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seattleboundwritergrl · 6 years ago

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2018: A Year in Motherhood

At the start of this year, Apollo was six months old.

He had his first in a series of colds and ear infections that would last until May.

We were working on sleep-training and nap-training, and I felt equal parts successful (he went to sleep independently with minimal fuss! We had a solid routine before bed and nap!) and like a total failure (he still woke up at least twice a night. Naps at daycare were, and still are, an unpredictable mess).

He was chubby and adorable. His smiles and giggles lit me up inside. Even though they often came as the result of some non-sleeping disaster, I cherished the quiet moments in the dark when he slept in my arms in the glider in our bedroom.

I was depressed. More deeply than I knew and it would get worse before I got better. I felt like a failure at everything… 90% of the time? More? Less? It’s hard to know. Depression skews everything. I was going to say it “clouds” everything, but that is not accurate. It’s more like a relentless thunderstorm season. Those hard Midwestern downpours that I hated almost as much as the snow. Soaking. Impossible to see through. Finally it would clear for a moment and there might be a rainbow (an Apollo smile; a good day), but then I’d discover the flooding and before I could even figure out how to tackle it, cue the next storm.

I spent at least half of 2018 feeling like a complete failure. As a mother. As a partner. As an employee. As a writer. As a friend. As a person. I have never dealt with failure--or perceived failure well. I’m a (recovering) perfectionist. The relentless storms obliterated everything around me. My identity was completely lost in the rubble.

I’ve spent the second half of 2018 digging out. June, July, into August--it was still raining, still gray and foggy, but that Seattle-style mist that I can cope with so much better. Only recently, though, have I started to thinking about rebuilding--or perhaps more accurately, building anew--and trying to sketch out what that might look like. Who will I be now as a mother, a partner, a friend, an employee, and a writer? How do those pieces fit together?

It can’t be a rigid fit. I must be more flexible, fluid, adaptable. I know this much. But who am I at the center? What does that woman even look like?

Currently I am fifteen pounds heavier than I was at the start of the year. Depression and breastfeeding helped me lose most of the baby weight quickly. When I stopped pumping and started taking antidepressants, it came back and I let it because I knew I had to focus on the mental instead of the physical. Most of my clothes don’t fit. A lot of them never will again because even if I lost all of the baby weight (which I likely won’t) and the weight I put on to get pregnant in the first place (which I definitely won’t), my body has changed. Growing another human has permanently shifted my ribs, my hips, my feet.

In my post-storm clean-up, the first thing I’ve tackled was the closets, ridding myself of those clothes that will never fit again, and uncharacteristically, I haven’t been very sentimental or nostalgic about it--traits that have made me a borderline hoarder in the past. I find I am actually eager to shed my skin. The truth is that it has never fit comfortably most of the time--or I haven’t let it--and this time I am determined to make sure it will.

But I am getting ahead of myself. 2019, the year I turn 40, that will be the building year. Soon, I will look forward and puzzle out my sense of self. I will also process and grieve the things that still need more time (my childbirth experience and that first year being swallowed by postpartum depression) or didn’t get any time at all (the death of my sweet kitty Lars, the end of Rookie).

Today, I want to look back because when it comes to my baby, I am sentimental and nostalgic. I also feel like I lost out on so much when I was deep in the throes of depression or that it has blurred. I am sure it blurs for everyone because of the lack of sleep, the constant stream of illness, the mastery of one thing (sleeping through the night! walking!) leading into new challenges (temper tantrums! getting into All The Things!) but I find it particularly distressing for a number of reasons. Mainly the depression and the self-blame I still feel for it, but also my writer personality drives me to document and capture everything.

Before Rookie closed, I’d come up with a creative prompt for December to create a visual and/or written record focusing on some aspect of the past year that resonates--a friendship, activism work, travel, music or books you’ve enjoyed. For me, it is motherhood. I want to capture my year with Apollo, his growth and mine, in photos and captions (and, I guess, this preface). Now that my time is so limited, Instagram has become my new blog or journal. It seems the right place to recap my year.

Here are the first three months, which I will be sharing today:

In January, Apollo loved his car and his jumperoo. He met up with some of the babies from our Centering Pregnancy group and met Mama’s good friend Jenny. He took his first swimming lesson and was iffy about it, especially going underwater. He had his first urgent care visit for an ear infection and cut his first tooth.

In February, Apollo played with his best friend, Rocco, and his kitties, Kaspar and Lars. He got a little bit more into the swimming thing, but swinging was an immediate favorite causing so many smiles, gleeful shrieks and giggles. This was a month of working hard on crawling but not quite getting there. There were so many nights of rocking on hands and knees on the playmat. We also had a visit from Opa, Boo, and Uncle Evan.

March was very eventful! Apollo sat himself up, then pulled himself up, and then with the motivation of his kitties and a beloved bear Valentine’s Day card from Nonna, he began to crawl! He also enjoyed eating hummus, going on stroller rides, more visits to the swings at the park, and a first visit to Seattle Gymnastics Academy. This was also a tough month--more illnesses, a rough introduction to formula when I stopped pumping and more teething.

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seattleboundwritergrl · 6 years ago

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Today you are one!

Dear Apollo Marcel,

As I am writing this, we are just couple weeks away from your first birthday. One. Whole. Year. I think we all deserve a pat on the back for that, don’t you? And you give back pats now. You do it when I pick you up. You crawl into my lap, pat my back, and say, “Mama.” It makes my heart melt. You give kisses, too. Even if they are just your open mouth pressed to my cheek or your lips making smacking noises in my general direction. It is in those moments that everything feels right in our little world--exactly how I thought it would feel. I know that you are happy and we have done well enough to get you there. For the most part, though, this year has not gone as I expected. No, it would be more accurate to say that this year was a lot harder than I thought it would be because I didn’t actually know what to expect.

