Begin again

“Drink from the well of yourself and begin again." - Charles Bukowski

Isn't that a marvelous bit of advice? It popped into my email today, courtesy of the Quiet Revolution newsletter I receive, and I saw it after working in my yard for a hot, humid hour.

This has been a very difficult week for me, and I have felt myself turning inward with anxiety, self-doubt, and overwhelm. It has been hard to fall and stay asleep, and harder still to tap into the confidence and self-respect I usually carry. I've felt like a solitary being caught in torrential downpour and tasked with catching every drop with nothing more than my hands. 

Head back, eyes wide, hands outstretched, it seems futile. Intimidating. Not worth trying.

I'm not sure what precipitated this inner maelstrom. I had such a happy birthday, flew high for a good bit and then started coasting downward on a steep slope. Most of my friends have felt awfully frazzled since the beginning of May; the end of school is shockingly busy and everyone is tired.

Just when your kids run out of matching socks and pants with intact knees, you start the race to the finish, and it's chock-a-block full of transitional meetings, final conferences with teachers about what may or may not need to be done over the summer, the coordination of gifts and last play dates before kids scatter on the winds of June. 

But this last-lap sprint can't explain everything, or at least it doesn't seem like it can. I have felt like an empty well and doubt I'd have thought to drink from myself anyway.

After writing about the situation in a tremendously wonderful class I just finished up, a friend responded: 
I believe mothering was never ever meant to be done in isolation. It's a construct we've created as society and it has been intensified in the last 30 years as we become separated (sometimes a good thing, grant you) from extended family and what were our natural tribes/villages. Now one woman is supposed to be all things to all her children but she can't be. It's a physical, emotional and mental impossibility. She cannot be good at *everything*.

Beautiful and true. Even the best of friends, and I am lucky to have so many, don't wholly approximate the community that other times and other cultures have and do have. The weight of that loss feels leaden at times.

Mom came the morning after a very low point, and I continue to be incredibly grateful for her presence. She has allowed, reminded and enabled me to slow down. She has helped with the laundry, the cooking, the cleaning, the yard. She has picked the boys up from school, helped me fix odds and ends, taken some of the heaviness from my shoulders.

Slowly, I am righting my listing ship. My vision is clearing, and I am able to remember that although I do not have a career and don't bring home the bacon, I am good at many things.

Today, as I plucked weeds and put down fresh mulch, a gentle breeze blew, and I felt calm. My mind wasn't racing, my jaw wasn't clenched. I wasn't worried about all I needed to do, I heard the birds singing and watched the ants march.

My thirst felt slaked for the first time in too long.  

I think it's called fried

Oh man, y'all. I am struggling. My body is a million silent screams pleading for quiet. Begging for the questions and demands and narration and bicker to just stop. We have been blessed, this holiday, with the most glorious weather. With family and friends, good food and movie-watching, laughter and a Christmas tree.

But.

The omnipresent "but." That lurker extraordinaire. That nugget of grim reality in even the shiniest of lives. That weighty ball that just can't always be kicked to the curb. 

This is hard, this parenting thing. On Thanksgiving, as several members of my extended family leaned across a kitchen counter, and we talked about a cousin's new baby, I recounted a story from Jack's early months.

One night, he must have been four or five months old, Tom and I had gotten him to sleep and were downstairs relaxing. Tom said, "Honey, wanna walk to Ben & Jerry's and get some ice cream?" And I thought the following: 
How lovely
and
Clearly, he is not cut out for fatherhood because we have a baby sleeping upstairs. 

What once welcomed spontaneity now required a babysitter or at least the daylight hours other than the work and nap ones, of course. And such has so often been the case for the nine years since. 

Mostly, this is swell. It's not like we ever said, "We'll have kids and nothing will change." Because that's malarkey, plain and simple. And neither of us are delusional. And we happen to like our children.

But sometimes, after you give and give and wipe and feed and listen and bandage and read and bathe, you just really want everyone and everything to shut the eff up. For real. Total quiet. Like you all took a vow of silence and meant it.

Sadly, thinking that's possible is too often the damn delusion. 

Because you probably have not only children but also a goddamn dog. Who is as needy as any child ever was.

Said dog is aging and getting mouthy in his years. Barks are for everything now, not just the mail carrier and others who approach your front door. No. Barks for cartoon dogs, real dogs, animals on TV who resemble dogs, animals on TV who do not appear to resemble dogs, hunger (real or imagined), the times you don't get to the porch door before dog's first bark has finished reverberating (you slow, slothlike, shitty dog owner!). Dog is never too tired to bark. No sir. Never. And if you put him downstairs, he will pee on your couch with pissy abandon.

These are reasons #902 and 903 that Percy is our first and last dog. And why I do not recommend having both dogs and kids. Unless you hate silence and never want it in your midst.

