oh this is hard

Motherhood is both enormous and tiny

Despite my general disinterest in mother’s day, even my dug-in heels are slipping against the tide of forwarded emails, blog posts, and essays I’m reading this weekend. Let me be clear: I have no problem with beautiful, heartfelt words about motherhood – in fact I adore them. I just find the packing of them into a single weekend a little weird. I think we ought to celebrate this every day, and in my view random celebrations mean more (big, huge massive exception: my birthday). I also share all of Anne Lamott’s aversions to Mother’s Day, so lucidly and wisely expressed in her essay here. I have always disliked this day but it wasn’t until I read her words that I really understood why.

Still, as Anne says, being a mother is among the richest experiences of my life, and I’m thinking about it this morning. Motherhood is is both enormous and tiny. It is made up of emotions so unwieldy that I can’t put them into words, and of moments so small I would miss them if I blinked (and I’ve surely missed millions). Sometimes the feelings are so giant I feel swollen with them, taut, tight, very much like I was in the last trimester of pregnancy. Sometimes the minutiae is so small that it seems impossible to hang any meaning onto it, and every time I am surprised when somehow, the hook actually holds. I’m not sure whether it is one facet of the human experience or a prism through which that experience may be seen.

In my struggle to experience the moments of emotion so overwhelming I feel as though I’m jumping off a tall pier into the ocean, or ducking through the heavy downpour of a waterfall, I turn to the words of others. It is in Anna Quindlen’s essays, Kelly Corrigan’s videos, and a million quotations that I have pulled out of books that I find myself nearest to understanding. I reach, grasping, for the ways that those far more eloquent than I have described and captured this experience.

For the tiny, the minute, I don’t have to look any further than right here. The moments flutter like magnolia petals around my feet, stunning, short-lived, and quickly turning to brown mush. When I write about them I’m trying to memorialize them in their pink beauty, their spring perfume wafting off of them in waves. In this way, motherhood is running upstairs to change my shirt before a meeting because Whit pressed his peanut-buttery face against my belly when he hugged me goodbye. It is instinctively holding out my hand to receive a chewed-up maraschino cherry as soon as I see Grace grimacing with not liking the taste of it. It is cooking the same zucchini chocolate chip muffins every single week because it’s the only vegetable Whit will eat, ever. It is driving around to four stores at rush hour because Grace was sad one day in preschool that everyone else had cartons of milk in their lunch and she did not (not easy to find small cartons of soy milk for my dairy-allergic daughter).

Big and small. Tiny and huge. Overwhelming and underwhelming. Tears and laughter. All of these tensions, some of them cliches, exist in every single day for me. Happy mother’s day to you all, regardless of who or how you mother. It is universal, this feeling, and spans far beyond the most traditional definitions of “motherhood.” Of that I am certain.

Two halves of this achingly full and short life

Yesterday was a tough day. I was sad and tired and emotional. Midmorning, driving home from an errand, I instinctively turned into a big cemetery near my house. I love this cemetery; I grew up visiting it with my mother. We’d walk around, admiring the trees and flowers in the various seasons. I have also attended many funerals at the chapel in the middle of the cemetery. It is a hushed and private place, with beautifully tended landscaping interspersed with headstones and formal tombs of weathered white marble. It is big and rambling, and it is easy to get lost. I drove around today until I found my favorite spot, by one of several little ponds.

I parked my car and walked to a stone bench by the pond. I was alone and didn’t see another person for the whole 45 minutes I sat there. It was cold and gray, and I shivered in my Juicy sweatpants and thin fleece jacket. I hunched over, shoving my hands deep into my jacket pockets for warmth. I kept my sunglasses on even though it was spitting rain, mostly to hide the tears that were rolling down my face.

Even on this resolutely, steely gray day, spring was apparent everywhere. The trees are bursting into bright green bloom, and the bush on my right was dotted with tight, bright pink buds. Two ducks, a male and a female, swam in the reeds at the pond’s edge right by my feet. In the rough patch of grass and wood chips where the lawn met the pond, a few tightly curled fiddleheads emerged. Their luminous greenness stood out against the dull brown of the wood chips.

Every single thing I could see, even the very place I had come, bidden by something I can’t name, sang of the interconnectedness of birth and death. Of beginnings and endings, wound together into a tangled knot. Impossible to separate. I sat there and felt the waves of emotion rising in my chest, trying to regulate my breathing but failing, nature’s insistent nascence in front of me blurring with my tears. I thought about Elizabeth‘s words: sometimes the big picture is more than I can carry. Sometimes – yesterday morning – I know this feeling intimately..

