Coming Out of the Gray

In Northfield, the temperature is finally veering toward the abnormally warm today.  For one day.  But for this one day the coffee shop is a-bustle.  Students bend over notebooks, sporting Birkenstocks and newly pedicured toenails; families shuffle in with mud clinging to boots and shoes, the kiddos pressing their faces to the glass refrigerator door, pointing out Oranginas and fruity sodas.  Your father wants to put in paving stones this afternoon while the earth is pliable.  I'm on my way to a meeting at church, a mock interview to prepare us for how to really interview potential new pastor candidates.

We have been to Florida and back.  Thisbe was the happiest of all of us I think.  She swam in a heated pool with a waterfall, made sandcastle after sandcastle on the beach (and then pressed the plastic figures of Anna and Elsa and Ariel into the impressionable walls), played mini-golf, rode on the shoulders of uncles and almost-uncles, fed giraffes, played dress-up at the Naples Children's museum, watched Frozen for the fourth time, laid out her clothing carefully in her room that was actually a closet, collected bits of dried coral and gingerly toed dead sea slugs, and just generally had a grand time. 

Somewhere over Georgia

"Look, Mom!  A hat without ear flaps!"

Watching "Frozen" with Auntie Agnes and Greg

You, on the other hand, became steadily less pleased with the world as the week progressed.  Maybe it was teething, maybe it was exhaustion or a growth spurt or over-stimulation, maybe it was too many people or the absence of familiar objects or the desire to move and the inability to do so--who the hell knows.  But by the end of the week you needed to be held almost constantly in order to stem the tide of shrieks.  You woke more and more often at night and were less easily pacified.  Letting you cry it out is one thing back at home...it's slightly different when there are a band of relatives to disturb in addition to your parents.  On Thursday, when you woke at 5:45 and wouldn't go back to sleep, I bundled you into the stroller, cap on your head and pink striped beach towel cocooned around you, and set off in the pitch black 55 degree air.  I ate a cinnamon roll and drank a latte at the cafe while you sucked on an indestructible baby book and attempted to nurse the nose of Mr. Bear.  You've been slightly better since our return but you are still prone to flapping your arms like a tethered pigeon and shrieking for no apparent reason.  You still don't roll, still don't utter consonant sounds, still prefer an expression of stoicism to one of glee.  When placed on your belly you fuss and raise your butt in a half-hearted Jane Fonda exercise move.

Refusing to roll down the Rolling Hill at the Children's Museum

After you and you sister wake up from your afternoon naps, we'll go outside.  I'll push you in the stroller and we'll gulp in the warm air.  Thisbe will wear her rubber frog boots and experiment with the tonalities of mud stomping and slurping.  Dada will putter with paving stones or dead branches or the broken car window.  We'll eat an unimpressive meal from the crockpot (something involving frozen stew vegetables and chicken and a gravy packet) and if I remember we'll attempt to make a Lenten centerpiece with felt and burlap and a candle holder from church. 

The weather in Florida was lovely, but it was a kind of boozy happiness: imbibed quickly and resulting in warm and fuzzy feelings for a limited amount of time.  Today is happiness for real, the happiness that comes after you have waded through grief or cold or loneliness.  The kind that feels earned rather than bought. In Naples you could see, on the skin of the tanned and weathered crowd, how the days there just keep unfolding into nests of predictable warmth and ease, a permanent blur of sun and shimmer.  Here we know spring as tempestuous and fickle.  Sun and then snow and then warm and then ice again. 

Oh Spring, you changeable vixen!  You equivocating ingenue!  You budding sociopath!  Your strip tease is endless but we will wait.  Wait and wait. Until the gray fades into a distant point. Until green burns our eyelids down.     

The Making of a Man

 It's officially spring and the weather is appropriately bipolar.  Today it's 45 degrees and when the sun appears life is glorious.  Thisbe runs with her coat unzipped, her hands holding the front corners open like wings.  When the sun is out the eye moves to the patches of grass, to the glint of light on the rivulets in the gutters.  Each inch of dry pavement is beheld with glee, each naked finger an act of grace.  And then the clouds come and it's still 45 but instead the wind finds the corners of the lighter coat, slides inside the cuffs and chills.  Gray stipples the hulks of snow and the grass is dun, the trees still skeletal.  No wonder it is the time of year where we remember death on Friday and resurrection on Sunday.

