Newborn Bliss

So I am emerging, even if brief, from my newborn cocoon to post. He, our fourth, was worth the wait! The extra twelve days of waiting post guess date--that is really what they are, even if you are sure of your conception date like I was and am. He was worth the extra 2 hours and 45 minutes of pushing, and the amazing release I felt once he emerged gracefully in water and much to everyone's relief and wonder. He was worth losing all my hair this pregnancy and still waiting it's slow regrowth, which since giving birth 2.5 weeks ago has sped up substantially. I managed to avoid induction! An induced labor is way harder than waiting a baby out! I know I have been there with my first. No matter the angst in waiting it is well worth avoiding the devil's spit, also known as Pitocin, at least in my humble opinion.

S. is a calm baby, a little love, who eats and sleeps and eats and sleeps and poops and poops and poops. His big brothers LOVE him, and say it to him daily..."I love the new baby," is a phrase that melts my heart at least three times a day! I am stockpiling these utterances because in nine months when he is mobile and attacking lego shrines I know it will be replaced with shrieks of "Mooooooommmmm, HELP!"

It's taken a while to name cuatro. I thought we were settled and then out he came and Peter said I think he is not a James. What? Not a James? That is the way I thought of him almost every day since six months when intuitively I felt yep, another boy! So to not have it be James threw me. Threw me to the point of we need to wait to announce his name. This throws everyone else by the way...to the point of no more "baby yet?" texts, but instead they are replaced with "name yet?" texts. Finally, we have decided...but I have yet to officially post it. Call me gun shy, or just soaking up my little time with him, but I know I need to go public and soon.

And then what every woman needs postpartum is a visit from a good girlfriend! And I got that in spades when Katie came with her daughter, M. Truly. It makes you feel capable again. I felt energetic and daring enough to walk around lakes, hit the mall, walk the neighborhood, lug home bags of wipes (did I mention we are going through a lot of poop again?!), and drink glasses of wine and chat and laugh. 

I hear my little calling through the monitor. This is all I have time for now, but be assured more to follow! And with that I hope next time to post a picture or two!

PS Just read your post "Be the Trout," and you make me feel like I could climb a mountain!

Be the Trout

OK, it’s official: My friend and co-creator of this blog, Elizabeth, is without a doubt the most badass mother I know. I just got back from three days at the Sullivan house in St. Paul. The idea was that I would go to Minnesota to help Elizabeth, who gave birth to her fourth son two weeks ago. But Elizabeth is so absurdly accomplished and unflappable that she can corral three active, young boys with a droopy newborn slung over one arm and make it look easy. I’ve been feeling kind of rickety lately, so I figured chances were good that she’d be the one taking care of me. 

dueling babies @ the pizza shoppe

I’d never been to St. Paul before and was blown away by how nice it is. Their neighborhood, Tangletown, is filled with old homes with big grassy backyards, tall trees, and actual sidewalks. You can walk to Whole Foods in five minutes, lug a month’s worth of baby wipes back in a red kiddy wagon, and debate stopping at the Grandview Theater to catch a late movie on the way home. Or you can walk five minutes in the other direction to the Italian Pie Shoppe on Grande to pick up pizza, like we did on my first night in town. 

Just as we got back to Elizabeth’s house, a man across the street began shouting at us. My first instinct was that he was a hostile lunatic and that we should yell back or run into the house and hide. Then I realized that he lived there and was just being friendly. He stood on his front steps and we stood on hers and yacked back and forth about the new baby, his dinner plans with his wife, the ETA of his babysitter. Ah, Midwesterners. I’d only been in town half an hour and I already knew the neighbors. All of this filled me with a deep sense of nostalgia—this was just like the town in New Jersey where I grew up, only even more Normal Rockwell-wholesome. 

