After Words

Guilt. With Rainbow Sprinkles.

Yesterday, I was feeling bad about sticking The Girl in the extended day option at her school (which meant I would pick her up at 2:45 instead of 1:30, which is when lunch bunch--already extended from the regular end of the pre-school day, which is 11:30). Extended day is not a very popular option among her classmates so we don't do it often, but I had a work-related appointment that I couldn't reschedule so off to extended day she went.

When I came to pick her up, she was sitting at the table, cutting and pasting her little heart out, helping one of the teachers make decorations for an upcoming mothers' day party. I had a twinge. The Girl is an artsy/craftsy sort--much more so than I am--but I don't know. Was this fun...enough?

We spent the rest of the afternoon, with The Boy where there was tennis and some incredibly complicated game on the monkey bars that combined Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Strawberry Shortcake, and there may even have been some guilt-inspired ice cream (particularly tasty with rainbow sprinkles).  

I asked about how extended day had gone, and The Girl said it had been boring. I told her that I was sorry she hadn't had more fun, but that I really appreciated her staying at school so that I could get my work done. And that was that.

Around bedtime, I heard The Girl describing her day to my husband, and she said, "I got to go to extended day because Mommy had to work."  The "got to go" stuck with me. "Got to go" is good. 

*****

This morning I lay in bed listening to the rain and thinking of something fun The Girl, and I could do since I have no pressing work today. I was thinking about the aquarium or maybe chasing down the new grilled cheese truck in Stamford. I'd let The Girl pick.

"Is there anything special you want to do to day, just you and Mommy?" I asked.

She smiled and said wihout hesitation, "Mommy, can I do extended day again today?"

 

Vacillating Feet

When I was nine years old, I had the most beautiful Easter shoes. They were white patent leather (not black patent leather, of course) and they fastened with a little gold clasp in the shape of a butterfly. We had gone all out because I could wear the shoes when I made my first communion later that same spring. I loved those shoes. They were only supposed to be worn for special occasions but I was happy to call any occasion special if I meant I could wear those beautiful shoes.

The summer after that Easter, we moved. Then we moved again the next year. We had a hard time establishing ourselves at a local parish. We drifted from the Church.

And that drift was fine with me. As I settled into my broody teenage years, I didn't believe in anything anymore, much less the teachings of the Catholic Church, but slowly over the years, I began to miss it—not the Church, exactly, but the concept of faith, the idea of belief. 

That longing shows itself in funny ways. When I worked in midtown, during bad days I would sometimes sit in the back at St. Patrick's cathedral, not to pray, but to think (of course, if that didn't work, I consoled myself by buying expensive somethings at the Saks Fifth Avenue next door). When I was planning my wedding, I vaguely wanted someone to read 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13, but I certainly didn't want to be married in a church.

In 2001, I took some of my dot com bubble severance to travel to Ireland. I visited churches upon churches and bought myself a simple silver cross as a token of my Catholic past. Although I still didn't pray, I wore that cross until infertility treatments began to go awry three years later. Then I took it off and put it away. 

 

After the kids were born, I started to think about religion in a different way. I don't worry that not being a part of a church somehow jeopardizes their immortal souls—I don't know if they have immortal souls—but I do worry that they are missing out on something by not being more exposed to the concept of faith.

I dabble in non-Catholic churches, but the last few attempts have been so unsatisying that I won't try again this Easter. Maybe next year.

Faith—is the Pierless Bridge
Supporting what We see
Unto the Scene that We do not—
Too slender for the eye
It bears the Soul as bold
As it were rocked in Steel
With Arms of Steel at either side—
It joins—behind the Veil
To what, could We presume
The Bridge would cease to be
To Our far, vacillating Feet
A first Necessity.

~Emily Dickinson

For the Record

In my quest to become pregnant, I endured 3 miscarriages, 4 Clomid cycles, 3 IUI cycles with injectables, and 1 IVF. Each of these blessed events was marked by at least one encounter with a transvaginal ultrasound, which is known affectionately in infertility circles as the dildocam.

Eventually, you get used to it. Maybe you start to wear funny socks so the tech will make chit chat with you about that while he is all up in your business in the most invasive way conceivable. Maybe you close your eyes and imagine you're somewhere else. Maybe you sniffle softly into your sleeve--provided you've been allowed to keep your top on--and remind yourself that it's going to be worth it in the end.

But it's still humiliating. And painful. And even if you are pregnant, the end result looks something like this:

There's a lot of actionable information there, right? Just seeing this image fills you with, well, what exactly? What "facts" do you learn from this that you didn't know before?

And I say that as a person who badly wanted to be pregnant, who wanted to see something on that ultrasound screen that transformed her life and gave her hope.

But to be forced to endure the pain and humiliation of the "shaming wand" when you've already decided to end a pregnancy? That's monstrous. And I thank Gary Trudeau for illustrating the point so well.

 

The Greener Grass

I've been working part-time for about a month now. It is truly, truly part-time—I just submitted my first invoice and I billed only 27 hours in the entire month of February—but finding those 27 hours has felt, at times, like an epic challenge.

