On Homemaking

It doesn’t happen often, but when I am asked I have to stop what I am doing and think. Occupation. Among all of the options, or fill-in-the-blank, there is a choice for me to wholly commit to this vocation I employ, or push it back further. Homemaker. It’s better than housewife, for sure. Or “housemom” which is what my brother-in-law’s ex-girlfriend once called it, and will henceforth never live down. It connotes visions of sugar babies to me - high-heeled, gym-going divas and also frumpy, apron-clad matrons.

It’s something I grapple with. Which is why I usually choose another option if given the choice. I still work 10-15 hours a week on “brand consulting” and marketing project for various clients, some start-ups, some established companies. But that really doesn’t sum up the bulk of my profession, which, I’m learning to say out loud to myself, is homemaking. I am a mother raising young children I stay home with, and I take care of our home and all that entails. It is a vocation rather than an occupation, I believe, since no one is paying me to do it. (And most of the time I can’t believe no one is paying me to do it.)

I don’t know why I struggle with the admission. My sisters, who both drive minivans were telling me when I admitted my reluctance to buy one, “Why? You’re not fooling anyone.”

Same, same. I’m not fooling anyone. I am not a high-powered executive. I do not have a “career” as it were. I am a homemaker. There, I said it.

~

I didn’t choose the thug life, it chose me. At least that’s what I tell myself, usually around 4 PM on a Wednesday when I am already bone-tired and still need to make dinner, and fold two piles of laundry and the baby is sick and the playdate I arranged for my oldest is going longer than expected and there are legos and barbies flooding the house and I feel like I can’t breathe. It is then that I feel it necessary to remind myself that actually, I chose the thug life. I made the conscious decision to stay home with my children during their early years even though at times it is so boring and mind-numbing I sometimes stare at my keys and imagine all of the places my car could take me away from here.

But I did the working mom thing, the full-time, 8-5, daycare thing when Claire was a baby and it works for some families but it resoundingly did not work for us. I recognize what a gift and blessing it is to be able to afford to stay at home with my children (it hasn’t always been this way), while also acknowledging that sometimes I yearn for the days where I got cute text messages about the baby between meetings and spent blissful weekends thrilled to be around for nap time and feedings and walks. I hope I can write openly about my gratitude for being here, for being here right now while my children are small and still admit that there are times when I hate it. As my mom is prone to remind me, “Having kids is not for the faint of heart.” Neither, might I add, is being a “homemaker.”

~

Growing up my mom used to attend our church’s version of “Girls Night Out”, aptly named “Homemaking.” (They’ve later changed the name to Enrichment.) I don’t know what she learned at homemaking night. Sometimes she would come home with a loaf of bread they made, but more often it was a printout of a spiritual thought or message. I attend “Enrichment”. We learn to meditate. Paint. We learn about emergency preparedness and how to survive Florida hurricanes. We made a quilt this year for a woman who lost a child. We play games. Have “Get-to-know-you” activities. I absolutely love it. There is always good food. My friends are there. It’s the perfect excuse to leave said home. I can feel good about attending because I’m “supporting” the women whose job it is to put it on. I have not learned one thing that has made me a better homemaker.

I have not found many things that have made me a better homemaker. I have, however, found ways to enjoy it more. Organization. Fancy cleaning products. Or even better - an occasional splurge for someone else to clean my house. A well-stocked fridge with plenty of treats for myself. An endless stash of books. Some on Audible, some on my nightstand. Others I accumulate on the side of the couch or bookshelf to leaf through during some tentative moment of peace. Enough hangers for my clothes. A robotic vacuum that Hazel has nicknamed Rosie. Fresh flowers on the table. Look, there are simple pleasures you seek out more often when you are home all day and those things are a treasure and should take priority over expensive handbags and nice shoes, no matter what any “influencer” might suggest otherwise.

Childcare tops the list, but maybe that is less about homemaking and more about motherhood. Although sometimes the two jobs, to me, feel inexplicably combined, although plenty of homemakers are not mothers and plenty of mothers are not homemakers. To me though, homemaking without the child-rearing sounds like a dream. Homemaking with the children is a whole different animal.

~

I recently finished a book where a childless sister tells her sister with three children that she is worried about becoming a mother because she feels it will limit her. “Motherhood is the most expansive thing you can do,” her sister replied. I keep thinking about that.