Loss haunts every single moment of this life, even the most suffused with newness, with birth. It is undeniable. The reality of this is sometimes more than I can bear. The awareness of loss, of death, of endings bangs around in my chest like a moth trapped against a screen window. Sometimes so powerfully I can’t believe I’m not visibly jerking around. Impending loss pulses in every single moment, throbbing like a heartbeat, making me think of the way you can faintly feel blood pumping out of a papercut.

Maybe it’s not a knot, though. Maybe it is simply two flip sides of a single reality. As we say goodbye to things, so we welcome new ones. I wish I could trust that. Or that it somehow mitigated the searing pain of the loss. That is so hard for me, who is so very attached. I know I should be less attached. I don’t know how, though. I realize that these are just the two halves of this human experience, of this achingly full and short life: beginnings and endings, birth and death, loss and life. They are as inextricable as night is from day.

And so I sat there. Trying to do as I have been trying to do: to feel my feelings, to sit with them without panic (so hard for me) and to just be patient. I looked at the water and the life bursting forth everywhere. I felt the roaring inside my chest and the raindrops on my skin, watched the ducks, tried to believe in the little green shoots that were so valiantly growing up through the ground. As I felt the tension leaving my body my shoulders fell and my back sagged into a comma, and my racing heart finally slowed. I began to breathe as I noticed that even in a place defined by death, and endings, life pushes through. I am trying to trust that. Really, really trying.

My real life has already begun

The effort to be present in my life has been the single most important thing I’ve undertaken in the past couple of years. Maybe ever. It has transformed how I think about the world and myself, and the relationship between the two. When I say “being present” I mean, literally, being engaged in and awake to my life. This sounds so simple, right? Well, for me, it’s not. No way. Perhaps I had further to go than most people: I am certainly one of the most preoccupied and distractable people I know, and I take multi-tasking to an Olympic sport (and then past it, where I start doing so many things I’m doing them all poorly). I’m extremely rarely engaged in just one thing, or one person.

It’s hard to articulate just how pervasive this not-presence was. And doing so makes me feel ashamed. I would often check my voicemail, remember that there were five messages, and be unable to recall the content (or caller) of a single one. I’d turn the wrong way down familiar streets because I was not paying attention. I used to play Scrabble with my family (under duress, since I am not an avid game-player) and play solitaire on the side because it was too slow otherwise. I play tetris on conference calls and read google reader during movies.

Beyond just distracted, though, I was also, even more toxically, wishing my life away. Every night, I’d hurry my kids through bathtime so I could get back in front of the computer or my book. I’d will them to JUST GO TO SLEEP ALREADY so I could have my night alone. And now? I’d give a lot of things to have some of those nights back. I’d go to soccer practice and spend the 90 minutes worrying about all of the rest of the things I had to do that day. I’d leave events early in preemptive worry about being tired the next morning.

I was never really there. And sometime in the past couple of years, I realized I was missing my life. There are great swaths of Grace and Whit’s babyhoods that I simply don’t remember. I took a ton of pictures, so I can look back at those, but I truly don’t have memories beyond the photographs (and I wonder if I was taking pictures, somehow, to compensate for how utterly not-there I was).

I suspect this behavior was a defense mechanism, because opening up to the actual moments of my life meant exposing myself to the reality of their impermanence. I knew instinctively how painful this would be. At some point in my early thirties, however, the balance shifted and I wanted to be there more than I wanted to avoid that hurt. I didn’t want to miss anymore of Grace and Whit’s lives. If it meant I had to take on some pain, some acceptance of how ephemeral this life of ours was, I was willing to do that. It is certainly my childrens’ arrival that precipitated this shift in outlook for me: the stakes were higher once they were here, and it wasn’t just my days I was squandering anymore.

It sounds trite, in some ways, but it is also essentially true: this moment is all I have. This moment is my life. Somehow, gradually but irrevocably, this realization seeped into my consciousness over the past few years. I realized how much I had already wasted, and I didn’t want to do that anymore. I am already heading into the middle of my life, and I don’t want to miss anymore of it. All those days that I felt I was waiting for my real life to begin, what a loss they all were. Colin Hay’s voice sings in my head, along with Ram Dass’s iconic book (I treasure my copy), Be Here Now.

So I’m not saying that I believe we should every single moment be playing trains with our kids on the floor. That we should evade our responsibilities to engage constantly in a always-happy celebration of childhood. Impossible, both of those things. And unrealistic. I’m not saying that there aren’t heaps of laundry and piles of dishes and lunches to endlessly pack and unpack in my life. Of course there are. I just mean that I want to be there while I do those things.

