No More Mourning Morning

 

It's the last week of the semester, and I'm finally feeling like I have the whole working mom thing figured out.  Or, the mornings, at least.

I remember that when I first went back to work full-time I was completely overwhelmed by the morning routine.  I couldn't believe how early I was going to have to get up just to get everyone out of the house on time.  I did it fine when we just had Addie, but somehow having two kids made things, like, ten times as hard.  There were so many bags to pack and people to dress and tantrums to quell.  Bit by bit, things just fell apart.  I stopped bathing.  The television was on non-stop.  I didn't hardly talk to the girls, so focused was I on just getting everyone ready.  I hated mornings.  They felt stressful, and set a stressful tone for the rest of the day.

This morning was the exact opposite.  I had a few minutes to chill with each kid; I took a bath; I drank my whole cup of coffee; I got to work on time.  So, here are a few short lessons, learned after a torturous four months of working mommy-hood:

1)  Make little adjustments.  Whenever I tried to figure out how to tackle the insanity of the mornings, it seemed like a huge, insurmountable problem.  But making some small changes really made a difference.  I'll try to explain them below.

2)  Get up a little earlier.  Not a lot earlier, just a little.  For me, getting up fifteen minutes earlier than I usually do means I can have a bath, or sit with Nolie before Addie wakes up, or check my email.  I'm amazed how much calmer I am when I give myself a little time to wake up.

3)  Ask for a little help.  In our house, it doesn't make sense for Eric to get the kids ready for daycare and to drive them there.  He does best when he can get to work early (really early) and come home early--he picks the girls up a couple of days a week.  But this doesn't mean he's totally off the hook!  He recently started making Addie's lunches on school nights, and he brings me a cup of coffee in bed every morning.  These tiny things have made a huge difference in how I feel about mornings.  And about Eric.

4)  Prep the night before.  We have a little couch in our entryway, and every night I line up all of my bags for the next day:  Nolie's diaper bag gets stocked; my purse, which will get filled with my lunch and Addie's stuff the next morning; my briefcase; my computer bag; and whatever else (library books, papers, etc.).  Then, in the morning, I just make sure the little assembly line has everything it needs, and I haul all of it out to the car.  No forgotten bags, no running around like a possessed nuthouse.

5)  Spend a little time with the girls.  Whether it's hanging out with Nolie for a few minutes before I try to get dressed or hugging Addie on the couch for a few minutes before we head out the door, these little bits of time really matter to me and to the kids.  Their attitudes improve, as does mine, and it's a good way to remind them how much I love them.

6)  Bathe.  I still can't do this everyday.  If I have to be at work early, or if there's a lot going on, chances are I'm not going to get a shower or a bath.  It just stretches everyone too thin.  But for some reason, I feel so much better if I've had a chance to wash my hair and shave my pits at the beginning of the day.  It's just that simple.  So, though I'm comfortable with having days where I don't get to, I'm trying to work the bath back into the routine.  I'm sure everyone around me is also glad for this.

I don't know why this was all so hard for so long--I look over this, and it all seems so simple.  And mornings will always sort of suck.  I forgot to eat breakfast today, for example, because Nolie pooped all over and Addie had six types of medicine to take (I exaggerate) and sometimes my needs (eating, peeing, breathing) take backseat.  But I'm getting better.  It gets better.

Hangover and Over Again

 

Eric and I went out to a party last night.  No kidding.  We got a babysitter and everything, and although we came home earlier than we said we would, we had a really nice time.  We went to a fancy birthday party, and then snuck off and had wine and chocolate fondue at a restaurant.  Eric said he would drive, so I had four glasses of wine.  Or so.

Next think I knew, we were on our way home from Boulder and I had the spins.

I'm not exactly a teetotaler, you know.  I have a glass of wine almost every night, or a beer, and on the weekends I might have two.  But I'm not much of an excess drinker, either.  Not because I'm a master of self-control, but because if you drink too much and you have small children, you pay a heavy price, which is called having to get up early in the morning and be pleasant to small human beings, when all you really want to do is puke and pass out.

