Garden Dreams

Each year, we plan a bigger garden. He and I
sit with grid paper between us, plotting the future
of zucchini, squash, beans and kale. We dream
of home-canned pickles gleaming on our pantry shelves,
the juice bursting from the first ripe tomato,
picked in summer heat, popped directly to mouth.

I tell him we need to dig to put up the kind of food
we'd like to feed a growing family well into winter.
Our lot has plenty of potential.
The front yard may be torn up and tiered,
the back alley bullied and rebuilt into beds.

My husband agrees: Grow more, grow much more.
We used to think that way about everything.
More vines crawling in the dirt behind our house
more tiny hands and feet padding in our home.
It's easy to dream on paper, before
you have to pick up your shovel, and dig.

Last year, I told him: No more children.
When I was younger, I thought there was enough
room in my house, in my life,
and in my heart, though I tremble to mention
how very full it is now, how I'm not sure
of its capacity for more. I wish it was larger.
I feel the soil beneath my hands crumble;
needs water, and I rise in the early morning light,
looking for something to give it to drink.

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Dear friends: I *finally* got the e-mail subscription box on this page working. If you'd like updates of posts, that is.

The new reality

Writing has gotten a lot harder for me lately, exponentially so. I know, I know: I have a newborn. Plus a toddler. The moment one goes down for a nap, the other starts fussing. While one eats, I'm feeding the other, then scarfing down whatever I can lay my hands on, in under five minutes, and it's usually gone cold. Then someone starts crying because she needs to be held constantly, or another starts crying because she's bumped her head on something. It's a very, very familiar story for mothers, one barely worth writing down. We're busy people.

Problem is, I refuse to define myself as a "stay-at-home mother." When people ask me what I do, I'm a writer, case closed. I work from home. This fact defines my day--it means that if both girls are sleeping, I'm not resting, or even doing something like preparing dinner. It means that I have responsibilities that extend beyond babies--even if these responsibilities are mostly enforced by myself, the part of me that says, "You need to get words on the page. You need to write today. You need to get further into this book."

I work every day--or at least, I attempt to. The truth of the matter is, if I don't manage to get much writing done that day, I am officially in a bad mood. Not writing ruins my day. I'm cranky and non-communicative at dinner, and my temper's short all evening. I don't want to connect with anyone. I don't want to play, cook, or talk. I just want to shut myself into a room, by myself, to get something down on the page.

How many words can I really expect to get down every day? Right now, I'm writing this in between nursing sessions. My baby squirms on my chest. I'm trying to eat a bowl of cereal, because I'm famished. I'm jiggling her, hoping to keep her at bay another five, maybe ten minutes. I don't have time to edit this post, much less create content I'm really proud of.

Working from home and simultaneously being present for both of my kids: That's the goal, and I'm currently not meeting it. I feel like I'm keeping about six balls in the air, while about ten others sit ignored at my feet. The most obvious casualty of my choices is housework. I don't think I've cleaned the bathroom in about two months. Yes, two months. I try to do a load of laundry every day (there's spit-up on everything--my clothes, hers, my sheets--plus we do cloth diapers), but most of the clean stuff is getting wrinkled in a basket in my room, or sitting in one of the machines still. The only time I get cleaning done is when I can somehow incorporate it into playing with my toddler: The other day, we took a pretend ride to Mars on a rocket ship, then swept dust from the satelites aka swept the kitchen floor. Spoon full of sugar, right? I'm still working on some way scrubbing the toilet could be part of a space mission.

Mostly I feel bad for the other people in my life: my husband, my friends. I simply don't have the energy right now to be present, to engage. I just don't feel like I have emotional energy left over at the end of the day. Maybe I need some sort of activity that's actually putting energy into me, instead of always zapping it out....writing can do that, when it's going well.

I really hate being a martyr here. This life--at home, with my two girls--was the life I dreamed of, the life I desperately wanted. I am lucky beyond belief to be able to afford to stay at home, not to mention having a home to stay in. I remember this every day, just about. But there's no escaping the fact that motherhood forces you to give up a large chunk of things you used to do in order to keep yourself happy. Like getting a solid night's sleep. Or attending yoga classes (can't afford that with two kids, single income). Or spending a chunk of every weekend devouring a novel that you've wanted to read forever. Or spontaneously going out to dinner with your husband. Until you have children, most people spend most of their lives taking care of themselves--it's a shock to the system, when suddenly you're struggling to complete the basics, like washing your hair.

