This probably isn’t the right week to write this since I’m on nearly 100% kid-duty while N TA’s an all-week class, and therefore feeling/thinking these things more intensely than I might otherwise (normally I have three afternoons away from home a week to write), but I think they all still stand.

I’m feeling the tug of work-outside-of-home these days–a growing internal momentum for it, a kind of ripeness for all the things I’ve studied and learned and experienced and contemplated to be funnelled into my writing life.  One’s 30s are often a time of intense engagement with work–when careers start to hum and when the gangliness that for many of us is our 20s starts to mature and deepen into something more like full-blown adulthood.  Couples who have young kids in this decade, and no nanny, probably all have to choose which in their pair will run with this outside-of-home momentum, and which will run with the inside stuff–which will work primarily with the kids, and which will "work" primarily with other things.  (intentional, even if not totally serious, use of quotes in that sentence)

But then there are those, like me, who are trying to do both.  And this is what I’m thinking about tonight.  At the same time that I feel the tug of outside-of-home work, I feel a tremendous tug to be home.  Or rather, multiple tugs, quite literally, on my legs all day.  The work of being present to and engaged with Elijah in the ways I want to be and the ways I think he deserves, combined with the work of running a household well–it fills up every hour I’m willing to give it.  And more.  This dance that is running a household and tag-teaming childcare with N and working on my book and maintaining this blog and keeping a percentage of my brain active on dreaming up next projects, well, I have to say it often feels less like a dance and more like a tug-of-war.

Sometimes I daydream about how spacious my life would feel if I just gave up writing–if I devoted myself to home stuff and kid stuff alone.  On one level, the thought feels like utter relief.  It feels like letting waves push me to shore rather than struggling against them, like joining the current rather than fighting my way always upstream.

But every time I have that thought, the very next one is a kind of voice, calling me to not give up.  It sounds like parents do when encouraging infants to walk.  "There you go–YES–nice work!  You can do it!  Yes, keep going.  Alright!"  Unlike them, it’s a lot more subtle, and speaks more with the twinkling of eyes and a beckoning glance than actual words.  But it has the same effect on me:  it keeps me standing up again and again, no matter how incessently gravity pulls me down.  It keeps a kind of hopeful grin on my face, and my banged up (or, as per the tug-of-war, pulled-apart) mind and body ever pressing on to sit down in front of this screen.

I feel like the universe wants me to write, and like something in me is alive and strong and beautiful when I am.  I can’t give this up.  I don’t want to.  I so terribly don’t.

So I keep doing it.  And living in the midst of all these tugs.  I feel weary of it, wanting to say to any one of them, "Fine!  I give up!  You win."  But I’m simultaneously energized by the writing part and the childcare part (no, I will never love spending hours on the phone with insurance companies, nor scouring the tub.  And I’d totally love the next place we live to have a dishwasher.).

But…so…is this just how it’s going to be?  Is living in this tension just the way of life as a dual-career person?  Can tug-of-war, practiced long enough, ever turn into a dance?

It’s a dark day here, where sunshine usually warms the pavement well before noon.  Misty and cold.  Elijah got his shots last week and hasn’t been sleeping well since.  My dreams last night were scattered with his noises.

I want to write about what was happening in my life five years ago when the Twin Towers fell, reflect on what that event and the dominos it’s pushed over since have meant to me.  What kind of outlook I have as I think about the world and its powers now, as I continue being me, but a me in this world, under this administration.

I want to, but my bigger drive to be a patient mommy wins out.  E has just gone down for his nap, and I need to too.  I’m so tired, and he only takes this one nap now, and the day is so young.  It’s a choice between the inner peace of getting thoughts on a page, and the body peace of getting some rest.  With E’s sleep so hit and miss, and consequently his mood, I think I’ll choose the latter.  I think we’ll both be glad I did.

Blessings on you this day.

One year ago today N and I walked out our front door, nervous, camera-clad, heading from the life we knew toward one we could only dimly imagine.  Elijah was born late that morning.

From that point on, our hearts and lives have been woven with a new thread, one that’s stronger and more vulnerable than anything I’ve ever known.  It smells like milk and soap and crackers and poo.  It makes us laugh every day.  It warms us and softens us and makes all the things we think so important elsewhere get cast in a different light.  It will be part of us forever.

We love you, Lijah Boy.  It is an honor to be your keepers.