I drank a couple of glasses of water when we got home, which must have saved me, because when I got up this morning I didn't feel totally sick.  Eric had got up at 5:30 because both Nolie and Addie weirdly and spontaneously decided this would be a decent hour to rise this morning.  My guess is they planned this last night.  "Hahahaha!" cackled Nolie.  "They think they're going to stay out until 11, on a Saturday night?  We'll show them!" 

"Yes," said Addie, smirking and rubbing her hands together.  "We'll make them so miserable they'll never call a sitter AGAIN!  5:30 it is!!!"  Evil laughter rings throughout the house.

Eric came and collapsed into bed at 7, with a muffled, "Your turn," as he turned into a drooling blob of sleepness.

I groaned, but really I felt fine.  Or, not really fine.  Kind of gross, and really, really tired.  The strange thing was that I always feel like that--tired and a little gross--in the morning.  I think until the kids are older and decide to consistently sleep well at the same time, I will always feel like this.  So, this morning, which was a kind of yucky, hungover morning, actually felt like a normal, run-of-the-mill sleep-deprived morning. 

I'm not really complaining.  We had a blast last night, the weather was gorgeous today, and things seem to be turning around.  I'm drinking less coffee, doing more yoga, eating more salad (albeit drenched in oil and crutons).  Things are going well on all fronts.  We have good, reasonable daycare all set for both girls in the new hood; we found a good trundle bed for Addie today, used and cheap; I got to watch some t.v. this weekend (season 4, Six Feet Under.  SO good).  One more week and the semester will be virtually over, and we'll be in our new house.  Man, I feel good.

But also kind of gross and hungover.  You know.  Like usual.

The Littlest Birds Sing the Prettiest Songs

Have I mentioned that Addie is now completely potty trained?  Now and then she has a bit of a wet diaper in the morning, but for the most part, she fully goes potty according to her own volition now, and hasn't had an accident in weeks.  She's also discovered the joy of dancing (at last!), thanks to a little karaoke machine her grandma and grandpa bought her for her birthday.  So we do a lot of boogeying to "Who Let the Dogs Out" (unfortunate choice of music, but the dance moves are worth it).

And Nolie?  Nolie has four teeth, and laughs her ass off now at the silliest things (me practically screaming "BAH" in her face, her sister running around like a cut-loose goat), and all she wants in the world is to stand up and walk.  The minute you put her on her butt she is pissed off.  You have to sit with her every minute of the day so that she can pull herself to standing until her legs are so wobbly she's leaning back and forth like a building set for demolition, and then she'll fall on her butt, and cry until you've popped her back up.  At which point the wobbling and falling begins again.

It's the greatest, this mom stuff.  I complain about it all the time, and it's so, so hard.  But it's also the greatest thing in the world.  I'll never tire of Addie whispering to me, "Mommy, you look like a princess today," as she sweeps my hair out of my eyes.  Or Nolie finally screaming mamamamamamama.  Those are good things.  I hold on to those.

 

Planes of Vision

 

I had the most horrible dream a few weeks ago, one of those dreams that you have a tough time shaking.

In this dream I was on a late-night flight, sparsely populated, and flying by myself back home from a conference.  I was excited to see Eric and the girls.  In the dream I could see through the cockpit of the plane and directly out the windshield.  The lights of the city were spread out before us, twinkling, as we descended.

All of a sudden, the plane lost power.  I remember being struck by the amazing silence of this descent, the quickness of it, its subtlety.  There was a surreal contradiction between this quiet speed and the panicky realization that if that power didn't come back on immediately, I would die.  I began to panic, to hyperventilate, when all of a sudden something else in me took over.  I just said (prayed?) that I wanted to see my family again, and that if that was in my destiny, I hoped it would happen.