You are in full force darling baby mode and we dote on you continually.  You have two teeth making their slow slice through the lower gum line and you devour slurries of prunes and apples and peas and mangoes and kale with a variety of enthusiastic grunts.  You're an expert at sitting and blowing raspberries but you still fail to roll or make consonant sounds.  Crawling is a distant continent.  But as long as you have a full stomach you are generally a happy boy, content fingering backpack straps or testing the texture of a jar lid with your tongue.

You are far more sensitive than your sister.  If your father sings too low a note or bangs a rhythm on the kitchen table too loudly your face crumples in distress.  If you're left alone in a room or (lately) taken away from me you squeal unhappily.  But your sensitivity to sound has also proved useful.  Though we've now weaned you of night feedings (can I get a "Hallelu--" oh, wait.  maybe not so much during Lent) you still sometimes wake at 5:00 or so.  Then Dada goes in and turns on a classical lullaby CD and within a few minutes you sway back into sleep.

But this sensitivity in you, this part of who you are and who you are becoming--well, it's the first time I've really had to face that I (and others) think of you in a gendered way.  Specifically as a boy and thus as someone for whom being highly sensitive might prove to be a problem in the future.  If you were a girl, our culture would chalk all this behavior up as "shy" and "sweet" and well within the realm of the ways girls should behave.  But each time I hear you cry at a loud sound or buckle at my absence I am torn between deep love at the emergence of this part of your personality and worry that the culture you live in will view this behavior as weakness rather than as strength.

Your sister, meanwhile, faces a similar problem.  Teacher Sarah had to tell me at our very first conference that I shouldn't use "bossy" to describe my daughter--that she was showing leadership skills and though she needed to learn to manage these skills, they were nothing to roll my eyes or shake my head in embarrassment about.  Indeed, there's even a campaign rolling through the internet right now called "Ban Bossy"--Sheryl Sandberg's attempt to promote leadership in girls.  Surprisingly (or not so surprisingly) I worry way less about Thisbe's fierce, intense, and strident personality than I do about your more attached, sensitive, and observant one.

And I wonder (and I'm going to try to say this without weirding you out too much) if it's more complicated with you because I have both a practical/rational version of what makes a wonderful man and then I have a biological/sexual version that stems from my own experience as a woman.  The first, much more PC version is all about sensitivity and kindness and compassion and intelligence.  That version of myself cares not a whit if you excel at athletics or know how to wield a hammer.  PC me is glad to buy you a doll to cradle and muffin tins to fill, glad to paint your toenails purple and purchase princess paraphernalia for Halloween.  But then there's the Un-PC me who, truthfully, has never been attracted to a man who was my height or shorter, who likes watching a man's body kick or throw or race shirtless down St. Olaf avenue, who is turned on by authority and strength.  And maybe un-PC me is just a product of social conditioning.  But maybe un-PC me is a product of biology too.  (If I wasn't lazy I would link to a bunch of articles that suggest this hypothesis).

I have no qualms about raising Thisbe to be intense and sassy and bossy--I mean AS A LEADER , in part because shunning some of the feminine "virtues" has worked pretty well for me.  I am all of those things and though there have admittedly been a number of romantic dry spells in my life--I've loved and been loved by incredible men (most notably your father, of course). 

But the bespeckled, soft-spoken, spongy, overly-sensitive guy?  I was never attracted to that guy.  He was always the friend I tried to set up with a single female friend...right before both the friend and I chose instead to date the inappropriate guys who couldn't speak in complete sentences but ran ultra-marathons.  Obviously with your father I managed to find a wonderful combination of both sensitivity and strength, of typical masculinity and the ability to listen without being an asshole.   And I hope for that combination within you--though I think it's unfair for me to hope for anything at all.  I'm called to love you for who you actually are not who I think you should become.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm sorry if I fail you on this front.  It's so easy to blame OUR HORRIBLE SEXIST CULTURE for pushing kids to be something they're not.  It feels decidedly more unsettling to realize that my own biology and identity as a heterosexual and sexual being might get wrapped up in how I raise you, in the subtle ways I reaffirm or question your behavior.  It feels, in fact, like Freud is gleefully haunting the edges of this post.

