This girl. This baby. On Friday she is 10. I’m hair-trigger emotional and very tearful about it. This parenting is a perpetual farewell and an endless alleluia.
Month: October 2012
Ten years ago
The last picture of me taken before Grace was born. 39+ weeks. October 22, 2002.
The day before Grace was born was crystal clear, the blueness of the sky matched only by the brilliance of the leaves that seemed to surround us as we walked slowly up and down the streets of our neighborhood.
Matt’s father was in the hospital and very ill. We did not know he was a month away from a life-saving heart transplant.
We had just – literally just – finished renovating the third floor of our house into a nursery and a family room. The nursery stood ready and empty, with freshly-painted yellow walls and a white crib and a giant stuffed yellow duck from Matt’s parents. The drawers of an old bureau that I had painted yellow were full of Dreft-scented size 0-3 month clothes. I had chosen a yellow velour outfit to bring our baby home from the hospital in.
We still called our unborn baby Finbar. Finnie, for short. A friend’s husband had named him or her when we saw him over the summer. I was so attached to the name Finnie I didn’t think I could ever call my baby anything else.
I had just turned 28 years old, at the end of a summer filled with the joyous, love- and celebration-filled weddings of some of my closest friends. I was the designated driver a lot.
I could feel tiny feet kicking my ribs. My back ached. A devoted lifetime stomach sleeper, I was having a lot of trouble getting rest. I was ready to not be pregnant anymore. But I could never have imagined how entirely unready I was for what came next. I went into labor on Thursday night the 24th. I sat in my father-in-law’s hospital room sensing the very first stirrings of a pain whose rhythmic and intermittent nature made me suspect that This Was It. But I wasn’t sure. My due date was in 2 days and I had thoroughly internalized the warning that I would go 2 weeks late.
I didn’t sleep that night, and by Friday morning we were walking around the neighborhood trying to pass the time and manage the pain. Our doula arrived. We walked and walked, and I moaned and rocked. I drank apple juice. The day was one of the most beautiful I can remember, drenched in glorious, glossy, elegaic late-fall light. I was on the brink of a change so large I could not fathom it, of the darkest season of my life, but then, also, of the most beautiful.
The births of my two babies, in all their violence and glory, are two of my most cherished life experiences. They are not only moments of my life that I recall with stunning, crystalline detail. They were also passages from one world to another, and somehow in the passage I was able to glimpse through the seam of this reality to something bigger and more breathtaking. What I saw and sensed changed me forever.
Grace’s birth was the story of resistance. It was about my gritting my teeth and stubbornly laying in for the stay. Part of the resistance was that she was posterior, but it was also about my own fears, anxieties, and utter lack of preparation to be a mother. I was in battle against myself, I know that now: I was holding on, not ready to embrace a new life (mine, not hers) and identity. I was not ready to face the end of a phase of my life, the multiple deaths that are contained in birth. The inexorable force of a baby descending the birth canal went to war against my own quite powerful subconscious, and I was in active labor for over 36 hours, and at 9+ centimeters for 3 hours.
I cried and I screamed and I begged to be put out of my misery: I distinctly recall telling my midwife, completely seriously, that I’d like her to put a bullet in my head and just cut the baby out. The pain was both incendiary and incandescent. It was a crucible through which I had to pass, the heat so extreme that I was rendered molten. It was an animal experience, a raw, passionate, and terrifying introduction to a ferocity I had never imagined I possessed.
I delivered Grace myself. At my midwife’s instruction, I reached down and put my thumbs under her armpits when she was half born and pulled her onto my own chest. I am more grateful than I can express for photographs of this moment. Little did I know I had months of darkness ahead of me before the grace that I had just brought into my life would be made manifest.
She came home from the hospital two days later in the outfit I had chosen. We arrived home the day the clocks turned back, and commenced months of crying, darkness, and difficulty. Labor had been just the beginning of a long process of being utterly changed. Talk about a crucible! That fall and winter, 2002-2003, remains the most difficult time of my life. But how outrageously beautiful is the view on the other side. I would never do it differently.
