Tonight, driving home from IKEA with my mother and my sister-in-law and my beautiful daughter on the eve of her seventh birthday, we reminisced about the time she was born -- about how sick I felt the night I went into labor but refused to admit I was in labor at all (since she was born a month early), about how sick with jaundice she was after she was born, about how overwhelmed and scared I felt. There were other, happier bits in the storytelling too, of course, but tonight I keep thinking about that because of what came next.
“How long was I sick?” she asked.
“You were really sick for about a week,” I said. “Remember those pictures we have where you’re tucked into the bili box right on top of our kitchen counter? We had a nurse come out to our house to check on you every day.”
“But what day was I better?”
“Well, you spent about a week in those blankets,” I told her, “but you looked like a carrot for about three weeks after that.”
She burst into peals of laughter. “A carrot! Mom, that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”
She was just delighted. A carrot! How absurd!
And suddenly I wished that I could somehow go back in time and give my new-mom self a huge hug. I remember -- and not fondly -- sitting in the brand-new blue glider, rocking my daughter who wouldn’t nurse off my rapidly filling, rock-hard breasts, wondering how I would get her to eat or how I would manage to take a shower. I bathed us both in tears, and every time some well-meaning person reminded me to enjoy every moment I felt a little more of my sanity drain away. Somehow it gives me a little comfort to imagine the mother I am tonight whispering to the mother I was seven years ago, “Someday, your daughter will want to hear every single word of her story.”
(Eventually, of course, we figured it out together. She learned how to nurse, and then eventually it stopped hurting. I learned that we both slept better when I brought her into bed with me. We learned each other’s rhythms. I tried to write it all down, even the messy parts, the hard parts, the parts that didn't go in the pastel-colored baby books. Those were the stories I needed from other mothers, because they made me believe that I could fall fiercely in love with my own, imperfect as it might have seemed at times.)
She’ll be seven years old in the morning. Seven. She’ll have memories of her own, memories of me, of this time in her life, of our family, and I realize that she really is the author of her own story. Not me. It’s a humbling thing, really, to realize our separateness long before she probably will, but I take it seriously. I struggle with how much of her life to share publicly now, because it really is hers. I feel so plugged into her psyche sometimes it terrifies me, even in -- especially in -- our more challenging mother-daughter moments, but at the same time I struggle with projecting myself onto her. One of my friends once wrote about how it’s only natural to see our daughters as idealized versions of ourselves, but that can be dangerous territory. I can see myself in my daughter, but she is not me. Nor do I want her to be. I wish I could put into words what I feel sometimes when I look at her now, when she doesn’t realize I’m just watching -- maybe she’s just brushing her teeth before bed, all long-legged and slim and slightly tan, and she leans over the sink to spit, gathering her hair in one hand and holding it back all by herself so she doesn’t get toothpaste in it. It’s such an ordinary, heartbreaking, wonderful thing, to watch this beautiful girl just be.
I really can’t write her story anymore; I can only write my own. There’s a loss in that, I suppose, but even on her first birthday I wrote that I would never wish her back to babyhood, as much as I ultimately loved it. Watching her become her own beautiful self, whatever I might wish for her -- that is my life’s greatest blessing and my deepest joy.
Monday, May 27, 2013
Saturday, May 18, 2013
The month of May
I love this time of year in the Pacific Northwest. Recently we had a week of weather so lovely I wore skirts and sandals every single day. Cherry blossoms have settled in pink piles along the sidewalks after weeks of landing in my hair as I ran by, shaken from their branches by the slightest breeze. Now the clouds have returned, but the rain is light, soft, warm. I ran through just such a drizzle this morning, and the smell of my neighborhood on this spring Saturday morning filled me right up with gratitude.
May in the Pacific Northwest arrives just in time to keep me from running screaming into the woods, because while it is the beginning of the loveliest time of year, it aligns perfectly with the worst time to be a teacher. Everyone is done in May, just so done. This year, though, I’m so aware of how deeply unhappy I was at school last year, and so deeply aware of the difference. Even on a less than stellar day. When I look back on the last seven or eight months I’m not sure I can think of the last year I’ve just loved my job and loved my kids and felt really, really good about it all the way I have this year. My school has seen a lot of changes in the last four or five years. So have I, really. I seriously considered taking an entirely different direction with me life after Isaac was born, for a lot of reasons, but right now I feel like I’m doing exactly what I’m called to do. That isn’t to say it’s perfect, because nothing ever is, and when I’m stressed out I’m still prone to bursting into Becca’s room during her planning period and shouting, “Everything is terrible,” but now when I do that I’m usually referring to something that can be fixed with a little perspective, a little breathing space, a few items crossed of a to-do list, and a small bite of chocolate.
