Stillwater

I have a giant panda bear taking residence in the jumbled mess of my backyard.

I don't know whether to succumb to his fuzzy embrace or give him the finger. His name is Stillwater, and he's kind of like a suburban Grasshopper.

Ever since I read Zen Shorts to Hannah on the couch one evening, Stillwater has been gently tight-roping the synapses of my brain, reminding me of the fact that I am utterly incapable of chilling out. I imagine him sitting out back, nestled in the tangled ivy, looking around for bamboo.

I got suckered (read, I couldn't say no) into attending a birthday party for a child my own daughter will most likely never see again after June. It's irritating me that I had to spend $12 on a gift. It's petty, I know. Stillwater says, "Your daughter will have fun and you always love free food."

"That's true, Stillwater. Hannah loves dressing up for parties, and I'm never one to pass up a table of snacks."

I volunteered to solicit a block's worth of neighbors for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I knew that I wouldn't rake in $200 or anything, but I figured I could count on at least $5-10 from at least 5 of my neighbors that we know fairly well. Only one neighbor, in the past four weeks, has forwarded on a donation.

Stillwater says, "That one neighbor gave $25.00. That's much more than you were expecting from a single contributor."

"Good point, Stillwater. She was the only contributor, but she was generous."

The kids have been waking up so early, 5:45am some days. The early waking combined with our irritation has made some for entirely unpleasant mornings, with the girls fighting, alternately scowling at me and clinging to me. Yesterday was a mess. David had a morning meeting, meaning I was all alone on a Saturday morning. Hannah was overcome with sadness from 5:45am to 9:20am, at which point she shed her melancholy like a pair of too-small pajamas and emerged bright and cheery.

"You were very patient with her, in trying circumstances," Stillwater consoles me. "You did your best trying to be positive without feeding in to it. And she came out of it."

"But the damage had been done. I was an anxious mess the rest of the day. Dave was working in the basement. Lillian was cranky and clingy. I yelled too much. I feel like, every day, my job is to be surrounded by cantankerous co-workers, thwarting my every move. No one wants to work as a team."

"Is this always the way it is? What about today?"

"Today is better," I admitted. "We made Hannah go back to bed this morning, and she fell back to sleep. Lillian played happily in her crib until nearly 7. It doesn't happen like that all the time, but this morning it felt like a blessing."

"And just in time," Stillwater tells me.

My anxiety dissipates a bit. I listen to the girls playing downstairs. They've pulled the chairs away from the dining room table, making their own tent under the tablecloth. They've fashioned a campfire out of two flashlights, and brought a cadre of stuffed friends down to enjoy the woods. I am oddly weepy, grateful for the reprieve, grateful that our own still water has been restored, absent of discordant ripples and chops.

"I'm glad you didn't give me the finger," Stillwater tells me. "I've enjoyed our chat."

"Me too."

"Can you practice not carrying the people, things and events that distress you? Can you practice putting them down and continuing on down the path?"

"It's much harder than it seems, especially when so much stress is created inside these walls."

Stillwater lays his giant panda head on my shoulder. It feels so surprisingly light. "You have a generous spirit and want to help people. Carry that. You're a better mother than you think. Carry that."

I can for a while -- I know this. The drowning wake of a large ship of chaos will find me again -- I know this as well. But hopefully I can take a walk out back, just past the tulip trees, and find Stillwater sitting in a clump of ivy, ready to help me find my way back to breathing, back to peace.

My Mind Is Everywhere...and Nowhere

Achoo! (Splat...)

This is the sound of Lillian sneezing, and also the sound of a copious amount of snot hitting the wood floor (or kitchen linoleum or sunroom tile).

Achoo! (Splat...)

I encounter a half-dollar sized splat in the sunroom, apparently just sneezed out moments before. Usually, Lillian will tell me, "Mommy, got some on da fwoow."

Enthralled with the groceries she's putting in a purse, she has forgotten. As I wipe the slick spot, I want to vomit. I can feel its lack of texture under the tissue, the way it oozes. Isn't May too late for a cold?

******

A migraine is resurging. After a fairly lengthy reprieve from headaches, this is the fallout. And I am out of my medicine.

Later, David will tell me, "Maybe you just need some more protein," with his characteristic sly smile. He doesn't add a plea for me to refrain blogging this tidbit, so I make a mental note of it.

"Even when I'm in pain, you hit on me." This is said with an accompanying eye roll, but still, I find it oddly reassuring.