This has been a long journey for us. There were many hard points where you felt like a dream that would never come true. Strangely, the moment you were there, though, I felt like I knew instantly. Despite so many disappointments, I knew in my heart that morning that the pregnancy test would be positive. Similarly, despite hoping for a girl because girls are what I know, I knew you were a boy. As my due date approached, I knew you would be late, but I hoped not by a lot. I’d had initial feelings about July 5th, which turned out to be the day we brought you home from the hospital, but somehow I also knew that I would go into labor the weekend I went into labor. When my water broke at one a.m. on Saturday morning, it was a little bit of a surprise, but I also thought, ‘Yes, this is right. It is time.’

But your birth is when things stopped working out the way I expected them to. I don’t really want to rehash that too much here, though. Labor. The decision to have an epidural after it became too much--the decision which was 100 percent right for me. The five hours of pushing that I knew deep down would not result in bringing you into my arms. The cesarean. I wrote about all of this elsewhere and I’m sure I will write about it again in more detail. For now, I just want to acknowledge that this was not how we hoped or expected it to be and that I think that flipped a switch in me--a switch that was easy to flip given my history. A switch that made a lot of things hard and disappointing. Or maybe this is simply where the exhaustion began. Deep deep exhaustion that I’m still muddling my way through. I need to acknowledge this and how it colored our first year together. How it has blurred so much for me. I need to say, “I’m sorry,” to both of us. We had a rough start that was not our fault, that was based on expectations that I had but am not certain where they came from. Not my gut. My gut has been buried through a lot of this and I am just starting to dig it out. I’m sorry for the ways this has impacted you, Apollo, though when I look at you honestly, with eyes recently cleared by a month of therapy and medication, I can say I don’t think it really has. I think that like you did throughout that labor that was difficult and traumatic for me, you have remained calm. Well, maybe not calm, but steady. You trusted the process when I could not.

Yes, that’s it. That is the truth about your birth right there: you trusted the process when I could not. And I thank you for that. And I forgive myself for being scared and scattered to pieces. If I could go back to a year ago, I would say only this to myself: “Be gentle. Be gentle. Slow down, step back, and be gentle.” That needs to be my mantra now.

Everyone would tell me to enjoy it, that it goes so fast, which is true, but also not. It is painfully slow sometimes. I think the truth that perhaps people do not know how to phrase is that it blurs. Perhaps they think to themselves, “Yes, it is blurry because it sped by,” but the truth is that it is blurry because it is exhausting and stressful. You are living a series of reactions. At least that is how it feels to me looking back on this first year. I tried really hard to hang on to moments. I obsessively photographed them so that I would be able to remember later. I wanted desperately to slow time down in some ways--so I had space to live in a moment, to reflect on it, to plan ahead. At other times I wanted desperately to speed it up so we could get to a place that might be easier--where you could sleep and weren’t sick all the time and could tell us more clearly what you needed.

That thing I said earlier about expectations not meshing with reality, about me constantly being disappointed in my own ability not to live up to the dominant narrative about early parenthood, that was pervasive. It colored most of this first year, hung over it like smog. Birth was supposed to go one way: naturally, hypnotically, easily. Breastfeeding was supposed to be easy as well, second nature. And going back to work, while not ideal, while definitely sad, was supposed to be something I could take in stride because working is what we Americans do.

All of that stuff sucked. It was a million times more complicated and harder than I thought it should be and I felt like a failure. Nothing seemed natural or easy, especially in those first few months. I still feel ashamed to admit this. I want to gloss over it, but you will learn, that is not in my nature. I am too honest. And, let’s be real, I am recording this as much for me as for you. Eventually these memories will probably be mostly glossy for me--at least I hope they will. It seems to go that way for most people. The cute photographs will take the place of hard emotions.

At this point, things are definitely getting easier, but in addition to my struggles with depression, for those first few months,I was constantly worrying that I wasn’t doing enough or that I was doing it wrong or at the wrong time. I’m not much of a singer so I wasn’t really singing to you. I am a big reader, but at first it felt strange to read to you. And was I stimulating you enough? Too much? Did you have the right toys? Too few? Too many? Did we put you in that sit-me-up chair too early? Did we start solids too soon? Were we doing it wrong? There were So. Many. Opinions. And remember what I said earlier about feeling like my gut got lost in the shuffle? Well, it did and it didn’t, in retrospect. I spent a lot of time feeling like I didn’t know you and in many ways I didn’t because you were new and just figuring out the world and how you wanted to live in it, but I can see now that there was a deeper connection. There was something coming from you, I think, that coaxed out what you needed in us. And truly what you needed was for us to try things, to experiment so you could experiment. The sit-me-up chair, for example, you loved that. It allowed you to see the world, and as a baby who learned to push up and look around because he craved that, of course it was the perfect next step. Then, when you were big enough, on to the jumperoo which allowed not only a good view, but motion. Oh yes, you love to be in motion! You were busy, it seemed, even as a little baby. You wanted things to interact with. You wanted to know the world. You spent a lot of time on your playmat, one of those rare babies who loved tummy time. You held your head up and rolled early because of it, I think. You loved looking in the mirror or at black-and-white toys, books, and pictures. You loved watching things move. Your first and best smiles and laughs came from the mobile we attached to a chair above your rock ‘n’ play. You also loved the birds above your playmat until they stopped working. Freddie the Firefly and Lou the Octopus were your favorite toys.