The strange thing is, as soon as I said this in the dream, I knew it would be true.  But I woke up before I could see the power come back on, so the disquietude of those terrifying, dark, silent moments persists some.  The intensity of my desire to see my little family was also completely overwhelming, and a little surprising.  I mean, I'm not the most other-centered person I've ever met.  But the switch from me freaking out over my death to focusing on wanting to see them again was strangely intentional and powerful in the dream.

I was thinking about this last night after Eric and I had a doozy of a fight over putting Addie to bed.  I have to work tonight and tomorrow night, so he was hoping I would undertake the occasionally arduous process of helping Addie go to sleep so he could have a break.  I, on the other hand, needed to balance the checkbook (also arduous) and prep for class today, and was looking at a late night anyway.  If I took the hour to put Addie to bed, I wouldn't get to bed until midnight.  And today is my twelve-hour day, so I needed some sleep.

[Note:  The irony is that Addie woke up at midnight and I ended up hanging out with her for an hour and a half while we dissected the "scary noises" in her room, including a roar that she continually demonstrated for me.  "But Addie," I kept saying, "That's you roaring."]

The gist, really, is that Eric and I weren't very nice to each other in this particular interaction, nor in the follow-up conversation after Addie went down.  It was the sort of argument that makes one understand phrases like "seeing red."  It was the sort of argument that makes me imagine moving into an apartment of my own.   

But the paradox is this:  it wasn't a big fight.  It was just a frustrating one.  When Eric and I fight, it's always over this same unresolvable conflict, the conflict of neither of us having enough time to relax.  I feel overworked and underappreciated; he wants me to leave the dishes in the sink and the laptop off.  I feel like he doesn't understand the unique demands of my job, the fact that I never have enough time to succeed because I have too many competing obligations; he feels like I'm taking advantage of him by using him as the obvious babysitter.

We make little strides at solving this dilemma now and then, and I think as the kids grow older, it is getting a little easier.  Still, it's hard not to let resentment take over, to count how many hours one person works, to justify every little minute of the day.  We deny each other small kindnesses because we feel stretched and deprived ourselves. 

So, I was lying on the couch after the fight, trying to calm down enough to focus on feminist film theory for my class today, when the airplane dream came back to me.  I didn't welcome it.  I wanted to stay mad.  But the vivid specter of loss floated there in front of me, demanding to be acknowledged, demanding that I give up my anger and value my spouse and kids above all else.

Man, that's hard sometimes.  It shouldn't be, but it is.  I don't know why it takes such fearful fantasies for me to recognize how much I love my family, but it does.  This being split all the time is difficult, and I think these disaster fantasies serve to unify me in some way, to bring me back to myself.  They are painful and useful all at once, but a temporary and unfulfilling fix at best. 

Such fantasies and dreams, which plagued me terribly after Addie was born, started to fade when she turned two (before we had Nolie) and Eric and I felt a little relief from the demands of babyhood.  I'm sure the same will happen as Nolie gets older.  For now, though, we struggle, each falling through the air like maniac parachutists, occasionally catching hands and holding on, sometimes tumbling off into our own erratic cartwheels, the ground approaching ever faster.  Where will we land, I wonder?  How will we fare?  Will we come back together, make a soft landing for one another?  I hope so.  I think so.  We fall for now, but won't forever, I think.

La La Lazies

 

 

Oh, boy.

I can feel a serious case of the lazies coming on.  Being home with Addie yesterday--having four hours of unadulterated (untoddlerated?) time to fold laundry and pack boxes and check email and blog was too, too wonderful.  I'm melting a little just thinking about it.  Plus, these last two weeks of the semester are always bizarrely easy.  Students are working on papers, I cancel class and meet them for conferences, tie up loose ends, and so on.  Not to mention there is a whopper of a rainstorm carrying on outside today.  A perfect recipe for jammies, beer, sofa, napping, daytime tv. 

Was there ever a me who did such things?  I have vague memories of a me in the distant past who did things like flop, belly-down, on the bed and listen to an entire c.d.  The extravagance.

Do you know what one of my secret dreams for the summer is?  To do a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

Seriously. 

