The Kiddie Cocktail

The sweet indulgence of ordinary days

Even though this is my third(!!) one, Mother's Day sneaks up on me. I forget that I'm one of those mother-type people now, too. So I didn't have any great expectations about Mother's Day, and we didn't make any big plans.

I could not have asked for anything more out of my weekend and my Mother's Day. We had amazing weather, to start with. Sunny and 70+ all weekend, with a few spring showers just at the end of dinner last night. I'm a fragile desert flower; sun makes me beyond happy. The small child was uncommonly pleasant all weekend long. Seriously delightful (except perhaps when trying to get her to nap).

Saturday brought me a toddler-free morning- errands without one in tow are sheer bliss. I was able to find everything I needed for my planned gardening at our awesome neighborhood hardware and garden stores, sparing me a much-dreaded trip to a big box store. (Home Depot just makes me cry. It does.) On a whim, I threw some wee garden tools for the Olive into my basket. On another whim, I stopped into a new coffee house for cappucino and a croissant. Just because I felt like it; and it felt so indulgent - me, alone, just sitting, for no reason other than that I felt like it.

I got home right after Seth and the Olive, and we went right to work gardening. She loved it. Loved it! For the first time, she really, truly helped instead of just "helped." I got her to fill a bucket with potting soil over and over, and bring it to me to put on newly transplanted day lilies. She helped me scratch up the dirt to prep it for sinking new stepping stones. She took her own watering can and watered all of the new plants. She was enamoured with every worm that I dug up and then sent wriggling back into the dark, rich loam, and we had to dig a few extra holes to look for more worms. I've dreamt of this day, when I could be out there with her, working, laughing and getting dirty.

 
 

We broke for lunch, attempted a nap (fail!), and then headed out to a first birthday party for the daughter of friends we don't get to see very often (win!). It was one of those fantastic parties, where you have a great time from beginning to end, where you feel gregarious and witty and meet new people, where you realize your kid is old enough to run around with a lot less supervision, where you just sit outside with a drink in your hand for hours, and talk and laugh. My only error was a failed execution of the proper water-to-food-to-wine ratio, which left me a leetle smidge more tipsy than I wanted to be, and gave me a bad night's sleep.

The Olive made up for it, though. She slept until past 7:15 on Mother's Day morning. This is utterly unheard of. She's usually up and talking a million miles an hour by 6:15; I'm usually awake before that, waiting to hear her wake and call me. For the first time in years, I got to lie in bed and read before anyone else was awake, one of my favorite indulgent pleasures.

But by 7:40, we were outside in our pajamas, on another beautiful day. I got some coffee for my wine-muddled head, the Olive and I searched the car for her missing shoe (found!) and my iPhone (found, but at my friend's house in Maryland from the night before. Oops.), drew with chalk on the deck, shared a banana, and pondered the rest of our day.

We ended up having a casual breakfast at Pound, the new coffeehouse I'd been to on Saturday. Their patio was surprisingly deserted, so we had it all to ourselves to share egg and cheese paninis, sip espresso, climb on and off the metal benches a hundred times, and watch the birds and squirrels in the tree canopy above us. Next, a trip to a favorite playground in hopes of encouraging an afternoon nap. The Olive can climb up the ramp of the slide by herself now, a trick she's been wanting to master since she could walk, watching the big kids and trying it over and over again. There was also plenty of running and jumping, because dang, that kid can run. Fast, and often.

 

Our next stop was Eastern Market, where my girl picked out a bouquet of pink snapdragons for me. She picked them for the color; what she doesn't know is that they look like the ones my mother used to grow in our garden in Santa Fe. A little grocery shopping for the week, some tastes of apple at the farmer's market, and back home for lunch. I got the patio umbrella out, brought the food outside, so we didn't have to go inside just yet.

That one glass of wine too many caught up to me at naptime, and Seth got the Olive to sleep by taking her for a ride in the car, then eased her back into the house and into her bed, while I got to lounge in bed and try to doze for a couple of hours. It was enough so that I was ready again for my girl when she woke from her nap and called for me. We had snacks, played with Play Doh, then (of course) back outside again for more digging and gardening, and some wandering around the block to pick up every stick. We had the luxury of nowhere to be and nothing to do, because my husband was cooking me dinner. I love to cook, but it wears on you when you do it all the time, and you have to feed small people who cannot wait to eat at 8:30 pm and would prefer macaroni to blanquette de veau. Having someone else (anyone!) cook a meal for me feels like the ultimate indulgence these days.

