Four walls–well, more than four, but that’s the expression, isn’t it?,
used to describe the physical aspect of a home; but always more than four.
I’ll count them all eventually, I know, given my anxious nature,
my obsessive catalogging and assessing of what’s before me,
the constant shifting of one thing to its Rightful Place or another,
figuring out what Rightful Place means in this new Rightful Place for me.
But not just for me. For the four-legged family who made the exodus with me.
For the Tiny Human who only gets half herself from me.
They say home is where the heart is, but how can that be?
How can that be when such a huge piece of my heart has to split herself between here and that hell I escaped,
still escape each time I close my eyes and am transported away from my direct environment
and back to the places in my mind that haven’t yet accepted that it’s gone, done, and over, for better or worse?
I think I go back there for that piece of me, that Whole Her, that has to share her time with two broken adults trying not to break another generation,
both trying to break cycles that have raged through generations.
We are glass. We have made glass. And we must not break this piece.
I sit, curled on a curled pillow from a time of optimisim and naivite,
wrapped in the strange comfort of new comforters,
listening to the unsettling new sounds of settling in, of settling for what comes with NOT settling for less than I deserve in love.
A new neighbor coughs in their sleep
(his? hers? I don’t know yet. These sounds are too new for me to identify each one with the distinct certainty of familiarity that can only be earned with time),
the new fridge whirrs, and the feline mews that she, too, is in unfamiliar territory.
Empty boxes surround me, coffins of newness and of oldness.
How is it that new belongings and old ones both make it into the same cardboard boxes?
And those same cardboard boxes end up in the same place?
Broken down, folded and shoved into some receptacle or another…
or, if you’re feeling guilty for your sins of consumption, burned in for fuel under branches and logs…
which seems a little savage, if you think it through.
Cut down the tree,
process it into an unrecognizable form,
use it for your needs,
then bury it under the non-bastardized forms of itself,
under its original shape, and burn, burn it all.
Release the energy you put into changing its shape and hide your sin.
Erase what’s been done.
You can’t erase everything, can’t kill everything with fire.
Feelings are made of fire, so how can you kill them by burning yourself up with them?
We are made of fire and clay.
The soft snores of family
(who swear they don’t snore)
tell me I won’t be finding sleep myself again this night.
Or morning.
It is 3am.
On a technical note, it is morning, not night.
But it’s treated the same as the pre-midnight hours, except on a time card.
Graveyard staff of all kinds know this strange dichotomy of hours,
hours that are both day and night,
know that the labels we put on the hours don’t mean shit to what you do with them.
That’s a concept both freeing and ensnaring:
what we call the hours, the days, the weeks, months, years,
mean nothing.
And what we do with them is everything.
I’m caught up in colloquialisms,
in quaint little catchphrases and -isms meant to comfort and usher me forward.
But having come to doubt my very right to exist as a whole human
for so very long and until so very recently,
I find myself questioning all of the assumed truths,
the old wisdoms we tell each other and ourselves to get through.
Some of those cliches are basic to the point of stupidity.
And my tolerance for stupidity, historically low before, has all but disappeared.
My tolerance for mine and the stupidity of others,
of the accepted words we say that hold no truth or meaning,
is gone like the snow that fell so temporarily, earlier this night.
Or day.
Or whatever it is now.
What it is now is 3am in a house not yet a home,
a new space I haven’t yet carved into my own.
I feel like the hermit crab between shells,
exposed, incomplete.
I’ve found the space I want to fill with myself, and I’m pulling myself into that space,
backing in,
pushing the soft bits of my soul into the recesses of this space.
And it already feels better than the shell I left.
But the new places this space places pressure on my body
(in this context, not my physical body,
but rather my mental body–
does anyone get what I mean by that??
Or is this another concept only understandable with my Weird Thinking??)
ache with the muscle-soreness of exercising hard,
of growth and change from within manifesting without.
Manifest and learn to love this newness
until it is old and familiar the way you used to be was as well,
but better than before.
For nothing can ever be exactly the same again.
One of those moments in time
Tonight is my last night off for the next 8 days. Which, ultimately, is completely worth it for the schedule I’m securing.
But anyway. In light of this, I decided that, once He Without A Name took Beasty to bed, I would take a bit of “me time”, a little Working MomCation, if you will. Which, in my case, involves several glasses of wine, a bath with a couple candles, and Norah Jones Pandora.