So things are really pretty good right now. I had somewhat of a frenzied, disappointing week, to be honest -- I felt overwhelmed and a little sad and tired -- but now, on Saturday night, cuddled up with my husband and my pug, sipping a drink and watching a movie, it’s easy to let go of specifics, to stop having hypothetical arguments in my head with people who don’t exactly know they’re participants, and to try to extend a little grace to people who’ve managed to ruffle my feathers. (Which, as we all know, is so hard to do.)
Ten days from now my little girl turns seven years old. All of her grandparents will be here to celebrate. I watched her run and climb and tumble at her gymnastics class today and wondered how in the world we made it to this point so quickly. Last night we all drove home from West Seattle, and Suzannah and Isaac played the “Smell my feet” game the entire way. I kind of hate the “Smell my feet” game, especially in the car, especially at night when we are all tired, and because also ew. But at the same time, it sent me spinning into this weird space -- I have spent so many moments kissing my children’s feet when they were babies, even toddlers. I have loved those little feet, and even now there is something so heartbreakingly sweet about, say, Isaac’s feet kicking above the floor when he sits in a chair. And I know there will be a time, not long from now, when I will remember my children screaming joyfully about their own stinky feet in the back seat and waving those feet all over the car, sticking them in each other’s faces, in our faces. Probably I will roll my eyes at the memory, a bit. I know I will think of it fondly, as we always do in hindsight. And maybe that’s why I write it all down now -- to try to keep and hold each moment, the hilarious, the absurd, the wretched, the sweet -- because I’m all too aware of how quickly it passes. The moments aren’t all sweet; please don’t remind me to enjoy all of them. But they’re all part of our story, and I do love our story.
May in the Pacific Northwest arrives just in time to keep me from running screaming into the woods, because while it is the beginning of the loveliest time of year, it aligns perfectly with the worst time to be a teacher. Everyone is done in May, just so done. This year, though, I’m so aware of how deeply unhappy I was at school last year, and so deeply aware of the difference. Even on a less than stellar day. When I look back on the last seven or eight months I’m not sure I can think of the last year I’ve just loved my job and loved my kids and felt really, really good about it all the way I have this year. My school has seen a lot of changes in the last four or five years. So have I, really. I seriously considered taking an entirely different direction with me life after Isaac was born, for a lot of reasons, but right now I feel like I’m doing exactly what I’m called to do. That isn’t to say it’s perfect, because nothing ever is, and when I’m stressed out I’m still prone to bursting into Becca’s room during her planning period and shouting, “Everything is terrible,” but now when I do that I’m usually referring to something that can be fixed with a little perspective, a little breathing space, a few items crossed of a to-do list, and a small bite of chocolate.
So things are really pretty good right now. I had somewhat of a frenzied, disappointing week, to be honest -- I felt overwhelmed and a little sad and tired -- but now, on Saturday night, cuddled up with my husband and my pug, sipping a drink and watching a movie, it’s easy to let go of specifics, to stop having hypothetical arguments in my head with people who don’t exactly know they’re participants, and to try to extend a little grace to people who’ve managed to ruffle my feathers. (Which, as we all know, is so hard to do.)
Ten days from now my little girl turns seven years old. All of her grandparents will be here to celebrate. I watched her run and climb and tumble at her gymnastics class today and wondered how in the world we made it to this point so quickly. Last night we all drove home from West Seattle, and Suzannah and Isaac played the “Smell my feet” game the entire way. I kind of hate the “Smell my feet” game, especially in the car, especially at night when we are all tired, and because also ew. But at the same time, it sent me spinning into this weird space -- I have spent so many moments kissing my children’s feet when they were babies, even toddlers. I have loved those little feet, and even now there is something so heartbreakingly sweet about, say, Isaac’s feet kicking above the floor when he sits in a chair. And I know there will be a time, not long from now, when I will remember my children screaming joyfully about their own stinky feet in the back seat and waving those feet all over the car, sticking them in each other’s faces, in our faces. Probably I will roll my eyes at the memory, a bit. I know I will think of it fondly, as we always do in hindsight. And maybe that’s why I write it all down now -- to try to keep and hold each moment, the hilarious, the absurd, the wretched, the sweet -- because I’m all too aware of how quickly it passes. The moments aren’t all sweet; please don’t remind me to enjoy all of them. But they’re all part of our story, and I do love our story.