Yes, the last month included winter vacation (5 fun-filled days without school) and this week includes early dismissal for parent-teacher conferences (also, the first time a teacher has specifically requested a that a conference take place but that is a freak out for another day), but it is clear that I have a lot to learn about balancing it all out. 

More than once, I've eagerly completed some project during the morning and raced off to school pick up only to find a pesky question from my client that needles me until I can steal away from the kids again and deal with it. And, as an added insult, I find it takes me longer to settle into work—to clear my head and focus on the document in front of me instead of the millions of other things going on in the background. And conversely, I can't quite shake the blather of work—maybe that nonessential clause was actually kind of important after all—to focus on everything else.

For example.

One day last week I forgot to pack The Boy his snack for school. It was not the end of the world—the teacher actually has a stash of backup snacks in the classroom because this kind of thing happens all the time—but The Boy is particular and might not have eaten the snack. Which also would not have been the end of the world because OMG it's what, three hours between breakfast and lunch and then lunch and the afterschool snack and would it really be so terrible to skip just one snack? But I was a patsy and hand-delivered a snack to The Boy at school, feeling simultaneously like a patsy and like the worst mother in the history of mothers because I had forgotten his snack in the first place.

The challenge on the table now is this: what to do for summer vacation. Do I trust that my work will continue well enough to justify spending money on camps for the kids for at least part of the day or do I play it safe and wait to see what my workload is like closer to summer, even though camp options are drying up as I type? 

Why

When I first started blogging, I decided to blog anonymously. I was struggling with infertility, and I felt misunderstood and judged and pitied by so many people in my real life that blogging was a welcome alternative. The blogging community was smaller then, and it became a powerful place where we shared information, supported one another, and formed a community that endures to this day, even as so many--luckily, gratefully distracted by the children we went on to adopt or birth--have fallen away from regular blogging.

I have come to know many of these people in other contexts--on Facebook or Twitter or even more fortuitiously in real life. I use my (first) name here and on Twitter. As I've begun to try to rebuild my long-dormant professional life, I've used this blog to provide writing samples.* Next week, I'm speaking on a panel about social media at my local library, and as I've begun to talk about the panel with non-blogging friends in town, the last vestiges of anonymity are slipping away.

The eroding anonymity has made it harder to write. As the name of the blog is meant to convey, this is a place that I turn to after words--spoken over coffee or a glass of wine with a friend or spoken to myself in the car on the way to pick up a child from school-- have been insufficient. This is a place where I often talk about difficult or unpleasant subjects, and so it is a place where feelings can be hurt--often my own, but potentially the feelings of friends or family. 

If you are here for the first time, I welcome you. I hope you'll stick around. And if you've been reading for awhile, thanks for your companionship. I can't tell you how much it's meant.

 

*Most memorable blog-related interview moment: talking to a potential employer as he perused pictures of my embryos. 

Both Sides Now

You remember that job I was all excited about?

While I was waiting to hear back, I vacillated back and forth between exhilaration at the prospect of starting something new that required me to leave my house without my children several times a week and sheer terror at the thought of leaving ma preshuss babeeeeez--if only for 15 hours a week. 

**Insert deus ex machina here**

Then everyone got sick. The Boy and I had the stomach flu. The Girl and The Husband had some sort of respiratory nightmare, and the we all swapped. No one went to school, and everyone was miserable, and all I could think was how the hell am I supposed to have a job on top of all of this? If they had hired me when they had mentioned they might hire me, I would have spent the first two weeks calling in sick, which would have blown any illusion of professionalism right out of the water.

Everyone got better and went back to school and the exquisite chaos receded from memory so I started to think again about the job and the Starbucks that's conveniently located right before I would get on the highway to come home from the job so I could caffeinate on the drive and be the most energized, committed, and present mother in the history of mothers by the time I got home to simultaneously help with homework, and make dinner, and drive to swimming and gymnastics and science and karate.

And then I didn't get the job. 

After some rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth, I got another job. It's freelance copyediting--the kind of work that that I did for years before the kids were born and briefly after. In some ways, it suits my fussbudget nature. In other ways, I find myself wondering whether I'm constitutionally capable of being as meticulous as I used to be. I'm finding that the confidence with which I used to wield my red pixels has eroded somewhat, while I'm more tolerant of clients who say "close enough!" rather than listen to me prattle on about why they really ought to be be using coded em dashes instead of double hyphens.

And now I have to get back to work.

SQUEEE!!!!!!!!

Solidarity

"Can you believe that?" the cashier said as she grabbed my arm and pointed through the large window in the front of the store and into the parking lot. 

I looked quickly in the direction in which she had gestured but seeing nothing out of the ordinary, turned my attention back to The Girl who was trying to sneak candy bars onto the conveyor.

"Someone should call the cops," the cashier muttered and now, as a devoted follower of the police blotter, I was intrigued, but with another glance into the parking lot, still nothing caught my eye as police-worthy or even slightly out of place.

"I missed it. What happened?" I asked.

