Cooking against the apocalypse

2:26

I gave the speech I had to give last week, and it brought no particular sense of relief.  My visit to the city wasn’t satisfying to me at all.  I was brought in as The Expert, and I am not.  Rather, I’m a collector of questions and maker of connections between people who ask them and act on them.  But people prefer answers to questions, at least from people who come trailing my particular clouds of privilege and institutional credibility.  I knew I should resist, but didn’t have a good way to start, or didn’t believe in the questions enough.  So I came home disappointed and frustrated and false-feeling.  And, to be honest, a bit bruised in ego.  Part of me did want to be The Expert, and dazzle them with what I knew and what I could give them.  Then their questions quickly outstripped my knowledge and scrambled me; I stuck myself in an unsatisfying place between telling and listening.  I told more than I knew or responsibly should have.  I listened not nearly enough.  I’m so disappointed.

I could call a friend who knows what this is like and talk to her about it, but I’m scared to. I’m scared that she’ll draw more out of me than I want to give — she’s amazing and needy, and it shouldn’t surprise me that those two things go together.  I’m scared that she’ll find me fraudulent.  I’m scared she’ll turn loose her own collection of questions and I won’t have good answers.  I can decide to sit with this for a while, instead of not calling her, I’m just not calling her yet.  I think I’ll have to call her, but I have to catch my breath first.  She’s work, and I need rest.

I continue to be a stranger to rest. I spent Friday afternoon cooking against the apocalypse.   After watching the inauguration, I started on a potato kugel for Shabbat dinner, which is actually pretty easy because the food processor does the hard work.  Lots of clean-up, though.  Then I decided I really wanted lentil soup, so got that going but ended up putting in not enough water at the start and too much at the end, so the flavor is a little wan.  Then pureed some white beans with olive oil, dried sage, shallots and a few other herbs because I thought I should do something with the white beans sitting in the freezer.  That was great — shallots are vegetarian bacon, wonderful flavor bombs.   Then tahini brownies because Milo likes them and because I needed to be busy but not with my brain.  I defrosted one of the challahs from new year’s, too.  And made deviled eggs, because I do that every Shabbat.  It was marvelous, I must say, to have so much good, homemade warm food.  To unroll into richness like that.  My guys don’t care about my cooking, but I care a lot, and that’s enough.

Yesterday I took a long walk with lots and lots and lots of friends: Milo and I went to the march in our city.  Milo was comfortable among the pussy hats and uterus drawings, although the slogan “The Future is Female” hurt his feelings.  “It’s supposed to be about equality,” he said, with a mixture of righteousness and confusion.  He held my hand when we were in the crowds, but when we ran into two of his friends from school who appeared to be un-parented during the march, he pointedly ignored me. I know my job, so I kept silent and didn’t even smile too much at them.

I might neglect the laundry and take to bed for an hour.  Today has been more and more and more tending to the externals, the dog, the laundry, the breakfast cookies (Milo eats them 10 at a time).  I did yoga and bought lots of delicious, expensive, recondite teas.  Well, I believe that they will be delicious.  I know them to be expensive and recondite.  Yes, to bed now.

2:50

Unhappy with sunshine because tomorrow it may rain

I am writing at the moment from a place of weakness and lots of tears, so if that’s not the kind of post you’re looking for at the moment, perhaps you’d like to come back another day.

So, this happened again.  Or this.  Or this.  Or this.  “This” meaning… I am searching for the right verb here — is it falling, slamming, breaking, exploding, incinerating, dissolving, crashing?  “This” meaning being in the soul-shredder of secondary infertility again.  This being all the tears and the pain ambushing me and scrambling my brain and just hurting, hurting, and hurting.

We went to a bris today — a circumcision and naming ceremony for a newborn Jewish boy.  And I was fine until I wasn’t.  I am exhausted by work and I had a rotten and stressful morning at the office.  Daniel was furious because he really needed to reach me (I had both our car keys and he was stranded at home) and I had left my cellphone behind when I went to lunch — being out of cellphone contact is a capital crime in our household (maybe it’s also an avenue of passive-aggression for me.  It’s possible.  I might take that up another time).  I am predisposed to tears right now, and I know that.  And that doesn’t make me feel one bit better.

