The Trivial Pursuit of Happiness

Beyond all odds, Ella is still asleep right now. It’s in these quiet, still moments that Motherhood catches up with me. How do I spend this (unguaranteed, quickly expiring) chunk of time – A shower? Breakfast? Cleaning up last night’s mess? Changing the cat littler? Pairing up socks? Do I read – for pleasure? For School? I need to balance the bank account. I need to make a grocery list. Wedding crafts. Hot tub chemicals. Research paper. Writing for pleasure! Washing diapers. Making newborn diapers. Vacuuming. Feed the fish. Read blogs. Answer emails. Exfoliate. Decide on colors for paint. Think of baby names. Worry about money. Do some yard work. Unclog the sink.

It’s not that there is not enough time in the day (a given, kids or not), but that I haven’t worked out yet how to spend these small pieces of time that I am given. I focus on school, the house is trashed. I focus on the house, my friendships are a mess. I focus on wedding things, or baby things, or (god forbid) self care things, and I do not walk away recharged, but frenzied for all the things I wasn’t doing.

Last on this list is writing – the kind of writing that I crave. I want to wake up and begin my day by reading, pushing out of my mind the day’s to-do list. Then I want to write, just for an hour, while drinking coffee in my pajamas, a steno pad balanced on my knee. I want to have time in the evening to digest my day, to sift out the pieces that, given a night’s sleep, will lose focus. I want to put this silly degree to work, just for me. Believe it or not, there are jobs for creative writing majors, but right now I would be satisfied with one perfect paragraph, that I can carry in my wallet and wear thin with touch. I do not have this degree to write the defining book of my generation – I have it because I want to write.

I tell myself that in 5 years, I may have a shot at this. Ella will be in Kindergarten, baby will be old enough for Preschool, and I will have (maybe) four hours a day, uninterrupted. If the cat is outside. And the kitchen floor doesn’t need moped. And if I can, oh please oh please, remember anything at all from the four years I spent sauntering around campus, a book of Adrienne Rich’s poems tucked into my purse, practicing the sound of words, practicing the way they fell together when I understood their power.

One of the requirements to being a humorist is that your reader needs to think you are always having a good time, even if you are not. I, for so many reasons including this one, am not a humorist. When I am in a bad, ugly, no good rotten mood, it’s hard for me to mask that in my writing. Hence the silence the last few days. I will blame it on being pregnant and hormonal, but really it’s just a case of the blah’s, which everyone gets every so often. Schools is fine, work is fine, Ella is fine, life is fine. Fine fine fine. Nothing is bad, but nothing is all that exciting either. It’s fine.

So, in the absence of meaningful writing, how about I distract you with a Day In the Life of our family?

A few of my favorites:

We. Have. Health. Insurance.

I am giddy. If I break my leg tomorrow, I do not have to set it myself! If Ella is still raspy in a few days, I can totally take her to the doctor! If Tom has two teeth that have needed to be taken out for the last two years, for the love of god, he CAN!

We have been applying for different coverage for months, and either being denied, or just ignored. Regardless, I checked the mail today and hear-by love Ms. Tamera White, who is pleased to inform me that she is happy to take our money, in exchange for the peace of mind that I can now, oh, I don’t know, pay for prenatal care. (dance dance dance)

Other great things about today:

This yarn(in the dark purple) + this pattern (pdf)

I get to spend two hours of my day discussing the merits and criticisms of Joan Didion

I get to spend the rest of my day with this person, who, when I asked her who she was talking to, said “Bunny”, as if, duh, who else could it be. Silly me thought it may be her pediatrician (who we can totally go see now!) (Which is not to say we haven’t taken her in for the scary rashes and fevers, etc, but man. $20 copay beats out $75 basic fee+tests any day.)

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Happy Earth day ya’ll. To mark it, Tom and I watched An Inconvienient Truth. I will spare you all another meandering diatribe, since I really am not as morose as my previous post would have you think. So how about some awesome links to things that give me hope that our children will have the chance to create world peace in 50 years?

No Impact Man: “A guilty liberal finally snaps, swears off plastic, goes organic, becomes a bicycle nut, turns off his power, composts his poop and, while living in New York City, generally turns into a tree-hugging lunatic who tries to save the polar bears and the rest of the planet from environmental catastrophe while dragging his baby daughter and Prada-wearing, Four Seasons-loving wife along for the ride.”

Treehugger: Because being a dirty hippie can also be chic.

Freecycle: Changing the world, one gift at a time.

Wwoof: Go work on an organic farm in Hawaii, or Chili, or Pittsburgh. Lisa did this and traveled through New Zealand for the price of a plane ticket. I wonder how many would let me being two kids…

Ps – Tom just told me that he voted for GWB, but “only the first time.” I paused for a minute when he asked if I would still marry him. He is lucky I did not know this on our first date…

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Growing up, family was a vague and fluid idea. Sometimes it held my father, sometimes my mother, and for fleeting moments, both. Sometimes I had aunts, sometimes I had cousins, but generally only in summer, and half of the people I called family were of no blood relation to me. Moving every six months, you learn how to act like a friend, but not be one.

What I had was my sister, and later, my brother. That’s it. The parents we had were flawed and human. I know where they came from, and I wish I could say they were able to transcend their childhoods, but they didn’t. They raised children who have a difficult time making connections with people, and who instinctively push people away before they are close enough to hurt us. Today we are all reclusive and heavily guarded. We go long stints without talking to friends, or even to each other. We love each other fiercely, but do not see silence as antipathy. We know it is just the space between words.