I know these things might come back one day, when the kids are older and not physically attached to me for the better part of every day. I get that this is a season. That doesn't really make it easier.

Forward

I thought it would be like a re-run, having a second child. Like getting to re-live all the best moments of the first time I became a mother: Seeing a reflection of myself whenever I looked into her face. Spending every spare moment marveling over her teensy-tiny feet and fingers. Not being able to stop holding or kissing her, ever. Stopping my whole world and launching into re-orbit, with her at the center.

Only now there are two stars in my home, each burning with an equal brilliance, each exerting her own gravitational pull. And while I feel the strength of the baby's needs when she opens her tiny mouth and squalls from hunger or discomfort, I also feel the needs of my older girl, for time and attention and affection. I can't just prioritize one need anymore. But neither can I lump the two of them together into a single unit.

I can't re-orbit, not completely. I'm spinning, instead, in figure eights, around my two stars. The dwarf star and the supernova.

---

I have said of my first, "She came out of the womb like that." Here is how she came: stubbornly, slowly, with a fist up by her face, as though ready for a fight. She was alert, silent as a starfish, somber and observant; I called her my yogi child. I called her my philosopher. She gazed out at the world as though she already understood what a twisted tangled web of light and dark it really was. I knew immediately she would be a deep thinker, that her memory would be that of an elephant, that the world's pains and problems would bother her at a marrow-deep level. I brush her hair back from her eyes and wish only that my love would get into her marrow as well.

And my second came so fast that, in the moment before she was born, even I did not expect her, did not adequately anticipate, did not prepare. The cord was wrapped three times around her neck and when her body emerged, it was the color of a bruise. But then she gasped, and cried once, and life rushed into her. She opened her eyes and looked stunned to be in such a place as this. Her silences are different; they are the lake just filled with rain, the first bud appearing in the spring. My prediction: She will be carefree as the breeze. When she falls, she will pick herself up quickly. And when she does, I'm still hoping she'll look for me and run into my arms.

---

I must actively remind myself that this time around will not be like the first. She rests in my right arm while my toddler snuggles under my left. I rock her cradle with one hand and type with the other. It doesn't feel fair, it makes me feel guilty, and angry, that my attention should be divided this way. But the fact is that that's the reality of the situation. There's no going back--only forward.

End of a Season

A month or so back, a few weeks before delivering my second child, I pulled the drapes shut, climbed into bed, opened my mouth, and, like a snake, swallowed the end of the year. It sat undigested in my throat, bony and twitching. I kept putting my hands to my ears, as though to block out the noise of it, scratching away. It would not go down.

I am not good at waiting. Not for the arrival of a baby that I wanted so badly it made my eyes burn. Not for the end of a year laced with enough discomfort to make a dove squawk. My body doesn't do pregnancy. My entire physical body chafes against the presence of another person inside me. It starts vomiting right at six weeks and keeps it up for another eight months. It brings me to my knees with fatigue. It literally begins to pull me apart, so that things like walking or turning over in bed become excruciating.

In the end I just feel, instead of bursting with the presence of a six-pound person inside me, empty. I have been wrung out. I live in a body that feels like a house in the aftermath of a hurricane.

I sat inside of that house for the last month, remembering where things used to be. Before the waves came and picked things up and deposited them in unexpected places. One does not sustain another person's life for nine months and then deliver it into the world without rearranging the furniture, so to speak. It is most obvious in my physical body, of course: there is a softening there, but there is also scarring, which you may view through the glass of "motherhood makes you beautiful"--or not. Similarly, my emotional self has also been rearranged: softened, yes, and also scarred, in places. There are pieces of myself I simply don't recognize anymore, they have come so far from the origin point.

Thinking about it all now, though, I'm not really certain I miss the way things used to be. I certainly wouldn't go back, not for anything. Scarring and all. Whether I find it beautiful--or not.

In any case, it has been difficult for me lately to do anything other than take in. I absorbed the end of the year, watching and waiting and trying to enjoy the lights and music and teetering on the brink of major life change. This means, basically, that my writing life ground to a halt for a while. In a strange way, I felt like this child absorbed my energy over nine months, beginning with the physical, then moving to the emotional, and finally, in that last month, she took the creative, the intellectual. I sat and rested. I filled myself with as much beauty as I could, hoping it would pass through the umbilical cord to my daughter. But there was nothing left, at the end of the day, to put on the page.