We should have had more children.  So simple to say (and so impossible to do) and yet it wrecks me.  Milo adores babies.  He said he could have stayed at the bris for two hours to be near the new baby — even if it meant less Wii time (this is an unbelievable concession for an elementary-school aged boy).  We should have had another baby for Milo.

We should have had more children for me.  I wasn’t finished yet.  I wasn’t done.  I’m not done.  I have more mothering I want to do.  There are women who feel done.  They had their kids, it was great or not, and now they are done.  I will never be done.  I will never be full.

And even as I say that I rebuke myself.  I was on the computer yesterday afternoon shopping for shoes for a wedding that’s 3 months away when I should have been watching a movie with Milo.  Hell, I’m on the computer RIGHT NOW when I could be enjoying Milo.  Every moment of regret and tears for the baby that’s not here is energy that could be going to enjoying, relishing, gorging on the wondrousness of Milo (which is what Daniel does).

I want Daniel to say something.  I want him to say, “It was a mistake not to have more.”  That would help.  But he doesn’t believe it.  And even if he did, he’s got such complicated feelings about his ambivalence and his physical role in our infertility, he couldn’t ever say anything about it.  To him, everything is perfect.  A new baby in the world is an occasion to reflect on the glory of Milo.  Milo’s adoration of a new baby is an occasion to reflect on the glory of Milo.

I don’t want to stop being the most important person in my child’s life, and that’s going to happen.  As children need you less, you need more of them to make up for the diminution of each one’s affection and attention — when something is diluted you need more of it.  We have, as I’ve written, ultra-concentrated joy.  I want less intensity, more duration.

And I hate myself a little bit for that.  I have something — someone — so gorgeous and good and precious and I don’t enjoy him as much as I should because I want more.  What is wrong with me?  Why can’t I be okay?  Why can’t I believe that I got lucky when it’s so clear that I did?   I keep looking for consolation, and it’s right there in the backseat, or upstairs, or downstairs — it’s right fucking there, and I can’t feel it because I am too sad.  This may be the cruelest particular trick of secondary infertility.  You are unhappy with sunshine because tomorrow it may rain.

Oh I don’t want to go to synagogue tomorrow and feel all this when I’m praying.  Have I mentioned how much I dislike synagogue lately?  Can’t stand it actually, and it’s an effort to suppress that, too.  I hate it.  I said it.  It’s not going to change my behavior, but I said it.  I’m going to start studying with a super-star teacher in our community and I want to lay it all out for her: disappointment, prayer, the withdrawl of providence, anger, all of it, and dare her to make it make sense for me.  I will be worse than the most sullen teenager she’s ever seen.

Yesterday I was filled with regret that I didn’t unilaterally stop birth control in the years in which Daniel was most uncertain about having another child.  It occurred to me that that might be my life’s biggest regret.  Irreversible.  It would have been wrong to do, but now I wish I’d done it, and I have to make it okay for myself that I didn’t.

All of this — praying, hating synagogue, managing my feelings, rewriting my past, comforting myself for doing the best I could –all of this is energy I don’t want to spend.  I resent the hell out of it.  I want not to have to do this.  Last week I was upset about the effort of managing my feelings about secondary infertility.  There is so much effort.

I now have to remind myself of what my life is really like, good and bad, and that I am so stressed, and that Daniel needs so much of my attention (and that is actually a good thing because it means I can’t run my marriage on auto-pilot — we can’t ever drift too far because somebody starts to flip out.  That’s a good thing.  We have a built-in safety net.  Sometimes it would be okay if we could drift a wee bit farther, if the safety net gave us a little more range of motion, but, better to have it than not), and that money is a huge issue for us.  Our situation is probably the optimal one for us.  All likely true.  But it’s an effort to remember that.  It’s an effort to be good and on the right path and improving and grateful and all the things I need to be.  I would like to be relieved of that effort — but I know that no one ever is.  It is effortful for everyone to be good.  Being human means making the effort.