In this season of little deaths, I would like to practice burying the expectations I have for you that come from a place other than complete love and grace.  Those that come from my insecurities or cultural pressure or those that are weirdly entangled in my own sexual psyche. 

Birth is, in part, the act of catching the being as he or she emerges.  And this is the great blessing, of course: that you are mystery and so the act of catching is repeated each day, our hands open and trembling to receive your screaming, messy, beautiful life in whatever shape it comes.

  

Ash Wednesday With Hives

An inch of new snow last night now rapidly deteriorating in the sun.  Patches of ice at intersections turning soft.  25 degrees feels like almost spring.  The raven on the branch outside is almost a robin.  Then he turns and he is a robin, breast a tawny orange instead of red, brown wings looking a bit rumpled and thin, very much the absent-minded professor who hasn't had time to iron.  Last night we went to Thisbe's school for an art show.  She showed us her work: a newspaper hat painted gold and topped with silver star and white rose; a drawing of Ariel standing upright on her tail, fins split and splayed at the bottom; faces drawn big and close, swirls in between and a caption "a party at my house"; a spindly house with windows and roof, a line of blue sky, our names etched into the siding.

Your face is a mass of red welts.  Your body is spotted red.  Fever of 101.5.  We're on day 15 of your cough and runny nose, an ear infection in there somewhere, another doctor visit to check your wheezing breath sounds.  You might be allergic to amoxicillan.  Or this might just be a virus passing through you.

It's Ash Wednesday, a day that some winters comes as a relief.  We are here in the darkness and cold anyway so why not think about sin?  Why not fast and pray?  Why not circle a little around our limited mortality?  But this year it feels unfair.  My eyes hurt from trying to find each small bit of animal motion in the treetops, from searching too long for spring in the brightness of the snow.  On a day where the winter feels like it's finally offering slivers of resurrection it seems brutal to march over to church and be marked on the forehead with a smudge of ash.

And your sister is fighting some kind of demon of her own.  She speaks to us in whiny, bossy, uncompromising tones and when we ask for kindness, for please or thank you, she goes ballistic.  "Get me my cereal/turn the CD on/I will NOT put on pajamas!" she shrieks.  Or she tries on "I won't do that.  I just won't.  You can't make me." And then she looks at me, red-rimmed eyes, crossed arms, tears.  Teacher Sarah says all parents get it sooner or later, we're just getting it sooner.  And love now, in her case, seems to be firmness, seems to be holding a solid boundary, devoid of emotion as possible.   It's our fault a little that she's in this place.  After your birth, and more recently in the midst of sickness we've bent over backwards to shower her with attention, to make sure she knows she is loved via kisses and kindness and hot cocoas at Blue Monday and special dates with Mama and on and on.  We forgot, a little, that sometimes loving your sister means saying "no."

A poet colleague recently said that sometimes what got her through the early months of mothering (new baby, no real time to write, unfinished housework everywhere, job responsibilites encroaching, etc.) was saying to herself: this is impossible.  To admit freely that the kind of balance she dreamt of simply would not happen for a while.  That it was literally impossible to do it all. 

So much of my frustration these past few months has come from "ifs."  I would have time to write IF the kids weren't constantly getting sick.  I would have been in a more pleasant mood today IF my husband had opted to serve something other than leftovers on his one cooking night this week.  The house would be a lot cleaner IF we hadn't had that blizzard.  And on and on. 

Another writer friend wrote a wonderful post about lent today.  I especially like Lenten Approach #3.  But I think maybe what I need to give up this year is the possibility of having it all.  The idea that under certain circumstances I could currently be a great mother/writer/teacher/wife/friend/citizen all at once.  I am tired of failing over here, within the American myth of the possible.  So tonight I'll offer up (likely with a hive-covered baby strapped to me and a four year old whining about how her cross itches) my dream of perfect balance and complete fulfillment.  And I will pray that leaving that longing behind makes room for a different kind of possibility to enter.