Has it expanded me? Yes. And also, no. I am more capable than I used to be, five years ago before I had children I thought I was busy but I didn’t know. Now I manage to meet my children’s needs and most of mine and work and keep my house running (and by that I mean there is usually toilet paper on the rolls and sometimes milk in the fridge.) I feel expanded when I get an email from my daughter’s kindergarten teacher, telling me that she was kind that day. I feel expanded when I make my two-year-old laugh, because it sounds like actual magic and sometimes those laughs are hard-won. I feel expanded when I realize that I can do things that are hard because I have to - because it all falls on me so I quite literally have to.

Am I less expanded? Yes. I am home a lot, bound by nap time and a lack of an office and mostly fatigue, because being out all day is tiring with young children. I joke with Kevin that I wouldn’t be able to have an affair even if I wanted to because I don’t interact with any men or many people who aren’t mothers also. I feel stuck inside sometimes, even here in Florida where the sun shines 360 days a year and it’s always warm enough to go outside I feel trapped because even if I wanted a different life I would have to leave this one behind to get there and I’m unwilling to.

I recently reread Eat Pray Love and keep thinking about the part where her editor tells her that having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. Motherhood, as some might say in a hallmark card is more like a tattoo on your heart but sometimes it feels like the whole dragon, fire-breathing, snaking around my jaw down to my neck.

~

Years ago I was in a sacrament meeting and an old man told a story about walking home from school on a winter day. He would trudge up the hill, his breath fogging the air in front of him. “As a boy,” he said, and I wrote in my journal that night, “I would love, when I would see smoke coming from the chimney of the house. Because it would mean that my mother was home.”

There is no home like your mother. Understanding that - living it, has been my life’s work.

~

Barbara Kingsolver has a lot to say about homemaking. “When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence,” she writes in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. “But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families’ tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.”

Economic independence is a big deal. Worldly influence too, I guess. But I think she’s right that in terms of daily life, if you disregard the small annoyances like the forgotten backpack and canceled sitter and colds, it’s not a bad gig. I love to bake, I love to read to my kids, I love to buy their clothes and with the right book on my airpods I don’t hate cleaning. I do believe in nurturing routines, as she writes. That moment post-nap when you get a tiny head nestled into your neck is, in a word, beautiful. I love that Claire runs to me off of the bus and hugs me and then shrugs at every question I ask about her day. I love that I get to watch movies, sometimes when it is still light outside! I love that I can live in socks and sweatshirts.

But Barbara, what about the minivan and the Lunchable is so bad? What about those of us that are pro-childcare and screen-time and still love the aroma of warm bread rising? What about those of us who hire a babysitter just for our sanity and drive to Starbucks and play Candy Crush and shop online when we’re supposed to be working, because it feels good to just do whatever we want for a couple hours? What about the people who like Lunchables because they are easy even if they’re full of nitrates. Who would rather pay extra to buy the app. Who cringe when they hear the dishwasher finish up because that means it’s time to unload it again.

I’ve read a dozen articles about being a “Millennial Homemaker.” Nearly all of them annoyed me. Homemaking with young children does not have to be Amazon Prime and wine o’clock and dry shampoo. It does not have to be chickens in the back (gross), gardens and beekeeping. It is not about helicoptering or freedom. It is not about survival. It is something much bigger than that. It is colossal.

~

But can we admit that at times, it’s shockingly boring?

My husband is an anesthesiologist. He comes home with wild stories. Things patients did coming out of their anesthesia, sweet moments he had with a patient. A lot of really gross things I wish I didn’t know about. I tell him about my workout at the gym. Leg day. What a bitch. Claire shows him the worksheets she brought home. Hazel refuses to sit down and falls off of her chair. There is peace, in our familiarity. But sometimes I wish I were pushing drugs through needles during a liver transplant instead of sitting on the floor watching Little Baby Bum for the 50000th time. Sometimes I wish I were heading to Guantanamo Bay like my cousin, who is a JAG officer instead of doing carpool. Sometimes I wish I were anywhere else. Because homemaking can be boring even for the most fun people. Don’t @ me.

~

The Highwomen sing:

“Yeah I want a house with a crowded table

And a place by the fire for everyone

Let us take on the world while we’re young and able

And bring us back together when the day is done

The door is always open

Your picture’s on my wall

Everyone’s a little broken

And everyone belongs

Yeah, everyone belongs”

Me too.

~

I wonder sometimes at the concept of having children. What is their purpose? It is no longer necessary to have them to help on the farm. We don’t need them to carry on a name. They are not necessary, I am realizing. I wonder at how many of them I should bring into their world, and the answer at the heart of why is that I want to have more. Is that selfish of me? I want the big family vacations and traditions. I want the summer reunions and a full house. I want them to have each other, most of all, perhaps because a meteor could end us all and wouldn’t you like to be near your sister when it does? I want them, because while they are not necessary in any practical sense, they are as vital to me as air or water.