Today I am thankful for Milo and for the possibility of change, even though I don’t feel that possibility right now,

Setting intentions, reluctantly

Today I am thankful that the evening with Milo and Daniel was significantly more pleasant than last night, when Milo and I got into an extremely bad downward spiral.   I am a “because I said so” authoritarian parent when pushed.  Milo is very good at pushing.  I should have realized what was going on, disengaged, stopped trying to stick to the schedule and the inculcation of discipline and good habits and just gotten to the bottom of his rotten mood.  But, um, I forgot to do that.  Daniel came home and looked at us as if we were both crazy, me (the grown-up) especially and toppled into despair.  Tonight we were our usual sparkling and fabulous selves.  And I made kale for dinner, which makes me feel exceedingly virtuous.  The guys tolerate it.

Here’s the thing about my blogging.  When I come here, I, as have repeated said, control the narrative.  I can shape the story, I can pace it, this space is mine without impediments.  And I have lovely readers and commenters who say nice things about me and it’s all cozy and delightful.

My home life is not nearly this reliable.  Since we’ve been back home, I notice how intent I am on blogging, which means I’m not as intent on focusing my attention on Daniel in the evenings.  Given that I started this blog largely as a way to focus my attention and intention on improving my marriage after infertility, this is rather ironic.  Daniel and I need loads and loads of attention from each other.  Or maybe we don’t, but it’s what we think we need.  We get rather peckish if the other is staring at the screen all night.  I’ve considered cutting back on my posting, maybe to two or three times a week (I’m averaging about five now, I think), so that I can just be more present with Daniel, and also get more boring household stuff done.  But I don’t want to.  I like myself more when I write.  I want to spend more time writing, for other venues, not less.  I don’t know how I’m going to work this out.

My time is so regimented and parceled out.  Adding entails subtracting.  Over the last several months, blogging more means sleeping less, which is not sustainable for me.  I need to be done by… well, about now.   Every night.

I try to avoid New Years resolutions, but this morning, in response to yesterday’s bad and unsettling evening and a minor but repercussive skirmish with Daniel the day before, I decided to set some intentions to do things differently.  I am skittish about setting intentions because of those wacky yoga emails and Oprah articles that say (they don’t even suggest) that the right intentions are the key to results.  Well, yeah, sometimes, kind of.  But they don’t always get you pregnant.  Necessary, not sufficient, not by a long shot.

But I do think that setting my mind towards changing my behavior is a reasonable thing, and for whatever I reason I prefer to call this an intention rather than a resolution because intention sounds encouraging and like a feather and less strict and heavy than resolution.  Yeah, semantics, but I’m a big believer in the careful use of words and that they matter.  I won’t make a resolution, I will set an intention (and I will be very, very wordy about it, won’t I?)

Anyway, here are my intentions:

I am, per Daniel’s repeated and ardent requests, going to shepherd all of us into the living room when we get home, so we can spend 10 minutes talking to each other, rather than launching the evening program.  This sounds simple, but it is nearly impossible for me to do, ever.  I get home and start racing the clock (dinner! homework! practice! bath! bed! all between 6:20 and 8:30! Ready, set, go!) and I expect Daniel and Milo to race with me.  Daniel wants this, but he would rather be pissed off about it not happening than make it happen himself, so I’m going to try it, for him.  I am testing my assumption that it is impossible to do this and still get a decent dinner on the table at a decent time.

I am going to use my commute home to reinforce my intention to do the above, and generally to avoid my usual pattern of rushing myself and everyone else through the evening.  I am going to be intent on being lovely and welcoming.  I may fail, but I will probably succeed more often if I at least think about it.

Big, huge, super-impossible one here: I have an intention — or rather, I intend — to stop telling Daniel how to take better care of himself, or even to take better care of himself at all.  Daniel stinks at taking care of himself in ways that I want him to, meaning exercise, sleep, proper food, water and handwashing.   I believe that most physical and emotional states can be improved, a lot, thusly, and a chorus of women’s magazines (the old-lady ones like Real Simple and Ladies Home Journal, not Elle) agree vigorously — as I hope you do, dear readers.  It works for me!   But Daniel doesn’t do these things, even though his doctor told him just two days ago that stress is causing some intense and consistent physical discomfort (esophogeal spasms).  And you know, what?  I can’t make him.  He knows what I think, and it doesn’t change a damn thing.  So, it’s up to him.  When he complains about how he feels I will say, maybe aloud, maybe silently, “So what are you going to do about it?”  And that’s it.