We ate outside again, drinking in the weather and the cool white wine, watching the Olive slurp spaghetti, taste the veal piccatta, shovel in creamed spinach (!), and eat her body weight in watermelon. It started to rain just at the end of dinner, but we stayed out there anyhow, under the umbrella, getting just a little damp in the passing showers. I got to play with my girl some more, and then break the news to her that our lovely day was over, and it was time to go upstairs for bath and bed.

I am always both a little relieved and a little sad when I have put my girl to bed at the end of the day. Relieved, because man, she's two and can be quite exhausting; but sad, because I miss her company. The sadness is always more pronounced on a Sunday night, because the weekend and my time of having her greedily to myself is over. The working day looms.

Exhausted, but satisfied, I went to bed and put off the reality of Sunday night with one more indulgence: my new Kindle. Holy shit, my husband (and daughter, nominally) got me a KINDLE for Mother's Day. The big Kindle, with the 9.75 inch screen and the 3G. I still can't believe it. We just did an iPad hand-me-down - Seth's mom got a new one, she gave Seth her old one, and I got Seth's. I was chugging along quite happily with the Kindle app. Even if I did covet the non-reflective, high-contrast, real book look of the Kindle, I was only going to drool at them online and not actually buy one.

 

You know why he said he got it for me? "Because you like to sit outside on the deck at Martha's Vineyard and read. And you can't read with the iPad outside. I know how much you like to do that." I still don't know what to say, and I haven't thanked him enough. I am grateful and humbled for this sweet man who somehow loves me so, in all my prickly and temperamental glory.

The Kindle is, of course, AMAZING (3,500 books! In my hand!). But the best gift this weekend was simply time. Just enough time to myself. Relaxed time with all three of us. Easy, easy lovely time with my girl. Who is ever more fun to be, as we talk and truly do things together now. The ordinary indulgence of time - there is never enough.

Only one?

How do you know if you want another child? This keeps going around and around and around in my head. Where it stops, nobody knows. Not yet. I don't even know why I don't know the answer.  I've been thinking on this topic a lot, for a long time. This post from motherbumper brought it bubbling up to the surface again. I've started blog posts on this, on the computer and in my head, many of them, over and over. But I haven't published them until now.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, when I was young and brash and thought I could plan everything, I was pretty sure I would have more than one. I would also be married before thirty, squeeze out at least one of thost babies before thirty, and be happily ensconsed in a leafy and pricey Washington, DC suburb with good public schools, the wife of a well-paid corporate lawyer. And that is how it would all be done.

Of course it wasn't. I got married instead at the ripe old age of 32, to someone else entirely. Then, I needed some time to travel the world with my husband, adventure, eat, drink, run a marathon. I just wasn't ready. Even though I didn't really know how profoundly having a child would change my life, I knew it would change it enough so we couldn't jet off to Thailand when we wanted to, and I couldn't spend three or four hours training for a marathon every weekend. I wanted to be good and goddamn READY.

And I was. I ran my marathon, went off the Pill, and serendipitously got pregnant within 3 months, at the "advanced maternal age" of 35. The thing is, I remember people asking me how many children I planned to have even while I was still pregnant with the first one. I just smiled, and said, that we'd see how it goes with one. Maybe it is my advanced age, but as your friends start having babies, it's just not that easy. The wrenching stories of infertility and miscarriage and preeclampsia and late-term fetal death and premature labor and disabilities pile up, and you know you can't take the birth of your one precious baby for granted. It just might not be that easy. And the birth wasn't that easy, not what I had hoped for or wanted. But she was healthy and perfect; though I felt violated and battered.

Then, there comes the sleep deprivation, the fact that you are ON DUTY 24-7, there is the juggling of that nagging day job that pays the bills with your parenting job, which may require your attention all night long. There are all the moments that you realize you don' t know what the hell you are doing, and you cry, and the fact that your child doesn't sleep all night until she is finally 20 months old. You are a mediocre employee, a semi-wretched mother, a bad and surly wife, a sleep-deprived screeching fishwife, impatient, stretched too thin, with barely a half-hour to yourself, alone, each day. If you are lucky. You are absorbed by laundry and meals and groceries and paying the nanny and finding socks and toys and some coffee and getting the right dose of Tylenol at 3:00 am, and still going to work the next day, feeling your daughter's cold invading your own body, scratching at your throat. You think, I'm such a crap-ass mother to just one kid right now...what the hell would I do with another one?