"You see that woman?" And finally I did see the person the cashier had in mind. She was a mom with two kids, one young enough to be riding in the shopping cart, and another slightly older walking beside her. I had "met" the mom a few minutes before when all our children had stopped in front of an endcap display of Valentine's Day pink cupcakes and had a collective nervous breakdown when the mean moms declared that no, cupcakes weren't on the list for today. We rolled our eyes at one another, pried our children away from the display, and moved on.  

"I see her."

"One of her kids isn't wearing a coat!" The cashier hissed.

And I laughed. I laughed because, not 20 minutes earlier, The Girl and I had argued over the things that needed to happen before we could leave the house (top three items: brush hair, put on shoes, put on coat). I won the coat battle by ceding the hair battle, figuring that the hood on the coat would cover a multitude of hair brushing sins. I laughed because it was an unseasonably warm 45 degrees out and a coat wasn't going to make or break anyone on the 2 minute walk from the store to the car in the parking lot. I laughed because really? Call the cops?

I thought of the times strangers could have sat in judgment of my parenting this week alone: when I carried my shoeless, kicking and screaming daughter out of gymnastics class; when I sent The Girl to school even though she said she wasn't feeling well only to have her come home a few hours later with a raging ear infection; when I forgot to check The Boy's folder after school and made him "hurry, hurry, hurry" to finish his homework before the bus came the next morning; or when I made the roasted cauliflower for dinner even though I knew that pretty much guaranteed that the kids would eat nothing but bread and butter.

These are the mommy wars. It's not the SAHMs versus the WOHMs or the breast feeders versus the bottle feeders or the cry it outers versus the co-sleepers. It's the total strangers who think they have the right--nay, the responsibility--to point to the myriad ways that you are doing it wrong. 

I paid the cashier for our groceries and stood at the end of the aisle arranging my bags trying to think of something to say, but words failed. Instead, I took off my coat, grabbed The Girl's hand, and walked into the parking lot to appreciate the warm breeze that almost felt like spring.

Soft Trails

A few weeks ago I did something crazy: I applied for a job.

I've been doing freelance copy editing off and on (mostly off) since The Girl was born, and I had always planned to return to work in a more full-time capacity when she starts kindergarten (nine months and counting). But I just happened to see a posting for a job at a local company I admire, and before I could really stop to be nervous about the fact that I hadn't been on a job interview in more than five years, and I wasn't sure what to wear or who would watch the kids or anything else, I sent a resume into the ether. It was the most ridiculous thing I've done in months.

More insane still? I had an interview (two of them!), and the job seems great and the company seems great and I'm not sure how I seem because I haven't heard anything, but so be it. I got back in touch with the people who are my references, and it looks like some freelance work will come out of that so as I sit poised on the edge of the new year, I feel like there are changes ahead. Good ones.

And so, dear friends, I wish you a new year full of possibility. What crazy things do you hope to do?

 

Morning Poem

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches--
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead --
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging --

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted --

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

~Mary Oliver

Crumbs

Seven years ago, we transferred these:

 

A few hours ago, I tucked this boy into bed:

What an amazing fact this is.

*****

Hope is the thing with feathers 
That perches in the soul, 
And sings the tune--without the words, 
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard; 
And sore must be the storm 
That could abash the little bird 
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land, 
And on the strangest sea; 
Yet, never, in extremity, 
It asked a crumb of me.

~Emily Dickinson

 

 

The Tallest Sandwich

I wish I were a more grateful person. I am unspeakably fortunate in so many ways, but this time of year I always find myself bogged down in the things that are not right--that I wish were different but am (or feel) powerless to change.

I am thankful for my husband and my children for putting up with me when I am like this. I am thankful for the gracious life I live where all I have to complain about is this "unsettled feeling in the blood," as Stephen Dobyns describes below.

And I am thankful to know that it will pass.

 

How to Like It

These are the first days of fall. The wind at evening smells of roads still to be traveled, while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns is like an unsettled feeling in the blood, the desire to get in a car and just keep driving. A man and a dog descend their front steps. The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk. Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find. This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change. But in his sense of the season, the man is struck by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories  which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid  until it seems he can see remembered faces caught up among the dark places in the trees. The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere. Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie, he says to himself, a movie about a person  leaving on a journey. He looks down the street to the hills outside of town and finds the cut where the road heads north. He thinks of driving on that road and the dusty smell of the car heater, which hasn't been used since last winter. The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers. In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark. Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,  where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights, shine like small cautions against the night. Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake. The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down by the fire and put our tails over our noses. But the man wants to drive all night, crossing one state line after another, and never stop until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror. Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill and there, filling a valley, will be the lights of a city entirely new to him. But the dog says, Let's just go back inside. Let's not do anything tonight. So they walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps. How is it possible to want so many things and still want nothing? The man wants to sleep and wants to hit his head again and again against a wall. Why is it all so difficult? But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich. Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen. And that's what they do and that's where the man's  wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator as if into the place where the answers are kept— the ones telling why you get up in the morning and how it is possible to sleep at night, answers to what comes next and how to like it.

~Stephen Dobyns