We should have suspected ill fate when we got the stereo home those many years ago, unpacked it, played with the fancy buttons, and the display said "goodbye" when we turned it off.  Unnerved by such affable plastic, we looked at each other, smiled skeptically, but in the end decided to keep it.

You must understand, it’s not like we don’t like technology.  We respect it.  We’re glad it’s in our walls and our computers, for example, and that by and large our car tends to run.  It gets us places.  We like the way those little switches make lights come on at night, and how you buy something at the store called "bulbs" when the light stops and soon enough it starts again.  We know all about this kind of stuff.

When it comes to many fancy buttons, however, we’re mostly glad to push them with the power turned off, at least when their host is new, and then hope against all hope we can discover, by color or texture, which ones make the host do the function we bought it for in the first place.

So this stereo.  Not only does it have many buttons, and by many I mean lots, but it also has a bar that takes batteries, just like our TV, which is also lined with many buttons, and come to find out (a sideways glance at the owners manual turned this one up), many of the functions of the machine can only be accomplished by use of that bar.

Lucky for us, turning the stereo on, playing CDs, and even little things called tapes, which we feel much endearment toward because they remind us of days when everything was far less complicated–all these most important functions happen without that bar, and we know how to make them go.  We’ll even show you if you like.

So a few years back when N was on a trip and I got woken up in the middle of the night to the stereo blaring, I was only confused about how it came on; I knew exactly how to make it stop.  This happened the next night, too, twice, and only once the night after that before it occurred to me the machine must be unplugged each night before sleep.  I’m sure you understand.  It was always kind enough to say goodbye when I stopped it, but never enough to ask whether I wanted it on in the first place.

The next trip N took (his work had a few during that season), I fell asleep on the couch, listening to the beautiful sounds of my friends C and L, who are musicians, and were kind enough to copy me a tape (nastalgic sigh) of some of their current stuff.  I fell asleep listening to them, only to wake up hours later to the sound of the radio.  Crap.  Didn’t unplug it.  It wasn’t loud, thank God, but it was on.  "Goodbye," I said as I yanked the chord from the wall and headed off to bed.

Well.  The next morning, I decided to finish the tape I had started the night before.  I pushed play (the button with the tipped over triangle on it, for anyone who’s interested), but lo and behold, the tape was at the end already.  Must have really slept hard, I thought.

I rewound it (two tipped over triangles, pointed to the left), and pushed play again, but the only sounds on that tape, the only ones left at all, were the staticy voices of late-night call-in shows.  From the radio.  The machine is possessed, I tell you.  Not only did it stop the tape, but it rewound it, and recorded the radio over the entire thing.

I was speechless.

Needless to say, I don’t keep tapes in that deck anymore.  Seasons changed, though, and we moved, and I don’t know, maybe something about the air in our new place, something about the angle of the moonlight or the lack of nighttime power surges has meant the radio stays plugged in 24-7.  No midnight blastings.  No illicit radio recordings.  Just darkness and quiet through each entire night.

Or so we came to expect.

We have a baby now, who loves buttons.  The more the better.  Buttons and dials–dials, especially.  We lay our fan flat on the ground, unplugged, and baby spends solid minutes, often many of them in a row, working on its dial.

So on the rare occasion that he gets a glimpse of the radio, hidden well behind the doors of our armoire, he’s transfixed.  Understandably.  So many fancy buttons.  We’ve indulged him more than half a dozen times with a good ten minute session of dial-and-push, laughing at having to turn the radio off repeatedly to avoid blasting our neighbors away.

What we didn’t bargain for, what we had no idea he could do, was operate the deeper and more complex functions of that machine without the bar.  And by deeper and complex, I mean functions no one should ever need to learn.  The child has learned, possibly in cahoots with the demon or demons that inhabit that thing, how to set it to go off every night at 11:53.  The radio.  For anyone who’s interested, that’s right in our deepest, most necessary cycle of sleep.

Whether this is merely a sign of the times, yet another clichéd example of child-knows-more-than-adults-about-technology, we don’t know.  The kid isn’t even eleven months old. 

What we do know is we have a post-it note on our table now, scrawled in the angry hand of a man half-asleep, that reads, "RADIO", which I think means something like "make it stop doing that–TODAY". 

