I’m sitting here in my family room, still sniffling and coughing and the end of a long cold. I was the final Winslow to be taken down by this bug, and it seems to have hit me the hardest, and yes, I am feeling a little sorry for myself tonight. I slept a lot this weekend, figuring that the extra day between semesters would give me enough down-time to kick this thing (perhaps my staying up way too late last week so I could have all my grades done wasn’t the best for my body or my immune system, but it felt good not to have them hanging over my head). But here I am, getting ready to chug a little Nyquil and pray for a long(ish) night of restful sleep before the new semester begins tomorrow.
It also doesn’t help that the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl. I am actually sad about this, although I still think it’s pretty amazing that they were back this year.
Side note: The other day a friend launched into a rant about “fans” like me, so this blog entry was originally going to be about that. Because I fully admit I’m -- what are they calling us -- bandwagon fans? Not fair weather fans, because I am one hundred percent sure I’m not going to care about any other football team if the Seahawks start losing all the time. But yes, the reason I’m into the Seahawks is not so much about football but because it’s pretty cool to see an entire region united and excited over the same thing. Also, I really love Richard Sherman -- like, a lot. And I make no apologies for that; I loved him when he started handing out school supplies and talking about the importance of education to kids in my school district. Also, he is really nice to look at. Also, I look good in blue. I’m shallow like that, I guess.
But in the last two seasons I have watched a very tiny handful of games (including two Super Bowls in a row!) all the way through, and enough parts of others to learn something. I can more or less follow what’s going on, and when I can’t, I rely on my friend Matt (from church, not to be confused with my husband Matt, who cares less than I do about football) or my brother to do a little yelling, and their tone clues me in to what kind of sportsing is going on and whether I should feel triumphant or downtrodden but determined. Sort of like the chorus in a Greek drama? Maybe?
I spent the last five minutes of today’s game feeling anxious, and then I just felt ridiculous because I am not a person who paces nervously during a football game. And then I felt depressed, because we lost. And on top of that, I have a cold, and I had to stop by the grocery store on the way home because Matt was making us soup but forgot a couple of key ingredients, and I suddenly remembered it’s the Sunday night before a new semester and I feel not quite prepared. I gave into a few minutes of grumpiness and self-pity.
But those moments pass. Because Matt was taking care of dinner and he’s promised to vacuum the family room and study later this evening, the two rooms in our house that could use it. Because my children love the Seahawks (my daughter understands football better than I do, and she loves Richard Sherman and Russell Wilson and Marshawn Lynch) and they were a little bummed but mostly cheerful because they had fun with their friend Sam and drank way too much butterscotch root beer. Because even though I’m anxious about tomorrow, I’ve also done this before, many times, and in the morning I will remember to trust myself and go with the flow and it will all be fine even if I’m not feeling great. (I still remember starting my second trimester during my first year of teaching with a terrible sinus infection. I had an entirely new bunch of kids -- at least tomorrow I’ll only have a very few new faces due to a very few schedule changes -- and I was still figuring out how to teach, period. I had no earthly idea what I was doing. It was like the first day of school all over again, only with a head full of mucous. No matter how tomorrow goes, it won’t feel anything like that.)
Back at home tonight, I stuck Suzannah in the shower and Isaac in the bath, popped a couple of ibuprofen, and settled myself on the couch for awhile with a book. Matt brought me a glass of wine, and moments later my headache had more or less abated. I ate a little soup even though I was full of Super Bowl snacks, because I couldn’t let the last thing I ate today be guacamole or tiny puff pastries filled with feta cheese and caramelized onion. Matt had prepared this simple but crazy tasty soup from the Moosewood cookbook that we used to eat all the time, so I ate a little of that and felt better.
“Hey,” I said to Matt over steaming bowls of soup, “do you remember where we were the night of the Super Bowl in 2008?”
He frowned, not really remembering. I can’t hold this against him, since I remember virtually nothing about any Super Bowl in which the Seahawks weren’t playing. (And I will fully admit that when they made it to the Superbowl in 2006, I still just mostly remember the fact that no one expected them to win, and I remember the snacks. To be fair, I was significantly pregnant at the time.)
“I’ll give you a hint,” I said. “Do you remember where we had to go?”
“Ahhh,” he said. “That was the night we had that issue with our plumbing...”
Sunday, February 3, 2008. Yes, an issue with our plumbing. Matt had to turn the water off at the main because we couldn’t get it to stop gushing in the bathtub or something, and it cost a lot less (both in money and in hassle) to just go to a hotel a few miles away than to try to get a plumber out to our house on a Sunday night. Super Bowl Sunday. Suzannah was just 21 months old. We threw a few things into a duffel bag and headed out to enjoy dinner at a local restaurant before hunkering down in our hotel room. It might have even been relaxing except for the tiny fact that Suzannah was going through a phase in which she utterly refused to sleep. Journal entries remind me that she’d been up for most of the night the day before, and I remembered the mind-numbing despair I felt that winter as I walked the hallways with my wakeful child at night, trying to nurse her, trying to soothe her, and feeling completely insane. It was like having a twenty-eight pound newborn, so, you know, rather a strain on the arms and the back. And I was expected to show up at school in the morning, dressed and behaving like a competent professional.
That night in early February, seven years ago, I wrote: Matt wound up driving around with Suzannah at three-thirty in the morning -- we've never had to resort to that before -- and I tried to fall asleep, but by then I was so worked up that all I could do was lie in bed, exhausted tears soaking the pillow as the red and blue glow from the signs outside filtered in through the parted drapes. This was the second night of almost no sleep, and I was beginning to lose my mind at the prospect of going to work in the morning and functioning like a human being.
It’s completely crazy that I feel sort of fondly nostalgic, reading that. But I also feel deeply grateful that we’re out of those weeds. I deeply loved my children’s babyhoods and I loved their toddler years and sometimes I hurt with missing those moments. But the mind-numbing fatigue, the drudgery! That was hard. Feeling completely insane as I got ready for work, seriously borderline hysterical because I hadn’t slept -- I can afford to look back on my younger self, rocking her babies with tears leaking out of her eyes, and say, “Oh, Mama. You don’t have to miss this part.” And my seven-years-older self can also say, “But I do, a little bit.” Because when life is reduced to those middle-of-the-night moments, when it’s about soothing a child’s tears, about nursing her exhaustedly on the couch in the dark, about walking and walking and walking, my seven-years-older self can appreciate the simplicity of that: the times when physical touch, whispering, walking can soothe a child’s needs. I knew what to do, and I did it. I felt my sanity drain from me on those nights, sometimes, and I felt a little less than myself in the morning. It wasn’t sustainable. But children don’t stay sleepless toddlers forever, and now when my little girl wakes too early I can say, “Go read in your room for awhile.” It breaks my heart and fills it at the same time.
Mostly fills it. My heart is full.
I was going to write about losing a football game tonight, but it occurs to me that I haven’t lost a thing.
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