This is a long paragraph that basically says “Stop nagging,” but I wanted to show how meritorious my intentions and my recommendations are, to show how heroic I am in renouncing them.

But if Daniel told me to do something (like write under my own name) as often as I told him to exercise or eat better, I’d be furious.  So, okay, empathy and silence.

Okay, this post has taken more than an hour, and I intend (!) to be gracious to Daniel and get to bed early tonight, so I’m off.  Ask me in 6 weeks (or days) how all this is working for me.

Longing and the counter-factual

Today, I am thankful to be back where I live (which I didn’t think I would be), and back to my blog (which is now misnamed, at least in the URL, because it’s not 2010 and there is much, much rebuilding still to be done).

I come from a very cool place that has gotten significantly cooler in the almost-20 years since I’ve lived there.  When I tell people where I’m from they look at me quizzically and say, “Why don’t you still live there?”   The answer used to be simple: I don’t still live there because I’m from there!   Had I not gone to college there, against my wishes and my vast ambitions, I might have found my way back and built my grown-up life there.  But when I set out to build, I wanted to build far away.  I wanted to build in the not-cool town in which I live now.  And I did, and this built-or-rebuilt life is deeply rooted here.  Where I’m from is a very different USDA growing zone, and I can’t imagine a successful transplant.

Except, of course, when I go back.  When I go back, I long to move us there.  I used to disdain grown-up life in my home town because I thought I knew exactly how it would go.  I knew where I would live, where I would shop, where I would pray.  It seemed claustrophobic.  Now it seems magical.  I wish I lived closer to my parents (whatever their flaws as my parents when I was a child — and they were flaws from ignorance and a too-small worldview, not from effort or temperament — they are superb parents to me as an adult, and brilliant grandparents to Milo).  I wish I could replicate for Milo some of the things I knew as a child.

And most of all, when I am in my hometown, I wish I could be who I think I was there, who I (mis)remember being there.   When I was there, well, I was 20.  I was bullet-proof and rocket-fueled.  Or so it seems now.  Now I think I could recover something lost.  I could be a writer there — I wanted to be a writer when I lived there.  I started writing there.  I was known there, I wasn’t Daniel’s shadow.  I was the superstar, the promising one.

So of course I longed to be back.  And of course I longed for more time in which I don’t have real responsibilities, like my job and dinner and bills.   And longing and imagining doesn’t, and probably will never ever again, happen singly for me.  When I long, I long for whatever sparks it, and the child I won’t have.  That’s my new permanent setting — longing in stereo.    My mother’s family came over for Christmas (my parents are Christian,  it all works out remarkably well), and there are a lot of them, and I was sad about my own smaller-than-I-wished family (leave aside that my grandparents, who produced this big family by having four kids were deeply miserable in their marriage.  I have no memory of them being happy together, and my grandfather died when I was 20, so I had a lot of time to see them both.  My grandmother has flourished as a widow, which is both happy and sad).

There were so many great moments on this trip, but there was that double shadow of yearning over most of them.  After Christmas, Daniel and I went away for a few days to an even cooler town whose main industry is creativity in a range of cool, artsy, foodie forms.  It was amazing.   There were a fair number of tourists there, and I looked at each family, hungrily, wanting to see just one child, not two, not three.   I saw indescribable art, but it never left my head that the artist had two children.  And I imagined a life in which I could be in this cool art town creating things and writing.  Why aren’t I?  (Short answer: not enough remotely traditional Jews.)

Yesterday I spent most of the day enjoying Milo, playing with him in my parents’ front yard, going to one of my favorite secluded places just down the road.  The three of us, my own little family, stood where I used to play in the shade and sand and water.  Milo and I stirred up dirt and tried to catch sticks.  The sun was shining, the light was soft, Daniel was as happy as he could imagine being.  And I was happy but even so I couldn’t stop missing the child who wasn’t there.  I tried to tell myself that if she’d been there, the moment would have been less perfect, because I would have had to stop her from falling in the water, because she would distract us from Milo’s discoveries, because something.  But it hurt, and I hated that it hurt.  I wanted to have this perfect moment and not be in the shadow.  But the shadow was between me and the moment.  I resent this so deeply.

