Shame and Other Hard Things

Some things are harder than I was expecting and some things are easier.

I feel *slightly* more functional that I was expecting to, so that's good.  It's a mind set, really.  You must force yourself out the the house.  You must make yourself comfortable with navigating the world with more factors to consider such as; are you dressed? And; is the baby going to eat/poop/sleep sometime soon (this is impossible to predict but nonetheless something to consider)?  And also; is it actually worth it?  I mean, how badly do we really need those groceries? Because it's just not that fun strapping your tiny itty bitty person babe into that awkward heavy car seat and then getting said tiny-person-in-car seat in and out of the store with whatever groceries you actually do really need.

Point being, I lack a certain lightness and freedom I had in the past but am still somehow leaving the house most days, at least briefly.

I'm also handling the lack of sleep relatively well.  My little love peanut doesn't sleep more than two hours at a stretch and it's okay.  He's put on nearly two pounds from his birth weight in less than a month and that makes me feel pretty good about the amount of feeding and the absence of long sleeping stretches we share.

The thing that I am struggling with though, the thing that at times threatens to crush me, is guilt over my older son, now 12.  Before having the baby, I talked myself and talked him up heavily about how I would do my best for him to feel just as important, just as loved as he always had.  I feel that I have failed at that and I feel awful about it.

My older son is amazing and wonderful in so many ways.  He is also incredibly strong willed and stubborn. And being a single mom with him since he was 2 years old unfortunately fed into a cycle of exhaustion and helplessness on my part that led me to often relent to his demands.  Plus, I suck at discipline.  It feels unnatural to me and I lack the emotional and intellectual buy-in.

What I mean by that is that I am vehemently, ferociously anti-shame.  I am so anti-shame that I stay as far the hell away from even the possibility of shaming someone as I possibly can.  It's not that I am opposed to experiencing accountability; the realization that you have done something that you don't feel good about that makes you not want to do it again.  But shame is so much deeper than that. It is something that infects your perception of self and is not isolated to the particular incident.  And that's what I am not okay with. Part of this is the therapist in me.  I want to understand, try to understand and to empathize another to the point that I totally exhaust myself.  I am excruciatingly careful with my words when in conflict with anyone.

Both of my parents are also very anti-shame.  My father has spent his life refusing to be silenced or shunned because of who he is or what he believes.  My mother, while less outspoken, is a tireless defender of the vulnerable.  And yet both of them, despite their strong value system, have often made me feel ashamed.  It comes out in the way they speak to me and in the things they say. Whether it is about how clean I keep my house or how loyal of a daughter I am, the message is the same.

And so part of this too, is that this is my child.  My children.  And I want my children to grow up being able to understand why things may or may not be okay, how you should and shouldn't treat a person because they really get it and not because they were punished and therefor fear or avoid certain actions or expressions.  But not to feel ashamed.

At any rate, my propensities coupled with the natural personality and strong will of my older son has lead us to a place in which, at times, he is very hard to handle.  He's resistant to doing things he doesn't want to do and doesn't yet care that that is simply part of life.  Maybe this is his age. I don't know.  What I do know is that he can go from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds and that the intensity of his anger is so unsettling to me that I find it very hard to emotionally unhook from it enough to lay down a consequence.  Plus, as I mentioned, I don't like the idea of consequences.  So we have a problem.

Lately, in the event that the anger monster comes out, I sort of freak out.  What I mean by that is that I go to a black and white place of "I cannot have that kind of energy/negativity etc. etc. in the house and around the baby".  And when he is not able to cool off or calm down, which he most certainly is not when something is, for example, taken away, I panic.  And when I panic, I shut down.  And maybe I ask for help.  Help in the form of sending him to his grandma or dad's house.

This is my dirty little secret. My own source of shame, the emotion I spend my life trying to banish from the world.  The infection that becomes about my strength as a person and my beliefs about myself as a mother.  I try to listen to what it's telling me about what I want to change.  But it overtakes me.

The lessons we learn from changed lives are often not those we were expecting to learn.  I am trying to be patient with myself.  And to remind myself that my newest childspring is less than one month old.  That's not a lot of time to have figured out how to beautifully transverse the choppy waters of a new family dynamic.

So it's a work in progress.  Like everything.  Like figuring out how to pee while holding a baby.  Except harder.  I haven't nailed either one without the occasional problem.  But I'll keep trying.

17 Days Old

My son was born 17 days ago.  My son is 17 days old.  Before long his age will be noted by weeks, then months, then years.  But for now, only days.