I am also not saying that I enjoy every moment of my life. Of course I don’t! To pay attention to my life is to receive both the good and the bad, and believe me, there is plenty of bad that makes me sad and regretful. Yes, sometimes it feels like pressure, and I realize I am just starting out on what will be a long, difficult journey. I get snappish and annoyed and wishing things would just be over … daily. But I know now what it is like to be engaged in my life, to really pay attention, and the fullness of the moments where I am able to do that makes up for all the times I fail. It is the memory of that momentary richness that brings me back to begin again. And again.

It is not a surprise to me that I’ve been drawn to books that meditate on this theme: Dani Shapiro, Katrina Kenison, and Karen Maezen Miller have all become important teachers of mine, despite their not knowing or having asked for that title. Each of them tells, in her own lyrical and compelling way, of her journey home. Of her journey to right here. To right now. I have been deeply, deeply moved by each of their stories. And the questions are as insistent as they are difficult (just thinking about these sometimes makes me feel like crying): What would it take to really inhabit the hours of our days? And what do we lose, if we don’t start trying?

When I talk about being present, I mean it in the most literal sense possible. I mean being in my life. I want my mind to stay inside my head for a little bit. I want my heart to dwell here, in the rooms of my days.

The rocky path to Grace

(apologies for reposting, this got inadvertently deleted and I care about this post so wanted it back on the site – I am so sorry to have lost all of your thoughtful comments!)

you probably can’t tell, but the curtain has already come down around me (late fall 2002)

After Terresa honored me by interviewing me at her blog, the Chocolate Chip Waffle, we started talking about how we had both experienced PPD . She pointed me to her beautiful post, PPD Sisters, and prompted me to write about my own experience with post-partum depression. My first reaction was to think of my own PPD sister, who I wrote about last fall. But I’ve thought a lot this weekend about Terresa’s nudge, and wondered why it is that I refer often to my PPD, but I almost never write specifically about it (at least not here).

Part of it is that I have so few memories of those actual weeks. It’s fascinating the way the mind recovers and copes, isn’t it? My memory has smoothed over those weeks of tears and panic like the airbrush facility in photoshop: the pain is still there, I can’t forget it, but its pointy, prickly granularity is sanded down to a more general, uniform memory. So I strive to remember specific moments, but I mostly can describe the overall experience. In my letter to my friend, I referred to the crucible of bewilderment, fear, and wonder known as postpartum depression, and I still think that’s a pretty good summary.

What do I remember about those first days and weeks? I asked myself this anew after Terresa asked about it. I remember a blur of tears, darkness, crying, and most of all a visceral, frantic sense that I had made the biggest mistake of my life. This fear was powerful enough to almost topple me: the panic that I had ruined my life was layered with the guilt for having those feelings in the first place in an incredibly toxic cocktail. I remember walking one raw, early-November afternoon, Grace strapped to my chest in the baby Bjorn, my hand almost freezing off as I held a phone to my ear (one of very few phone calls in those days) and cried to a poor, unsuspecting friend who was expecting a joyful new mother. I remember sitting in the rocking chair in my kitchen, a week-old Grace asleep on my knees, wondering numbly why it was that my doula (there for her postpartum visit) was looking at me so oddly, why she kept urging me to call my midwives, why she took Matt into the other room and whispered something to him.

It all came crashing down at my 2 week midwife check-up. I am still horrified that most women have to wait until 6 weeks for their own appointments after giving birth, and am intensely grateful that my midwifery practice mandated this 2 week appointment. I sat across from the midwife, Grace asleep in her bucket carseat, and dissolved into tears. I remember crying with those all-encompassing sobs that make you feel like you are drowning. I could barely breathe. I was not allowed to leave until the end of the day, at which point I left with prescriptions and therapist appointment cards clutched in my hands and a dawning sense that I was truly not okay.

I have heard many funny stories of how control-fanatic women like myself struggled to adapt to motherhood. I always laugh, but the truth is that my reality was different. I crashed off the cliff of depression so quickly and so utterly that I was not even trying for control (for the first time in my life?). I didn’t even care, which was for me much scarier. I just sat there and cried. I think the fact of my surprise pregnancy contained within it the seeds of my PPD: I had never been in control of this, not from the very beginning. I, who have been able to muscle my way through basically any challenge (mostly because I was good at only selecting those challenges that I could conquer), was completely undone by this 7 pound, 12 ounce baby, and it devastated me.

My body fell apart as rapidly as did my mind: within 2 weeks I was 10 pounds thinner than I had been pre-pregnancy. I did not sleep, I did not eat, I did not smile. I looked like a cadaver, with deep circles under eyes that would not stop crying. I would not talk to anyone; the phone rang and rang and I refused to pick it up. Now I see I was recoiling into the deepest recesses of my body and spirit, trying to physically hide, to pretend somehow that this was not happening.