It’s fitting that Elizabeth should live in St. Paul. Everyone there seems so nice and normal and not at all caught up in their own dramas. Even the drama of having four kids six and under is not a drama in the Twin Cities, where baby carriages are standard accessories and a family of four is considered small. I was impressed to see that Elizabeth was taking her new arrival in stride, and life continued more or less as normal in the Sullivan household. There were chickens to chase in the Wild Rumpus Bookstore after a Mother’s Day outing to Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis and bikes and wagons to ride in the backyard, and tiny baby S. slept through most of it, sacked out on a chair in his brothers’ room or tucked into his sling while we ran errands at the Mall of America (natch). As chill as the mother who birthed him. 

bliss is a brand-new (sleeping) baby

I was beginning to think nothing could phase Elizabeth—until the last night. Details will be spared, but suffice it to say the scene was straight out of the movie Outbreak, with rubber gloves and buckets of bleach being wielded and small children howling in the next room. I did as all good houseguests would do and hid in the kitchen, doing the dishes and marveling as Elizabeth tamed the wild rumpus by barely raising her voice. 

Still, I learned a lesson. Or two. Even seemingly perfect, imperturbable mothers can get crushed by a code red HazMat situation in the bathtub. And it’s easy to remain calm and collected when it’s not your kids melting down in the next room. When Elizabeth finally emerged, looking like she could really use a glass of wine, I remembered some good advice I’d read recently in the mega-wise Becoming the Parent You Want to Be. Whatever happens, do your best not to get sucked into your kids’ drama. Remain as detached and mature as possible. Even if they’re freaking out, don’t freak out. Stay calm and carry on. In other words: Be the trout. Don’t get hooked. 

Easier said than done. Be the trout, I coached myself the next day, back in Santa Fe with a wild child of my own flinging rubber duckies in my face and sneaking out of her room to hide outside when I wasn’t looking (hello, heart attack). But I wasn’t the trout—not that day. I was blown out from traveling and took the bait, which of course only made things worse.

No one’s perfect. We’re all human. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be the trout. One can always hope. 

Practice for the Day

Loving what is before me.

Quote of the Day

"Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all." — Pema Chodron

Daydreaming with Dad

Today would have been my father’s 74^th birthday. When I’d call him each May 5, my first words were always “Happy Cinco de Mayo!” which typically sidetracked us into an animated discussion about the many margaritas we’d consumed in our lives, especially the ones we’d consumed together, before I got down to the real business of the day. (On my birthday, he’d return the favor with “Happy Daughter’s Day!” or “Happy Halloween!” or some similarly silly and peripheral greeting.)

Dad, 2007

Last year when I called, it was late afternoon on his Virginia farm and Dad was putzing around the kitchen, thinking about getting ready to be taken out for dinner to the local café in Flint Hill, 24 Crows, or maybe even sneaking in a passing glance at the early news (surely he was the last person in the world to watch network news?). My stepmother was out in the barn feeding her horses and had not yet been kicked in the arm by Spike (or was it Mouse?). That would happen shortly after my dad and I hung up, derailing birthday dinner plans and resulting in a fractured forearm and a long night in the E.R. Looking back, that was the beginning of it all, the long hot dry summer of trouble, when the news from Huntly Stage was grim and getting grimmer: My stepmom’s arm wasn’t healing, it hadn’t rained in weeks, the fields had dried up, the vegetable garden was a husk of its former self, it was hot as blazes, but—glimmer of hope!—at least the air conditioning still worked. 

You’d have to be deaf not to hear the distress signals, but I was having the opposite kind of summer. I was pregnant and then Maisy was born and I was cocooned in baby bliss (or was it sleep deprivation?) and far too preoccupied by this tiny, new precious life to fret too much about drought and disgruntlement on the farm. I hate thinking about it now—what I might have done or could have done had I known what I know now. 