Saturday, May 4, 2013
The Beautiful Now
I don’t remember what I was doing the other night -- probably settling into the couch to watch an episode or two of Friends (I just bought season 3; now the only one I don’t have is season 1) to unwind before another too-late bedtime. Both kids had been tucked in for awhile, and my brain was just shy of functioning. So I didn’t hear Suzannah right away. By the time I did, her cry had taken on the urgency that accompanies real fear. It had the panicky “I’m going to throw up” sound to it, to be honest, although Suzannah rarely throws up. Still, the cry meant business.
“Shit,” I mumbled, scrambling to my feet. Before I could reach her she’d already made her way to the kitchen. She pointed tearfully at her mouth.
“Did your tooth come out?” I asked her. She shook her head. “It’s bleeding,” she whimpered. Sure enough, her top front tooth hung by a thread from her bloody gums. This was the same tooth she knocked loose in her fall several days earlier. She doesn’t work at her loose teeth, so they have the potential to remain just barely attached for quite some time before they come out. But while my daughter is a pretty tough kid, she finds the sight of her own blood quite upsetting, and that, combined with the unsettling feel of a barely-there tooth, was too much for her.
“Do you want to try to pull it out?” I asked. She shook her head. “Do you want me to try to pull it out?” She nodded.
So she perched on the lid of the toilet seat, and I tried to pull out that tooth. I’ve never tried to do that before, and as it turns out, small baby teeth are slippery and not easy to grip. I tried with a washcloth, but after a tug, Suzannah gave a little sob and pulled away.
“It’s okay, Bug,” I said. “We don’t have to do it tonight. Let’s just rinse out your mouth and leave it alone for now. It’ll be fine.” I wrapped my arms around her and she rested her head on my shoulder. She let me rock her like that for a long time, and then I tucked her back into bed.
It was such a small moment, really, but it was also unspeakably sweet and kind of heart-wrenching in a way that defies words.
Fast forward a few nights. Shortly past three o’clock in the morning, I woke to our daughter standing beside our bed.
“My tooth came out,” she whispered.
I sat up. “Where is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Did it fall on the floor?” Shrug.
“Do you think you swallowed it?”
“I don’t know.”
I sighed. “Okay. Why don’t you climb in here for a bit.” So Suzannah crawled under the covers in our bed, and I spent the next ten minutes blearily searching through the folds in her sheets with no success. I crouched down on the floor and ran my hands over the carpet. I reached under the bed, thinking only about the spider my husband had allowed to escape behind the bookshelf in her room a couple of months ago. (Suzannah does not like the sight of her own blood, but she is remarkably unconcerned about spiders in her room. Obviously she hasn’t considered the possibility that the spider her father allowed to escape has since become a grandmother, probably, to lots of other horrible spiders that are waiting for a night like this in which to scurry over my hand while I’m searching for a lost tooth.)
It felt kind of absurd and surreal -- this crawling and groping around on my daughter’s floor, searching for a baby tooth at three o’clock in the morning -- but also, the one perfectly clear, coherent thought that came to me was that this is the very essence of motherhood.
I did not find the tooth.
I returned to our room and said something about writing the tooth fairy a note, about how she would understand that the tooth was lost but would see the gap in Suzannah’s mouth and get the message and probably leave her a little something anyway. Suzannah accepted this and allowed me to usher her back to her own bed. (“Do you think she could have really swallowed it?” Matt mumbled in the dark, sounding worried.)
A couple of hours later, after my alarm jarred me out of sleep but before I showered, I crept into Suzannah’s room once again and left two quarters in her tooth pillow. Two quarters is the going rate for teeth in our house these days. It was also, as I recall, the going rate for teeth back when I was losing them, so probably she is supposed to get more money or bigger presents or whatever, but really it’s not about that -- it’s about the shiny coins. It’s the symbolism. It’s about the satisfying plink of those coins dropping into her piggy bank. So two quarters it is, despite the fact that her friend Kathryn apparently gets, like, five dollars per tooth. (First graders compare such things, it seems. For the time-being, though, Suzannah seems blessedly unperturbed by the difference.)