We started food on the early side because I wanted to. I wanted you to have sweet potatoes on Thanksgiving. It was new and different and you were unsure of it, but sweet potatoes continue to be one of your favorite foods. We had great plans of making your baby food, of actually reading up on baby-led weaning, but as sleep-deprived, working parents that wasn’t really in the cards. We pureed some things. We bought some pouches. We introduced foods separately at first and made sure to get all the potential allergens in that way and then we let go of that careful introduction. We followed the ebb and flow of your eating patterns even though it was messy and frustrating a lot of the time. We learned to dress you in a full long-sleeve bib and a hat and to shut Kaspar in another room. We came to accept that some days you would like something and the next day you might not. At first you loved the pouches and being spoon fed, but eventually you grew frustrated with that and we realized that you wanted to feed yourself. Mostly that’s what you do now, with your fingers, though you’ve come to accept that some food is easiest with a spoon that, for now, we must wield. I love that as long as you are in a good mood, you will happily try new foods. Your dad calls you a foodie because when we go out to breakfast we get you things like asparagus goat cheese quiche and you happily eat it. You eat curried tofu and noodles. We go to the Farmer’s Market regularly now and you’ll have black bean pupusas or dal and naan. You love quesadillas, but for now, you’ll also eat your broccoli. Hummus by the spoonful was an early favorite. You recently discovered a love of berries as well as watermelon. For not knowing what we were doing, it seems that so far we’ve done well, at least as far as your palate is concerned.

Though we haven’t gotten you out in the world as much or in the exact ways as I hoped or expected, we’ve done different things and more than I’ve given myself credit for. We joined a PEPS group so we could bond with other new parents in the area and you could have a crew of baby friends. We meet up with them at the Hill City Taphouse. We also go there with Casey, Corey and Rocco, who you have been hanging out with since before you and Rocco were born. While I might not have imagined a tap house as the place I’d be frequenting with my baby, it is a relief to have a cider with Daddy and other grownups while you play with your baby friends at the table or in the play area. We also go on walks with our neighbors, Kirsten and Wren and their dog Star. Wren is just a month older than you and I love that we have friends right in the neighborhood. We’ve met up with Allison and Amelia at parks, first to walk with you and Amelia in strollers, but now to swing and play in the sandbox. You love swinging as much as I did as a kid. I hope that you will love swimming like I did as well. We started swimming lessons right after you turned six months old at the Rainier Beach pool. Our attendance was a little spotty due to all your illnesses, but we went as often as we could. You still definitely don’t like putting your head under water and you prefer the front float to being on your back. Playing with toys in the pool is by far the most fun in your opinion. I’m sure you think it is just a big bathtub and you can be moody about baths as well. Mommy or Daddy goes into the the tub with you and you play with the toys and are a little obsessed with trying to drink the water.

I’ve struggled with the guilt of having you in daycare because of all the illness you’ve had--you were basically sick nonstop from Christmas to May; you’ve had two urgent care visits, two ear infections, and one awful fever that lasted five days--and because I felt like I was missing out on so much and someone else was doing all the things I should have been. I still miss you like crazy, and if it were possible to work part-time, I would do that in a heartbeat, but I wouldn’t take you out of daycare. The sickness sucks and I hope that what everyone says about the great immune system you will have is true, but I know that daycare is a gift we’ve given you too. You love Ms. Nina and she loves you. You love those bigger kids, Tia and Jude and Liah, too. You love playing the piano there, doing puzzles, playing with the cars, blocks, and especially the inflatable ball. You dance to the “Skeleton Dance” and clap to “Bingo” and “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” You have a whole little life there, which though I am sad not to know every aspect of it, I am glad that you enjoy it so much.

You are also learning so much there! You copy the big kids and it has motivated you to get moving. It took you a little while to go from sitting up and getting on your hands and knees to actually crawling, but once you did (and you were motivated, in that case, by your kitties and a Valentine from Nonna with a fuzzy bear on it), you were moving fast. Pulling up and crawling happened basically simultaneously and you were quick to advance to cruising. Then, it was at daycare that you started pushing a chair around so you could keep up with the other kids. Now you push your little alligator walker at home and laundry baskets. You even stand on your own for a few seconds while you clap to the music from your car or reach for my oatmeal.

Ms. Nina is a teacher and between her and us, we solidified your love of books--so much so that it was your first word! Book and ball are the things you ask for the most. You have so many words for your age though, and once again it is from mimicking the kids you are around at daycare. You say mama and dada and Nina. You ask for water (“wawa”). You sign for milk, more, and all done. You also say all done along with bye-bye and night-night and this weird little phrase “I-wahm,” which is clearly your version of “I want” or “Mama, I want.” The list of words just continues to grow: kitty, doggie (though it admittedly sounds mostly like “dada”), turtle, car, baby, shoes, gentle (thanks to how often we remind you “gentle pets” when you are going for the kitties), no, cup, bottle, and even “pot-pot,” which the older kids at daycare say to go to the potty.

You amaze me so much, Apollo Marcel. I feel like in the past couple of months we are finally getting to know you. This might be because I am finally getting my mental health on track (and you sleeping through the night starting at 10 months old helps for sure!) or because this is the time when interests and personality really begin to shine through for most kids. There are some things I’ve seen all along--your desire to be active and engaged in the world, for one. You’ve been a thrill-seeker since very early on. We learned this when Grandma came to visit around Halloween and started playing peekaboo with you--the louder we shouted, “BOO!” the more delighted you were. You also love being lifted over Daddy’s head like an airplane, tossed in or dropped through the air, chased, and surprised. Your passion for swinging is probably related to this as well and perhaps some of your early favorite books. Goodnight Bear was the first one you really clicked with, laughing when Daddy made the bear noise: “Grr Grr!” You also love the monsters in your little Odyssey primer, especially the Cyclops who eats humans!