******

My mind is everywhere, and nowhere. My part-time job, which I always knew was temporary, is over. There is a chance that it could start back up again in July, but who knows. My final school transcript arrived, so I gathered all the papers, reports of my past academic work, and all important registration fees and tuition and sent them off in a hopeful bundle. It doesn't seem that I'll miss the deadline for the first summer session. If all goes well, a week from this Monday, I'll be sitting in a lecture hall doodling on a notebook and daydreaming about the way my husband smells when he comes back from a long sweaty day of conservation. Rank? you ask. No, delicious, I respond.

******

The bed is unmade.

******

Yesterday morning, I spent about 45 minutes reading the New York Times article on Chris Matthews. What should have taken around 15 minutes went a half-hour longer because my children don't care to let me read articles about political pundits. And I think, why am I trying to read this? And then I think, why shouldn't I try to read this?

******

"I want you to help me wax my pits," I tell David.

"Um..okay."

"But you can't be a pussy about it. You really have to yank the strip hard and quickly."

I have grown weary of shaving them. 5 hours later, the pinpricks of stubble are peeking through, taunting. Even going a day without shaving results in a feeling of needing to hide under a long-sleeve shirt. And I'm lazy about shaving. At the current rate, my pits will never see the light of day.

******

It's raining today. Gray has fallen over our house like a blanket. Just yesterday it was sunny and mild. Hannah and I were outside, and over our heads was the Goodyear blimp. We tried to follow it, but our neighborhood's thick canopy wouldn't let us. We lost it behind some towering trees. I liked watching Hannah's eyes try to process something never seen before.

Five

This past weekend, we celebrated the entrance, five years ago, of a life that has left us enchanted.

Family filled the house, much food and drink was consumed, and Hannah, Lillian and their much-worshiped cousin flitted about, inside and out.

(The almost birthday girl, outshining the glorious azaleas.)

Since she was not quite but almost born on Cinco de Mayo (a mere three and a half hours earlier), I decided Mexican was still where it was at, and made enchiladas, fajitas, salsa, and rice lace with cilantro and lime.

The kids had none of it, preferring instead the less pungent, less spiced and decidedly more American cuisine of chicken and fries.

(A rare embrace, in party finery.)

What had I been doing five years earlier? A state of confusion, contractions four minutes apart. Hadn't labor just started? They were mild, but regular. It was, in hindsight, the first indication that my birth plan was to be balled up into a crumpled heap and discarded.

It doesn't matter anymore. Sometimes I get a twinge of regret, but mostly I'm left with the relief of someone who worked hard, needed the most drastic of interventions, and still got to meet her -- bald, blue-eyed and not fond of her nursery hat -- in the end.

(No birthday song, just some quiet wishes and candles extinguished.)

She's into butterflies now, as evidenced by the cake above, and by the gauzy insects that hang from her ceiling, the colored cut-outs decorating our sunroom windows, and the butterfly habitat birthday present. We wait, anxiously, for our caterpillars to arrive in the mail. Then we'll watch them transform.

The metaphor is not lost on me. All of the transforming I've done in my life, none has been more startling than my transitioning from not-mother to mother. Sometimes, when I get everything wrong and feel startlingly inadequate, I'm as plain as the moths that flutter around a lit window in evening. But other times, when I feel whole and good and content, my wings are as brightly colored as the orange on a Monarch, and I feel my children watch me with awe.

(I watch them with awe, too.)

At bedtime, on the night of her birthday, Hannah asked me, "Is it snuggle night, Mommy?"

"It is, perfect for your birthday," I said back, as we got into her bed after books. Turning back to her after looking at her clock, I said, "You were born, right now." It was 8:23pm, 5 years ago, she had been pulled, slick and yelling, from my abdomen.

"What kind of cake should I get for my sixth birthday?" There she was, already thinking ahead, while I was stuck firmly in the past, thinking back on her arrival.

Where there had once been the uncoordinated chunk of a newborn, now lay the gangly limbs of a wanna-be dancer. Watch me spin is one of her favorite refrains. I watch her, spinning and still, sleeping and awake, shy and gregarious, sullen and happy.

(Yep. She's mine.)

I hope that I get to watch her for a long, long time. Happy Birthday to my Hannah, my butterfly.

The Counselor

Sunday night I attended the first part of a five-part training series on learning to become a volunteer breastfeeding counselor for a nursing 'warm' line.

It was a strange thing to be once again immersed in the logistics of nursing: the physiology of milk production, the all-consuming importance of a good latch, positioning and compressing and how to tell if your baby is drinking or simply fluttering about for comfort, foremilk/hindmilk imbalance, and on and on.