This is homemaking to me. I am building something that I love and hoping it is something broad enough for my children and their huge selves and the lives they are and will lead. It is acceptance and it is grace and it is survival, yes, but also intelligence.

I’m tired of buying the version of womanhood and motherhood and homemaking I am sold. I’m so tired of feeling like my stomach should be flat and my house should be bigger and my car cleaner.

I want to read books and eat bread and take naps. I want to wear comfortable clothes and take long runs and tickle my babies. I want to write books and sell them too. I want to grow old with Kevin and watch him garden from the window while I read and play cards with friends and crawl into bed with my adult children and hold them the way I do now. I never want that to not be okay. I want to watch them have babies and build their own gardens. I want them to want what I want only bigger. I want them to wrestle with their own questions the way I have and think about me, age 30, in a hot house in Florida and wonder what I thought. I never want it to be too late for them to call me. I want them to have beautiful, heart-pounding sex with people they love. I want them to taste every dessert and always have a book in their bag.

I don’t know what awaits us in heaven but I hope it holds some of life’s pleasures and I hope it is one long sunset after another with cards and salsa on the porch. I hope it is more homemaking on a grander scale.

I hope it is the most crowded table there is.

What I Want to Tell Every Wife Whose Husband is Starting Residency

This post is my most-read post ever, on this little blog (which is not saying a lot since I’ve posted maybe 10 times in the last 5 years). Since I published it I’ve received dozens of emails from spouses of medical students who found my blog when conducting a Google search, wondering if they were the only ones who felt alone during this process. Many of them have become pen-pals, either with me, or with each other. Some have asked for a follow-up about residency. This post is for you. You know who you are.

Four years ago we made the trek to Gainesville, Florida. When I thought of Florida before I moved there I conjured images of white beaches, silver buildings with spiny palm trees, and equally, trailer parks and boggy roads - alligators sprinkled throughout. It was far, so far from our home in the rocky mountains. Medical school was a mere 10 hour drive in Arizona, a 1.5 hour flight! A cheap ticket! You hardly needed to prep, just hop on the plane and before you even get your ginger ale no ice, you’re there! We lived away from home but just barely. Florida was another planet as far as I was concerned - the true Wild West, though the irony of that metaphor is not lost on me.

I wrote about the move, four years ago:

"It will start to feel like home," Kevin told me the other night. "I want you to write down how you feel right now about this place, because in four years when it's time to leave, you'll come back and read it, and you'll remember that you can build and rebuild again."

I suppose he's right. We are not perennials, left in the same place to resurface year after year, born new, whole and green. We are transient, moveable. Our bodies tied to one another, tied to survival, scattered across this world that feels at once minuscule and vast. 

But the love? At times it hits me that it is the only perennial thing left. A miracle, budding in each new place, with the same people, some new ones too, resurfacing after a long winter.

I had no idea. I had no concept of the ways we build a life in a place that feels as foreign as another country. I wish I could go back and tell myself how when it came time to leave I would wish to write sonnets, love songs  to Florida - how sacred that place, and those hours, and those people, most of all, would become to me. But the truth is, at first  it felt scary and uncomfortable and somehow annoying, also, as if the entire state was this task I had to check off of my life list. A responsibility as necessary as taking out the trash, paying the electric bill.

~

You receive your matching orders, and you go. Sure, you can submit a rank list - 1-10, or 12, or 15, of where you’d like to go in order. But some algorithm matches you and you are lucky to get a spot and even luckier if it’s the location of your choice. I had friends who got their fourth pick, sixth - even some who got their very last choice. Still, that’s better than having to scramble, which is what happens when you don’t match into any of the places you interviewed and ranked, so you have to try to get in any open position or even change your specialty. I know people who scrambled into something they love though, and others who were set on a specialty and changed two years in.

Florida was our first choice. And still, I felt numb and sad when we received the news. I might have felt that way matching anywhere. It’s an odd feeling to open a slip of paper to see where you will be living for four years, which is why it matters so much that you do your homework on each program and don’t limit it to location. Some programs will work you to the bone. Some will ask you to cheat your numbers (without directly asking you) so that you work more than you report. Some pay for your insurance, some give you a food or housing stipend, some allow you to moonlight. All of these factors should be considered in addition to location - perhaps even more so, because they will affect your life and how often you see your S.O. more than the location itself. 