Time has a strange way of changing when you have a new baby in your life.  Days and nights blend and blur, marked only by the punctuation of a hunger cry.  Right now those cries come every 1-3 hours, the longest stretch of silence being somewhere between 3 and 7, a time that I cannot, no matter how exhausted, seem to nap.

Days feel incredibly long and yet despite this, it is rare that I am able to complete even the smallest most innocuous task.  Going through the mail.  Putting one load of laundry away.

This is not a complaint.  Merely an observation.  And one that for some reason surprises me.  I don't feel tired all the time.  Nor am I sad.  I just feel slowed down.  Like I am moving through amber love infused molasses.

I can stare at my son for hours.  Perhaps this is where so much of my time is going.

When I hold him, which I am approximately 20 hours a day, I feel complete. When he is being held by another, usually his father, I feel a baby shaped hole in the curve of my torso.

This is what being the mother of a new life is like.  It is thick and slow and full and aching and sweet and light all at the same time.

I said in an earlier post that I hoped to retain a greater sense of self with this mothering experience than I did 12 years ago, when my first son was born.  And I believe I am.  Not because of anything I am doing or not doing but simply because I have a greater sense of self.  But I also am realizing that I would never, ever want to remain unchanged by such a profoundly life changing thing.  It is a gift to be granted such change and it seems appropriate that the shift in time, my increased vulnerability and susceptibility, would result in other such openings.  A tear in the fabric that so tightly wound me into myself.

In only 17 days I have learned some hard truths about myself, as life changing events are often wont to so enlighten us.  One is that I am terrified of conflict.  Anger is a emotion that, when I experience it in others, causes me to panic.  I don't know why this is and I dance between thinking that anger is toxic and thinking that anger, like any other emotion, is temporary and okay to witness just as long as damaging behavior is not part of it.  Another thing I have realized, along these lines but not exclusive to them, is that I am generally profoundly avoidant of things that make me uncomfortable.  Going through and purging contents from the boxes that have overtaken our basement.  Disciplining my older son when he breaks rules or is terribly disrespectful.

I had an inkling of these things before.  But now they stare me in the face and I feel the palpable urge to flea into a storybook otherworld in which I do not need to address them.  Even though I know they are steps on the path towards becoming an even better me.  And nothing motivates you more to be your best you than having a new child, who is yet to know the flawed and faulted you. The you that is lazy.  The you that is scared.

I don't say this to you to or to myself for pity or mercy.  I like who I am.  I am a good person, strong and skilled in my professional field, and I know that I am as loving and attentive of a mother as they come.  But I have before me now the gift of the potential for change, the time suspended in order for me to find it, and the reason to reach for it.   In this in-between world I am sleep deprived and soft and slow.  But I am hoping I have the strength to begin a journey that parallels the others branching out from, around, and beside me as well.

Of Stale Air and Fans

The first signs of summer will forever remind me of my Grandmother's house.  It happens in an instant. The room feels hot and stifling, a fan gets turned on, and I am transported.

My Grandmother's house was in Amityville, Long Island.  It is still strange for me to think that she does not live there anymore.  That I do not have another home there.  That her death was many years ago and that with it came the loss of that house. 

Her home was on a canal.  It was a red home, with one tree in front, two in back.  One being big enough to attach a plastic tire swing that my cousin and I utilized regularly, the other being my favorite, a weeping willow  that eventually was removed because its roots were poisoned by their steady and thirsty intake of salt water.  There was a hydrangea bush.  And a boat dock that for most of my childhood housed a blue and white sailboat called the Amy O that I rarely went on, never being much of a natural water type girl.  In that canal I remember jumping off the boat dock when the water was high and being somewhat terrified each time that my feet would touch the bottom, where the mud and the slime and the unknown lay.  In that canal my Grandmother's dog Derby died  when he wandered one night, old and nearly blind, into it.  My Grandmother jumped in after him, strong woman that she was, and tried to save him but could not get his flailing, heavy, slippery body back onto land.    In that canal the boats, motor boats, of the boys my cousin and I flirted with, kissed and were frequently pressured into doing more with, watched for during the summers, would pass by, as aware of us as we were of them.

At the end of my Grandmother's block, only one house away, was the bay.  The house that divided my Grandmother and the bay belonged to a large woman named Gene French who wore mu mu's and turbans, had a solarium type room reserved exclusively for an extravagant Christmas tree and scene, and who frequently made appearances for many years in my dreams.  Always the same. Always in her home, where a small clear stream containing small shimmering fish all made their way through her living room. 