I told myself often that this was a season of life. That it was no reason to panic or despair. That writing would return to me, once the storm quieted, moved on. I would find it beneath the debris, undamaged though changed.

Now that she rests not in my body but in my lap, I am hopeful that the season, like the year, will turn over and become new again.

What God Doing?

When we left church a couple of weeks ago, my toddler asked her first theological question.

"Where's God?" she wanted to know.

In the front seat, I glanced back at her little cherub face in the rear mirror and took a deep breath. Here it comes, I thought. At the age of two, she has begun the "God questions," and I'm just hoping I'm half up to the task. Get one of these wrong, and one day she'll be wondering why the foundation of her world is cracking in half, why I put her on the fault line.

"God is everywhere, honey. God is with you, God is with Mama, God is with Daddy, God is everywhere." (On top of the question of the "correct" answer, there's the question of how to translate it into terms a two-year-old can understand. Does she have half a grasp on the meaning of "everywhere?" I doubt it some, but then again, I tend to underestimate what she understands, as evidenced by how often I accidentally talk about her Christmas presents right in front of her.)

Anyway, I felt pretty good about that answer. Pretty sure.

The next week, she upped the ante.

"What God doing?" she asked me.

Smack. 

"Ummmm," I murmured, "good question, honey."

Only two years old, two "God questions" in, and I'm out of my league.

I think part of my problem was that I took the question quite concretely. My daughter is, after all, two. She asks, "What doing, Mama?" about 50 times a day, and every time the answer is something like, "Cooking your lunch, sweetie," or "Sweeping," or "Changing your diaper." I don't exactly answer her questions with an abstract explanation that I'm "parenting," even though that answer would of course be true.

In the same vein, I didn't really think answers like "redeeming the world" were exactly what she was looking for. So the question, as I heard it, was: What is God doing, precisely? Like, right now.

Good question.

The reason she's asking is because my daughter is concerned--you might even say obsessive--about the exact whereabouts and activities of her most immediate family members. Every morning, once her daddy has left, she wants to know "Where Daddy? What Daddy doing?" Even though the answer is always, always the same. It doesn't matter. She wants to hear me say it. Wants the assurance of placing her daddy on the map, imagining what he's doing.

Why is it that not once in the last two years have I shouted from the bedroom, "What doing, God?"

Anyway, the whole thing is bothering me, because frankly I don't really know "what God doing." I mean, I know a lot of things that God did. I know a couple of things that God will do. But here? Now? What doing?

The Story of Today

I wrote this short essay earlier this summer (hence the references to the blazing-hot weather) and felt it deserved a home here on this blog. 

When I woke up, I did not want to attend to the screaming baby. Actually, she’s a toddler now, but whenever she screams like that I still think of her as the baby, because non-babies do not normally, upon waking, begin shrieking at the top of their lungs as though they had been stabbed in the eyeball with a letter opener. Then again, non-babies are capable of getting themselves out of bed, and let’s face it, the letter-opener-in-the-eyeball scream is what normally propels me into her room, to rescue her from the crib.

            In any case, I didn’t want to get out of bed at all today. I’d been having this dream. The details of it are fuzzy now, but it was one of those dreams in which I was a completely different person, who lived in a different place and did not have children. And when I woke up, I did not want to have to mother my baby. I wanted to go back to the dream, which seemed like it was probably going to have a delicious ending before her shrill voice came crashing in.

If I was forced to wake up from the dream, I wanted a day where I did not have to mother her anyway. I wanted a temporary transfer to a parallel universe. In a parallel universe, I perhaps would have been someone who played cello in an orchestra, or who made a lot of money and spent it on shoes and wine, or who lived in Italy. In a parallel universe, I would not need to choose between yoga pants and the one pair of maternity jeans that fits me right now. I would not have to go through the exact same tedium every single day, whether weekend or holiday or whatever: get up, soothe, change diaper, fix breakfast, eat standing up, clean up, sweep, do toddler’s hair while she does an advanced form of toddler gymnastics on the bathroom floor.

In a parallel universe, I would probably get to shower.

This morning, I laid in bed a long, long time, wishing I could go back to sleep, wishing she would just go back to sleep, daydreaming about the childless life. I even prayed and asked Jesus to just make her go back to sleep, which I realized was a completely inappropriate use of prayer, and God was probably up there going “Does she think I’m some sort of genie?” and responding kind of how I do when my daughter asks me to produce more cookies from thin air.

