of the time while still not being able to do most of the things I want to do—rest in the quiet of the outdoors, do farm work, or leather work, be independent, rest in any kind of quiet at all. Read, write, shower whenever I want.
As many (most? all?) married people do, at some point, we’ve been trying really hard not to have “pissing contests”—that “Well I am really fucked over here!!” — “Well *I* am really fucked over here, TOO!!!” thing. Those are mostly unproductive. After having a few of these in the past couple weeks, I can at least say that, for us, it’s helped us to actually remember/realize the specific difficulties we’re each facing. And if pissing contests are the only way we can get to calm, loving, productive conversations, right now, then—so be it. We’ve decided that we should start worrying when the pissing contests don’t lead to compassionate conversations.
I remember, way back (four years ago?) when Marshall and I first got married, the fights we’d have and how traumatic they were to me. I hadn’t seen productive conflict modeled for me at home, growing up, so when my husband I got into it, I’d completely freak out, and—more often than not—completely shut down, and/or run. Sometimes that was crying my eyes out, and sometimes it was getting really, really angry, instead. It’s a little embarrassing to admit that I spent quite a few nights on the couch in my first year of marriage, staring into an abyss that wasn’t actually an abyss. But, thanks to a husband who knew a lot more about productive conflict than I did, we taught each other and learned from each other. In the past couple of years, we’ve had the “best” fights we’ve ever had. We feel stronger after a “good” fight than we do on a sunny day when everything is going super awesome and nothing is wrong.
But having a baby, and having Meniere’s, is really for real some shizz. Hence, pissing contests, postpartum rage, etc.
WRITING THIS ALL DOWN HAS BEEN COMPLETELY THERAPEUTIC. And I’ve been able to write this whole thing while being a pretty B- wait-staff to my baby—juggling her around to different toys/places (currently, she’s on my lap staring at the laptop screen, oh my god) every four-six minutes.
I wish I could write really finished, polished mini-essays instead of this kind of fragmented thing—but I’m trying to have faith that I will be able to do that again someday. Maybe (as is the way of the world, of God) sooner than I expect. So now I’ll have some cheetos and forget all the stuff I was supposed to do this morning. Maybe I am starting to figure this out.
At this moment I’m having my second cup of coffee of the day—an unspeakable luxury. So unspeakable, I can only type it. The gods will not hear. They will not know.
I’m trying to change the way I think about my days. I’ve been consumed with thoughts of productivity, in a “what the hell did I get done today” kind of way, and rating myself on whether I can do something Spirit-filled (write, sing, pray, yoga, etc.), menial (laundry, change sheets, put on real clothes, vacuum, eat food), or just the bare minimum (keep baby clean and happy, keep self from becoming deranged). This is itself, I’m starting to see, insanity. The end result is a few things done, a few things half-done, and me a stewy bitch come dinnertime. Which I rein in like an amazing human being, for the most part. But I can see that I’m a big part of why I’m not really enjoying life, these days.
I don’t know how to balance my life, really—and I realize that’s ok. I realize that new parenthood is having balance continually knocked off-center. Tough to accept; tough to look at my life, compare it to others’ lives, and think “This is going great,” even when that’s the case.
So, as always, and as long as the baby remains asleep, a list:
1. I made curtains for our bedroom windows & the living room windows. (Transporting self and baby [in fragile sleep-state] to two thrift stores in search of white bedsheets to cut up was exciting let me tell you. SO worth it.)
2. The attic fly problem is almost gone.
3. I found two roly-polies in the house today.
4. I got started on new baby books, with a doe and fawn for the covers.
5. I listened to a Radiolab episode today, which I used to do all the time while working on leather. It was sweet, albeit interrupted several times by fitful baby.
6. I guess she’s teething, now. I feel bad for her. She’s a really positive-minded baby, so it sucks to see her dealing with sore gums.
7. Spring is probably coming. We’ve had warm rain—which, along with the crocus, hyacinth, and daffodil, is one of the Harbingers of Spring.
8. I’m looking for a dress to wear in Carla’s wedding, and everything is just too beautiful. Will I be able to wear anything beautiful? I keep seeing dresses that I love for too much money. Free People is the worst. Worse than Anthropologie, with whom I’m becoming disenchanted, actually. (All the prints, ugh.) I’ve spent many hours minutes looking through the Free People website, and have found a dress and a pair of boots which I then proceeded to dream about. Unattainable. I told Marshall about them, using the word ‘unattainable,’ and he mocked my pain.
9. Since I’m breastfeeding, I can’t diet. Which bodes well for my chocolate addiction, and ill for my ability to wear a pretty dress come May. But, as Marshall keeps reminding me, spring is probably coming. At which time I can get active again.