Wish us luck.  Bedtime fast approaches and the mysteries of the box remain.  Even if we have to unplug the darn thing, we half expect a cackle to come with its goodbye.

So that you know how much of my life these days isn’t spent on the kinds of thoughts recently stacking up here…

Yesterday was a really hard day.  I don’t feel like talking about it here, or showing you what my eyes looked like when I got up this morning.  But I will tell you about a surprise I woke up to.

The mites are back.

(post title courtesy Judy, via Fran)

The first year of parenting can be full of insecurity.  So many millions and billions of people have done this thing, this raising children thing, that it’s easy to feel like everyone else knows something you don’t, some secret code for doing the right thing.  Like when your baby trucks along on a given schedule, for example, and then up and changes it on you.  Or when the baby next door is doing one thing, but the baby in your lap can’t do that thing, has never remotely come close to doing it.  Or vice versa.  I’m sure the same goes for teenaged babies, too.  Probably all ages.

So when you come across other parents who feel the same way you do, the same kind of insecurity, or even if they’re not insecure, are just facing the same sorts of things you are, there’s a kind of peace in that, a kind of grounding, where you realize this club in which you thought you were only faking membership?  You aren’t faking it.  Nobody really knows what they’re doing.  And even if they feel like they do, their baby is not yours, so what works perfectly for theirs probably isn’t fair to impose on your kid, in your situation.

I was driving home from the library today, feeling bummed about not getting more accomplished on my book, when the thought occured to me that as much diversity as exists among infants, like, say, at what month they grow teeth, or when they learn to speak or crawl–all that diversity that pediatricians are constantly telling new parents is normal, only grows exponentially with time.  The nurture side of the nature-nurture equation gets more and more diverse, and with it our genetic responses to it.

So it only makes sense to relax a little more into being who each of us is, parenting our own selves like we ideally would offspring:  accepting that we are who we are, not the kid next door, not that other writer or teacher or parent or pastor, not that person we’ve always assumed we would or wouldn’t be.  We are us.  And that’s entirely normal.  Normal for what it means to be human.  Our stage of development, regardless of anyone else’s, is the only place we can be.

The last few days have felt like bootcamp around here. Baby wakes at 4am, and then fights every naptime tooth and nail. I will say it hasn’t been hard to feel gentleness toward this creature who is cause for so little sleep (including his own). He doesn’t know how to sit down yet, and is programmed to be only virtical now that he has the skill to get that way, so the dear just stands there, exhausted, crying. Lie him back down, and up he goes again, ad infinitum.

Last night as I lay exhausted in bed (I won’t even tell you how early it was), I wanted to pray. I wanted to ask for a blessing on all of us–of peace, of deep rest. Of bars of a crib that won’t beckon Pied Piper-like at 4am. I wanted to ask for help with my writing, too, and knowing how to talk and think about who I am and all the other things bouncing around my brain.

I tried, but the words wouldn’t come. I’m in an awkward stage with the All, if that’s what I might call God. Awkward in the sense that, well, to whom am I praying when I pray? Something that hears me? Something that has feelings about me? Or is it to myself? I believe that each of us has more resources, more depths of wisdom inside ourselves than we can ever know, but even knowing that is little consolation in the face of feeling helpless or small. In the face of sleep deprivation and hopes and dreams that sometimes feel way out of reach. Is it me to whom I pray?

Or is it something much bigger, something like The Universe, and are my thoughts percieved by this All, then, like that butterfly line, and somehow incorporated into the ongoing flow of creation, maybe even in such a way that what is created after that prayer is somehow different than if it weren’t prayed? I like that way of thinking of it.

All in all, sometimes it feels much easier, maybe even despite all the suffering everywhere that has such unsettling implications on its own, to pray to a personal consciousness, a person sort of God, that’s somehow distinct from everything. At least that would feel a little more possible lying in bed at night, at the end of a full day of mothering, when I’d really like to be mothered myself. When I’d like to be listened and tended lovingly to.

Maybe blogging is a kind of prayer, and all your ears are the real and personal, embodied hearing of God.

Buddhalijah, so named for his adorable belly, decided at 1:15 this morning–that’s A.M. for anyone who’s interested–that it would be a good time to stand up in his crib, the crib whose mattress we haven’t adequately lowered yet because who knew he could pull himself up like that already, and call for attention.  This by the boy that sleeps through the night.  Every night.  11-hour clockwork.

