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?

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