In the cab on the way home from the airport tonight, I turned my head and cried a bit.  I wasn’t happy to be coming home — to my real home, the one I live in now.  My hometown is obsessed with pleasure and lifestyle and beer and food and its own coolness.  It’s not overtly anti-intellectual, but it kind of wonders why you’d want to work so damn hard.  Nobody works past 7, nobody works weekends.  My real home, my now-home, is all drive and power and status and ambition.  People work weekends whether or not they really have to.  Creativity exists here, but it doesn’t exactly flourish — that’s not what we do here.  Or rather, we are creative but not generally in soul-nourishing ways.  (Good lawyers are very creative, for example, as are real estate developers and deal-makers.)

But then I got home, inside my real home, with my stuff and my life.  My tools.  My decisions.  My responsibilities.  And thanks be to God, I liked it.

When I go away, I get wrapped up in counter-factuals.  If I had stayed or returned to where I grew up…. If I had married someone I was supposed to marry (a type, not a specific individual)…. And every counter-factual includes that child I didn’t get to have — because why not?  If I’m imagining a life I don’t have, why not throw in the object of my most ardent unfulfilled desire?  Counter-factuals are dangerous for me.  Unfortunately, that’s how I tend to experience the world.  My favorite thing to do in a new city is ride the subway, because that’s what people who live there do.   My new favorite thing to do is to find a yoga class, which I did in the super cool art town.  I am always imagining my other life in another place.  I can’t just be a visitor.  I need to sense the texture of the life there.  And in for a penny, in for the pain.

Lawyers talk about good facts and bad facts.  Secondary infertility is a bad fact.  But the other facts, the life I really live, is full of good facts.  I can feel them when I am surrounded by them.  I am okay with them.  They are good.  They are blessings.

When I was in the super-cool art town, I did a little yoga one morning in my hotel room, and I surprised myself by sobbing as I lay in shivasana.  I was yearning to be consoled.  If God couldn’t or wouldn’t or didn’t heed my prayers for another baby, I begged for consolation.  Some huge, transcendent, deep and abiding feeling of consolation, something that a human couldn’t provide (Daniel is not in the consolation business.  He wants my pain to disappear, to non-exist.  Consoling me means recognizing how much I still hurt.  He can’t afford that.)  And I cried because none was forthcoming.

But it occurs to me a little bit now that my consolation is here, where I live, where I am writing, where I am building, where I cook dinner and get tired and do stuff that is and isn’t rewarding.  It doesn’t feel like I thought — it’s not a great soft pillow, it’s not a balm, and it’s not comprehensive.  But it’s adamantine, like my own hard-won strength.  It’s not a blanket — it’s a tangle of very, very strong and true threads.

 

Sick leave

Today I am thankful that I feel well enough now to sit up straight and type for a few minutes.

I could write a post showing, not telling, how dramatically and suddenly sick I got in the wee hours of Monday, but that would not be nice to read.  I spent all of Monday in bed.  I felt so bad I didn’t even get up to turn off the light so I could sleep.  I have been stay-at-home, stay-in-bed sick three times since mid-September.  Flu, bacterial upper-respiratory infection, and now this virulent virus.  I’ve worried I was sick another two times and thus had four courses of antibiotics since mid-September.

I’m tempted to make this into a metaphor about the aftermath of infertility — why wouldn’t it be?  Why shouldn’t the physical fallout be comparable to the emotional fallout?  That may be the case, but it’s also true that dear Milo has been sick at least four times himself since mid-September (three rounds of strep, one random virus).  Milo is not, as far as I know, suffering from infertility.   (Y’know there’s someone out there who would make the argument that in fact he is, that the pain in our household has infected our sweet son, that being an only child against his will is making him physically ill.  And that person, whoever she is, can f*ck right off.)

This last virus is probably connected to my emotional state.  Whenever I am beaten down with exhaustion, my stomach kindly goes haywire just so I can be very still for at least 24 hours.  It’s happened several times before.  I wonder if I sensed it coming.  I had planned on a shopping expedition on Monday (some repairs were being made to the building that houses my office, so I had the day off), but decided to do it Sunday instead.  Maybe my body said, “Okay, good, you’re done.  You may think you have a lot of work to do, but, really, you’re done.”