I'd like to just hole myself up in my little office at the new house and do a giant jigsaw puzzle.  A really hard one.  Like one that is all one color, and the pieces are only slightly different from one another.  The urge to do this is so strong it's nearly overwhelming.

It's not as if I have summer off, by any means.  I have a bunch of projects I'll be getting paid to complete, plus all that off-the-clock stuff I do over the summer but don't really get paid for.  Still, time is a little more elastic.  I can work from home a lot.  And there are no classes, so deadlines are a little fuzzier.  Fuzzy enough to leave time for the jigsaw puzzle.  Fuzzy enough to take a day off now and then.

I realize it's not about the puzzle.  I realize that what I really want is some time to just lose myself in some mindless activity, free from obligation.  It's not as if I have some burning passion for doing puzzles or anything.  I'm a freak, but I ain't that freaky.  I haven't done a real puzzle in probably twenty years. Once when I was a kid--around nine or ten--I spent three whole days of my Christmas vacation doing a giant puzzle in the basement of our house, the t.v. running the entire time.  Some part of me must be tapping into the mindless pleasure of that memory. 

I know this because there were some puzzles at Steve and Julie's this weekend, and I didn't want to let any of the kids play with them.  I wanted to do them.  "Are you trying to clean up?" Julie asked me.  I think she's worried I'm going to come in and try to organize her house or something.  But that wasn't it at all.  I couldn't really explain that I just felt obsessed about seeing all those neat little pieces come together, to have it all be complete.  A sense of accomplishment without really risking anything.

What this made me realize is that I haven't had any time to be mindless.  I know, I know--the Buddhists are always trying to get you to be mindful.  I think it's just that everything I've been doing lately has been closely tied to a "should" or a "must."  Because time is so precious and goes so quickly, I've felt the need to justify every little activity as being related to motherhood or work.  This is exhausting. 

The lazies, they are a'coming.  Hallelujah.

Babes and Beaches

Seeing my kids play on the beach every day of their lives wouldn't be too much, I think. 

 We mostly spent the weekend spending time with family, but for an hour on Sunday before our plane left, we did this:

and this:

There was so much that was good about this weekend.  Before we left, Addie was starting to tell a lot of stories about little kids whose moms had left them, or died, or went to work all the time.  Both girls were fussy a lot of the time.  Nolie didn't want to be put down--I think she is always worried that I'm leaving.  These four days went a long way in healing these painful signs.  Four days of uninterrupted mommy time helped.

This is harder to pull off at home, when I feel torn by my other obligations to work and the house.  But this weekend was a good reminder of how important my family is to me, and I to them. 

And Eric.  He is such the protector of us all.  Whenever we have time to just be together, I fall for him all over again.  I love him more all the time, his attention to us, his fear for us, his unwavering support.

The first two days we were in San Diego, I felt wound so tight, like I just wanted to curl in a ball and sleep--the stress of the weeks prior was deeply ingrained in my bones, I think.  By Saturday, though, I was feeling better rested, more relaxed, smiling more.  Stretching at night didn't hurt.  And I loved being around family, loved these little Schneider kids, Addie and Gwen and Raiff and Nolie.

Here's Addie, begging Gwen to play with her (Gwen wasn't always so sure).

Addie woke up with croup every night we were there, but remained in pretty good spirits until yesterday on the plane, when her fever spiked and an ear infection, unseen before, got ugly.  So, back to the doctor today.  Now they think it might be allergies, that she just doesn't drain well.  So she'll get Benadryl for a while at night, and hopefully that will help.  I want her to be well, want to not spend so much time in doctor's offices.  Want her not to have so many antibiotics.

I felt that old tension creeping into my shoulders today as we were driving to the doctor's, and forced myself to shake it off.  Part of me was relieved to have the day home with her, and she's napping now, so that I can write this.  Tomorrow, it is back to work for the final two weeks of the semester.  Then we move, then some time off, I think.  We'll head to Telluride for the bluegrass festival in June, and spend a lot of time in our beautiful new backyard this summer.  I can't wait, I can't wait, I can't wait.  Just three more weeks, then I think I'll figure some things out.