Meanwhile, all of your mama friends in the neighborhood betray you. They gang up on you. They all get pregnant again. They all fall, one by one. Bethany and Jennifer, then Rebecca and Emily and Suzanne, and Stuart and Shannon. Every. Last. One. Some of them have their second before their first one (that one that you shared with them, the one the same age as yours) is even two. You can't imagine. Well, you can imagine, and that's what scares you. A toddler howling at your feet to be held while you are clutching a hungry newborn. Nursing the infant every two hours, while your two-year old wakes twice a night from cutting molars. You think, I'd go crazy if I had an infant right now. I am practically crazy as it is, I barely have this routine, this life in hand.

Your pregnant friends, they comment on it, they ask you at the playground one day. So when are you going to have another one? Look at your daughter with that baby, wouldn't she be a great big sister? You just say, "Oh, we were never sure that we wanted more than one. We still don't know." It's the truth, and you don't think it's a big deal, but your friends seem shocked into silence, and they don't say anything more.

You start to wonder if something is wrong with you. Why don't you know? Why aren't you certain? Why aren't you like them, happily having a second baby, no matter the sleep deprivation, or the mental toll, or the size of the house, or the financial burden of double childcare costs? Are you being selfish? You think of all the people you know who have had this choice made for them, because of infertility, chronic illness, nightmarish pregnancies and births, premature babies, these agonies that they cannot physically or emotionally or financially go through again to have another child. You think of what some of your friends have gone through to have a second. The miscarriages, the finances, nine months of debilitating nausea (again), the surgeries, the IVF, the monitoring, the medications. You had nothing that bad. You got pregnant easily, had a pretty easy pregnancy, you had a fast, easy labor, but a freak flipped-breech baby. You are healthy. You could most likely have a VBAC this time around. You're considered "rich" by most standards; you could afford it. God, you must be selfish, when you might have another so easily by comparison.

Age is creeping up on you. Thirty-fucking-eight is right around the corner. Those media-hyped piles of statistics and shit about declining fertility. Your worries about whether your daughter should have a sibling. You don't really know, because your half-sister is thirteen years older, always barely present in your life, more like a distant cousin. You were basically an only child. Your husband has an older brother, but doesn't feel strongly about having another baby. He said, some months ago, that he wasn't ready for a second, because your first, your Olive, your preshus, is pretty intense. You don't know if he's changed his mind. You're utterly afraid to talk about it, afraid that some decision will have to be made. You wish you were six years younger.

The Olive's outgrown clothes and toys pile up in her closet in boxes, saved for some moment in time when a decision is made. You can't get rid of any of them, not yet. She still needs you so much, your girl. She needs to be held and comforted, and it takes everything you have, some nights, to get it all done in the dinner-bath-bed rush, and you can't imagine how you would do it with two of them. Some nights, you go to bed right after she does, because you have nothing left. Could you find something, anything, for a second child? And your sweet husband, already shuffled off to third place, what happens to him, to your marriage?

Yet. Yet. You don't want to regret anything, leave anything untried, undone. You already know in your head how the study would have to be renovated to turn it into another actual bedroom, and where the furniture would be placed. You wonder where all the books would go, but you have ideas. You think about your friends' kids, playing together, entertaining each other, knowing each other as only siblings can. You wish you knew what that felt like, so maybe you'd know if your daughter needs it, that sibling.

But you didn't like being pregnant, not at all. Didn't like nursing all that much either, even though you did it for nearly two years. You think about the agony of going through all of that again, all that discomfort, inconvenience. And more years of double-disrupted sleep, and teething and chasing and toddlers and baffling tantrums.

Sometimes, you feel that your family is perfect, right as it is. Cozy, with just you three. Only one child to wrangle, one carseat, one extra plane ticket to buy. So much love and attention, from two parents, three grandparents. Then, there are those times when there are three or four of you with her, and it seems ridiculous, overindulgent, to have all of those adults just for one small child, such excess, wasted resources.

There are, of course, those many moments of pure gold and bliss. Your utter infatuation with your daughter from the moment she was put into your arms. Your endless fascination and amazement at every single new thing that she does, even now. The smell of her curls, the feel of her small warmth in the cool mauve-grey dawn as you are both waking up. You look at her, so utterly herself, so lovely, shining. And you can't even imagine loving anything as much as her, can't imagine finding it in your heart to love anyone or anything so much, again.

But you never imagined her either. She was impossible to imagine, impossible to dream about. Only the reality of her could be enough, and more.

So, how do you know? How do you know if you should have another? How did you know?

Because I still have no idea. And time breathes, hot, at my heels.

 

Everyday forgiveness

This is a 30 Days of Truth Post: Day 04 → Something you have to forgive someone for.