Since Daddy and I are both quiet, introverts, the super active, thriller-seeker side of you intimidate us a little bit. Are you going to be an athlete? Into extreme sports? What will we do? But at least you also have a zeal for books, which I do understand, and like me, you’re very eager to learn. That is part of why you watch closely and imitate whether it is words or Grandma putting a cup over her mouth to make funny noises. Though sometimes you have a short attention span and are trying to get us to start reading a new book before we’ve finished the one in our hands (hey, I get the desire to hear All The Stories), you also get very focused on the tasks you set yourself to: stacking blocks, taking tools out of your tool box and putting them on the tool bench, putting things into a container and dumping them out. You definitely get frustrated when you can’t get to or do something you want--another thing I relate to very well. Crawling was hard for this reason--you were on the verge for so long and I could tell it frustrated you--but you seem a bit more patient with walking perhaps because you have so many other ways to get around.

You’ve always had very strong opinions and don’t hesitate to express them, which might be something you got from me as well as your big emotions and independent streak. Currently you are a little shy in new situations or large groups. You have been to a block party and three birthday parties including your own since I started writing this, and you tend to hang back at first and cling to me and Daddy. Right now, you are very attached to both of us in general and get upset whenever either one of us leaves a room (unless that room happens to be daycare with Ms. Nina!), so it may be related to that, but you may have inherited some of our introverted traits after all. I’ve learned you need extra time to decompress after big events too--more cuddles and books before bed, for example. I get it, kid; I’m that way, too.

There is nothing like seeing you delighted though. The peals of laughter when I get down on the floor and loudly crawl after you or when Daddy sends you flying through the air. Watching you dance to one of your favorite songs or especially to one that you hear a lot around me like “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince, or “the Friday song” that John Richards plays on KEXP. Seeing you really get into a song and clap, or best of all, make your own music on the piano at daycare or the one Carol gave us, and of course you turn anything and everything you can into a drum. And then there’s your love of balls--that was the highlight of the block party with your PEPS buddies, a big basketball. I’d never seen you so excited-- “Ball! Ball! Ball!” The balloons from your birthday party are another new and exciting kind of ball to you, too. But above all there’s your sheer joy when you notice one of the cats (“Tithy!”) or see a dog (“Dada! Dada! Dada!”). I think dog-sightings might be even better than the food at the Farmer’s Market in your opinion, right now. One of your favorite things about hanging out at Rocco’s house is his dog, Bb. Just this past Friday, we saw two dogs at the tap house where we had dinner (where you also got to see Bb) and you kept crawling over to them. You let them lick your face for at least a minute, squealing in delight like it was the best thing that ever happened to you. I’m so happy that you have such a love of animals, buddy. They populate some of your favorite books, are some of your favorite toys (the barn with the animal sticks, the jar of bugs, and now the jar of farm animals you got for your birthday), but nothing beats seeing them in person.

Last but not least, I cherish our quiet moments. A lot of times you fuss in the car, but I love the mornings when we drive along the lake to daycare and I see you in the mirror, just peacefully looking out the window, sometimes chatting to yourself or moving a little to the music on KEXP. And then, hard as it was at first, I’m sad that breastfeeding is winding down for us and I will hang on to those morning and bedtime sessions as long as I can because that is our special time. I can just look at you, feel your skin against mine, run my fingers over your crazy hair, snuggle you and snuggle you and slow things down just for a minute. Even when I am zoning out, scrolling through my phone or more recently, dictating a letter to Congress to resist the awful things our government is doing, I am deeping aware of the feel of you, your breath, your rhythm, your connection. Sometimes you doze off. Sometimes you declare, “All done!” and then ask “Buh?” when you spot the table of books beside us. Sometimes you look up at me and smack your lips together, asking for kisses. I smack my lips together too and then cover your face with kisses and you giggle and maybe kiss me back or maybe pat my back and say, “Mama” as we rise up to start our day.

I love you, my sweet, thrill-seeking, tender, observant, brilliant child. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad you’re mine. I can’t wait to see what our next year together holds.

Love,

Mama

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seattleboundwritergrl · 7 years ago

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There’s a road...

“There's a road that takes me home/Take me fast or take me slow/Throw my head out the window/Feel the wind, make me whole”-P!nk

Two weeks ago, I was officially diagnosed with Postpartum Depression. It was not a revelation or a shock. It felt inevitable, which was frustrating, but mainly it was a relief. To have a diagnosis also meant to have a plan for treatment. Anyone who has struggled with depression likely understands how hard it was just to get to the diagnosis and plan. It’s hard to admit that you are in pain and it is not going to go away. It’s hard to ask for help. It’s hard to think you *deserve* help. It’s super fucking hard to navigate the insurance to cover the help. That last thing really was almost an insurmountable roadblock—I just didn’t have the bandwidth. So, diagnosis and plan is a huge accomplishment.

It is only the beginning though. Things are still really hard. 90% of the time there is a weight on my chest—sadness, anxiety that I don’t yet know how to release. This week it only got harder when Lars got sick. We did learn yesterday that he does not have cancer. We still don’t know what’s wrong, but that is a huge relief. Maybe now I will finally get some sleep. Because of course, since life works in funny ways, this week Apollo finally started sleeping through the night. He still wakes and whimpers but will go back to sleep on his own. I couldn’t go back to sleep though because I was worried about Lars. So here’s hoping that Apollo keeps sleeping and Lars improves.

This morning I went for a run. I put P!nk’s latest album on. I haven’t listened to it that much yet, but I really connected to the above quoted song. I kept skipping back to it, and mostly alone on the quiet loop around Seward Park, I let myself ugly cry as I ran and listened and thought about roads. My road. The one behind, the one ahead. Metaphorically and literally. I stared out at Lake Washington and thought, I am here and that alone is an accomplishment.