A Few Things Well

 

Conditions today were excellent.  The weather warmed some, my boss agreed to give me some teaching relief next year so that I don't lose my mind (at least not completely), and an extremely full day ran really smoothly.  Plus, I had some awesome teaching moments that made me feel like Jerry Maguire--at the end of the movie, not at the beginning.

Also, and I am thanking baby Jesus for this, we close on May 7, and not on April 30.  We had mentioned to our realtor we might want to close early so that we could get into the house, but this would have meant some serious finagling for me that last week of classes.  As my good friend Garth Brooks says, "Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers."  What happened to Garth?  Ah, the anthems of my youth.

Mostly, I just feel this gigantic relief tonight.  Classes are almost over, and the grading hump at the end of the semester is never as bad as in the middle.  We're headed to beautiful San Diego tomorrow, and I'm not taking my computer, or a book, or even a pen with me.  I swear.  There will be nothing even resembling work in my life over the next four days.  I am just going to sit and drool in the corner while my kids crawl all over me.

Good spirits.  But there are a few things dinging at me, things that my mind is tumbling over and trying to figure out the significance of, and whether future action is required, and how much guilt I need to be assigning to things.  It's this:

I fancy myself a good mom.

Oh my God, it's out.  I admit it.  I think I'm a pretty good mom, most of the time.  But also, accompanying that impression, is my sense that I'm also the worst mom in the world.  I am one to live at the extremes, you see?  I'm either the best mom ever and can stand in judgment over all the other sorry moms out there, or I'm the shittiest mom ever and child services should just come right now and get them because anything would be better than my crazy ass.

Because I've been so ridiculously overwhelmed at work lately, I think my "worst mom" sensors are particularly sensitive at the moment.  I miss my kids.  I miss me.  Things feel a little out of control.

Everyday there is a note in Addie's lunchbox telling us how her mood was, whether she went potty, how much lunch she ate, and what she enjoyed doing.  Usually, the words "cheerful," "talkative," and "friendly" are circled on the page, and usually it shows that she ate "some" for lunch.  But not today.  Instead, today, Addie's teacher had marked that "Addie needs more food in her lunch, please."

What?

Are you saying I don't feed my child enough?

Are you saying I let my child go hungry?

Are you saying that I might be....a bad mom?

Oh Lord.  Ima gettin goin.  Then, when I get home, Eric tells me that Addie's teacher says she was "weepy" all day at school, maybe because of the move?  Honestly, Addie's weepy now and then, so this shouldn't be a big surprise.  Still, I'm freaked out.  Why circle "happy," "talkative," and "friendly" on the Daily Otter News if in fact my child was "weepy"?  Is this some cruel game?  Should I be having interventions with Addie to deal with this?  Why is my child weepy?

Also, there's the trouble with finding Nolie good care for when we move.  I interviewed someone today who seemed like she might be a good fit, but it's 15 minutes in the opposite direction from work.  So I'm back in the old situation of driving half my life away to get good care.  We could have a nanny, but then we might not be able to pay the mortgage.  Plus, I work from home a lot in the summer, and am not sure I want anybody around the house.  The mouse is turning the wheel on this one, too.

No, I'm not a bad mom.  But I have been so busy lately that I'm forgetting a lot of things, and missing others, and that's not really like me.  And yes, I believe we'll find great, reasonable childcare for Nolie.  And things, very soon, will calm down so that I can be more present in all parts of my life.

But in the meanwhile, the little pinpricks of everything that has gone undone, or underdone, pinch at me.  This has been a good lesson in the enormous price of stretching myself too thin.  It's also been a good lesson in letting some things go (like the need to have a floor to which one's feet don't stick, or a toilet without a good coating of hair all over it).  I think better to cut back some and do some things well, live well, and be well.