Because of course there was more to Dad’s angst than he let on. He’d been filling sluggish for several months, leftover lethargy from what he thought was a kidney stone. After he died, I found a small spiral pocket notebook on the shelf of his closet, on top of a lopsided stack of sweatshirts. In it, he’d recorded his weight in thick black magic marker, every day for three or four weeks in August and late September. Just a date and a number, no comment. The trend was down. Not precipitously, but by the date of his last entry, just before his diagnosis on September 16, he’d dropped four or five pounds. Dad was a data guy, an inveterate observer and amateur scientist. He dutifully logged every inch of rainfall the farm saw in the 30 years he lived there and practically every penny he spent every day, but these entries, however unadorned, seemed to radiate a new kind of emotion: fear. This time he was more than just the observer; he was the observed. 

Then he found out just how sick he was, and the doctors gave him six to nine months without treatment, but his disease was a runaway train and he didn’t even make three. Now it is his birthday and staggering to the fragile, grief-whipped mind to contemplate that a year ago none of this had really begun, or was just beginning, only we didn’t know it. 

Today Steve and I planted a peach tree in his memory. He and my step-mom used to have a one on the west side of their house that was like a caricature of a southern peach tree. It literally drooped with fruit; the branches scraped the ground. In the sweltering sticky heat of high summer, when the fields grew knee-high overnight and needed to be mowed by my dad every other day it seemed, you could not pick the peaches fast enough. They practically grew as you watched. Eventually the tree wore itself out with all its fecundity and had to be taken down, but I’ve always fantasized about fresh peaches from my own tree. 

Dad's peach

After the tree was planted, I got Dad’s favorite Rappahannock County baseball hat and a copy of his long road-trip journal, "American Heartline," and sat beside tree. I put the hat on, black but faded from long days in the sun on his tractor, with a single raggedy pinky-sized hole on top, perhaps from an errant spark (once Dad almost set his own fields on fire, accidentally, but that’s another story), and flipped the laminated book open to a random page. The first words caught my eye were “Bye, Dad.” I took that as a sign, so I started reading aloud to the peach tree. In that day's entry, Dad was in St. Aubert, Missouri, and had met some men, as usual, and was knee-deep in friendly, ambling conversation. There was a joke, of course—that was Dad’s way of making people feel comfortable—and talk about farming and rain, too much of it that year, the summer of ‘95. 

Then I lay back on the flagstone path and tilted Dad’s black cap over my eyes. When he was alive, Dad used to lie on his shrimp-colored living room carpet after lunch and daydream for 20 minutes or so. He was an exceptionally industrious, hardworking person, almost to a fault, but he allowed himself this one respite each day. It was, he told me once, a chance for his brain’s alpha waves to recalibrate. He'd looked this up in the dictionary, he wrote me in an email, and found that alpha rhythms are“a pattern of slow brain waves in normal persons at rest with closed eyes, thought by some to be associated with an alert but daydreaming mind." He concluded with this cheerful afterthought: "Glad to know I didn't just make it up!" Dad didn’t doze off but lay there in a hazy state until he felt ready to get up, at which point he usually felt refreshed, if not tingly with new ideas and clarity. Leave it to Dad to find a practical use for daydreaming. 

Lying there, with Dad’s large cap perfectly screening my face from the midday sun, I crossed my legs at the ankles and folded my hands on my stomach, just like he used to do. I heard the cottonwood tree’s thumbprint leaves rustle in the breeze and the miniature, falling-apart wind chime I’d hung years ago in a branch of a nearby juniper begin to tinkle. I don’t remember ever hearing the pathetic specimen make a noise before. I smelled the sweet lilacs and felt ants scurrying up my bare shins. 

I didn’t think of Dad as much as feel him. He was all around me in the air, and I could smell his farm—not just the farm, but Dad on the farm. The farm and Dad were one, indivisible. I had a sense of him—his hands, his voice, the way the barn he built sat on the hillside. These came to me not in specific images but through the sounds of the day, as a weight that passed overhead and lingered just long enough for me to know he was there. 

As you probably know by now, I’ve become obsessed with slowing down lately. So I’m going to remember this feeling today, and take every chance I get to lie down beside the peach tree with Dad and be still. 