Tonight, there also happens to be a lighting/ thunder storm passing through the area. (Critical background detail: I adore thunder storms. I drove 5 hours to Fort Bragg several times a year almost exclusively for the off-chance of catching a good storm. We moved to Eastern Washington during prime storm season, and I swore I knew no other home…I might be exaggerating a touch, but you get my drift…)
So I finish my incredibly relaxing bath and go upstairs in my comfy robe, find myself on my gym/playroom balcony, watching this storm unfold. Clare de Lune comes on, the lighting cracks, and, one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand, the thunder echoes. I sigh, the knots in my shoulders and neck loosening. The piano plays on, familiar as mother’s perfume, and the rain intensifies. I wonder what could possibly make this better, and Moonlit Sonata takes Debussy’s place in answer. The sky lights up and the responding thunder cracks again, and I forget everything but these sounds and the contrast of warm indoor air and soft, cool, outdoor breeze. A wild grin smears itself triumphantly across my lips, reclaiming a place in my heart I forgot existed. For a moment, the ripe tension of the storm erases all other tensions pulling at my seams. Everything hangs in beautiful balance, frozen for just a few quenching moments.
The storm peters out, nothing but a soft drizzle to play in the background of my drift to sleep. An occasional distant lightning strike illuminates a far corner of the sky, and I know with delicious certainty of minor-key bittersweetness that this is as close to spiritual as experiences get for me.
I pause, considering, and admire the simplicity of what puts me at peace.
I can come back to this moment as often as I want.
This latest school shooting. I get how easy it is to jump to needing stricter gun control. And I’ll grant you that the process is flawed and needs reform.
But a piece that isn’t even being mentioned by most is this: look at how many opportunities there were to change this kid’s experience. Look at how many chances we had to see that this was coming and to intervene.
This particular kid’s story really eats at me because I’ve heard stories like his–ones of absent family, loss of all support figures, ostracism and bullying, and the cascade of circumstances that leave kids alone, scared, angry, and without the skills to navigate our world–so many times. Our system failed him. With tragic consequences.
This isn’t to condone his actions. Does every bullied, orphaned, “different” kid end up committing acts of violence? No. But there were also so many instances where it was apparent to the people in his world that he might, including social media posts in September specifically stating that he was going to be a school shooter that even the FBI was notified about.
My question, frankly, isn’t why he had access to guns but why weren’t interventions to help and stop this kid taken more seriously? Why is obvious mental health and judgement deficit not more of a call for support than a call to block access? While gun safety is critical, people are the ultimate deciding factor in these tragedies. People with mental health and coping deficits need more than just a gun ban. What leads a person there? And how do we in our structures and systems intervene to prevent a person from being led there?The question I keep coming back to is: What can I personally do to work against these things? What can I do directly to/with/for the people likely to commit these acts? Calling them monsters and splitting hairs over whether they have mental illness or an anger problem or violent religious or personal ideology doesn’t do anything to impact the pathos in them. Chasing legislative changes that may or may not occur and petitioning representatives and peacefully protesting the continued occurrence of gun violence doesn’t act directly enough to reach most of the people committing these crimes. What can I and my neighbor and my daughter and some stranger in the Bronx or rural Wyoming actively DO to recognize and redirect that dangerous behavior path in those individuals? In other words, if all attempts at legislating this problem away or improving healthcare systems and these big, large scale projects to solve this fail and it’s in my hands to personally take action, what can I do? Because today, attempts at changing legislation failed. Changing the healthcare system failed. And it will tomorrow and the next day and the next. And, unfortunately, with the current administration in power, those legislative and structural changes are likely to be fiercely resisted and blocked every chance they get. I’m not saying don’t work toward those things. But don’t count on them. And find something you can do directly. And share your ideas. I won’t even pretend to know all the answers.
Shutting out mental health issues only exacerbates them. In the individual and in society as a whole. We could have helped this kid. And, if nothing else, if it really was too late to help him heal, we could have seen this coming and stopped him. Vilifying him as a monster who should never have been sold a gun is a way of dismissing our failure to respond and prevent his actions. If you want to end gun violence, you have to look at more than just the gun.
I Like a Glass of Good Bourbon
I like a glass of good bourbon–every now and again.
I like the velvety fire of just a sip at a time, curling across my tongue and unfurling into nothingness like oak-flavored smoke.
I like the way a glass will give a mischievous glow to the more shaded corners of the mind, the way the Trivial and the Mundane seem to fall away, revealing the Important, the Meaningful, the Relevant and True. I like the way words are less of a struggle to let go of, just enough inhibition removed to let them flow like fresh honey from the comb.