I started some wordy post for Day 4 here all about all the things I have already forgiven, but not forgotten, and learned from, and blah blah blah. Which is true. I think I've gotten old enough and wise enough and have lost enough brain cells through wine and childbirth to leeeet goooo of a lot of things. (There are however, a few things that shall never be forgiven, which shall be covered in one of these other truthiness days. Still the elephant, still never forget.)

Anyhoo. There just isn't anything big lurking out there that I need to forgive. The forgiveness needs to come in little doses in my everyday life. I need to forgive my sweet husband for, well, everything.

Why is it that those closest and dearest to you have the power to irritate you beyond anything else? That just doesn't seem right. And frankly, before we had a baby, Seth and I were pretty zen and chill. We didn't fight, really, and still don't. We discuss a lot of things. There are harsh words, usually on my part. I have no patience, and I have a quick temper. Seth finds it hard to believe, but I am actually far more patient and slower to anger now than I was when I was younger. Which still isn't very patient or slow.

So, we had a few tiffs here and there in the first three years of our married life. Then there was the baby. Our beloved, adored little fish, little frog, our girl. But with all that also came crazy sleep deprivation, stir-craziness from staying at home with her, and me feeling utterly overwhelmed when I finally did go back to work. It just amped everything up. I was shorter, terser, quicker to anger and tears, impatient, frenzied. It's gotten better as I've found out how to manage everything, but it is still far from perfect.

As I've said before, since the Olive was born. I was singly, completely devoted to her, mind and body. She comes first, always first. I am second, because I have to take care of myself in order to take care of her. Seth, poor Seth, is barely third. It can't be any other way. I do what I have to in order to survive, to keep us all sleeping and eating and clean and functioning. I feel so tightly wound sometimes, so rigid, but I feel like it *has* to be that way in order for everything to work. I have to get to bed early, so I can get up with our before-sunrise girl. I feel like I have to spend that precious time between the Olive's bedtime and mine making food for the next day, because otherwise, what the hell are we all going to eat? So, I don't have much left for anything else, most of the time. My fuse is awfully short, my reserves awfully depleted. My poor husband is the nearest target.

I have to forgive him for going to bed late, for snoring, for forgetting sometimes to clean the highchair, for not putting away his laundry, for not getting up on time in the mornings, for appearing to spend time surfing the internet when I think he could be helping me or playing with the girl, and for not psychically knowing exactly what it is that I want. I have to forgive him for wanting to snuggle up with me at night when I just want to sleep, and for not knowing where everything is in the kitchen, because I maintain such control of that room.  

I have to forgive him all of this because I know he loves me and loves the Olive beyond anything. He would do anything for us. He tries to do his best for us. I don't have to worry one iota about money. It is one thing we do not fight about, ever. We see eye to eye on what to do with it, and I trust his management of our finances completely. He has planned for our retirement, for college, for next year's roof repairs, for everything. Often, this is what he is doing while appearing to aimlessly surf the internet. I only realize it later when I pick up the laptop and open it to an Excel spreadsheet with a detailed tracking of all our expenses.

I have to forgive him because he almost never snaps back at me when I am short with him. His temper is slow, unlike mine, and I've really hurt him if he says angry words back. He still adores me, somehow, spoiled, temperamental bitch that I am. He tells me I am a good mother, and that I am even more beautiful now than when we met and married.

I have to forgive him because he is such a good father. He doesn't complain that the Olive still so clearly prefers me so much of the time. He is able to snap her out of a negative groove better than I can, change her tune from tantrum to happy. He plays with her in ways that I don't, games with blocks and balls. He makes daddy play dates with friends, and takes the Olive to the playground.

I have to forgive him. I have to be less irritated. Because he is there, always there, steady and gentle. Because he loves us.

Betwixt, between

I'm back at work now. The "real" work, the kind where you get paid actual dollars, not just in adorable baby smiles and long afternoon naps. It hasn't been the easiest transition, as you can read here, on my other blog, the one that I think I've almost outgrown.

I have a foot in each world still, though the foot is definitely wearing heels now, and not flip flops. I'm just not all that busy at work yet, so I fidget here, and wish I could be sitting outside with the baby (let's call her The Olive) instead of with my colleagues, wish I could just nurse the baby, instead of hooking up to a milking machine. Wasting time at work, wishing to be home, surfing the internet looking for cute clothes for The Olive, obsessing over What The Baby Should Be For Her First Halloween Because It Has To Be Perfect! And Cute! And Cuter Than Everyone Else's Baby! and trying not to check Facebook too many times, but rationalizing that my employer should just block it if they don't want us to be on it.