(Later, Matt -- still worried about the possibility that Suzannah had swallowed the tooth -- searched for it himself. He covered the same territory, obviously, but seven-thirty in the morning is decidedly different from three-thirty in the morning, and he emerged triumphantly from her room a few moments later. “Found it,” he said, more relieved than proud. He really was worried about the potential swallowing. I thought it was unlikely, but also, it must happen, right? No one ever hears about first graders needing actual medical intervention because they swallowed a tooth, right?)
She lost another tooth the following night. This one had been loose for a long time, prior to her fall. She seemed concerned about losing two in such quick succession, but we hugged her and high-fived her and made jokes about turning into a jack-o-lantern, which made her giggle. The tooth fairy nearly forgot to visit the second time, so when Suzannah woke up nearly an hour earlier than usual to check her pillow, I managed to convince her to go to the bathroom first -- I told her that the tooth fairy likes to visit just before she wakes up, and she had other houses to visit and it was a busy night and she might not quite be ready and I don’t even know, it was ridiculous, and Suzannah looked at me skeptically but humored me anyway, and by the time she returned to her room there were the two shiny quarters! Like magic. I love that my daughter indulges me like this.
It’s not a big thing, really. Kids lose their baby teeth, and it becomes routine, like so many other parts of growing up. And I suppose it’s like any other milestone -- potty training, for instance, or eating solids for the first time. In other words, interesting only in the child’s own household, even though the parents’ friends will pretend to be interested and excited on their behalf. I really do understand this; I was fundamentally uninterested in these things until I experienced them myself. But this is the essence of parenthood. It’s not really about the milestone itself; it’s about the tiny moments contained within. It’s rocking my daughter as she perches on the toilet seat, marveling at how she seems so vulnerable but also so grown. It’s crawling around on her bedroom floor, squinting against the light at three-thirty in the morning, searching for this tiny little chip of a tooth without questioning why. It’s improvising these little stories for her (and for me), it’s framing these experiences in intentional ways so that she feels safe and valued and finds the joy in them, as we do.
That’s where the joy hangs out. And so we celebrate our little gap-toothed girl, who still delights in discovering quarters in her tooth pillow, who can still perch on the toilet seat without her feet quite reaching the floor and let me hold her, just hold her, and I know that what matters is not the tooth and not the quarters but the noticing, the remembering, the staying present, the juxtaposition of the baby and the girl and all her future selves. The moment. The beautiful now.
“Shit,” I mumbled, scrambling to my feet. Before I could reach her she’d already made her way to the kitchen. She pointed tearfully at her mouth.
“Did your tooth come out?” I asked her. She shook her head. “It’s bleeding,” she whimpered. Sure enough, her top front tooth hung by a thread from her bloody gums. This was the same tooth she knocked loose in her fall several days earlier. She doesn’t work at her loose teeth, so they have the potential to remain just barely attached for quite some time before they come out. But while my daughter is a pretty tough kid, she finds the sight of her own blood quite upsetting, and that, combined with the unsettling feel of a barely-there tooth, was too much for her.
“Do you want to try to pull it out?” I asked. She shook her head. “Do you want me to try to pull it out?” She nodded.
So she perched on the lid of the toilet seat, and I tried to pull out that tooth. I’ve never tried to do that before, and as it turns out, small baby teeth are slippery and not easy to grip. I tried with a washcloth, but after a tug, Suzannah gave a little sob and pulled away.
“It’s okay, Bug,” I said. “We don’t have to do it tonight. Let’s just rinse out your mouth and leave it alone for now. It’ll be fine.” I wrapped my arms around her and she rested her head on my shoulder. She let me rock her like that for a long time, and then I tucked her back into bed.
It was such a small moment, really, but it was also unspeakably sweet and kind of heart-wrenching in a way that defies words.
Fast forward a few nights. Shortly past three o’clock in the morning, I woke to our daughter standing beside our bed.
“My tooth came out,” she whispered.
I sat up. “Where is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Did it fall on the floor?” Shrug.
“Do you think you swallowed it?”
“I don’t know.”