I am trying not to over-do it, and I have a lot of packing and other preparations to tend to for our week long trip to my parents’ house, so posting will probably be very light until the new year.

Oh boy, I am so very ready for a new year.  Anyone else?

What I think I've learned

Loss is a powerful, if rough, teacher.  Here is what I think it has taught me, or rather, here’s a first pass at what I think it has taught me.  I expect I’ll revisit this topic.

Be grateful.  I am still a C student at being grateful, but before infertility, I wasn’t even in the class.  I thought I had earned all the wonders and goodness in my life through hard work, the proper attitude, general kindness, punctuality, reasonable intelligence, and extreme diligence about paperwork.  Hah!  None of that mattered in infertility.   I recognized that so much of my life is the result of luck and gifts.  In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison describes the process of putting a few drops of black pigment into white paint, which has the effect of intensifying the whiteness.  I know Ellison was talking about black and white people in America.  Still, this run of non-luck has put all the rest of the luck in the foreground.

I can live with it.  There were points in the process when I thought I would go mad if I didn’t have a second child.  I did not think I could contain the rage and disappointment and confusion — I thought it would incinerate me.  I would never be able to tolerate it.  But I can.  I am.  I can be happy when a friend sails into two instant pregnancies in her very late 30s.  I can enjoy other people’s babies and not be sad (not too sad, not super sad, not wrenching sad.  Sighing sad, but that’s not so bad).  This surprises me.  My mourning about not having a second isn’t over, even if I don’t always recognize it.  But it’s not as all-consuming as I thought.  (Go ahead, type it.   Type it knowing that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and “May we be written in the book of life” and “On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who shall live and who shall die…” is coming up.  Go ahead.  Dare God.  Dare yourself.  Stare the prospect of utter dissolution and despair right in the face and say how you feel right now. )

Feel what you feel now.  Yeah, okay, about that.  There’s no point in declining to feel okay now out of fear that I’ll feel like hell later.  The mood shifts might be exhausting, and I might look up from weeping on Wednesday and say, “But I felt fine on Sunday,” and start another cascade of tears.  But that’s still no reason to miss out on the calmness and reasonableness, and (go ahead, tempt fate again) even pride in being able to be calm and reasonable and wise at this moment.  In fact, I think it’s good to lay down this marker, so that on Wednesday I can remember this and say, okay, that’s possible.  If it’ s not possible for me now (i.e. Wednesday), but it may be possible again.

Feeling worse later on doesn’t falsify feeling better now.

Give my heart completely to Milo. Okay, this is a tough one.  I was saving room in my heart for Milo’s sibling, so I held back just a fraction of love from him.  I didn’t want to fall in love with him completely, because I feared I would slacken in my intensity to have another one — and if I slackened, it would never happen.  (I didn’t slacken, and it didn’t happen anyway).  When I saw Daniel devote himself completely to Milo, I wanted him to hold back.  I wanted him to believe that his fatherhood was not complete.  I wanted him to keep wanting something more.  Daniel didn’t do that.  To him, Milo is complete and perfect and sufficient — satiating, even.  So I held back for both of us.

I regret that, deeply.  My emotional accounting was so wrong, so unnecessary.  So infertility has made me a better mother to Milo.  He didn’t get a sibling’s love, but he got more of mine.  I am not afraid to love him in the way I should have loved him all along.  I am so sorry I didn’t before.  I can treasure him.  He is not part of a never-completed set.  He is himself in full, and I delight in him.

O-kay.  (Can I get an “A” in this?   I’m still so achievement oriented.  I failed infertility, but can I get an “A” in learning from it?  Nobody ever says that being a good student, a great student, has tremendous downsides later in life.)

Posting will be light for the rest of the week — have I mentioned that Rosh Hashanah is coming up?

Service interruptions

My sister-in-law and niece are here, so I may not be blogging (or against-the-odds-accidentally-conceiving) for the next few days.