Lately, I have been driving Lake Washington Boulevard to daycare/work. It does take me fast (people speed like crazy) or slow (but you often get stuck behind bikes). It has very specific meaning to me as well because of a house down at the other end of it—the house where Kurt Cobain committed suicide. I’m not shy about the fact that I first came to Seattle on a spring break trip to pay tribute to Kurt on the 10th anniversary of his death. I fell in love with the city at first sight, with all my heart, and now I am here, which was hard and took a lot of doing. My connection to Seattle at this point has very little to do with Kurt, but he is still a touchstone for me in so many ways because of what a huge influence he had on me as a teenager. I connected to his pain. I still do.

A couple months ago, after seeing a picture of Kurt and baby Frances Bean on Instagram, I said to Scott that Kurt must have been really been hurting to leave her because I couldn’t imagine leaving Apollo like that. The thing that I have yet to admit to anyone but my therapists is at the point a couple of weeks ago when I knew I needed to get help for what I knew was PPD, it was because the thought occurred to me that now I did get it—how Kurt could hurt that badly. It was a dark and ugly thought. So I navigated the road blocks and got help.

When I run or drive along Lake Washington, I sometimes think about how it might have been one of the last things he looked at. I feel sorry that he couldn’t find the peace and strength that I draw from it. This is my road, my home, the place where I will dig deep and find a way to be whole. Where I work toward small goals like run all the way around the Seward Park loop in 30 minutes so I can do the whole thing one morning a week before work. I am almost there and much farther than I was a couple weeks after giving birth when I couldn’t even walk a quarter of a mile. I work on my brain the same way, trying not to be too hard on myself.

Anyway, this should be an essay, not a Tumblr post written while pumping (for the last time, by the way, which is both bitter and sweet) on lunch break, but I only have the beginning of the essay anyway and I thought I might as well record what I have when I could. It’s all a work in progress and I am making progress.

“This world we know/ It takes our bodies, not our souls/ It takes us high and leaves us low/ But they honestly never imagined we'd get this far”

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seattleboundwritergrl · 7 years ago

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Goodbye, Albatross

I’m drinking coffee to the background sounds of the rain, KEXP, and the hum of the white noise coming from the baby monitor. Setting aside the fact that I’m not sure the baby will nap very long and I feel like I have so much to do (and I have to get better at setting these things aside), this moment is basically perfect. It’s so Seattle it hurts. It’s something I never would have dared to dream of roughly (holy shit, almost exactly!) 13 years and 9 months ago when I visited this city for the first time, though I think it is what I knew in my heart I wanted from the moment the skyline came into view on the bus from the airport. I’ve talked about that moment many times. How I felt it, in my heart and soul, that this place was home. Nothing was more meant to be.

And yet as soon as I got back to Chicago, I made a decision that would trap me there for years to come.

I’m trying not to be so hard on my former self. The twenty-four year-old who knew nothing but dysfunctional relationships, codependency, making desperate moves to somehow improve the unimproveable, desperate moves that always sacrificed herself.

In April of 2004, I was in year seven of what would be an eight-year relationship with an alcoholic who was manipulative and emotionally abusive in his own way though it’s taken me until now to see that because my bar was set so low. My ten-day trip to Seattle with a group of girlfriends who had loved music the way I loved music as a teenager had given me the first clear glimpse of what I really wanted for my life, and it was a life without him. But when you are rolling so hard and so fast down a hill that’s so steep, it’s hard to stop til you hit rock bottom.

End this, leave him, go to Seattle might have been in my head when I got on the plane back to Chicago, but when I landed and he told me he’d found the perfect listing for a townhouse for us, it was too hard not to pick up where I left off. House hunting. Hoping desperately that our own place would create commitment and responsibility and fix things.

So roughly (actually I think exactly, but my writing time is too crunched to fact check myself) 13 years and 7 months ago, we closed on this townhouse. There were so many bad signs aside from the fact that it tied me to a person I knew that I didn’t want to be with anymore. There was shady wheeling and dealing to make the finances work. The bubble was in full effect. And of course, the day before we closed, my boyfriend angrily quit/got fired from his job over petty shit--the exact opposite of the responsibility I had been hoping for. For the remainder of our relationship--that last most awful year--he was unemployed. I carried and paid for that sketchy mortgage with my mom who was desperate to help me even though she had to know this was a terrible decision. He turned the basement into a poorly painted mancave where he drank a 24 pack of beer a day and yelled at me for not being fun anymore.

As we battled to keep our heads above water over the years with this townhouse, my mother would sometimes get weepy and say, “But it was your home!”

No, I’d insist. It was and has always been my albatross. It was a mistake, the biggest and greatest, the icing on the cake of seven years of fuck-ups. It has been nothing but a burden. It was never home.

That’s not totally true though. It has mostly been awful. The symbol of the worst part of a relationship that should have been a three-month fling. The cause of my anxiety about thunderstorms due to a summer of basement flooding. (I will drown in this place. Literally or figuratively, I would think.) The source of strife and drama with family and friends. The thing that held me back from my dream of moving to Seattle for years, and then a burden for my mother to deal with when she said, “Go, please. Follow your dream. We’ll figure it out.” It is the thing that may prevent me from owning a home here. But there were a few positive things about it:

It allowed for second chances. At the beginning of my disaster of a relationship, I was living with a dear friend of mine and my behavior during the relationship nearly cost me that friendship. After I finally loosed myself from the boyfriend, the real albatross in my life, that friend moved in with me again. I will always treasure our time as roommates.

Additionally, my relationship with my father had been rocky since junior high and when I broke up with that boyfriend, he flew out to help me repair the house and I found forgiveness and peace with him.

I planted a garden with my mother outside of that house.