The Red, Plastic Ring (or Let it Go)

A blizzard whipped through Minnesota on Thursday and Friday.  Schools closed, windshields turning into blank pages, vegetation frosted and heavy, cars swishing their rear ends at stop signs.  Inside our house, wadded Kleenx on the end tables and couch arms, on top of the microwave and beside the laundry basket on the carpet.  The good news is that no one is desperately sick.  The bad news is that we all seem to have the same cold--runny nose, cough, sluggish, crabby--so at any given moment, snot is always being wiped from someone's face. 

We all went to Target today.  Thisbe rode standing at the front of the cart.  I bought a latte at the Starbucks inside and I was so incredibly happy when they offered me a small red, plastic, ring that you can attach to your cart to hold your coffee cup.  What an amazing invention.  Thank you, whomever did that.  (I also give thanks for the lovely friend who had Thisbe over for a playdate yesterday when school was closed.  And for the fact that both you and your sister are currently napping.  AND--also renewing my faith in God--for Bethel's Parents Night Out from 3:30-7:30 today.  Hallelujah.)

While I shoveled the eight inches of sow, your father took photos.  Which was especially cruel considering I only seem to have one leg.

Your sister seems to have lost all the coping mechanisms she learned over the past year.  I said she couldn't have cheesy noodles for lunch and she burst into tears.  Daddy said he wouldn't move the small IKEA table for her until she asked nicely (rather than commanding) and she burst into tears.  When she asked for a second PBJ sandwich and I told her she had to finish her hard boiled egg first she burst into tears.  (Well, actually, first she said, "FINE.  THEN I WILL MAKE THE SANDWICH MYSELF."  and I said, "OK, go ahead" and she screamed through her squinty bloodshot eyes "BUT I CAN'T MAKE THE SANDWICH MYSELF.")  Meanwhile, after not pooping for a week, you released a BM of epic proportions.  So much of it was on your back and so little in your diaper that it truly seemed like you'd released the poop out of your 10th vertebrae (T3 vertebrae?  I don't know what I'm talking about).  But I had to balance your naked body on the edge of the sink while Daddy washed your back.  And over the shirrrrr of the water and the screams emanating from Thisbe's room, the sound of the Frozen soundtrack, (Kristen Bell singing "love is an open DOOOOORRRR!!!") which we bought at Target because, well, fuck.  I give up.

Hunger

At your six month check-up you were in the 25th percentile for weight, the 50th for height and the 75th for head circumference.  You still can't (or won't roll) though you relish lifting your legs high into the air and bringing your heels down with great force.  You like to suck on the strings of my fleece hoodie.  When you nurse your upper hand is always reaching--to touch my lips or chin or hair, to feel the texture of my sweater or cotton shirt or bare skin.  You get distracted from nursing now and often fling your arm out and turn your head mid gulp to see what your sister is up to.  Your main form of communication is blowing raspberries or shrieking, you have yet to discover how to say "buh" or "ma" or "da."  You cry when Daddy or I hand you to Nanny Barb and put on our coats to leave.  You smile often but are slow to laugh.  You observe.  Measure people.  Bounce.  You still wake once a night to eat but you also devour solid foods during daytime hours; fruits are your favorites.  You tolerate sweet potatoes too, but on the three occasions I tried to feed you peas you blew them all over the kitchen.  

Perhaps most telling, especially as I think about you compared to your sister at this age (which Daddy always cautions me not to do) was your response after you bit my nipple for the first time.  Thisbe did so as well, around six months, and it took me by surprise.  I told her, rather sharply, "no!" and she released the nipple, leaned back, and gave me a huge, shit-eating grin.  When you bit and I told you "no!" you released the nipple, leaned back, stared at me in shock--and then your face crumpled into sobs.  You are far more sensitive than Thiz--loud sounds, separation, a sharp tone--all of these can move you to tears.  And also, the thing I keep forgetting to say somehow, is how incredibly smitten we are with you. In addition to all the facts I've listed above, you're also the gooey abstractions: sweet, delightful, darling, handsome, etc. etc. etc.  We love you to pieces.