Milo is starting a campaign to go to sleepaway camp next summer.  I’m for it.  I think he’ll be the perfect age, and I think he’ll love it.  Daniel is reacting with something like blind panic.  “He’s too young.  He’s too young to go away for two months.”  It’s not two months, he’s not too young, or he won’t be next year.  Daniel can’t bear to let go of Milo, to see that he’s moving steadily into his own realm, and this will only accelerate.

This infuriates me.  I have been having to let go of my treasures and dreams for years.  I am having to let go even now, and permanently.  I have no patience for Daniel’s panic.  It hardens my heart.  I should be overflowing with sympathy and understanding, but I feel mostly anger.  It’s a nasty confluence of things — hopes, hypotheses, first reactions, last chances.

And this blind panic reminds me of Daniel’s attitudes and anxieties about the second child generally, so all that pain starts to resonate again.  You wouldn’t know it about Daniel, who appears very cerebral and claims to venerate reason, but he is (or, to be fair, he can be, he sometimes is) a pinball, careening from one strong, irrational feeling to another.  He uses his considerable intellect to dress up his overwhelming feelings with words and reasons.  I see that now.  It may be taking the edge off my anger, but it may not.

Updated, after a night’s sleep and reflection:  I am not angry.  Maybe my intention not to be pissed off at Daniel is working.  But I am still very stirred up — maybe a little bit angry.  The reason to have more than one child is that the sweetness is so fast moving.  They go to summer camp.  They go to college.  They get married (or not) and go on vacation without you.  They have their whole grown up lives.  Having two or three or a dozen gives you that many more chances to catch that fast-moving sweetness, so that when one launches, you have the comfort of the other(s).  And by the time the last one launches, you’ve had time to get used to it.  Having more than one is having compassion for yourself as a parent.  It cushions some of the regular, workaday, necessary heartbreaks.

I asked for a sign, but…

I did.  I asked for signs from God.  And He may have sent one, but it’s not the one I wanted.

Yesterday I wrote that I might not be happier if I had a second child.  Today, I learned belatedly about this article.

I’m not sure that I’m pleased about being right.  I’d kind of rather God said, “Oh, wait, sorry, I’m a little slow on the draw here, but sure, of course, you can have that second baby.”  His indication that “Yes, sweetie, you’ll be okay with what you have now” is less satisfying.

In other news, today I have been a good mom, a yes mom.  I said yes to things that normally I would say no to, because no was somewhat more convenient for me.  I enjoyed Milo’s company tremendously.  Milo is reading a book about houses and how all the systems in them work, and he wished aloud that he could see how the toilet tank functions.  So I said, “Okay, come see,” and we peeked inside one of the toilets.  I medicated a freak-out about bug bites (Milo is a major hypochondriac, which he inherited from his father and my father) with root beer.  All this happened because I took the afternoon off and decided not to worry about work.  Maybe I don’t need more children, maybe I need less work.

A glimmer

Tonight was an end-of-session shindig at Milo’s camp.  These things are among the hardest for me to navigate, because my one-childness (only-childness?  What’s the parental analog of being an only child?) is so obvious to me then, when every other adult has two or three kids clamoring around them.

But it wasn’t so bad.  It wasn’t so bad when a completely delicious little boy with blond curls passed me a dozen times as he ran with that pell mell toddler gait up and down the center aisle and reminded me so much of Milo at that age.  It wasn’t so bad when I spotted a couple and thought for most of the night that they, too, had only one child, but then saw them with both their daughters.  It wasn’t so bad when even the hippy-dippy, living-on-a-shoestring artist couple behind us in the ice cream line were there with their two kids.  (Maybe because Milo admitted to having a crush on their lisping little girl and offered to buy her an ice cream.  She declined, because she had her own money.  I was smitten — I do so love a gal who pays her own way.)

I’ve felt okay before, and it’s always been temporary, so I’m sure another crash is imminent (eminent? Yes! Certainly not transcendent).  But it’s nice to believe for now that this genuine feeling of okay is a good sign.  It’s progress.  I adore progress.