Watching videos of newborns latching on, I felt the distinct tingle of a letdown deep in my breast tissue. It was a phantom, of course, like itching from a limb that's been removed. There is no milk there, but my eyes sent these images to my brain, and my brain responded, as did my breasts. Oh, those round heads and rooting mouths, at once so delightful and frightening!

I'm removed from it and I'm not. One cannot have an intense nursing relationship with their child and then pack it all away like it was inconsequential. It certainly wasn't everything, but it was so much more than nothing. It was something so special that at times (like when the trainer asked me to summarize my experience breastfeeding) I almost feel speechless. How to sum up something so frustrating and exhausting and confusing and, of course, achingly beautiful and lovely?

There was the firstborn who seemingly had zero interest, and the second born who wanted nothing but the breast. There was the thrush and the nipple vasospasms and three bouts of mastitis. There was oversupply and overactive letdown and a nursing strike here and there. There were cracks the size of the San Andreas Fault, healed only by frequent applications of the miracle known as Dr. Jack Newman's All-Purpose Nipple Ointment. There were tears, and plenty.

"You'll have a lot of personal wisdom to share, then," the trainer tells me.

Hah, that's for sure.

But there was also that time when Dave and I dared to venture out to his work holiday party a mere 10 weeks after Lillian's birth. She would scream nearly the whole 5 hours we were gone. And when we finally got back and I changed into my pajamas and sat down to nurse her on the couch, she -- who refused all bottles and so hadn't eaten as long as we'd been gone -- just looked up at me. I thought for sure she'd latch on instantly and slurp like a person given a Dasani after a stroll through Death Valley. Then she smiled, this big goofy grin. Hey Mom, you're back. Boy am I glad. She almost nursed reluctantly, preferring instead to examine my face. She'd take some sips and then detach to look up at me again, and smile. And this experience, being of the achingly beautiful variety, is one of many seared like a tattoo on my brain.

Another memory: Nursing Lillian to sleep, her chunky 7-month old self, during a late evening hailstorm. As we cuddled on my bed, the sky opened up, releasing a torrent of small chunks of ice. Despite the thunderous sound of ice on a slate roof, her hands merely fluttered about, grabbing my shirt. Her eyes never opened. The fierceness of nature, both indoors and out, is what I remember from that night.

So I was that mom calling the LC and La Leche League and the hotline in tears, and I also, later, was that happy mom, content in the nursing relationship we'd forged together, not needing advice or suggestions on anything but how to get an oft-waking baby to forgo boob for sleep. Everything else, we had ironed out.

But I'm more than a little nervous about all the various roles I'll have to play as counselor. Will I get it right? Will I be supportive enough? Will I actually help?

Most of the calls I made were simply about being heard. I needed to vent. I needed to get Lillian to take a bottle (for my sanity) but I knew she would never take one. Still, I called and spoke and was listened to. But there was also that time when Lillian refused my right side, choking and sputtering on it whenever she dared. Patty, the sweet LC affiliated with the birthing center I go to, gave me some suggestions that got us over the hump and back to contentment.

It is my role to not be judgmental, to phrase my advice in such a way as to not be issuing orders (even if it seems like orders are needed), to issue support statements and to follow up. I know I can handle it, but there is that part of me that thinks I should take no part of leadership, that I just don't have it in me.

It is my greatest fear when I think of nursing school as well. Me? Responsible for others' care? Pshawwww!

And then I think about the two kiddos I've somehow managed to raise from helplessness into toddlerhood and beyond.

It's in me...I just have to believe I have something to offer outside the realm of my family.

Wordless Wednesday -- Flashback

Nearly two years ago...

Someone didn't like the birthday song.
****

But she clearly loved her tricycle.
****

That baby, though you can't see her face, is obviously delicious.
****

See? Simply yummy. Chunky arms, courtesy of me.

For more, please visit Wordless Wednesday.

Haiku Friday

Melancholy girl,
spends the morning under her
sheets, blue eyes peeking.

I keep checking, but
let her stay, knowing a good
sulk can be healing.

So different from
her sister, who shakes sadness
off like drops of rain.

*****

Please visit Jennifer and Christina for more haikus!

It's Okay If You Think I'm Crazy

Hannah's school put on a Spring concert last Thursday night. It was immensely delightful to look up at the altar and see all those children assembled there, dressed as expected in their Sunday finery.

Hannah's dress wasn't quite Sunday best: a sleeveless white frock with embroidered flowers, it was slightly stained with some streaks of blue paint I had tried to scrub out, to no avail. But her sandals were brand new acquisitions from Payless, that wonder of a shoe store for those not willing to shell out $45.00 on StrideRite each time the foot grows a half-inch.