I sighed. “Okay. Why don’t you climb in here for a bit.” So Suzannah crawled under the covers in our bed, and I spent the next ten minutes blearily searching through the folds in her sheets with no success. I crouched down on the floor and ran my hands over the carpet. I reached under the bed, thinking only about the spider my husband had allowed to escape behind the bookshelf in her room a couple of months ago. (Suzannah does not like the sight of her own blood, but she is remarkably unconcerned about spiders in her room. Obviously she hasn’t considered the possibility that the spider her father allowed to escape has since become a grandmother, probably, to lots of other horrible spiders that are waiting for a night like this in which to scurry over my hand while I’m searching for a lost tooth.)
It felt kind of absurd and surreal -- this crawling and groping around on my daughter’s floor, searching for a baby tooth at three o’clock in the morning -- but also, the one perfectly clear, coherent thought that came to me was that this is the very essence of motherhood.
I did not find the tooth.
I returned to our room and said something about writing the tooth fairy a note, about how she would understand that the tooth was lost but would see the gap in Suzannah’s mouth and get the message and probably leave her a little something anyway. Suzannah accepted this and allowed me to usher her back to her own bed. (“Do you think she could have really swallowed it?” Matt mumbled in the dark, sounding worried.)
A couple of hours later, after my alarm jarred me out of sleep but before I showered, I crept into Suzannah’s room once again and left two quarters in her tooth pillow. Two quarters is the going rate for teeth in our house these days. It was also, as I recall, the going rate for teeth back when I was losing them, so probably she is supposed to get more money or bigger presents or whatever, but really it’s not about that -- it’s about the shiny coins. It’s the symbolism. It’s about the satisfying plink of those coins dropping into her piggy bank. So two quarters it is, despite the fact that her friend Kathryn apparently gets, like, five dollars per tooth. (First graders compare such things, it seems. For the time-being, though, Suzannah seems blessedly unperturbed by the difference.)
(Later, Matt -- still worried about the possibility that Suzannah had swallowed the tooth -- searched for it himself. He covered the same territory, obviously, but seven-thirty in the morning is decidedly different from three-thirty in the morning, and he emerged triumphantly from her room a few moments later. “Found it,” he said, more relieved than proud. He really was worried about the potential swallowing. I thought it was unlikely, but also, it must happen, right? No one ever hears about first graders needing actual medical intervention because they swallowed a tooth, right?)
She lost another tooth the following night. This one had been loose for a long time, prior to her fall. She seemed concerned about losing two in such quick succession, but we hugged her and high-fived her and made jokes about turning into a jack-o-lantern, which made her giggle. The tooth fairy nearly forgot to visit the second time, so when Suzannah woke up nearly an hour earlier than usual to check her pillow, I managed to convince her to go to the bathroom first -- I told her that the tooth fairy likes to visit just before she wakes up, and she had other houses to visit and it was a busy night and she might not quite be ready and I don’t even know, it was ridiculous, and Suzannah looked at me skeptically but humored me anyway, and by the time she returned to her room there were the two shiny quarters! Like magic. I love that my daughter indulges me like this.
It’s not a big thing, really. Kids lose their baby teeth, and it becomes routine, like so many other parts of growing up. And I suppose it’s like any other milestone -- potty training, for instance, or eating solids for the first time. In other words, interesting only in the child’s own household, even though the parents’ friends will pretend to be interested and excited on their behalf. I really do understand this; I was fundamentally uninterested in these things until I experienced them myself. But this is the essence of parenthood. It’s not really about the milestone itself; it’s about the tiny moments contained within. It’s rocking my daughter as she perches on the toilet seat, marveling at how she seems so vulnerable but also so grown. It’s crawling around on her bedroom floor, squinting against the light at three-thirty in the morning, searching for this tiny little chip of a tooth without questioning why. It’s improvising these little stories for her (and for me), it’s framing these experiences in intentional ways so that she feels safe and valued and finds the joy in them, as we do.
That’s where the joy hangs out. And so we celebrate our little gap-toothed girl, who still delights in discovering quarters in her tooth pillow, who can still perch on the toilet seat without her feet quite reaching the floor and let me hold her, just hold her, and I know that what matters is not the tooth and not the quarters but the noticing, the remembering, the staying present, the juxtaposition of the baby and the girl and all her future selves. The moment. The beautiful now.
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