I tried reasoning with myself. I had had the unmedicated delivery I wanted so desperately, despite it being long and arduous. How could I have survived that experience, whose pain was fresh and blinding, and not be able to bear this? I had delivered a daughter, the gender of child that I’d never even allowed myself to admit how much I wanted. How could I not be grateful? In the face of such a thick, inarticulate fog of despair, whose power felt primal, logic absolutely failed. I could not see past the storm clouds either in my heart or on the horizon (and there were many there, too: an economy in collapse and a terminally-ill father-in-law awaiting a heart transplant).

I admit that for all of my pretense at open-mindedness, I had always thought that people who took anti-depressant medication were simply not trying hard enough. That arrogance disappeared overnight when I swallowed my first zoloft. Grace’s arrival was my hint – and, frankly, it was more like a sharp slap to the face, since I seemed to have trouble hearing the hints – that trying hard was not always going to be enough.

My recovery was gradual. If I plunged off a cliff in a near-vertical line when Grace was born, I climbed out on an angle just north of horizontal. I got significant help. I saw more than one therapist, frequently. I took medication. I can’t remember a specific day that I looked at my daughter and felt the swell of pleasure, of joy, of love that I had expected when she was born. It did happen, though I hate that I can’t note a specific day that those feelings arrived, and I love her fiercely now.

The truth is that I expected motherhood to be simple. I had been told that it would be instinctive, that I would look at my baby and realize I’d always been waiting for her. I didn’t. While I’ve spent my life working for specific achievements, I think I thought that this one thing, being a mother, was my birthright. It wasn’t. I am dogged by a profound guilt about those early days. I ask myself all the time what kind of damage my ambivalence did to her and to our bond. My passage to parenthood was marked by a deep grief that is integrally woven into my identity as a mother.

I delivered Grace myself, pulling her onto my chest with my own two hands. From that moment I began a long and difficult passage to the grace of motherhood. It did not come easily to me. I’ll never know if this has made me a more confident mother, for knowing the treacherous shoals I traversed, or a more insecure one, for the lingering knowledge that I did not embrace my child immediately. I try to tell myself it doesn’t matter now.

One phone call from our knees

A song I love by Mat Kearney came on while I was running yesterday, and one line was stuck in my head all day:

I guess we’re all one phone call from our knees.

The song was referring to a phone call bearing bad news. And I thought of the phone ringing in the middle of the night when Matt’s dad got his heart. I thought of while my mother’s best friend and her mother were dying, and about how every time the phone rang I would startle, and pick it up with icy dread in my stomach. To this day when the phone rings after about 8:30 in the evening my heart lurches, and I assume someone is in the hospital.  One call.  One moment.  One fleeting choice.  On our knees.  Or worse.

I thought more broadly of the decisions, choices, and coincidences that shape our lives irrevocably. As Dani Shapiro says in Devotion, “I had tuned left instead of right; had taken (or not taken) the trip, the flight, the challenge, the chance” – each small choice we make takes us to where we are. A job interview taken, a second drink agreed to, a leaning into a kiss rather than away, walking a different way home. If you imagine our lives as a line etched into space, moving backwards and forward, going through forks in the road, there are some spots that would be luminous in the retelling, glowing with the importance that we did not know they had until after the fact.

Some of the big forks in the road announce themselves, with neon lettering and loud honking sirens: who to marry?  where to go to school?  what job to take?  But I believe that many of the choices that actually create our lives, and, perhaps more importantly, who we are, are small, surprisingly imperceptible in the moment.  And then, over years, the ramifications of each choice make themselves known.  Our lives echo with the decisions we make, with the steps we take, forward, back, left right.

It is the phone calls in the night and the emails out of the blue that are on my mind today, the innumerable small snowflakes of life’s decisions that build into the immovable, permanent icebergs of our lives.  I’ve written before about this, more focused on the the internal experience of these shifts, of this gradual contouring of who we are.

” I am thinking about my personal mythology, about the moments of my life that shaped who I am today. Some of them are big, I know, like the births of my children, but many of them are small. In fact I think it is true, this notion of destiny taking shape in silence. Often the true shifts that change our direction irrevocably happen invisibly to others. This is the terrible, wonderful privacy of this life: nobody can know our internal terrain well enough to walk it without guidance.”

It occurs to me now that being brought to our knees need not always be a tragic thing: one could spin Mat’s lyric around to say that one small phone call, one event we may not have controlled, could bring us to a position of communion and worship with this world.  I imagine he meant the more obvious and negative meaning, but I like my interpretation, which just says to me that both good and bad changes are always a single moment away.  The veil of our glorious, ordinary lives can be pierced, for good or for bad, in every second.  Which just brings me back to the same persistent theme that tugs at me every time I sit down to write: what we have is this.  Right now.  And only this.