Happy birthday, Dad. 

Mother Trouble

Had to share this link today from Motherlode about the new 2011 State of the World's Mothers report, published by Save the Children. It's a sobering reminder that our woes as Western mothers—too little time for this or that, a teetery balance between self and kids, oh the angst!—pale in comparison to those of mothers in sub-Saharan Africa and Afghanistan, where it's dangerous to bear and rear children. 

The study analyzed economic, health, and education conditions for women and children in 164 countries. Norway, Australia, Iceland, Sweden, and Denmark grab the top five spots, while the U.S. ranks 31st out of 43 developed countries. (One of many reasons for our lackluster rating: We have the least generous maternity leave policy of any wealthy nation.) Afghanistan ranks last.

Read more here at Motherlode, and thanks to Lisa Belkin for the reality check on this run-up to Mother's Day.  

Shelter from the Storm

I’m just back from a long weekend in Sonoma, celebrating my mother’s birthday with my sisters and their kids. As always, Sonoma was gorgeous and I found myself missing a landscape that’s never been mine, but still manages to tug at my heart: the high, bucolic hills a patchwork of grassy meadows and neat grids of grapes. How vines so twisty and gnarled can give the illusion of such precision and order is a mystery to me.

After the birthday celebrations were over, Steve and I snuck out for our usual run up the one-lane road to the top of the Mayacamas Mountains. The sun was setting and as we gained altitude, the air became damper and richer, more alive with the summery smell of Douglas firs and sweet bay leaves and far to the southwest we could see the high rises of San Francisco and Oakland shrunken with distance and glittering in the late-day light. It felt both Mediterranean and maritime, with a bit of Northwest big-tree grandeur chucked in for good measure, and it made me wistful for a life I don’t lead, or used to lead, or might someday want to lead, but I didn’t say any of that. If I had, all fears and exhaustion and doubt might have spilled out, and I wanted to be free of them, at least for a little while.

It was a choice I made. Sometimes it’s easy to forget we have choices. We may not be able to choose the events that define our lives, but we can choose how we respond to them. In the past few weeks, no matter how fast I run, grief and motherhood have finally caught up to me, weighing me down with a heaviness that feels both inevitable and inexplicable. It’s hard to put words to the darkness, only that when it settles on me, most everything I love feels difficult, insurmountable, wearisome. It moves in as a storm, clouds blowing in from the west, wispy and innocuous at first, wind building until it’s directly overhead, flattening me for a few hours or a few days with its wall-to- wall charcoal skies and sideways rain.

This is a meteorological event—I don’t have a say in the matter. The only thing I can do is root down, fling my ice axe into the ground and hang on so the cyclone doesn’t pick me up by my pinky toes and suck me in. I suppose this is normal, this reeling of birth and death. Maisy is nearly 10 months old; she has been out in the world longer than she was in the womb. My dad has been gone for five months, twice as long as he was sick. What to do? How to make sense of it all?

When I was little and feeling out of sorts, my mother would say, “Just get busy and do something”—a gentle, upbeat prodding, the verbal equivalent of whisking me on the bottom with a tea towel. She made it sound so simple, and it was. I’d go shoot hoops in the backyard or ride my bike around the neighborhood or pester my sister to play Trivial Pursuit or stretch out on my bed and read Harriet the Spy. Invariably, it worked. Activity was the antidote to that nameless, shiftless loneliness we know as kids, when we first become aware that time is passing and life is moving, carrying us with it, and that nothing lasts or is permanent.

But it’s tiring to be busy doing something for so long. So now I am trying to choose stillness, to find silence and peace in even the most fragmented moments, to slow down and do less, to live in the troughs between the storms. I don’t really know what this means, only that I need to find a balance between endless, instinctual striving and a visceral need for stillness. I could try to figure out, right here in this post, how to do this, but that would defeat the purpose. So I think I’ll just settle in and shut up and see where the troughs carry me. It’s a mystery.