10. Absolutely cannot believe the baby has just slept an hour and a half, allowing me to make and drink a second cup of coffee, create templates for the deer baby books, and type out a partially-coherent blog post.
11. I meant for this list to be a list of things I’m making a point to enjoy, or that I’m looking forward to, not just a list of things.
12. Something I need: Shiva Rea’s postnatal yoga DVD. I so loved her prenatal one, and I feel like doing her postnatal practice semi-regularly would be another Harbinger of Spring. My body needs sunlight, I need sunlight, everything needs to be doused, soaked, annihilated with days and days and days of gold gold sun. Yoga—especially guided by people like Shiva Rea—has been, from the first time I did a downward dog, prayer. I need it. All these things.
…put photos of my kid on the internet frequently. Today I was like, Man, I haven’t put photos of Mary online in forever—I should do some today. I did actually Instagram a photo of her last night, though, and add a couple photos of her (though indirectly, really, since she wasn’t the point of that particular group pf photos) on Facebook this afternoon. And the blog post of tons of photos of her is how old? Two weeks?
I decided to not flood Facebook with baby pictures a long time ago, even before I was trying (and failing) to get pregnant. I’ve unfollowed most of my Facebook connections, partly to keep blood pressure from spiking (politics and/or general bigotry), partly in an effort to quit spending so much time scrolling down the newsfeed, and partly because of all the photos of peoples’ kids / babies. I found the baby / kid photos so incredibly dull. I couldn’t believe in their inherent value, independent of aesthetic or utilitarian purposes (and most of them were independent of aesthetic or utilitarian qualities).
I get it, now. Here’s what I’m picking up: your friends and family, if they’re truly close to you & love you, are actually almost as excited about the baby photos as you are, especially if they don’t get to see the baby in person often/at all.
[Typed all that with one hand, sleeping baby occupying the other arm/hand. Have put baby down, sleeping like a freakin angel, will post photo in a second.] [J/k.]
Also, your baby has invaded and conquered your life, and the moments when that’s not unwelcome are an entirely new flavor / quality of light / musical sound. It’s an entirely unique experience for you, and entirely unique things should be photo-documented; so you do that. To other people, though, people with no interest in other peoples’ kids, your baby pictures are like old tires floating downstream. I remember those days…..
I worried, during pregnancy, about how so many peoples’ kids’ lives are splashed across the internet, photos of all ages in all places doing all kinds of activities, and about whether there’s anything detrimental that will happen because of that. Safety, privacy.
[Baby awake again, left arm/hand again out of commission.]
So anyways, here are some baby photos. I’m still not going to flood Facebook with them, and I’m gonna try to rein myself in on Instagram, since those media shoot your photos out into other peoples’ living rooms by default; I shall instead put most of the photos here, where you have to come looking for them in order to find them. And here is Mary’s first-ever trip to our beloved mountains.
1. In spite of continual waking in the night, last night, because of fidgety baby in growth spurt, and worrying about her being too cold, I feel actually pretty ok today.
2. I just had toast, coffee, and all my vitamins without the baby waking up. Ha.
3. Baby freaked out last night, was inconsolable, and then choked on the “gripe water” I was anxiously droppering in her mouth—froth, blue lips, terrible lapses of breath—so we put her in the car at 10:30pm and went to walmart to buy a baby swing, which she likes.
4. Since I couldn’t find my house-shoes this morning, I put on real shoes, and then felt I should put on real clothes, so now I feel like a real person.
5. Megan predicted that 2015 would be another year of babies, as 2013 was, and so far I have three pregnant friends.
6. I’m having this unexplainable feeling of buoyancy right now, that I think has something to do with having been able (name THAT verb tense) (ha) (if that was a gameshow I would so watch it, omg) to effing drink a whole cup of coffee sans interruption, and wearing real clothes, but also seeing photos of the women’s march on Nashville from the Nashville Scene. It reminded me that people get out of the house and do things, and while (see previous post) I’ve enjoyed my new-mother-hermitage, I’m beginning to feel like I want to begin doing other things again. And it’s not an overwhelming thought, anymore.
7. I have to start poetasting again. I simply must. Marshall and I—in a fit of new-parent-sleep-deprived-misery—decided that spending money on some new grownup toys would make us feel better, so we both got smartphones. I know. Satan is on my speed dial, now. But anyways, I anticipated a couple weeks of high interest levels in my phone, and that is happening (I’m on Instagram, now, for instance), and I’m starting to feel a little gross about it. I’ve found myself getting mad at my baby for squirming or whining while I’m trying to do something on my phone. Like I said, Satan. So, I need to start technology weaning, and writing.
8. The house is pretty messy, but I cleaned the kitchen and did so many dishes, yesterday.
9. I also roasted a chicken yesterday and made some broth from the carcass, which I have to re-heat and strain today. If I can jar up that broth, do laundry, vacuum the bedroom, and write a poem, today I will have been Superwoman.