Many other things that still exist like time travelers in my current life, my real life, can bring me back there, too.  Wrigley's spearmint gum and the combination of pretzels and ginger ale and the first explosion of a raspberry placed on my tongue and closed in on.  But the heat and the fans are the strongest.  

Amityville was hot and humid in the summer.   There were fireflies warm thunderstorms and muggy nights.  Sleepless nights.  Nights spent tossing and turning tucked away in the upstairs of house where the mustard brown carpet was the same one my uncles walked upon in their own youth. The fans only stirred the dead and heavy air.  The open windows only let in more heat and the sound of crickets and the occasional lustful and awkward whispered shouts of an adolescent boy below, sometimes answered, sometimes not.  Sleep always came eventually but it was a hard fought battle replete with many false alarms.  

It is not unusual for me even now, so very much later, while drifting in and out of restless sweaty sleep or waking up to a cooler morning and the sounds of fans competing and complimenting each other like dueling pianos, to think for a second that I am there, in my Grandmother's house in Amityville, and not here.  Here across the country in Portland.  Here across the decades of self.  

Other than photographs, this is how I know I was once a child, once an adolescent.  Once someone other than who I am now.  These disorienting moments of transportation, of world straddling and time jumping and place dwelling in places that no longer exist.  

These moment are precious to me.  More precious in their re-experiencing than they ever could have been in real time.

I believe that is the power of all memories.  To connect us to our former selves and the places and people that together compromise them.  To make us realize that we are each of us contained in this very moment, an entire universe.  

I am 37 weeks pregnant.  I made it to 37 weeks.  For a while there, we weren't sure that I would.  My first son was born at 37 weeks and both this pregnancy and that one were ripe with the threat of preterm labor.  But here I am.  Here we are.  Baby still inside.

Of course last year they would have changed the perimeters of "full term" from being 37 weeks gestation to 39 weeks.  But who's counting?

My last day of work was yesterday.  My awareness of a need for hobbies skyrocketed at approximately 8:15 am, after I had completed my morning ritual of eating breakfast and checking my email and Facebook and then finding myself with nothing else to do.

This pregnancy has been a mixed bag for me.  To put that into context, I should say that it felt more complicated to me than my first pregnancy.  For one thing, I am 12 years older. Having two babies 12 years apart is an amazing thing.  I am a different human than I was 12 years ago.  My life is also in every way different; husband, job, home, friends.  In almost every way, this is a good thing.  I have a solid and grounded sense of self, feel enormously supported by my community, and am at least somewhat prepared for what parenting entails.  The only things that are not an improvement are my financial stability and my blissful lack of awareness of how difficult raising a child can be on a person and a relationship.  But perhaps the latter is a blessing in disguise.  Knowing potential problems and pitfalls can after all, help you avoid them.

Pregnancy is a profound exercise in letting go.  Letting go of the sense of control of your body.  Letting go of expectations of how things should go.  Letting go of attachments to what is coming since in all honesty, you can't know that.  You can only know that it will change you.  Or that it already has.  And so you need to let go of the past you and accept if not embrace who you are now.

I journaled only sporadically this pregnancy and predominantly when I was trying to work through something.  I wrote with pen on paper when I felt isolated and struggled to ask for help and then when I finally did I wrote about what I had learned about generosity and how I wanted to integrate that knowledge into the me I am always striving to become.  I wrote when I felt disconnected from my body and disconnected from my baby.  I wrote when I struggled to wrap my mind around the idea that I would be a mother to two and not one and I wrote when I felt scared about how that would impact my cherished relationship with my still only child.  I wrote when I could not seem to let go of my hurt and disappointment and anger at people who had negative or less than supportive reactions to our pregnancy news.

These were my private writings.  My unfiltered and unedited pieces.  This; what you are reading now, is what comes out the other side when I've done my processing and I'm ready to share.

The goal of this blog is to do what I was not able to do with the arrival of my first child.  Find the balance between mother and woman.  Maintain and tend to the thread of me that continues to knit itself into stories, stories that create my identity.  This is not a pregnancy blog or a parenting blog, though because both of those markers apply to me, there will no doubt be stories that focus on those themes.  The goal of this blog is to remember.  To tell.  To allow me in doing so to live with more presence and intention.

To what is known, to what is unknown, to the stories told and to those as yet unwritten.