I like the slow burn as the bourbon blazes down into the depths of my body and sparks warmth across my flesh, and I like the faint brush of dew across my forehead seeking to quench that heat.
I like the clarity that comes with knowing you’re a little fuzzy. The dichotomy of the experience.
Dancing Gracelessly
I hate the days that drag, the days I wish I could fast forward through. I hate how much I would miss out on if I could.
How much do I miss out on, toe-tapping through the intolerably long hours, though? Trying to distract myself through cruel eons of tedium? Being present in the moment is a struggle right now.
This year has been rough to be present through. A car crash, repeated injuries and illnesses, the loss of a coworker, the loss of THREE kids I’ve worked with in 6 weeks…it’s been heavy. Keeping my eyes forward, focused on achieving The Bright and Less Distant Future, has been all there is.
It’s funny, sitting here in limbo, outlasting the days between now and that bit that gets built up in my head as The Beginning of The Rest of My Life…it feels stagnant, boring, oppressive like humidity. Three months, Autumn. Three more months, and you start walking that road.
Trying to string my thoughts together into coherent ideas has been harder than normal, and it’s creating some anxiety for me; words are my thing. Words are where I dance, graceless as I am in my physical movements. So to struggle with words is to feel extremely off-balance.
In my frustration, it seems it would be nice to not care how the words come out, to regurgitate them before me and see them for what they are and make sense of it all afterward. But I do care, and so, in the absence of effective words ready to fall flashing brightly from the tip of my tongue (or pen, or keyboard), I fall silent.
Silence can only be maintained for so long, though, before the excess builds up and spills out as Flighty, Distracted, Disorganized. It gets labeled “Quirky” and I continue to search for appropriate outlets for it.
It’s been a few months of struggling to find the words and manage the excess madness. Here’s to happily finding words again, and to finding outlets for quirks, should the words fail me again.
On Losing a Bright Star
We lost a dear friend yesterday. I hardly have the words to write the sadness that is in my heart, the collective agony of loss in the countless people whose lives he touched.
From the first night I met Bill, I knew he had a heart that was bigger than his ample chest could contain. His spirit echoed in the sonorous baritone boom of his voice. He was at once both fierce and soft, kind and firm, gruff but warm. Although we never worked the same shift, I know he was fantastic at his job. I know the kids we worked with knew he cared. I know the staff who worked his shifts respected and trusted him. We all did. And we all miss him more than there are words for.
Bill gave me a baby shower present shortly before I left on maternity leave last summer. He knew I love Harry Potter, and he knew I planned to read to Beasty; he also knew I had left my books in California. So he brought me a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I don’t know if he was familiar with Order of the Phoenix or the series as a whole or not, but he certainly knew how to pick them.
Early in the story, Harry discovers that he can now see skeletal, horse-like flesh-beings called thestrals, creatures only visible to those who had seen death. Luna Lovegood helps Harry see that the thestrals are not to be feared or hated; that they’re misunderstood because of their association with tragedy; that, despite their strange appearance and unfortunate reasons for being seen, there are beautiful and good qualities to be found in the thestrals. Bill had a similar way of seeing the good in a kid, of caring about even our most challenging kids, no matter how the kid presented him- or herself. Like Luna and the thestrals she saw because of unfortunate circumstances, Bill could look at a kid and see past the unfortunate circumstances that brought the kid before him.
At the end of Order of the Phoenix, Harry loses his godfather; he watches Sirius fall through an archway and slip under the veil hanging there. Harry waits for him to stand back up, half-expecting Sirius to pop through the veil with a wicked grin on his face and the flash of a fight shining bright in his eyes. But it doesn’t happen. And the reality hits: this man, who has stood in in Harry’s father’s stead, who has selflessly supported and loved Harry without condition, is gone. We have waited for a healthy Bill to return to us, but that is no longer to be. And the reality of his absence cannot be dismissed. I still catch myself expecting to hear his laugh booming from the CM office, still half-hope his obnoxiously large chair will be in front of our desk.
Bill, you are so very missed. You have touched so many lives, so many more than I think you realize. The emotions I saw today from our coworkers, from the kids who knew you, scream to the stars that you have been here, that you made a difference to so very many of us. You are so very loved, and our hearts ache as we feel your absence.
To my EYC family, I love you all. And I feel with you our great loss. We will do right by his memory.
Cluster-feeding Cluster-f**k: Mommy’s Cluster-fed up!