I fell in love with my now-husband in that house. And I stayed in Chicago long enough for our relationship to take hold because I had that house.

It kept me in Chicago until my niece’s last year of high school and our relationship, which I treasure as dearly as I do the one with my own son, would not be what it was without that.

I wrote both of my novels in that house. And my now-husband helped me create a writing space that I loved, with a view of my dreams above my window.

My beloved cat, Sid, passed away in my arms in that house. Here he is during the last year of his life in front of the kitchen curtains that came with the place--that I loved and everyone else hated.

As much as that house cost me, that is what it gave me. And today, finally, I am done with it. It is sold. I lost money on it, but I survived with my credit intact. I managed to refinance when the bubble burst. I managed to rent when I couldn’t sell. I couldn’t have done it without my mother, my husband, and a good friend who is a realtor. I stayed afloat when many didn’t. Only one of my neighbors didn’t end up in foreclosure. All of them were working families of color. That’s who really paid the price of the last recession and with this current crooked regime in office, let us not forget that. I have more to say about that. I have a lot of bitterness as those in my general age bracket do--about my debt, about how I lost instead of gained when I tried to buy a home. I have a lot of fear that I won’t get a second chance to have a real home of my own that I own in the city I love. But today, I want to set that aside.

I want to set it all aside. The regrets of the past. The fear of the future. Because after 13 years and 9 months, in the year I gave birth to my son, I can finally say goodbye, albatross. I can finally start to forgive my own mistakes.

I can finally breathe. And I will do that. I will step out and suck in all of this rainy Pacific Northwest air because I am free.

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seattleboundwritergrl · 7 years ago

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Greatest Expectations (Processing this whole motherhood thing...) Part I

As of my writing this (as in this very sentence), my baby, Apollo Marcel, is ten and a half weeks old. Who knows how old he will be when I finish. I expected to be able to write this weeks ago--well, I did and I didn’t. But I will get to that, this whole post is going to be about expectations. I will start by saying, though that I don’t know how long to expect it will take me to write this. I’m typing in the dark as he is asleep but sort of stirring in the bassinet next to the bed. It was a rough night, an overtired night for everyone, and of course I should be sleeping too, but I can’t because my mind is whirring. I am typing slowly because it’s actually been awhile since I’ve used a computer rather than my phone and I’ve even been using voice to text on that more often than not. It feels like I’m actually conversing then, with the people I am messaging most which is mainly my friends with children, especially those in the thick of this newborn phase as well. Also it means I am talking around Apollo which is important. I suppose it is good for him even when I am fretting or venting to these friends. But anyway, I digress...

Expectations. Well, my expectations were fucked from the beginning. When I started trying to get pregnant, even though I was... shit, math, dates... 35? 36? and had been on the pill since a month before my 18th birthday (that I remember clearly), I thought I would get pregnant quickly. In fact I had something like a six month window where I felt like things would work out for my life--so I could teach the class I needed to teach to make maternity leave money and allotting enough time before I expected to have a book out (ha, that’s a whole other set of expectations that got skewed.) I didn’t get pregnant in those six months. In fact, it would take a year beyond those six months and I would get pregnant right before we planned to start fertility treatments in earnest (and I mean besides the acupuncture, the diets, the herbs, the ATMAT massage, etc etc). It was a whole lot of a heartache--a still unwritten essay’s worth of heartache--not to mention really triggering as a sexual abuse survivor. Cue a whole lot of feelings about my body being broken. But the month I got pregnant, I feel like despite month after month of false hope, I knew, I really knew. I knew I was pregnant. I knew the time was perfect. I also knew I was having a boy, even though I’d always wanted a girl. All the bullshit I’d found really hard to swallow on my darkest days over that year and a half of trying--that it will happen when it is meant to, turned out to be true. I’d changed jobs at work and a had a really supportive boss. I’d accrued a lot more PTO. Most important of all, I’d been in therapy for a good stretch of time.

Therapy helped me immensely with my perfectionism, my need to control things, my self-doubt. I worked through the things that caused that, the things I knew would hinder me as a parent. Not all the things, I’m sure. As someone who has been in therapy since she was a teenager, it seems there are always More Things. I thought, because of this, I had some fairly reasonable expectations about how all of this would go and how I would react. I thought, in fact, that I’d done a pretty good job of not having expectations, of being ready to go with the flow. And I do want to give myself credit and say that I did a pretty good job--a way better job than I would have a year or a year-and-a-half earlier--but of course it is impossible (at least for me) to have zero expectations and be totally zen especially about something as huge about bringing a child into the world. So I did my best, but I still had expectations, hopes that weren’t met and I’m still processing them.

Expectation number 1: That my baby would be born into a world where we’d elected the first female president of the United States not one where the piece of garbage running at the helm is a completely unqualified old white man who is a sexual assault criminal and somehow cannot seem to utter the words NAZIS ARE BAD. The election took place the day before we saw our baby’s heart beating for the first time. It was equal parts hopeful and terrifying, especially for someone who put off having kids for so long because she was afraid of bringing one into a dystopian hellscape. Because of the Trump presidency, the weird pregnancy dreams that I was looking forward to (because I am a weirdo who loves having weird dreams) were all nightmares. Like constantly. And I am a white woman living in Seattle. I can’t imagine how pregnant people of color felt during this time. I also expected that I would be able to do more to resist during my pregnancy and maternity leave than I have. I have to remember that this is a long fight and I will be a more active part of it when I have the physical and mental capacity and right now I am focused on growing a white male who will not be a garbage human.