She was beautiful. As the kids paraded through the door of the church, making their ways past the audience and up to the altar to sing, Hannah seemed to be both looking for us and trying to avoid our gaze. I loved that.

Some of the kids' lips barely moved, some were singing quietly, some were practically shouting. The waning light of evening filtered through the stained glass windows. Lillian stood and bounced on David's knees, unabashedly singing along, though the words she sang were her mostly her own.

There were families with new babies, families with babies closer to 6 months of age, families with toddlers Lillian's age. And there were pregnant women, women having their third and fourth babies. Even my neighbor friend, who was there to watch her 3-year old -- her 1-year old was home in bed already -- confessed in the pew to me that she was ready to start trying for her third. I was struck by the seemingly constant process of expansion. Every family unit seemed already bigger or on the cusp of getting bigger.

As Lillian shouted out the words to "Mr. Golden Sun" -- her hair uncharacteristically held back with barrettes, her face clean and bright, her dress shifting with each movement -- I found myself melancholy. Between my almost 5-year old who was performing, and my 2-year old who was putting on a show all her own, I wondered if I truly was done having children.

I've gone on about this here before, when that swearing off of babies I did throughout the first six months of Lillian's high-maintenance life started to wear away. I wouldn't even go on the record in any official capacity saying that I, Kelly, want another child. It's not nearly as simple as that. I wish that it were.

I wish that I had decided on becoming a nurse straight out of high school, and that I already had a career and a salary, and that we already had a minivan that could fit 3 small children in it rather than two cars that can only fit two.

And I wish, probably more than the silly-sounding but necessary items I listed above, that I felt I had the constitution to handle a larger family. That somehow, my feeling that handling two children is quite enough, thankyouverymuch, is ridiculous and melodramatic, and that what could be the harm of deciding to add another.

After the kids were in bed the evening of Hannah's recital, I found myself explaining my feelings (yet again) to my patient husband, who incidentally, is fairly convinced that two is enough. "I feel jealous that other people are able to handle it, and not me. What is in their blood that isn't in mine?"

What do they have? I kept up this dance in my brain, telling myself that they probably were swamped, overwhelmed and overworked.

A few weeks ago, during one of our last fires, Dave and I sat in front of the toasty flames drinking. I was drunk on Caravello, Pom and vodka, crying into my ice-cube filled glass. "I just don't want to close the door on it," I cried. "I just want a little window or something. Please, just tell me you haven't completely ruled it out."

Dave, who still had his sobriety, told me gently, "I haven't closed the door completely." As he held on to his beer, he proceeded to tell me all the reasons why it would be good for us to stop. "How many times have you told me how much you're dying to get out of the house, to do something else? And we'd love to travel, take the kids out West. Everything gets pushed back, your plans for school, all the things you want to accomplish. Plus, you kind of hate being pregnant and aren't that fond of newborns." He said this all without a hint of exasperation or lecturing, which, drunk and vulnerable, made me love him even more.

Plans. I'm just getting started on my future. Nursing school is still a futuristic concept. There are the prerequisites I have to fulfill.

And, yes, there is the hatred of heartburn and pelvic pain. And exhaustion. Oy, the exhaustion.

But...

Seeing the girls makes me wonder about who we'd next create. It's a romantic dream, imagining the first meeting and seeing how the genetic rolling of dice all played out. As much as they drive me crazy, they also enchant me, like little boisterous fairies, flitting about and scattering their spells. And I know in my heart that we'd never regret an addition to our family. That we'd make a new reality, tough it out and do our best.

I also know how hard it would be - that, I don't have to imagine. I'd find myself wondering what to do while my two eldest were fighting ferociously over the Casio keyboard and I was tied to the couch, nursing for the 12th time that day. That instead of using the potty, Lillian would most likely decide, in a plea for whatever attention she could get from me, that the floor was a more suitable place to urinate. That Hannah, who stakes her claim to my body by rubbing her nose all over my arm like a cat, would nestle in even harder. That I'd frequently feel out-manned, out-gunned, overwhelmed.

******

Sometimes David and I joke about it. I like this. It makes me feel slightly less crazy.

"I know how I could convince you," I tell my husband one morning, as we sit and sip our coffee. The kids fritter around at our feet, playing with dolls. "I would say, 'Dave, I bet you can't do it. I bet you can't get me pregnant.' And it would be a challenge you just couldn't refuse." And I see, as he laughs, that he's instantly ingested this sentiment, that it appeals to his can-do attitude. He flashes me his best 'you-know-I-can-knock-yo-ass-up' look, and we return to our coffee and to the day ahead.