I consider myself contemplative–one who thrives on time to ponder.  Multitasking isn’t so much my thing.  For this reason (and surely a hundred more), having a child and pursuing a beyond-home career are stretching me.  At the end of most days I feel it, that combination of exhaustion and reved-upness, where my mind is still trying to puzzle together the things I wanted to do today but will need to do tomorrow (or the next day) instead, while my body is saying ENOUGH.  EAT.  SLEEP.

In an attempt to get a handle on when to do what, and when to tell my mind enough already on trying to figure it out, compulsively, I have officially turned into the guy from About a Boy who has his days divided into units.  His life is way too empty, so our motivations are different, but you should see the weekly schedule I’ve created for myself.  All the non-childcare moments are divided into blocks.  I’m super excited about three projects, simultaneously, that all require huge amounts of time, so here’s me and my gangbusters looking way more like the drip, drip, drip (i.e. an hour during this naptime, two before bed) that look like nothing, but slowly, tenaciously, get canyons made.

This all is to say that for a few weeks, I’m closing up shop.  Here.  Not for good, but until I can get some marked headway made on these projects (and thus have units to spare).  One of them is a new blog, so if all goes well, you will hear much, much more of me after the break.  In a different venue, but one I think (hope) you’ll like.  I can’t wait.

So stay tuned, and take care of yourselves, and much, much love to all of you.

Yay!  It’s not raining!

Cheeks

Maybe some of you have seen ads for a new book, Perfect Madness:  Motherhood in an Age of Anxiety, by Judith Warner.  I haven’t read it yet, but I looked at the pages Amazon posts and it seems interesting.  From what I gather, it’s a book about the feeling many mothers have these days–particularly middle and upper-class moms–that there’s some optimal standard of parenting that they’re never quite able to reach.  A "choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret" Warner calls it.

This cocktail really is poison, but I wonder whether many of us sip on it daily.  And this, whether we’re mothers or not.  Parents or not.  I wonder whether this book is a microstudy of a much bigger problem, and whether those of us who struggle with the feeling it describes–the "not enough syndrome" I might call it–might be helped to realize we’re sipping not on something of our own making.  What if it’s a feeling that’s actually perfectly normal and even to be expected, given the way our society runs? 

If we stopped working so hard to hide that we’re feeling this dis-ease, could our energy and creativity and confidence be freed up to actually address some of the causes of it–not causes of a personal, this-is-a-product-of-my-upbringing nature (which surely need to be honored and addressed as well), but causes that are broader in nature, and maybe simultaneously closer to the roots of this beast than the individual households that it’s ravaged?

This all sounds so abstract, but I don’t think it has to be.  I’d love to sit down with 15 or 20 people and name our experiences of this poison, this cocktail of not-enough feelings (which includes things like rage and bitterness and depression and anxiety).  We could start to brainstorm ways our culture produces this poison and is set up perfectly to peddle it.  We could begin to imagine what resisting the poison might mean. 

Could this be a way to depersonalize shame?  A way to more effectively lessen it than all our private attempts at willing it, or praying it, or therapeuting it away?  Warner says yes, when it comes to mommy madness.  What about the madness of us all?

It is a mysterious thing to be so responsible for a life, so elementally connected to it (I wipe his poop; I pick the dear boy’s nose), knowing it’s only for a season.  This must be what breaks my heart wide open when I hold him in those tender moments, when I put my face on the ground next to his and we laugh.  It’s the knowledge that he will grow up and be his own person, and that as he does so, I will step respectfully away—of course not in every way, but truly, and significantly—and that this is the way things are supposed to be.  I grieve the loss already, even as I’m glad for him to grow, and bless him to do so; in fact the prospect brings great joy.  He is mine, but not mine.  Part of me, but separate. 

I have to wonder whether this is true of our own selves in our own dear bodies, whether this isn’t part of the grief that accompanies dying.  We’re given these connections (bodies, children), but sometimes have to notice that they aren’t ours forever.  We notice how much we love them while they are, and that maybe, too, they never were ours altogether.  The mystery.

Elijah had a rough day with naps today. N left yesterday for a conference, and I wonder if he senses it. It was late afternoon before he finally fell asleep on my lap.

I looked at his rosy cheeks, his film of dark hair, his little brow unfurrowing, and all of it—his hands, the scratches on his face from his untrimmed nails, that dent between his lips and nose—it all made me want to weep. What is it about pure innocence, such uncomplicated thereness that makes me cry? I wanted to tell him I’m sorry for the things he’ll suffer. I’m sorry that the world is so big, and we’re small. That I’ll miss holding him like this when he grows older. That the way he looks up at me lately, with eyes so full of wonder, so full of hope and anticipation, and sets his hand on my cheek, it fills me up with holiness. It makes me believe, even for just that second, that maybe this, this is tasting God. And that maybe he’s literally getting what I long so deeply for: to reach out for and actually touch the face of God. To look into her eyes, maybe after a fit of crying because I wonder if I’m alone, and get to see and feel and even smell that she’s real, and warm, and present, and smiling on me.

Sleep well, dear boy. Sleep in a cloud of lovedness. May we fill each other’s lives with God.

I need to say again how much fun I’m having with this guy.  Every week he’s learning something new—to laugh more, to reach out and grab hold of things, to prop himself up a little better on his elbows.  Yesterday he started doing this funky thing with his tongue, where I swear it looks like he’s sucking on a marble.  There are no marbles in our household, but I was actually checking his mouth for one yesterday.

Since before Elijah’s birth I felt this crazy drive to avoid talking about him or motherhood too much—in “real” life, and on this site.  I’ve nursed a lifelong fear of motherhood sucking me into isolation and into being dismissed and/or ignored and/or found irritating by people who aren’t parenting.  I want to be interesting to people, and I’ve feared that motherhood is just plain dull to the general populace.

But here’s the thing:  by “general populace,” I’ve unwittingly meant those with public power.  As I observed the world around my childhood self, I think I did a kind of power analysis and came to conclude that those who “matter most” don’t really talk about babies or housekeeping or food.  They talk about work (the kind that makes money).  Politics.  Religion.  Sports.  The majority of them are (or were, in my life) men.  Eager to be taken seriously, I began a life-long quest to avoid the topics that power people avoid, and, conversely, the topics to which the mothers all around me flocked.

There is good sense to this quest—in wanting to be valued and heard and respected, and in wanting to build, rather than burn, bridges with people in different stages and roles in life than my own.  But the sense I’m now making of it all adds this to the mix:  by my avoidance of openly embracing most things maternal (i.e. talking freely of them with people not involved in the task)—and by maternal, maybe I should say historically so, because times are definitely changing—I don’t want to buy into an unfair game.  A game that says public life is more valuable than private life, men more valuable than women, earning money more valuable than literally putting the food on the table.  I don’t like that game.  I think it sucks, actually.  I don’t like the parts of men and women that it stifles and closes down and builds to over-hugeness.  No, I am not only a mother (as no mother is).  I am lots of things, and have lots of interests in life to pursue.  But one of them is definitely motherhood.

Anyway, here’s me realizing that I’ve been playing that game on this blog a lot more than I’d like, and that instead, I’d like to play the post-more-about-the-motherhood-I’m-enjoying-so-much game. Right now that sounds a lot more fun.