February we love far less.  The weekend made me want to staple my eyebrows.  Daddy and I were home both days, all day, with both of you.  And I feel incredibly guilty that I did not enjoy that time very much really at all.  I played Eye Found It with your sister and Daddy played Legos with her; Daddy took you for a walk in your snowsuit and I held you while I stirred the boiling noodles and the bechamel sauce; I bought yogurt and a pork roast and hummus at Cub, Daddy attacked some ice dams on the upstairs widow's walk; Thisbe decided to sleep without her pull-up and promptly wet the bed; Thisbe developed a 100 degree fever and red spider veins across the whites of her eyes; Thisbe performed a rhythmic gymnastics ribbon-twirling dance while singing "Part of Your World"; you bounced in your exersaucer, shrieked or didn't shriek in your high chair, ate sweet potatoes and apples and peaches; Daddy took Thisbe sledding, Daddy took you to church; I gave Thisbe a bath, washed the sheets, folded laundry; we read Aladdin, Lions at Lunchtime, Afternoon in the Amazon; Thisbe watched Peter Pan and Daddy and I watched Sherlock and Parks and Recreation and a little of the Olympics; Daddy wrote a course proposal and I read Hass' essay on Images.  

I think my favorite moment of the weekend was the fifteen minutes where Thisbe and I lay together on the couch.  She was stroking Dog-Do and I was stroking her hair.  We were half-listening to you and Daddy playing in the next room, half watching the fan orbiting the ceiling, half enjoying the sun glancing off the snow and onto our faces, half thinking our own thoughts.  Thisbe finally said something about the globe sitting on the top of the bookshelf.  Only she didn't call it a globe, she called it "that earth ball" and I liked that.  The pale green of the walls and the red, wool tartan blanket over us.  That was nice.

I love you and Thisbe and Daddy so very much.  I am lucky not only to have you but to have had the privilege to choose this life, the one I'm in.  And I keep choosing it, every day, because it still remains the life that I desire.

But there is something about this time that also makes me want to staple my eyebrows, that makes me sometimes think, when I am alone in the car, of just continuing to drive, onward, until I reach a large body of water.  There is something about this time that makes me feel suddenly old, that makes me feel angry at the friends my age who have chosen not to have children and who suddenly look incredibly vibrant and rather smug about all the freedom they have stuffed in their pockets.  I choose this.  I choose this.  But there are parts of me, parts that like to write and run and read and sit and stare at the ceiling fan, and these parts have been put aside for the moment.  These parts are getting hungry.  Ravenous really.  

We are blessed with gobs of support.  Blessed beyond measure.  Still.  Some days I feel like I am feeding everyone and longing, desperately, to be fed.

One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Well, little man, I failed on my resolution to blip for the whole month of January because I was run over by the flu.  Last Tuesday I took you to the doctor because, though you were getting better, you still seemed fussy, not quite yourself.  I thought maybe you had an ear infection.  You had an ear infection.  And I could feel something coming to get me too.  Your car seat felt 50 time heavier.  I shook a little extra from the cold.  By 7pm my fever was 102.5.  From Wednesday through Friday, I only made it out of the bed to pee or to nurse you.  And on the few occasions I did venture into the bathroom, the gorgeous sight that awaited me in the mirror was not only the stringy, oily hair, hollowed eye sockets, and wan skin of an ill person but also pink eye.  In both of my eyes.

