Since last I wrote, the bubble of air I talked about before has gone AWOL, and I’ve been trying hard to will myself into a fish. So far I’ve succeeded mostly at going to bed earlier than I already do to avoid the kind of meltdown that happened on my way home from preschool drop-off last Tuesday (I cried most of the way home). Apparently, there’s no age exemption for feeling exhausted and overwhelmed.

When Eli was born, a family friend whose kids are grown said raising kids is 50% pleasure and 50% pain. At the time I felt sorry for him, knowing my experience would be WAY more tipped pleasureably. But now, three years later, I take issue with the measure entirely. I think the pleasure and pain of childrearing are located on entirely different scales, so that, at least for my first three years of it, the pain is about 90% and the pleasure 95. I could write a long list of all the ways that caring for my kids is utterly depleting me, on every level, and then depleting me some more. But I could write another list, equally long, of all the ways it’s filling me up. It sounds like paradox, and maybe it is, but I think it makes sense with two scales. One has a lot more to do with the physicality of doing this job - what it does, literally, to the body and brain and to where my body can be located (rarely book or clothing stores, conference rooms, offices, coffee shops, alone in the bathroom, in my seat for an entire meal, awake by choice after 10, etc). The other has more to do with the spirit, I think, or whatever part of me feels things like wonder and joy, and has the capacity to grow in things like wisdom, compassion, love. My rough edges feel totally, utterly exposed by that first scale, and the second is helping me find freedom from them. Or put differently, my physical-deprivation edginess (what comes from never being rested, recharged, or fully fed) is doing a number on the edginess of my soul.

I want to write more about my experiences of all of this, but until I find more air, I offer this question for thought: what if pleasure and pain don’t *ever* have to be parts of the same pie, and it’s possible to experience more than 50% of both no matter where we are, or what we’re doing? Wouldn’t it change the way we experience pain if this is what we thought were true?

the reasons why I dig (just before Eli tried to steamroll Charlotte)

(See previous post for an introduction to this series.)

Two of the many surprises of this last year have been that my “guts” are both far more limited and far more expansive than I ever dreamed. I have always known that I get edgy when I don’t get enough sleep or time alone or haven’t eaten for more than two hours. I need to pee and poo like anyone else, and tend to get cold easily. I like to have a small pillow between my knees when I sleep. My eyes are particularly sensitive to the sun. Things like this are all true, but I swear, my guts have been my superpower more than not when catering to my own needs has been difficult or impossible. “Mind over matter” has allowed me to make it through sundry discomforts with grace and dignity totally, and sometimes regally, still in tact.

Then I got pregnant for the second time, and realized someone stole my superpower. During that pregnancy I chalked it up to pregnancy–hormones and their accompanying insomnia and mood swings, constantly increasing physical discomfort and its accompanying insomnia and mood swings, anticipatory anxiety and its accompanying insomnia and mood swings, a two-year-old and his accompanying insomnia and mood swings. But once the baby came, and my hormones calmed down, I realized that try as I might, I could not find the bootstraps of my will. I wanted and had committed to so many things–exercising, writing, emailing, hosting friends, assuring dust and grime that no, a sublease wasn’t possible–yet very few ever happened. I came to feel cheated by my own body, since my will was alive but apparently had no one to do its dirty work. I had not experienced life like this before.

Simultaneously, I have been shocked and awed by the guts required to make it through the work of my days. On very little sleep, and rarely with even the buffer of that 4-hour block of deep sleep that happens early in the night for most people, I have needed to interact constantly with a totally dependent baby and a sweet and jealous and curious, active, inquisitive toddler. And I have had to find ways of transporting both of them safely into and out of those stores where you buy food and clothing and stuff. And make food into edible form for them. And deal with the “fall out” of said food hours later.

It all sounds so innocuous, and even appears so when observed, but the guts it has required for me to do it without being mean and destructive by the ninety-fifth time I’ve been asked the same question, or the thousandth time I’ve gone to bed without doing one of the things on the “really want to do once the kids are in bed” list (like, sit still; clip nails; read one page of book), or the millionth time I’ve tried to talk briefly on the phone with a friend or insurance broker or business owner only to be incapable of hearing them over the din–happy or sad–around me, have taken my breath away. I am without breath. Almost all the time.

But I do it! I dig deeper. And when I think I can’t dig one more spoonful more, there I am again, shoveling.

Apparently my superpower has been superfunneled into things I never expected needed it, so much so that there’s little left for that list of things my ego demands I want done.

Capitola Beach, June 2008

Well hello! Yes, I’m here. I can hardly believe it myself. After many, many months of trying to get my head above water, I think I may have discovered a little pocket of air opening up beneath the water (where I’m totally still dwelling), which may be enough to allow for some words here now and then. Writing has always been my primary means of finding and making meaning, and after many months of almost none of it (writing), I’m feeling starved for some (meaning). So here’s a first attempt at naming where I’ve been (in my not-writing life) and where I think I might be headed (on this blog).

Parenting two has turned out to be far more challenging than I ever imagined. It has called into serious question so many things I used to take for granted about myself, like: that I’m organized; that I can strategize my way out of most stressful situations; that I can always find time and energy to write; I can be depended on to arrive on time and not need to cancel (repeatedly); I’m aware of my feelings; I’m in good physical shape; I’m well-rested and clear-minded; I return emails; underneath the social graces, I’m not a generally frustrated person.

In the last year, almost every aspect of myself that I used to like has been stripped from me, and I’ve been on a long and bumpy path of making peace with that. I’d like to write more about that process here.

At the same time, I have discovered a world of joy and wonder that’s off the grid of public life, and, indeed, does not require its inhabitants to be anything like the person I used to be. It’s a world inhabited not by deep reflection, or eloquent words, or ego strokes. Here, no one gauges popularity or stylishness or smarts. Showering, brushing teeth, and lack of offensive odors are completely optional. In short, “keeping up appearances” gets zero traction.

Instead, we’re all very raw, and very real. When we need to burp or fart or drool, we do. When we eat, we always spill. When we’re happy, we squeal, sad, cry, mad, everyone in the room tends to know it. We sing about everything, dance often, and spend huge chunks of our days hugging.

Before now I have had, and desired, very few words to give to my life in this world of engagement with kids, but I think I’m ready to talk about it now. The challenges I’ve experienced in this world have tended to get worded so much more readily than the joys that I’d like the new challenge of balancing what I say about it. It is a breathtakingly wondrous world, truly.

And of course, like I said at the start, I’m starving for a sense of meaning in it all. I have had so little time for reflection that I feel adrift in a sea of not-knowing-how-I-feel-or-what-I-understand-about-any-of-it.

So here goes: a series of posts wherein I try to get caught up with myself and my world.