Itchy

It's starting to feel as if there's no point to me.  You know those times when everyone else seems better at what you do than you?  That's what I'm in now.  The part of me that knows how to play, how to function creatively, is stalled out, and that never feels fun.

I can't even put words together in interesting ways right now: "that never feels fun."  Where's the lift in that, the scope or the poetry or the sigh or the wail?  Where's the balloon release of it?  It just sits there, metallically, like a piece of something you dismantled that you couldn't find a place for when you put it back together, it sits and glowers at you for failing to find its purpose.

This is when you look in the mirror and only see grey hairs, only see the age, the weight, the milage of your face.  There's no wisdom there to balance it, no earned grace or maturity, just someone past their prime aging badly.  You're the mom on the teen show: tolerated, humored, sidelined.  Your chance to be integral to the narrative has long since passed, and you are a minor character in your own life, ricocheting from reaction to reaction, always in motion towards or away from some more important character's views.

This is when you go running and instead of endorphins, there are shin splints and sore hip sockets.  When you run you think of all the years you didn't, and you realize you can never catch up, never run far enough or long enough to outpace all the bad decisions you made then.

You can't do your taxes, it's too depressing.  Facing down the slow slide of your money into nonexistence would take a backbone you don't have.

You can't leave town and get a fresh perspective: you're in that wilderness between the youthful backpacker and the aged tourist, and your responsibilities hold you firmly in place.  Maybe you were never a butterfly at all, but the pin that holds your moth body to the placard is just as inexorable, just as inescapable.

You need some imagination, some belief.  You need some romance and some sleep.  You need to be the one who tells a story and holds everyone rapt - it doesn't even need to be your own story, it just needs to be your pacing, your artistry that holds them.  You need to matter.

But today you don't.  Today, the best tactic you've got is to furl your wings and pack them away for now.  And somewhere inside, very privately, you nurse the hope that there will come a day where you unfurl them, let them catch the wind, stretch them very wide, leap ahead, and find yourself again airborne, laughing, laughing, laughing.

That face

I've been very quiet.  I can blame it on being the mother of a brand new baby in terms of having less free time, but that's only part of the equation.  The other part of the equation is that being a mother to this particular baby has been so delicate and beautiful, I have trouble writing it down.  She's terrific, and now, close to a year old, she's full of smiles and hugs and wanting to be near mama.  It's incredible.  And lucky, so lucky.  I know people who don't want kids, can't have kids, have kids and regret it, have kids and love them hard but have given up much of who they are for those kids.

And folks, none of that is wrong.  It's just life.  The hard thing about writing about kids especially is that it's such a charged issue, such a sensitive subject, that anything I say has the whiff of being a judgement on someone else.  Instead, within reason, I honestly think the vast majority of parents are just trying to do what's best for their kids.  Whatever choices those parents are making, if you were following their every footstep, their decisions in context would probably make sense.

This also allows for the fact that parents screw up a lot.  I have begun to see that as long as parents love their kids and don't concentrate on the screw ups, the screwups aren't that important (barring injury, bodily harm or mental abuse, of course).

OF COURSE I see parents doing things and think, whoo boy, no way, that's not for me.  But I do try to live and let live.  So I've been careful not to write much about the choices we're making, because I think it opens one up to a kind of criticism I just don't need, and implies a kind of criticism of others that I heartily dislike.

Soooo, that having been said:

We're so lucky.  My daughter is absolutely capable of whining and crying, but overall she's a happy, cheerful, curious ball of love.  She sleeps pretty well overall, not when we're traveling but when we're home and on schedule, and she's usually very interested in other people and new things.  She seems smart and capable and healthy (my god we're so lucky with that one, it's so out of our hands), and far from being a drain on my energy, she's been really enjoyable to watch develop.

Now, what I've let slide is my sense of self.  I find it very tricky, trying to provide for my daughter's very reasonable needs and still hang on to my own also reasonable needs.  There's a balance there I haven't achieved.  But I spend time on each side of the fence, and I have a terrific husband who thinks about me as much as he thinks about her.  (This is especially incredible because I don't do the same for him - granted, this first year a lot of the care has fallen on me due to breastfeeding, so his part of that is to take care of me, still, plenty of men don't.  Again, see above: lucky.)

I have to believe that working to be a whole person can only help my daughter as we move forward, that teaching her by example that women have identities and purpose beyond their family will be positive.

See, in my experience, having a kid doesn't make you grow up because of lost sleep or needing more money or anything like that.  You're forced to behave better than you otherwise would because someone is watching your every move, and your every move is shaping them.

I can't afford to behave childishly anymore.  I've got a child who does that, and I have to teach her better.