So, between the car accident, several busy days of dealing with the aftermath of said accident, what I suspect is an impending growth spurt and cognitive jump–oh, and possibly a pair of new teeth coming in…we’ve started cluster-feeding again. With gusto.
This girl has literally been latched and nursing all night for over a week. She drains one breast, cries until I switch sides, and drains the other side while she waits for the first side to refill. During the day, she spends a good 60-70% of the day latched. And most of the rest of that time, she’s stuck to me like glue.
I hit a point about half-way through last week where I desperately needed a break. I was touched out, tired from constant wake-ups through the nights, hadn’t been able to shower in several days…I was not at my Mommy Best. The Mr even tried to take Beasty off my hands for a few hours, but she wouldn’t have it. She just wants and needs me right now.
I had a bit of a melt-down over all of it on Wednesday. I had gone out to my totaled car to clean it out, was re-confronted with the memory of the accident, and there were too many similarities that afternoon to the night of the accident. Beasty was crying inconsolably. I was running late. I felt flustered as I tried to determine what needed to come out of the vehicle and what was not worth it. I left a lot behind.
I ended up being late for the doctor appointment (Beasty is growing right on track, hitting milestones either as expected or ahead of time, btw. Proud mama right here.) I had to pee like crazy the whole appointment. I ended up being late to pick up the Mr. And by the time I got to his office, I was in tears.
As he came and took over driving (especially after the accident, I much prefer the passenger seat), I had the full Mommy Meltdown I’d been putting off for longer than I care to admit.
They happen, from time to time, the meltdowns. They’ve happened for longer than I’ve been a mom, longer than I’ve been an adult, longer, really, than I can remember. I reach a point where I’ve lost sight of the big picture just trying to get through each day (hello Anxiety, hello Depression, in the flesh). And it all crashes down, at least in my mind, around me. Sometimes there’s a migraine, sometimes it’s just a fog of excessive energy and emotion. I get through it, and I have some clarity about what I missed and how to do better moving forward. It’s easy to see on this side of it, impossible for me to recognize how to stop it when the ship is on its way down.
And on this side of the meltdown, I find myself determined to do better, to fight against the chaos and clutter in my mind with new tools.
This time, I’m working on calling myself out when I see a behavior that’s a product of anxiety or depression: I call out the behavior (one of my big ones, for example: avoiding making phone calls), find some way to alleviate the anxiety (maybe giving myself 10 minutes to read while Beasty nurses, or walk myself through the phone call, something that brings me into a calmer space), and then I do whatever it is that the behavior was avoiding or affecting (you know, making the stupid phone call). I’m trying hard to catch myself in the act, to make sense of my less-reasonable behaviors and redirect them.
I hope I can be a good example for my Beasty. She deserves a strong woman as a mother and role model.
Labors of Love and the Love We Find in Laboring
Friday was World Breast Pumping Day. It came just 4 days after I hit 6 months successfully breastfeeding with Beasty. I was able to accomplish this in part because I pump.
I pumped early on to help my supply increase, and I pump while at work to maintain my supply and to provide Beasty with food for the 7-10 hours I’m away from her, 3 days a week.
Breastfeeding was something I deeply wanted and feared I wouldn’t get, even before I got pregnant. Almost exactly 4 years before Beasty was born, I had a breast reduction surgery. While I still firmly believe that having the surgery greatly improved my quality of life, it became something that I feared would rob me of an experience for which I longed.
But I did a lot of research and discussions with my care providers, both at the time of surgery and through my prenatal care, about increasing chances of success. My surgeon took my wishes into account when he did his work. I learned about stimulation techniques, supplements, and pumping patterns and techniques. I had Beasty latch almost immediately, and I refused to give up through struggles with pain and supply. I continue to monitor very closely how much I produce. For me, breastfeeding has very much been a labor of love. For me, pumping has been a huge piece of that labor.
There have been a number of people, by virtue of their positions at my company, who have helped make pumping a possibility, and to them, I will always be grateful. They may not even know that they did anything, but the 20 minutes, 2-3 times a day, that they gave me have made a huge impact on my life, on my daughter’s life. It might seem like a small thing, but I can’t thank them enough. They have helped me achieve what I thought was impossible.
So here it is: 6 months strong. Six months of natural feeding, of bonding, of establishing benefits for both of us that will trickle down through the years. Here’s to every day that I get to keep doing this, and here’s to aiming for another 6 months. And another year. And feeding another baby (in a few years…) with my body.