The birth itself also did not go as I’d hoped. I have a NICU nurse for a mother and a Labor and Delivery nurse cousin, so I felt I had a pretty real grasp on how things could go. I would aim for a natural childbirth, but accept that I would have the baby however I needed to in order to assure that he and I were healthy. That’s all that mattered at the end of the day. So I practiced breathing and meditation. I went to childbirth classes and Scott and I practiced the techniques we learned there and through the hypnobirthing resources I’d gathered. I saw the nurse midwives at my practice and went to Centering Pregnancy for my prenatal care. I got a doula, a woman with the best energy I’d ever felt, who I knew would provide the calm support we needed. I spoke honestly with her about my abuse history. I worked on those fears with my therapist. I will say that the one thing I am so proud of, and my doula, Jessica, emphasized how proud I should be, is that I chose to get the epidural when I knew I needed it. Was I as dilated as I thought I would be? No. Did I use the tub as much as I thought? Also no. Did I get to eat the food I’d ordered. Quite unfortunately no. But there came a point where I recognized very quickly that the pain was triggering. That I was screaming NO at my contractions, and my No, obviously was not going to be respected. That soon I would freeze. I would check out and disassociate. That was the one thing I did not want--to disassociate during my son’s birth. So I said, “Platypus Pancakes,” which was my epidural safe word(s). And I felt good about it and my midwife, who had run my Centering group and also knew my history and worked so carefully with me, laughed and told me that that fact that was my code made him love me even more.

However, despite this moment of pride, despite the amazing support of my team and my partner, my birth was still traumatic. Apollo was fine--he was chill throughout the whole thing (well, after breaking the amniotic sac before I had contractions and kickstarting the whole process). There was not a blip on the monitor and for that of course I am grateful, but he was in a slightly bad position (which I suspected because of the pelvic pain I’d had through much of pregnancy) and he was a much bigger baby than anyone expected. Seven or seven and a half pounds, the midwives kept guessing, which seemed right. But ultimately he was 8 pounds 9 ounces. For these reasons, I could not get him out after 5 hours of pushing and was told I needed a cesarean. That 5 hours of pushing had done a number on me. I had horrible back pain, like so bad I was scared I would never be okay and scared I wouldn’t be able to be still on the operating table. It was not helpful that suddenly we were in medical mode. I couldn’t process anything. I couldn’t have another ice chip even though I was dehydrated as fuck. I was told by the emotionally tone deaf anesthesiologist that if my back pain wasn’t managed by the additional epidural or whatever it was they were doing, that they would just put me out. The idea that I would be unconscious for my son’s birth was beyond scary. Unsurprisingly, my blood pressure on the table was extraordinarily high. I wasn’t aware of it--dissociation was happening at that point for sure--but my doula would tell me later that it scared her. That’s why she was trying to get me to breathe.

The thing that brought me back in the OR was the doctor’s pronouncement that my son had a big head. I may have even laughed. Of course he did. The size of the male Kuehnert noggin is pretty legendary. But I was still out of sorts--able to watch my baby from across the room as the rubbed him down, able to hear his cries, able to yearn to have him on me right that second as I’d hoped for all along--but definitely not physically or mentally where I expected to be, where I wanted to be. And that has continued to plague me through these past ten weeks.

I think I’ll continue this in another post though because it has gotten long. He allowed me to write most of it in one sitting and is now down for another nap, but this seems a natural stopping point, so... To Be Continued When I Am Able

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seattleboundwritergrl · 7 years ago

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And after four years in Seattle, Baby makes three…

July 5th will mark the 4th anniversary of our arrival in Seattle. I’m writing this in advance because I expect to be busy that day. I’m pregnant with our first child and due tomorrow. I suspect he’ll be a little late. In fact, he might even choose to be a week late and arrive on our Seattleversary. As much as I want him to come NOW (because I am anxious to meet him, pregnancy is pretty uncomfortable, and all of the major to-dos are done), that would be kind of perfect. It wasn’t until I was here, finally in the home of my heart, that I felt I could consider having a child. It was certainly something I longed for, just not something I felt was tangible for me.

I was thirty-three going on thirty-four when we left to Chicago area. I’d been married for almost four years to a partner that I could absolutely envision having a baby with—in fact I had envisioned it, the two of us with a little boy, so uncomfortably early in our relationship that it was one of those things I wrote in my journal and cringed at the thought of even my best friend reading. It was not something I’d ever discussed with my partner because it didn’t seem like it could ever happen. I’d put my career first, my writing, and it was not going as planned. I’d put out two books by the time we were married, but I was in no way earning a living off of them, or even the combination of books, freelance writing, and teaching writing. My main income was from bartending. I had the crappy in-case-of-near-death health insurance you get when you are self-employed. Neither of these things was conducive to pregnancy in my mind. Not to mention that other than having a great partner and great friends, I was deeply depressed. I’d gone from feeling somewhat content in Chicago in 2003 to merely tolerating it in 2006 to absolutely loathing it in 2012. I had not been a happy child there and would not want to raise a child there.

Right before we moved, two of my good friends had babies. As I held them, and especially as I looked at my partner with my friend’s brand-new son in his arms, my heart nearly burst with desire. Not that I told anyone. I wrote it in my journal, lamenting that it was probably too late. That I would just have to settle with finally getting out of Chicago and moving to my heart city. I didn’t know, after all, if Seattle would be different. If I would find work quickly. If I would still be struggling to cobble together income from different sources.

But Seattle was different. After six weeks, I got a job at a university, one I actually liked, even though it was full-time and meant a big shift for my writing. I also had great benefits, and as I recall, I used those to bring the idea of parenthood up to my partner. “Look,” I said, “I could have a baby and all the prenatal care and time in the hospital would be completely covered!” It was intimidating to have this discussion, to even admit that this was a thing I wanted—really, really wanted—even though I had never said much about it before. It was also intimidating to consider—the responsibility and especially the fact that as much as I wanted a kid, the cynical and damaged part of me had grave doubts about bringing one into the ugly, fucked-up world. Again, it was Seattle that changed my perspective. The beauty of this place that I used to regularly document and marvel at right here on this blog. It had been so healing for me, so transformative. It made me think that life could be good, that I could raise a child in a happy place instead of one that felt suffocating and wrong like the Chicago area had for me. Most important of all, my partner and I had taken a huge leap and done a Big, Scary, Seemingly Impossible Thing when we’d moved across the country. This made me feel like I could do anything.