I don’t know where I am going with this. I have written about my family so very much in this last year (my creative writing focus has shifted from poetry to nonfiction, and hell, when you are given good material, you may as well use it) that I am tired of analyzing the past to understand who we have become today.

Recently though, I have been told that if I am not in constant contact with my blood relatives, that I must not care about them. It has made me look critically at how my family operates so much differently than others, and how I am changing that cycle.  I feel like I have taken the opposite route, or at least I hope I have. Tom and I practice Attachment Parenting (with a grain of salt sometimes) and by having the relationship I do with Ella, I am able to see how the other relationships in my life suffer from detachment. The good news is that I see this – the bad news is that there is not a book “How to stop being so cold hearted  and pick up the phone you lazy jerk.”

In a way, this is why I started writing online years ago. I share more of myself here than I ever do in person, because I am more comfortable with words, with the backspace button, and with my own rambling thoughts. People make me anxious and guarded – here I am able to save a draft and see if that is really what I think tomorrow.

So here is what I know: family is built on trust and respect, not phone calls. I am flawed, but making the effort to change. I am patient with myself and others, but not with impatient people.

I know I just posted 20 minutes ago, and I should be putting on my shoes to go to school, but I need to show you what I just finished.

It’s a big sister shirt! I decided I wanted to make one yesterday and thought “Hey, I havn’t embroidered in 15 years, maybe I should do that!” And lo and behold, today it is done.

You can definately tell what color I started with (Black) and what color I ended with (Yellow) but eh. We plan to use it to tell Pam and Mike about the baby (“Oh, mom, did you see this shirt Ivory made Ella?”) and perfection is not my bag. Neither is being on time to class apparently. Must.Go.Now.

 I could have sworn I saw my little brother today, at the the bus stop near my house. Same build, same hair, same walk. I double took as I drove by, and then sat in my driveway for a minute debating how crazy it would seem if I walked over, saw it wasn’t him and walked back to my house. It reminded me so much of right after my mom died, when I would see a thin, dusty blonde woman in a crowd and have to restrain myself from yelling her name. I still hear her laugh occasionally on a city bus, or walking across campus, and look around. It’s not her, I know that. But it doesn’t stop my stomach from fluttering, and my hands to shake a little.

So while it is onebazilllion percent more likely that it could have been my brother, than any of those women were ever my mom (the death factor and all), I am chalking my ‘sighting’ this morning up to the fact that I miss him. I do not let myself dwell on it, because really, what can I do? But in little ways, I am reminded how much I wish he would just show up at my front door.

Last night on my way to pick up Tom at the bus park-and-ride, I passed a woman holding a tiny infant girl, with two small boys walking behind her. She was carrying a tattered diaper bag in her free hand, and looked tired. None of them were dressed for the weather (at least 40F) and one of the little boys seemed to have on only a windbreaker over boxers, and the other did not have on shoes. I was not in the right lane to pull over, and when I pulled back around they were down an ally, and I was late to pick up Tom. I didn’t have any cash on me, or even a diaper bag with extra clothes. I drove by, rationalizing that I did not have an extra car-seat for the baby, and besides Ella was finally asleep.

It’s easy to distance ourselves from poverty, when we are warm, and full, and we know that no matter what we will not be abandoned tomorrow. It’s easy to get caught up in the wants, the ridiculous class envy, the trivial little bumps in the road. It’s easy to imagine that true poverty only exists in far away places, not in your pipsqueak city in the bleeding-heart northwest. It’s easy to look away.  It’s easy to drive by.

It’s hard to sleep, wondering if those kids are warm.

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Robert Frost, from A Prayer in Spring

Thoughts and prayers with those affected by yesterday’s tragedy.  It’s all we can do sometimes, to take stock of the beauty around us, and hope it is enough.

Talking with friends at knit club (knit club, party time, fabulous) I realized how excited I am for (get read to hate me) birth. Birth! I am excited for birth! I just came out of the closet as a birth-lover!

Okay, so it should be said that birth – the actual pushing another human being out of your ‘lady place’ (also known as: crotch) hurts. But I think we forget, when it is looming over our heads, that birth is about so much more than the physical. Birth, to me, represents an emotional opening, more than a physical one. A primal connection to a self that we are numbed to by the very act of living. I have never felt stronger than the first moment I held my daughter, and, in my weak moments – when Ella is watching television, the house is trashed, and I have 3 papers due for classes, and I am not sure I can be the kind of mom, or wife, or writer, that I thought I would be – I remember screaming that I could not do it, I could not push her out, and then knowing, knowing in the roots of my feet, that this was the trial by fire.

There is so much resistance to pain in any form in our culture, and I will admit I keep a bottle of Ibuprofen on my desk. I am a wimp when I smash my finger in a drawer, or when I have a tooth ache. But I also firmly believe that there are different kinds of pain, and that some pain (oh no!) is good pain. The emotional pain after you lose someone you love is this kind of pain – it pushes you forward, changing who you are at your core. The pain of birth is this kind of pain, to me.

So I pushed. And pushed. And yelled and growled and suddenly she was in my arms and I was not the person I had been 12 hours before. I was her mother.

How much of my experience was due to the birth path we chose is questionable. Do I think that women who have a medicalized birth, with nurses and doctors milling around, bright lights in their faces and (god forbid) surgery still come out of it completely transformed? Yes. Absolutely. But I would not have been able to have the experience I did, had we chosen to birth in a hospital, and I would have missed out on the most important moment of my life so far.

I am ready to welcome this new baby into our lives. I am ready to hold her in my arms, knowing that birth was the easy part. It is the living every day with a part of your soul outside of your body that is hard. I am ready to be his mother, and am so very excited to meet him.

T-minus one million days to go.