Sometimes I think, If I can't beat 'em, I might as well join them. So I'll turn on the music for a dance party -loud enough to drown Percy's inevitable barking because he hates things like other people dancing and hugging which tend to happen when music is played- and not four minutes later I'm panting and exhausted because people, please. I have been up since 6am and haven't sat or stopped doing since then. I don't feel like dancing. Don't feel like noise. And Percy becomes downright certifiable. 

Is it any surprise that I find such comfort in my cat? My sweet purring independent kitty who is quiet 98% of the time and tends to put his bum in Percy's face. That guy is my dream come true. He is no nonsense to the max. He just wants a morning snuggle (awesome), some food (understandable), and plenty of time to prowl the alley (whatever).

It is not any surprise to me.

And so, as this "vacation" comes to a close, I wait for Monday, as I so often do, with unbridled joy and anticipation.

I will release my screams into the vacuum of an empty home and then I'll sit in front of my sparkling Christmas tree and think about Oliver saying "Oh man, this tree makes me so happy!" and smile over his happy outlook on life.

 I'll look at the Periodic Table ornament Jack painstakingly crafted from so many individual Perler beads and appreciate his dexterity and curiosity.

I will brush the cat and walk the dog and distribute the folded laundry and make muffins to refill the freezer store. 

The stereo will remain quiet. Natural lighting will suffice. And I will join myself in peace and replenish as best I can.

Of moons and nerves, of good moments and dark ones

This evening just before 8pm, my ragtag crew piled into the car and headed to a point higher than the plot on which our house stands. Jack's class is studying China, and in anticipation of tomorrow's celebration of today's Moon Festival, he is to have observed the moon and his reactions to it throughout the past week.

Wednesday night was successful (just look at that photo Tom took!), Thursday was vetoed because of an overtired meltdown, Friday and Saturday nights were too cloudy to view anything, and although tonight is still overcast, the clouds were moving on the wings of a hasty wind. We figured we could glimpse something if we got to an elevated space free of trees.

Once at the triangular patch of grass at the intersection of Nebraska and Van Ness, we tumbled out of the car, plastic telescope and clipboard in hand. Tom was the only one not wearing pajamas. Jack was dressed in long-sleeve and pants orange-and white-striped skeleton jammies, with the shirt tucked in dramatically; I had on a matching set covered in hydrangea blossoms; and Oliver was, unsurprisingly, wearing a mismatched pair that included an inside-out shirt and bare feet. 

I'm certain we looked incredibly bizarre. But sitting in the grass as a cool breeze gusted, we glimpsed the gorgeous moon for a brief time and felt happy.

It was a blessedly tranquil moment during a weekend which has had quite a few highs but also some real lows. Perhaps all families with young children live their weekends on such a roller coaster. Some may be better suited or able to handle mayhem, cacophony and filibuster-scale chatter.

I, myself, wish we could disembark on occasion instead of being strapped in to the front seats on Friday at 5pm and forced to climb, loop and fall until Sunday after dark. I'm tired of being so enervated by simply experiencing a weekend.

That word connotes such leisure and relaxation. Weekend suggests catching up on sleep and togetherness, lazy afternoons and all-day pajamas if you like. 

We've got the togetherness and all-day pajama parts down pat, but leisure? Relaxation? Sleep? Time for individual pursuits? I don't know what the hell you mean. 

Even the peaceful lulls ask something: that a movie be turned on or that we adults put our own desires to bed or that we be waiting to pounce (and able to immediately relax) when the stars align and the kids play without calling to us for longer than fifteen minutes.

Do you know that by 9:30 this morning, after I'd made beignets and hung out, I'd listened to Jack try to engage me in conversation about the periodic table for upwards of ninety minutes? People, I wasn't capable of managing that in college (I'm not joking; I was a ghastly chemistry student), much less on a Sunday morning. I'm also not super interested, as I feel confident that I know as much about carbon and iridium as I'd like. 

So, I armed him with two dictionaries and a wikipedia page, and asked/pled/demanded that he study by himself while I did some work for class. Suffice it to say that did not work, and I felt both defeated and angry. Pissed. Because a brain can only take in so many insistent requests for needs other than its own before starting to fritz out. 

Ol, meanwhile, had taken every toy out of every bin and tried on and then discarded every costume. Tom and I were tripping over plastic tools and MagnaTiles and Lego men and toothpicks and acorns and books. And the house looked like it threw up in itself. And I just could not take all of that input. I can't. 

By the time we reached the little patch of grass where we stationed our observatory tonight, it was roughly 13 hours after our day began. Jack, armed with two shiny new reference books, was still talking about the periodic table, and Oliver had just eaten half the noodles off my plate even though Tom took them out to dinner earlier. 

I was happy in that grass, but getting there felt Herculean. It's hard to balance all the various energies needed to parent well, maintain a marriage, stay connected to friends and self and keep your heart open enough that despite fatigue and frustration, you're at the ready to appreciate the golden moments in which lovely memories are made. 

It doesn't feel possible sometimes. The moon hides, the grass is scratchy, you never knew what ytterbium was in the first place.