10. My husband is sensitive, supportive, hard-working, and another long boring list of adjectives & adjectival phrases. I never expected to be so loved. My moments of fragility and profound frustration, in the past month and a half, have been lit by his candlelight. I thought having kids was supposed to ruin marriages, but we are not being ruined … How astonishing life is, and will always, always be.
The last part of my birth story involves pushing, delivery, and post-delivery things … blood, guts, etc.
So anyways. From 11:15am to noon I went from 7-8cm dilated to complete, and this is where I start remembering certain things very vividly. Up to this point, I’d gotten into a rhythm and was riding the waves, no end or beginning in sight or memory. After this point, though, there were actual things to do. At 12:20pm I started pushing, mildly surprised to find out what “feeling pushy” really feels like: it didn’t feel like anything I’d ever done before, not even taking a dump, but I still knew how to do it and felt—not an urgency, but an insistence. The train was coming into the station. Man, there are so many metaphors that are kind of apt but slightly awkward. Birth “canal.”
I was disappointed—in retrospect—that I didn’t feel the baby moving through my cervix (as someone once told me she had felt, during the birth of her son) … but I could feel her head in the birth canal, man. It was relieving, in a sense, to be able to do something with the pain & strength of these contractions instead of just riding them out, but only in a sense. Mostly it hurt like crazy. But the end was near, and suddenly zooming toward us, shaking me and the bed and the entire room, and I was trying to hit it as fast as it was going to hit us.
So it was irritating that pushing in a hunched-over type position seemed like it wasn’t getting me anywhere … and at 1:00pm I tried The Squat, which I’d heard could move things along faster (because of gravity). All this time my baby’s head and body are moving, and I could feel her making progress. Again, it was a fairly unbearable feeling, though it wasn’t just painful; there was this huge insistence, which at the moment reminds me of Poe’s “The Bells” as it accelerates through to the final stanza. I’m sure there was tons of adrenaline. She crowned at 1:45, and the nurse told me to quit pushing and hang on for a sec, which I was SURE at the time was because they had to run and get the OB (true), but now I think they probably wanted to slow things down so all the skin could have a few minutes to keep stretching over the baby’s head (possibly true) (still resentful).
In vain, however, as I did tear in a few places, first-degree. This was the second moment of fearful indecision in my labor—my baby is crowning and there’s no going back, she’s filling up my whole pelvis and I can’t stand her in there anymore, but the pressure of her head on my perineum is also hugely burning and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better … I remember feeling like I was standing on a cliff, summoning the courage to just jump off. Just for a second. And I jumped. This is the only time in my labor that I yelled (if my memory serves). Man oh man. And the OB and what suddenly seemed like 16 nurses are telling me things (“great job”) and there’s a blur of activity and an enormous (not really—only 6 lbs 11 oz) gray baby with a very unpleasant look on her strange, puffy face is put on my chest. Her head had this conical shape, and she wasn’t crying, but she looked so confused and like all her feelings were hurt. I felt bad for her. And amazed that she could be so big. I wondered if I would have this “I already know you” feeling, but I didn’t. I felt like I was truly meeting her for the first time. 2:02pm.
Aaaaaand then other sudden and unexpected things. Blood had pooled and clotted in my uterus, and the OB had to go in right away after the clots. This might have been the most traumatic part of the whole birth story, mostly because I wasn’t expecting it. I didn’t even know it was something that sometimes had to be done, or that it would hurt like fucking hell. And then I got a bunch of numbing shots down there, and then endured many minutes of being stitched up, some of which I did feel, very keenly. I’d torn in a couple places—not sure how many, as I was warned by KG “not to look down there” once I got home (or at any point, until healed)—and it really felt like the stitching-up took forever, even though I could tell Dr. Shoutko was being very quick and efficient. Medical professionals tend to amaze me.
This tearing thing was something I’d worried about, pre-labor, quite a bit. Since I went into labor so early, I hadn’t gotten to do any perineal massage (which according to my birth class teacher helps mentally more than physically, anyway), but my baby’s head really wasn’t that big, and I did push for an hour and a half. I’m still investigating why this happened. Maybe it would have happened no matter what.
So that’s the end of the birth story, Blog Version. It’s a hugely important story, to me, partly because it’s an enormous job of work that I did, with all the accompanying feelings of empowerment and pride, and partly because it’s the story of the first time I saw my baby, Mary. My birth story had much more to do with me than with her, since she was so healthy and did so well through the whole thing, but now I’ll begin blogging about life with her. And that will be a totally different story. And since the sleep-deprivation hath begun, I can’t come up with anything either revelatory or warm/fuzzy with which to end this post. Oh well—more of those later.
What While We Slept 
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