Steve is away for the weekend, skiing in Silverton. Lucky boy. Yesterday was one of those days when, for several fleeting, insane moments, I actually regretted becoming a mother. I’d spent the morning mountain biking La Tierra on the north side of town with my friend Steph. The trails were freakishly dry and clear for January, and I was riding skinny, silky singletrack on a Saturday morning with one of my best and oldest friends—the ways things used to be; the way things ought to be. Afterward, we sat in Steph’s sun-streaked kitchen, comparing notes about how our lives had diverged. She doesn’t have kids and can come and go as she pleases, no advance notice required. The full weight of my captivity hit me as I realized that she could walk right out her door that very second and do whatever she felt like doing without having to tell anyone or make a single contingency plan. I, on the other hand, had a ticking watch on my wrist, two tiny children at home, and a nanny about to turn into a pumpkin, so I saddled up and coasted downhill to home. All afternoon, while Pippa squawked in her crib instead of napping and Maisy cried herself to sleep, I wallowed in a giant sinkhole of self-pity. I felt ancient and exhausted—not just from two hours on my bike, but from the thought of all these years and changes still ahead of me. I wanted my old life back, thank you very much. But of course there’s no going back—never ever.
Later that evening, after the girls had gone to bed, I put on the DVD “The Kids Are All Right.” It opens with flashing vignettes of teenagers snorting lines, hurling themselves off of garage roofs, and sneaking around behind their parents' backs. I felt instantly defeated. I’m not sure I can survive, I thought. And not just this, but the next 16 years. But then a weird thing happened. I began to relax. Maybe it was glass of wine I’d just chugged or bad-boy Mark Ruffalo playing the loving, rebel sperm-donor dad, but the movie started to soothe me.
I slouched on the couch, watching Annette Bening go off the deep end and come back again in a feat of badass emotional resilience, and an old saying came back to me: “Oh, my crazy life!” This was my mantra before mantras were the hip, enlightened thing to have (in the late '90s), and I’d chide myself with it whenever I made dumb decisions or got into a snarled-up, tangled mess. Which was often. The funny thing is, the line kind of works. Life is crazy. No one has any control. Sometimes you just have to throw yourself onto the train tracks and let yourself get run over by a couple dozen trains: the two-and-half-year-old-refusing-to-nap train, the I-can’t-string-two-sentences-together-without-interruption-train, the two-hours-on-my-bike-now-kicks-my-postpartum-butt train. One after the other, they’re steaming down the tracks. The sooner I can accept this, the sooner I’ll stop grasping so hard to the illusion of order, predictability, schedules I can set my watch to, naps long enough for me to write a hundred word or two, the foolhardy notion that my girls will be anyone but who they already are, and are meant to be. And the sooner I’ll be able to do the only sane thing in the face of insanity: laugh it off.
Oh, my crazy life.
No comments:
Post a Comment