We talked about it for over a year. I shed a lot of tears. I practically gave up when I saw that the cost of childcare was basically my take-home pay from the job that had made it all feel possible in the first place—the job I both wanted and knew I would have to keep. And then there was the fact that my partner had never seriously thought about this possibility, had always just assumed that it would be just the two of us and I would be as happy as he was with that. This was totally fair on his part since it had taken me years to confess this secret desire. We tried to set deadlines to make a decision. One loomed during our first visit to Mount Rainier and I have a horrible, tear-stained memory of the bumpy drive back down thinking that even though we’d just made one of our toughest climbs together, that we may never get past this hurdle. He seemed more on the verge of no than yes, and while I knew I had to honor that, I wondered—as did he—if I would ever feel whole in our previously near-perfect relationship again. I confessed a sappy secret: that I’d written the initials of the boy and girl names I’d liked in the sand next to a lake when I’d gone off alone. Though the conversation would go on for a few weeks longer, he would later tell me that for some reason that hit him hard. The idea of letting those initials go turned his pending ‘No’ into an ‘I’m still terrified, but okay, yes.’

There was another struggle to come, one that is too long to get into here and needs to be written in the proper time and place, but I’ll just summarize by saying that once we started trying, it took a year and a half to get pregnant. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life. I thought my depression was bad right before I left Chicago. This was worse. On par with (and also painfully interconnected to) how I’d felt in the aftermath of my sexually abusive relationship.

They say it happens at the perfect time, though, and it did. Also, somehow, despite month after month of thinking this and being disappointed, I really did know deep down that this was our month. We took a relaxing anniversary trip to the coast. I took the pregnancy test the day before my best friend, the girl of my heart, came to visit me in the city of my heart for the first time. I blurted, “Hi! I’m pregnant!” to her right as she stepped off the street car. It was a particularly joyous visit.

There are too many details about the pregnancy itself to get into here. I admittedly hated a lot of it—the sick, exhausted, painful parts—but I’ve been through a wide array of emotions that, again in the right time and place, I will document. (When one of your big personal hurdles to deciding to become a parent is “But the world is a pretty terrible place,” it is quite emotional to hear your baby’s heartbeat the day after instead of electing the first female president as you so deeply believed and hoped would happen, a racist, xenophobe who proudly committed sexual assault is put into office instead.) It’s been odd to me, the girl who has journaled everything since third grade, that I have barely documented this. I haven’t really blogged since before I got pregnant due to the aforementioned infertility-related depression, but I also haven’t recorded much in the beautiful pregnancy journal that I got for myself and I’ve gone days and weeks at a time without writing in the daily journal that I’ve kept for five years. A lot of this is due to exhaustion—working full-time while growing a human is intense!—but also because pregnancy is equal parts super slow and super fast, or it has been for me anyway. I spent the first half waiting to feel better and also to reach X milestone that would make me feel more secure that this baby would be born okay (though as the daughter of a NICU nurse, I didn’t really feel okay until I hit 37 weeks). Then I spent the second half overwhelmed with all of the to-dos both baby related and not.

But here we are, the day before my due date, and a lot has been accomplished. Our house is as set-up as it can be (though not nearly as cleaned and purged as I was hoping). I’m as prepared as I can be for birth and a newborn (though not nearly as prepared as I would like to be as reading like writing went mostly by the wayside for me, so a lot of the books I intended to read are half or not at all read and I feel a bit like I’m about to take a test that I had no idea how to study for). And though I didn’t journal or blog, I did write. Once I hit my second trimester, I devoted 30 minutes each morning before work to chipping away at my novel—a very dark YA about rape culture, girl power and witchcraft set in the woods of Washington—and I came away with a 100 page partial and synopsis that I am very proud of and hope will sell while I’m on maternity leave. I trained my temp at work last week and just yesterday I finally finished knitting a big baby blanket and made my labor playlist which had been vexing me. Today, the first wave of visiting family arrives.

So I’m ready, though perhaps baby is giving me some time to reflect before he comes, which is nice of him. And maybe he will time his debut to match our Seattleversary in some way, whether arriving on that day or coming home the day we came home.

Because almost four years in, there is no doubt that Seattle is home. People asked, of course, as soon as we announced the pregnancy if we were moving “home” to be closer to family. Since I have such tough feelings about Chicago (not to do at all with family!), it took everything not to hiss and spit that I am home. I know it will be hard to do this without family around and I selfishly hope that my parents might retire out this way to be close to their grandchild. They also both understand that it was only possible for me to be strong and happy enough to do this, to have a child, in Seattle. My mom, the NICU nurse, has marveled at the medical care and options I’ve had out here even compared to her top-ranked Chicago hospital, like for example, the doula program at my hospital. Child care is going to be expensive, and like basically everyone who doesn’t work in tech, we are very worried about the steeply increasingly cost of living in Seattle. I’m not sure we’ll be able to afford to buy a house (though part of this is a Chicago problem—my inability to sell the house I have there before the market skyrocketed here). But I know we’ll make it work. The journey to get to Seattle, and to get to our family of three, has made me and my relationship with my partner stronger than ever before.

I look forward to year five in Seattle, our first year as a threesome. I hope to get back out into nature and to find a way either on here or elsewhere to do more reflecting on our life.

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