I stumbled to his room, opened the door, and watched as he, in the dark, like a newly felled tree, tipped backwards.  THUNK.  Yes, it was inside the crib, but it scared him and woke him up more thoroughly, and caused me to realize that this kid, the kid who just learned to crawl yesterday, is not only capable of curling himself over the rails of his confinement, but also falling, hard, indescriminately.  I had visions of those sweet cheeks and that santa claus belly only slightly cushioning a very long fall to the hard wood beneath them.

So the mattress had to be lowered.  Right that minute.  And by the time the light was turned on and the lowering done, and a round of rocking, and wailing in the crib, and nursing, and rocking, and wailing in the crib, and bedtime music, and rocking, and wailing in his sleep, because the whole ordeal, we think, was started by gas, he finally conked off before 4.

All you parent readers?  I’m sorry I ever thought you ought to be more cheerful or well-rested.  Or well-adjusted.  I’m really sorry.

Okay, so here I am again.  I’m soul searching this week, trying to figure out what mix of things is sustainable for me, and so far I’ve gotten one clear answer:  not this one.  I’ve packed every minute to the brim lately, and feel something deep inside of me, some important place where children run barefoot and there’s time to watch clouds and what you do isn’t groomed for resumes, was never meant to be–I feel that place wilting and shrinking and getting overshadowed by this other place, a place that isn’t bad or even something to be wished away, but a place that must be held in check.  A place that wants badly to produce.  To matter to lots of people.  To have tangible things to show for my time, and not just things, but really wonderful amazing wiz-bang kinds of stuff.  Stuff that impresses people.  Lots of them.

And guess who suffers, besides me, when that place starts growing beyond itself?  The people who matter to me most.  Isn’t that ironic?

I have a non-fiction book I want to write.  I have a new and more complicated blog I want to start.  I have a novel that’s itching to see the light of day.  And I also have an 8-month-old who needs me quite a lot at this point, and deserves to be seen far, far differently than as a roadblock to some race track I’m trying to ride.

I’m realizing that life isn’t something you wait to live until the kids are grown or even just in school.  Life isn’t something you put off until your resume is long.  It isn’t something you hold like your breath, or keep locked in a cage, feeding but once or twice a day. 

It’s here.  Right now.  It’s this week, and this spring, this night with all the trees in bloom, and the crickets cricking, this lamp spilling golden light across my lap, my hands, the little scar where I accidentally poked myself with led in seventh grade.  I don’t want to fill this glorious life I’ve been given so full that the glory fades, and it doesn’t even matter because I don’t have time to notice anyway.  I don’t want to be so preoccupied with the next ten things I’m trying to accomplish that the one right in front of me gets only half of me.  The little boy whose eyes are so blue and smile is so big and heart is just bursting with eagerness to be mine right now.  Not half-mine, but all the way.  And that goes for N, and the other dear ones in my life, too.  My own face in the mirror.

Be still, I hear, and I feel that place inside of me expand.  I feel my feet on cool, green grass, and see clouds start billowing by.  There’s one the shape of the book I’m writing, and it’s whispering all in good time, and another the shape of the book I hope to write next.  There’s one the shape of fear, the fear that I’m losing time on a race I need to win, and if I don’t catch up now, today, or at least by the end of this year, some important thing will get lost forever.  Something I really want.  That cloud is shifting into some new thing, a new mist that looks like gladness, and it’s coming down to catch me up inside itself, catch me up and make me laugh like Eli, when all he can do is glee (if that’s not a verb it should be).  Because glee is what a lot of life calls for.

When it finally sets me down I see the landscape of my life, and realize I don’t want to get everything done I set out to do if that means missing out on here and now.  I don’t want to if it means not living in the fullest sort of way, thinking living will have to happen later.  Because later sometimes never comes.  And even if it does, there will never be this night again, this season, this dear one on the phone or at my neck or lying next to me in bed, at this age, with this sort of love.

So I’m here on my blog right now because it makes me happy, and because speaking publically helps call a thing to life.  I’m trying to imagine my way into a lifestyle that’s slower paced than the one I’ve lately tried to live, that still finds ways to honor the hats I truly love to wear:  writer, soul-nurturer, mother, wife, friend.  I want to honor these things in a much more liveable way.  As far as posting goes–here or on a new blog–we’ll have to see what this might mean.