But this isn't a post about how much it sucks to be sick.  This is a post about what I want for you when you feel really sad or really sick.  Because the sickness happened.  But here is what else happened last week:

After I wrote my last fairly pathetic post about January depression, a lot of friends wrote comments about the post on Facebook (you'll now have to go find out what Facebook is).  And their words made me feel like I wasn't alone.  Then that night a friend knocked on the door out of the blue and brought chocolate cake and wine and tonic water and a hyacinth plant and a hug. Another friend sent a hilarious e-mail about how she wasn't doing too much better and had in fact just poured chocolate syrup directly into a jar of peanut butter.  After I got sick another friend who's a nurse practitioner called in a prescription for eye drops for me and our wonderful neighbor friend brought over potato leek soup and bread and butter for dinner.  Gak came to take care of you one afternoon and in the three hours she was here she also managed to do laundry, water the pants, vacuum the rugs, and make another dinner for us.  When we still needed more care for you (since the nanny cancelled), he called a retired friend from church and asked and do you know what she said?  She said, "I am so happy you called."  No long pause during which she weighed helping to care for a baby against the chances she herself might get sick--she made us feel like we were doing her a favor or something (and I am continuing to pray that she is not sick right now).  And then there was your father, who spent the last week of J-term essentially being a single parent.  Feeding you both breakfast, putting you both to bed, shoveling the 7 inches of snow we apparently received (I haven't yet been outside to confirm this), bringing me water and toast, making trips to Walgreens, and on and on.

And I know there are a lot of others out there who would have helped too.  Who would have been glad to.  So this is a post about community.  It's something I can't really wish for you since it's something you'll have to believe in enough to make happen.  So, sweet boy, even if you are an introverted boy, show up for people.  Reach out to them.  Learn the names of your neighbors.  Go to ECFE classes.  Join a church even if you're not so into God at the moment. When your friends give a reading or play a show or defend their dissertation or run for elected office or give presentations--show up.  Cheer loudly.  Have some friends who are at least 20 years older than you.  Ask them for advice.  Read the local newspaper. Call your sister.  Send her a silly e-card for no reason.  Bring your excess zucchinis to the new person on the block.  Remember to say thank you.

I don't do or haven't done well enough many of the things I just mentioned.  I've especially not been good enough at saying thank you lately.  But this week brought me to my knees.  Literally first.  Then figuratively. 

This week marked the first real moment, too, where my own care of you could not be sufficient.  You turned six months old on January 31st.  And you should know that you are being held, diapered, lifted, supported, rocked, tickled, bounced, and buoyed by many, many hands.  And I am so grateful.

The Very Real Urge to Hibernate

Negative 24 when we woke up this morning.  59 inside the house.  Brilliant blue sky and the cold glaring down. 

You are in much better spirits, bouncing happily in your exer-saucer, opening your lips for spoonfuls of pear puree, trying to turn the knob of my nose to open my face, etc.

I am not in such good spirits.  Somehow, your father coming home from the trip felt like it should be the end of a difficult month.  But it wasn't.  The temperature is still disturbingly low.  I'm still wearing only grungy, highly washable clothing items (since you're still a snot lord).  I'm in a rather unhealthy cycle of caffeine to get me through the day and alcohol to reward myself at night.  I should have taken you walking today but somehow lugging the stroller in and out of the car, lugging my shoes and your diaper bag in and out of the car, and then circling on the grey track for the twenty minutes you allow me before beginning to fuss seemed like too much energy, too much work.  Especially because on each go-round we pass the row of treadmills and stair-masters and the co-eds with bopping ponytails and i-pod budded ears, sweating off the fat free ranch dressing they had with lunch.

Instead of walking we went to Target.  I filled the cart with boxes of Kleenex and organic baby prunes and 9M fleece sleepers from the clearance rack.  I bought a latte from the Starbucks inside and pushed you in circles and hated being the suburban mom with a Starbucks buying crap out of boredom and desperation at Target.

I feel huge and ugly and sluggish.  I feel a very real urge to hibernate.  I can almost taste how beautiful it would be.  To bed down in a nest of fur, to sleep uninterrupted until the pull of birdsong and the clash of tulips woke me in the spring.  To be gone from it all, temporarily. 

I know, too, how ridiculous this is.  Our house is warm.  We have money and jobs we love.  Kids we adore who came to us without much difficulty.  We feel safe outside after dark.  We don't fear persecution.  We have community and computers and chocolate hearts in red tinfoil.

You still despise tummy time.  You look around for a few moments and then you lay your cheek on the ground, defeated and lifeless.  This is how I feel today, sweet boy.  As though someone has put me in a position that requires a kind of strength I'm not yet certain I possess.