But the match is only the beginning.

~

We moved into a little green house in a beautiful neighborhood. It was the ugliest house for blocks. We signed a four-year rental agreement sight unseen and from the outside it seriously looked haunted. I hated the muggy heat. The landscape that continued as far as your eyes could see, no hills, no mountain view. But that house was a refuge. After four years I know the way the floors feel beneath my bare feet, the small indentation between the island and the couch. The walls are full of holes where I hung art, where the girls crashed their scooters. I hated that dishwasher, the dryer that never seemed to completely dry the clothes in the humidity. The tile that looked dirty no matter how much bleach was used. But I loved 8164 SW too. My books, a rainbow of stories, with its own shelf for library books. The basket of blankets that the girls turned into forts, and picnics and magic carpets. Mostly I loved the sound of the garage door, because that meant Kevin was home.

I spent hours - weeks - months - years alone in that house - okay, alone with my small children, but as any mother can tell you, that is even more difficult than being truly alone most of the time. The good news is that the growth of loneliness already happened in medical school. In this way, residency is easier. You have been missing them for years to their training - it’s more of the same. But this time, you get paid! 

A lot of jokes are made about resident salaries. Countless times I heard people complain, saying it wasn’t enough, they are broke, it’s not fair! But here’s the thing - it’s only a low salary because of the hours worked. Otherwise, it’s more than the average American family. After years of paying instead of being paid, the income is a beautiful thing. And it is enough. It is enough. It is enough.

~

Everything grows in Florida. Weeds, mold, lice. At times I felt like the state itself was out to get me. (I can see why prisoners were sent there hundreds of years ago, let’s just say that.) It will rain out of nowhere, blue sky and then BAM, torrential downpour. The heat is sticky and consuming and in October you are still rocking shorts and sandals while the rest of the world transitions to apple cider and sweaters and it is painful in a very first world way. 

 Hurricane season come then, and you find yourself circling a station you drove 20 minutes to get to because you heard they still had gas but it’s gone now and you just wasted the gas you did have trying to get there. People stock up on bottled water and canned food. You watch the circle of doom approaching you, every day a little closer than the last, and you realize it just has to go through you, that it won’t go away. That the amoeba-looking ring you saw on the news all of those times as a kid actually destroyed homes and livelihoods and even lives. You are one of those people now, and you promise you will never watch the weather without a prayer in your heart for the people on that part of the map. 

Lighting strikes more often there than anywhere else. Because, Florida. One Sunday as we ate dinner with friends, the strikes were so loud they shook our house. I panicked, holding the baby, wondering where the safest place to go was. Our router blew up. Our neighbors less than a block away were the unlucky recipients of the direct hit and their entire house burned to the ground within minutes.

Lizards climbed all over my screened porch, and when I caught a sight of them while eating lunch I always lost my appetite. We named the most frequent visitor King Triton. He had a red pouch at his throat that would go in and out, in and out. The cockroaches were less welcome guests, scuttling around at their leisure - once, even, across Kevin’s foot while he fed the baby before bed. I was at a baby shower and heard screams coming from the porch. A massive black snack slithered across someone’s foot. Along the path of our nightly walk there is a house by a pond that is home to legions of frogs at the right time of year, the grass popping, their slimy bodies pumping senselessly. 

Consider everything you’ve heard about Florida. It is most likely true.

~

But what no one tells you in a brochure is that beyond the palm trees and the white sand beaches and yes, the swamps and the gators - there is a wild beauty. Because everything grows there, wildflowers scream across the freeway, purple flames as far as the eye can see. The grass is coarse, but green, the water in the sky and the air hydrating the vegetation, and your skin, and your lungs. While my family in Utah was sheltered for what seemed like 6 months of winter, we were going to soccer games with dewy grass, taking long walks without jackets, singing Christmas carols in a wagon with a Santa in short sleeves. Claire went to a summer camp where they decorated visors that said, “God’s Team!” on them and had more diversity in her kindergarten class than I saw my entire K-12. 

We took trips all over the state. Moody Jacksonville, Amelia Island,  Coconut Point - but mostly we went to Orlando, because if you aren’t a Disney nut before Florida, you will be when you leave. The first year we had season passes we went to Disney World 25 times. Nearly a month of our year. The second year the tally was closer to 12. If you want to know what to eat there, hit me up. I can point you to every restroom. The Tiki Room is the best place to nurse, but in a jam, the People Mover will do. Fast passes and parking and what you should pack are second nature to me. I never thought I would wax romantic about Disney World, but here we are. It is a wonderful place, Walt really did good work and the thought of Main Street in the fall nearly brings me to tears. 

