the edge

So Jorg, my huband, dropped a bomb on me. He is going to be away for a week. An entire week of 24 hour caring for my son….of waking up in the middle of the night with just Lukas, me and my wild imagination. 24 hours of responsibility. 24 hours of being a grown up. I’m not ready. I already wake up some mornings thinking “wait Lukas just give me a few minutes of caring only about myself before you need anything. I’m not awake enough to be responsible for another human being yet.” I already despise the fact that the first event of my day is changing a diaper. I feel like such a wimp. I mean, I’m a grown up. I should be able to handle being alone with my son for a week. Millions of single mothers do it all the time. But I am not one of them. If I were a single mother I think I would live with other people. I would take in a border. I would become a border. I would never try it alone. I know I need to grow up and deal with it, but I cried. I told him he couldn’t go. I told him it was impossible. If it wasn’t hard enough to be left alone with my little blue eyed bundle, the week that Jorg is going to be gone is the week that the play I am directing is supposed to open. “No. It can’t happen. Tell your boss forget it. Next time you can go. Not now.” I said to Jorg, who sat there patiently waiting for me to calm down. I called my brother. I called my mother. I called my friends. I think that I overreacted. I think that it was just the last straw in the childcare nightmare. Now it is a day later. I have thought about it some more. It has made me reassess all the things that I have taken on. I think I took too much work on. It’s just a balance. I like saying yes to work. I like how working makes me feel. But I don’t like coming home to a crying and desperate son. I don’t like the stress of trying to balance it all. I don’t like the guilt that I feel all the time. I feel guilty when I leave him. But I will continue to work. Just maybe a little bit less. And I will survive a week without Jorg. Thanks to a few very helpful friends. I have met my edge. I am taking a breath. I am going into it.

oxygen

So we are introducing solid foods. Lukas dribbles rice cereal down his face and smiles at me with his two teeth. The two teeth, which are very cute, but due to extensive nipple biting caused me almost to wean him at 5 months. Alas, I won’t wean. I want him to have breast milk and I love feeding him. I would miss it greatly. Rice cereal, however takes a certain amount of patience. One tiny drop goes in and 3 drops come drooling out onto his clothes, his hands, his face, into the rolls of skin that make up his chin. It’s a process. But we have to do it. I am teaching now, two classes back to back and that means I have to be away for 6 hours. He has to eat something during that time and after last weeks fiasco with the bottle, I know that I can’t trust him to eat formula. He wouldn’t take the bottle. He refused it, opting instead to go from 2:30-8:00 pm without food. I came home to a starving, screaming baby who smiled deliriously when he saw me and proceeded to guzzle from my engorged breasts and pass out. So, although I had hoped to give him only breast milk for the first 6 months of his life, we are moving towards solid foods. Part of me feels guilty about this. I was with a group of mothers last week and told them that I would be away from Lukas for 6 hours. They looked a little shocked and concerned. What would he eat? How would he survive without me for such a long stretch? One mother said that she had only left her child for 3 hours, another for a few here and there and the third had only left her son once for 45 minutes!! Already the judging each other has begun, the weighing up of priorities and the need to justify our own choices as “right” by making others “wrong”. Why are we women so hard on each other? Perhaps no one judged me at all. I probably was just judging myself. Should Lukas be my only job right now? Am I putting his development in jeopardy? I don’t know. But I do know that I need to get out there. I need to be more than a mom. My mother always reminds me of the emergency instructions given on crashing planes. “Make sure that you secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others.” So here we go. May we all make it through in one piece.

passing

I’m a bit of a hypo-chondriac. Any strange bump or odd ache that can’t be traced and imme-diately I begin to imagine my final days. So I have this strange pain in my finger and in my wrist and I start thinking its some unusual, undiagnosable disease and this is it. Normally it has felt quite tragic when I had these dramatic thoughts. Now with Lukas it all takes on a new sadness. This morning as I am changing his diaper, carefully avoiding my aching finger, I imagine his life without me. I imagine our final days together. He would want to play but I am ill and unable. I imagine him growing up hearing stories from Jorg about me, from my friends, from my parents. I imagine him looking at baby pictures that I am in with him and how he wouldn’t know me. I almost make myself cry. Okay Susan it's time to reign in your dramatic imagination. You have gone too far. But this is a reality for some people. These things do happen. These thoughts make every moment now precious. The realization that it could all change keeps me awake to the moment. My health, my life is not guaranteed. I am not owed anything. I am only human. I have often thought that if we only acknowledged the fact that none of us will be here forever, that everything is temporary, then we could really live. We could really love. We could see the small frustrations as what they are, small. We could really be here in the moment, knowing that this is all we really have. I look at Lukas and I think to myself, if everything goes as it should go then he will outlive me. This is the way it is supposed to be. I look at him and see a small piece of my own mortality. I feel my own age. I am no longer the youngest in the generational line. I am moving through it and this is both beautifully natural and poignantly sad. I don’t think that I am really dying of a rare finger and wrist disorder but I know that I will die. I will not be here forever and I am here now. As I hold my little baby and feed him at 3:00 AM, as I empty the diaper pail for the millionth time, as I stand at the window with him and watch the cars pass, I think to myself, this too shall pass. Nothing is forever. All I have is this moment with its perfect disorder, with its beautiful, mundane and profound offerings.

showing up

This morning my friend Trina called. She asked me how I am. I answered “good” and really I am good. It’s a sunny day. It feels warmer out. I hear new birds outside and that makes me hopeful for spring. I have a few plans for today. Make a soup. Have a friend over for lunch. Our big outing is to go to the library for “shake out your sillies”. It’s all relative. A year ago if you asked me what I want to do for fun it wouldn’t have been going to the library to shake rattles and listen to oldies while a bunch of babies wiggle and crawl around me. But today that sounds great. Today that is an outing and any outing sounds good. Lately I feel like I’m just killing time. I watch the clock. Its 8:00 so that means that he should take a nap soon. He will probably sleep until 9:15 or so and then he will need to eat soon after. I should eat again. Now it’s 12:00 and I should go shopping. Oh it’s Wednesday already, only 2 more days until the weekend. Now it’s Sunday again, almost a new week. Now he is another month old. Time just passes but I don’t want to live my life this way. I don’t want to kill time. I seem to get further and further away from “who I was”….or at least further away from how I showed up in the world. I used to show up as a wacky and zany spontaneous artist….a hiker, a skier, a biker. Now I show up as the mom, I shop, I make food, I clean, I change diapers, I go to the library. I know. I will always be the artist, the wacky woman….but I want to show up in the world that way.Today I am relatively good. If you asked me how I am, I would say “good”. But there is so much more going on. This being a mother is such a big change. I really never knew