Finally, I extracted myself from the sheets and went in to my daughter, who by that point was kind of ballistic.

“I know, I know,” I told her. “I’m sorry.” But I wasn’t sorry; I was grouchy. I did not offer the explanation that I essentially did not want to see her that day, and I was kind of hoping that if I waited long enough I could at least get another 20 minutes of sleep. I wiped the snot out of her face and brushed the hair out of her eyes and changed her sopping diaper. She put her head down briefly on my shoulder, crying, and then lifted it up when she had the revelation she has every morning: “Eat!”

Except then she wouldn’t eat. She only wanted to lick the grape jelly off of the English muffin that I’d spread with PB&J and then wantonly demand “more,” like a manic despot. If you have children you know that she took my reasoned decree—that she could have more if she would first finish what was already on her plate—about as well as Veruca Salt being told she couldn’t have a goose who lays golden eggs. So, eventually, her breakfast went in the garbage, which meant that she would be hungry all morning, which meant that she’d keep on being a pill.

After breakfast I asked her what she wanted to do, and she replied quite firmly, “Animals. Zoo.” It was the first time, actually, that she’d ever come up with her own plan for the day. Normally, I ask what she wants to do and she says nothing, because it’s kind of an abstract question anyway, and then I suggest what I want to do, and we do it. Personally, I wanted to go swimming, because we haven’t been in a while, and because it was so hot. We’d just been to the zoo two days before, and it seemed like yet another zoo trip was just a tad bit excessive, even though we have a membership.

“Well,” I said, “the other option is the pool. Would you like to go to the zoo, or to the pool?”

“Zoo,” she dictated. I sighed. ‘So this,’ I thought, ‘marks the first day of the rest of my life.’

I couldn’t exactly deny her, considering I’d asked her and everything, so we packed our stuff and did our hair and I asked her yet again whether she was sure she didn’t want to go to the pool and she said No Way Jose (basically), and we went to the zoo.

It was super hot, and I thought longingly of the pool, of cool water on my head, of tan lines that didn’t resemble a Nebraska farmer’s. My daughter was fussy, almost immediately, her legs dragging until her pace became excruciating. I sighed and pulled out my baby carrier—advertised as sufficient for children up to 45 pounds, a claim we’re probably going to wind up testing—and strapped her in. It wouldn’t have been quite so taxing if I were not also pregnant and asthmatic. Pretty soon I was dripping with sweat, panting like a dog.

Finally, we found an oasis: a covered area filled with benches. On top of that, we were just in time for the elephant show, which would mean 30 solid minutes of pachyderm-provided entertainment. ‘We’ll just sit here and watch elephants for the next hour,’ I thought. ‘And then go home.’

The elephants perked us up. So did the ice-cold water we sipped. She stopped whining; I stopped seething with frustration.

The show ended. We pulled out our lunch. We ate quietly, and I looked around. The woman behind me pulled her baby in to her breast to nurse. She looked so peaceful and present about it, stroking her baby’s cheek, the baby clutching her shirt. And I thought not of the baby on the way, who soon enough would be breastfeeding, but of how much I missed nursing my daughter, how I wished we could do it then, because it was always so calming to both of us, the touching of skin, the way she would put her hand on my breast, the way I would put my hand softly on her cheek, looking into one another’s eyes, the giving and filling of one another’s needs.

I looked over at my daughter. She looked so suddenly big, in the way only your baby can look big. I felt startled, a bit, by the length and strength of her legs, by the way her hair flopped into her eyes, by her capable hands fiddling with the Tupperware.

Suddenly I just wanted to touch and be closer to her. Wanted to grab her in both arms and smother her with kisses. Wanted, even more strongly, to nurse her as though she were still a baby. Instead I reached under her chin and tickled. She giggled, kicking her legs. Like a child myself, I gave a little squeal and tickled some more. And then we were both laughing, tickling, squirming. I forgot about the morning, and I forgot about my dream. I forgot everything. It all evaporated in the warmth of that moment, how my daughter tilted her head back and scrunched up her nose when she laughed. And I thought: If I could keep only one memory in my heart forever, I would choose this one.

And so it’s funny, isn’t it? The way your mother’s heart can turn, so quickly and completely, so softly on its heel.