Here’s to what we never thought we could–but did. 
Just a little vent-y side note…
Yesterday was one of those specific days that stand out individually against the general blur of days past in the mind. There are those days that are the sort that stick out because of monumental joy: the weddings, births, first dates, etc. The shimmery days, if you will.
Unfortunately, the other sort of days that do that tend to be fraught with misfortune. That was my yesterday.
Yesterday sucked. As I knew I would, I survived it. But even that ended up being a close call.
It started with struggling with the Beasty. She is aptly nicknamed at times…yesterday was one of those days. She’s going through some big cognitive jumps, along with her front upper teeth descending, and between those two things, her sleep has been all jacked up. Which makes her a fickle, indecisive handful of a Beasty.
She and I have developed a strong bond through babywearing, and as she’s gotten bigger, my front-facing Infantino is our ticket to tasks like meal prep and dishes. And laundry. And feeding animals. And…well, everything, pretty much. Point is, babywearing is the bees’ knees, and I highly recommend working through any initial struggles you encounter.
Anyway. We were babywearing as I put together a salad for my lunch. I, admittedly, wasn’t paying as much attention to Beasty’s reach as I was to the location of the tip and sharp edge of the knife I was using. She reached across and grabbed my salad bowl and pulled it off the counter and onto my pinky toe, and I felt my toe crunch.
This is 10 minutes after.
This is 24 hours later.
So I got through my barrage of four-letter words, got some ice on it, and got on with my day. The Mr called to let me know he’ll be a bit late, so I planned a trip into town that would coincide with his pick-up time.
Fast forward to pick-up time, and I’ve taken a different route to pick him up to accommodate a gas stop. As I passed through an intersection (as it turns out, the intersection I needed to turn at, rather than going through), a car passing across my path. Way too close to avoid collision. I caught her back end, lost control, and slammed into a traffic light pole. Thus ending my drive to the Mr.
There she is, my faithful Baby-Ru. Her final act was to keep me and Beasty safe. Airbags deployed, I got rocked incredibly hard, and I’ll need to replace my car seat, but we both came out of it with no major injuries. Beasty doesn’t even seem to be sore today.
We are so lucky. So incredibly lucky.
Today, I feel a bit worse for wear; I can tell that I hit my face on the steering wheel and then the airbag after it deployed, that I braced my right arm on the wheel or the dash upon impact, and I’ve got some bruising and pain that’s popping up across my chest and abdomen.
But the physical pains are minor in comparison to the panic and guilt I felt over my daughter. I don’t know that I could have handled her being hurt or worse (I won’t even bring myself to put it into words). It took me a minute to get myself freed enough to get to her, and those moments of struggle make me nauseous even now.
Holding her close now, as she sleeps soundly against me in the Ergobaby, I feel primally protective over her; the urge to never let her leave this close-snuggled hold is strong. Even though I’m exhausted and in a fair amount of pain, I can’t bring myself to let her from my arms for more than a few minutes. Even though I am struggling to keep my calm through her fuss, struggling to find the patience for it, I also don’t have it in me to take space from it.
Motherhood is the most challenging, wonderful, awful, painful, rewarding, hardest, weirdest adventure I’ve yet undertaken.
Winning the Ick War
Today is a struggle.
I came down with the bug that the Mr had earlier in the week, and I came down with it much worse. I’ve been running a fever for about 24 hours now, my body aches worse than anything I’ve felt since childbirth, and my daughter still needs me to be a mom.
Today feels insurmountable.
Between the animals, the absolute war zone my room has become, and Beasty’s constant needs from me, I feel overwhelmed. I feel like that warrior I talked about birthing is gone, off fighting a more winnable war.
Today, my anxiety is getting the best of me.
But here’s the good news: I’ve recognized it. I can now work on managing it. There are things I can do to alleviate the feelings of being overwhelmed, once I recognize where they’re coming from.
This is a winnable war. I may not get the decisive and easy victory I so badly want (and, let’s be real, could really freakin’ use) today, but I will get through it.
I will work on my patience with my daughter’s incessant, ever-changing needs (boob in mouth–but also entertainment, motion, ambient temperature changes, diaper changes, support with teething pain, a giant-ass pony with lollipop shits…you name it, she probably wants it and will scream bloody murder until you find the right combo). I will work to meet both of our many, many needs today.
And I will forgive myself my shortcomings today, the battles I lose for the sake of winning the war against shutting down completely and letting it all fall apart.
Falling Into the Penseive 