Trying something new over here. Resting. Yesterday morning after Maisy went down for her nap, I got back into bed with my big fat novel Freedom, and gave myself over to Patty's delicious suburban Midwestern malaise for a few pages, then dozed a few minutes, read a few pages, dozed, and so on. Outside, the magpies were cackling to each other on the roof and I could hear the neighbor kids, newly on the loose for summer, playing at the bottom of the driveway. Someone’s mother was calling, Maisy’s noise machine purred its reassuring, staticky hum, and I just rested, suspended for a few fleeting moments between relaxation and inspiration.
Last week I found out I have perinatal mood disorder, otherwise known as postpartum depression. Now I finally have a name for this weird surging anxiety that comes and goes like storm clouds rolling in from the West, the listless blahs, the screeching impatience with a certain two-year-old, the occasional overwhelming urge to run away. I feel like I’ve spent the past few months Jell-O wrestling the giant elephant in the room, trying to pin his slippery elephantine wrinkled hugeness down but somehow always just missing. Now I know. Now I can do something.
What I’m doing is resting. Or at least trying to. The doctor gave me strict marching orders: 9 hours of sleep a night. Stick in the earplugs, put on the eye pillow, lock the cat out of the room—do whatever it takes to get more sleep. Easier said than done with writing deadlines and two tiny girls in the house, one of who has finally figured out how to climb out of her crib and pitter-patter into our bedroom at the ungodly hour of 6 A.M. But still, it does seem more doable than the doctor’s other demand: Lower the bar.
Lower the bar? I’m the kind of person who when someone says Jump, I ask how high. I was raised that way, hardwired to strive. My sister, six feet tall, ran the hurdles in high school. I just tried to keep up. In our house, the best antidote to every affliction was action. “Just get busy and do something,” my mother always used to say. I feel like I’ve been busy forever. Lowering the bar is going to take some work, which is of course part of the problem.
Somewhere there’s a sweet spot between endless striving and aimless laziness. Finding this balance strikes me as the toughest nut to crack. How can I slow down enough to let the natural flow back into my life without feeling like I’m lying around on the couch watching daytime TV on the nicest day of the year?
It’s not just me, and it’s not just PPD. Everyone’s too busy all the time. On our hike this morning, my friend, who’s also a writer, lamented about not having enough quiet time to finish her next book. The book wants to be written; it’s ready to come out. She’s not lacking inspiration or ideas, but clear, empty space and time and stillness. She’s single and doesn’t have kids, but we both feel the relentless tug of other obligations, distractions—people and responsibilities in our lives that we love and couldn’t bear to give up but still take us from ourselves. So one question is, How can we hold onto our true selves in the midst of the chaos?
A few weeks ago, in a hotel room in Vermont, Steve and I played bleary-eyed predawn referees to our daughters’ impromptu boxing match on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor while trying desperately not to wake the neighbors through the 200-hundred-year-old floral wallpapered walls. As the two-year-old won and the 10-month-old wailed, I turned to Steve and said, “Someday we’ll laugh about this.” And he, in a pitch-perfect tone of weary acceptance and cheery resilience—in a display of perfect, lovable Steve-ness—replied, “Might as well be today.”
I don’t really have an answer to our conundrum, just a faint flicker of hope that came to me this morning while I was changing Maisy’s diaper. She was kicking her pudgy legs in the air and trying to logroll off the table while I fumbled with the wipes. She wasn’t in a rush or perturbed or sad or impatient or distracted or exhausted. She was just there, grinning madly at her mother, doing her best to wiggle and squirm and strive while I did my best to hold on. For a split second, my mind emptied of everything but these two words:
I wrote them down to remind me that someday I’ll look back and remember this time as crazy and wonderful and maddening and possibly even, dare-I-hope magical. As Steve would say, might as well be today.
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