And ten years ago today that all lay in the hours ahead of me.
Parts of this post were originally written in December, 2009.
A very special weekend
Grace and I spent this past weekend in New York with her best friend and her mother (who is one of my dearest friends; I know, I am fully aware of how lucky I am!). They turn 10 exactly 7 days apart from each other, this week and next, so we were celebrating their big transition into double digits.
The weekend was gorgeous. The sky was a saturated, autumn blue and days were warm. We rode the subway, had dinner at Balthazar, went to a wonderful show on Broadway, danced on the big piano at FAO Schwartz, clinked white wine and Shirley Temples in a toast at dinner. We took a carriage ride in Central Park,, ate cupcakes from Magnolia in a deserted park in the soft dark of early evening, walked up and downtown, visited mecca (Dylan’s Candy Bar), and had sushi for lunch.
The girls wanted desperately to play on a playground and so we did, walking into Central Park late in the afternoon on Saturday. I watched them running around, their joy palpable, aware of it won’t be long until they won’t be caught dead at a playground. My favorite moment in a weekend crammed with happy ones was our walk home from dinner on Saturday night. Park Avenue was empty, the air held the last gasp of October’s warmth, and the girls ran ahead of us, their laughter ringing in the night air.
As usual it is the in-between moments that move me the most. I walked down the street, chatting easily with a friend I cherish, watching my daughter and her daughter dancing ahead of us. Those ten minutes were life at its richest and most wonderful, and I knew it as I stepped through them. As we rode the train home on Sunday, Grace turned to me, eyes shining with tears. She told me that she was really sad the weekend was over, but that she knew she would never forget it as long as she lives.
Neither will I.
To live content
To live content with small means. To seek elegance rather than luxury…. listen to stars and birds and babes and sages with an open heart. To study hard, think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions. Never hurry. In a word, to let the spiritual, the unbidden and the unconscious rise up through the common. This is my symphony.
~ William Henry Channing
Thank you to the wonderful Lianne Raymond for again sending me just the precise quote I needed at just the right moment.
Questions & answers
I’m answering the thoughtful questions on my Six Year Anniversary post slowly, savoring them. Thank you to those of you who took the time to say something! Today, questions about writing and blogging in particular:
Do you always think blogging will be a part of your life? Ever entertained a hiatus? What is your favorite part of writing? And do you have advice for other writers regarding the craft of writing?
It is hard for me to imagine life without blogging. It is so central to my life now, such an ingrained pattern, and as I’ve noted, I honestly believe that the practice of writing here has fundamentally changed the way I engage with the world. I’m trying to do some real writing outside of this blog, and now and then I think: well, I should stop blogging, free up some time for the other projects. But I just can’t seem to do that. Every writing-related change and joy in my life is directly due to my work here. How could I step away from that?
A hiatus, I do think about. I’ve loved the last two August breaks, where I just share pictures. I generally re-share my favorite posts from each month at the end of December. But I guess those are not true hiatuses, because I am still coming here. Truthfully, I do think about a real break, mostly because I fear I’ve become incredibly repetitive here. But I’m afraid I will come back to crickets. And of what losing the practice of this process will do to the rest of my writing and life.
My favorite part of writing is surely when I hear that something I’ve said touches a reader. One of the central pleasures in my own life is the feeling of reading someone’s words and thinking oh, yes, that’s what I mean, though I could never express it, and thank goodness I am not alone. The idea that I may be able to provide a similar sensation to someone else, even very rarely, is reason enough to put pen to paper. It’s a reason to live, in my opinion.
Advice. It seems absurd to ask that of me, who is still such a novice, such a hack, who has so very much to learn herself. I don’t have any wisdom to offer, unfortunately, other than open your eyes and pay attention. And then write it down. And do it again the next day. And every day after that. That is all I know how to do. That is the extent of my practice, my knowledge, and my advice.