It occurred to me as I sat through the endless program (Milo’s bit only took up 10 minutes) that maybe I am as happy as I would be if I had two kids.  People now study these things.  They find that people who win the lottery generally go back to being as happy as they were before they won, unless of course winning the lottery completely wrecks their life.  Apparently people who become paraplegic in accidents also eventually achieve the same level of happiness or life satisfaction as they had before they were hurt.  That’s very hard to believe, just as it’s hard to believe that having another child wouldn’t make me happier.  I mean, it certainly would make me happier, because I wouldn’t be sad about not having another child, but maybe once it got worked into the rough rhythms of daily life, I wouldn’t be happier than I am now.   Well, not exactly now, as in this period in which I’m dealing with the end of a dream and the hard work of learning, finally, how to be a nice wife.  But now-ish.  Now as in some kind of life continuous present.

How can that be possible?  There’s no way to check it.  I can’t imagine that any mother would say, “Yes, I can imagine that I’d be as happy as I am now without Elena/Rebecca/Asa/Asher” (those were names I’d weighed for my second), although my God I would love her if she did.  I love love love mothers who can get some distance on their own mothering, who can say, “yes, it’s great, but there are other great things, too.”   She wouldn’t be able to imagine life without Elena/Rebecca/Asa/Asher.  There would be a big hole where E/R/A/A is now, and that would be intolerable.  But if she could rewind it so she didn’t know better, what would the outcome be?   What would she be doing with all the energy and love that’s going to E/R/A/A, and could she perhaps not imagine her life without that thing?  This blog, my life, is playing out that experiment.

Save some for Wednesday!

At the rate Daniel and I are going, heartbreak Wednesday will be nuclear winter.

Another fight last night.  Who knew I could scream so loud?  I’ve never done that in life before, only in dreams.

We fought, again, about trying to try without really trying.  Daniel finds the concept revolting, promise-breaking, reality-denying.  So tonight I called my oldest friend, who is pregnant, and asked her to come on Saturday to pick up our old baby stuff, which I’ve been hoarding.  I think this will be a very good thing for me.  It will be easier for me to let go of my dream if it’s in the service of hers.  All the tools and clothes and kit that helped me be a mother to Milo will help her mother her own son.  I think this will be a good thing.

Maybe Daniel will see this and relax (and then we can try-without-trying without him knowing!).  Maybe then feng shui and karma and other non-Jewish pop-cosmologies will open a door for me.  Or maybe I’ll just have a lot more room in my basement and closets.   This very final letting go of all hope and effort is no small undertaking.

I will regret these fights, these lost days, weeks, years one day.  I will want these days back, even though now I want them only to be over.  How do I know this?  Because I want Milo’s infancy back.  Desperately.

I was not great as a mother of an infant.  I was exhausted, nervous, jangled.  I didn’t have close friends nearby with babies, nor did I have peers.  I felt entirely alone.  Daniel, who now adores Milo ravenously, was befuddled by this new demanding entity.  I didn’t enjoy it enough.  I was so lost, so confused, so worried about absolutely everything.   I wasn’t patient enough.  I didn’t treasure all the things I could have treasured.  I carry so much regret and guilt about that.

I wasn’t significantly better when Milo was 1 or 2 or 3.  I still wasn’t patient enough.  I didn’t want to play.  I just wanted relief or sleep or quiet or some other cool adult life that I wasn’t having.  Milo was and is a super-high-energy, very intense kid, and I struggled with that.  The family I came from was on a very low flame emotionally.  I didn’t understand being so needed, so in demand.

Finally, when Milo turned 4,  I understood what people meant when they said the time goes so fast.  Four was a magical age for my Milo, and things have been on an upward trend since then.  But I think it’s not the difference in Milo (although a beloved friend and mother of four once confessed, “I don’t love the baby stage”), but the difference in me.  I got it, finally.  I slowed down.  I have a journal from that time that I used to document that I was slowing down and how I did it.  It was an emotional/temporal accounting.

I know (more) how to pay attention.  I know (more) how to slow down.  So can’t I have a do-over with another baby?  I promise I’ll do it right this time.  I will be so attentive, so grateful, so loving, so patient.   Mothers of more than one will read this and shake their heads sympathetically.  I have an inkling that the demands of the earlier child or children keep you from savoring all the moments with the later ones.  There aren’t do-overs, ever. My do-ing over has to happen in the present.