I actually felt wildly optimistic this morning, because the weather was amazing, this cool, brilliant late summer gift of this time of year, and I actually got a decent amount of sleep in the last few days (this round of teething seems to be at a lull....shh, don't wake it up) and I almost seem to have my shit together today! Whoa!

I also ended up having lunch and going for a walk with my husband. Oh yeah, that guy. We happen to work in the same building, which is mostly good, but sometimes weird, because ack, worlds colliding! and all. I still feel strange being alone with him without The Olive. We have only been alone together without her for a couple of hours at most since she was born. I realized today that we have to figure out how to be together again. Just us. In so many ways.

I have been quite single-mindedly and bodily devoted to The Olive since she was born. She has refused to take a bottle, which has made it quite a bit harder for us to have this thing I've heard of where husbands and wives hire this person called a babysitter and go out alone! together! for dinner or a movie or something. My precious breastmilk ball and chain has made this whole "going out together" thing something of the misty, dreamed-about future, the zenith achieved after "weaning," which is a whole 'nother topic for another day. So, the only time we have gone out for a baby-free evening was for my birthday, back in February. My mother in law was in town, and she babysat for us. It was back in those days where the baby didn't have a bedtime yet, so no one had to worry about putting her to sleep by 7:30. We just made an early dinner reservation, and got home within a couple of hours so that the baby would not be howling and hungry. So it turns out that it's now kind of strange to be alone with my husband. Like we need to be reintroduced, have a second date all over again.

And learn how to, um, get around the bases again. The truth is, I have no idea when we last had sex. I do know it was at least 10 months ago. And certainly longer. I never had that mythical libido surge that many pregnant women have. I was suffused with worry throughout my pregnancy, especially after a scare at 25 weeks with some premature contractions. That turned out to be fine, but the attitude of the medical professionals made me probably overly afraid to do lots of things, like exercise or have sex. I just didn't feel it for sex, y'all. Just. Not. There. Bloated hippo. Alien fish in belly. Bleagh. (You can bet if I went past my due date, it would have been another story entirely, but alas for the poor cock-blocked husband, I went into labor three days before my due date.)

Then there was the rude slicing open of my abdomen to retrieve The Olive who had decided, at the last minute, to turn herself breech, just to make things interesting. Any empowerment of our planned natural birth was obliterated by the shock and pain and horror of an unexpected hospital Cesarean. The scar still feels numb; I'm told it always will. It pulled uncomfortably for weeks, and ached when I began running again. I had been manhandled, assaulted, unwanted touching.

Even healing myself was not my primary job. Sustaining the tiny, beloved Olive was the universe, the all. She was nearly constantly connected to my boob, curled next to me in bed every night until she was over two months old. She was mine. My body was hers. My body was a tool for nurturing. My body was healing from ravages. My body was not mine. It became something "other," something functional only, when I got pregnant, when I gave birth, when I was cut open, when I nursed the baby.

It is still not mine. I am a statistic - one in thousands. An IUD, placed eight weeks after The Olive's birth, somehow perforated my uterus and is now floating somewhere in the right side of my pelvic/abdominal cavity, waiting for laproscopic surgery to retrieve it. I feel violated, betrayed once again, both by the excruciating procedure to insert the IUD, and the fact that I now have to have another unwanted surgery to remove it.

I am somehow considerably thinner than I was before I got pregnant. This seems to be a side effect of being a milk machine, because I really didn't work at it. (Sorry. It's true. I know you hate me now.) I see my husband eye me when I am dressed up a bit, and I know he thinks I look great. I'm glad. But I still don't feel, well, sexy. I can't imagine being touched in that way. I'm not sure I will be able to until the baby is weaned. I feel like that  is my body's job right now, and as soon as that is done, maybe we can go back to it being a decorative model. I'm not sure I can do both.

Plus! The logistics! I go to bed before the husband, and get up before him. Yes, the baby still sleeps in our room, though not in our bed. The perhaps one hour a day I have to myself, well, honestly, I want to drink a glass of wine, sit on my ass, and watch True Blood. My poor husband. He's become merely functional too: the picker-up of farm shares and packages; the taker-outer of garbage; the baby entertainer while Mama cooks. I try not to snipe. I don't always succeed. He has never said anything, other than requesting a few hand jobs here and there. I comply, of course. He asks for little. I think he understands. My body is not mine to give to you just now. I just can't. I swear, someday, I will be able to, and we can leave the baby with your parents and we can go, back to that place that we used to be in, where we used to know each other differently, where we were not just parents, where we were ourselves, wholly. I swear we will go there someday. For just a little while.