Consider everything you’ve heard about Florida. It is most likely true.

~

The first week after our move I was invited to a baby shower for someone I didn’t know. I’d spoken to a few girls on the phone - even had a friend from medical school who matched there the year before, so I wasn’t starting entirely from scratch, but I definitely had that familiar, middle school new-girl feeling. I stewed about whether to go or not. It’s one thing to get to know people at church, or the park, or a party. It’s another to attend a party for someone you’ve never met. I probably went through six different outfits. I showed up with a stomach of nerves. We played a charades game that was so far out of my comfort zone as the new girl I thought I might throw up.

Carly, who I went with ended up becoming one of my very best friends. Brooke, who the party was for ended up becoming one of my very best friends. Sometimes bravery is loud. Sometimes bravery is just showing up.

~

A few months after we got to Florida, everything fell apart. We were supposed to go to Switzerland in October, with dreams of the Alps in the fall, cozy fondue, sweater weather! But two things got in the way. The first was Hurricane Matthew, which was hurtling towards us at breakneck speed, predicted to be as big as Katrina. (Spoiler: it was not.) The second was a miscarriage. After nearly a year of trying to have another baby I was pregnant, but then I started spotting and visited my doctor days before we were supposed to leave. She was concerned the pregnancy was ectopic (Spoiler: it was not) and was concerned about me flying to another country. That same week our car also refused to start.

I remember sobbing that night with Kevin, not necessarily because of the trip, or the miscarriage, but because during all of this, I had people to call. Claire was two at the time, and even though we’d just moved, I had friends who welcomed her at a moment’s notice. Friends who brought me flowers. Friends who hugged me, even cried with me. I was so afraid that when we moved away from family I would be doing everything on my own. Instead, it was an induction to a new sort of family. One of the best parts of living away from family, ironically.

I can’t count how many hours I spent with my friends. At parks, pools, air-conditioned houses. I rocked babies while my friends folded laundry. I folded laundry while my friends rocked babies. We sat on the back porch watching naked toddlers stumble through sprinklers. Brought countless picnics and dinners to parks. We ate Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas morning breakfast together, visited each other in hospitals. Once in awhile we would hire a babysitter in the middle of a Saturday so we could watch a matinee in the cool theater. We celebrated birthdays, lamented pregnancies, cried from lost pregnancies, delivered meals, picked up groceries for each other. When people ask me what I miss the most about living in Florida the answer is easy: the people. The people who were more family than friends. The people who made the long afternoons and evenings alone worthwhile and even bearable. There was no wasted act of kindness. Those women, those people were my mother because I was so far from my own. 

I don’t know where you are moving. Maybe it’s to Alaska, maybe the state next door, maybe just a few hours away from home. Wherever it is - I hope you find your people. Because they will become your home.

~

Second year of residency our Hazel Jane was born, blazing bright and beautiful like a meteor - she has not slowed down since. After a year of trying to get pregnant, a miscarriage, more waiting and then a grueling pregnancy, she was here and Claire became a sister and we became parents, again. 

Two months after she was born we went to Utah for Christmas. Kevin used one of his three weeks off a year to be there - and we spent four out of seven of those days in the hospital. A day into our trip we went to Duck Creek, 3.5 hours away from Utah Valley, isolated in the snowy mountains when she suddenly struggled to eat, spiking a temp so high we left in the middle of the night, racing down the icy roads to the hospital where they admitted her after an ambulance ride and a spinal tap that they made me leave the room for. 

For three nights I wept. My baby girl was confined to an elevated bed, tubes going in her nose, into her arms and legs. I held her only to nurse, so grateful that I could help her in some small way. I sang so many songs. Edelweiss and I Will Follow You Into the Dark and Sweet Baby James and all of Allison Krauss. The doctor told me that if she was even 90 days old this wouldn’t be as serious. Kevin joked that he traded one hospital for another but he never complained, never did a thing but rock our baby when he could, and translate the medical language for me and ask all of the right questions. It wasn’t the first time I relied on him as a doctor and not a father, but something about those days made me grateful that he is both. 

Days later we decided to bless her, at home. Pre-COVID, the men around her wore masks - painting masks my dad had in the garage. They hovered over her and they gave her a blessing from God. I cried later, because it wasn’t the blessing I would have planned, instead rushed and timed right before Christmas. “She was a wanted baby,” my sister said, acknowledging my frustration. “You’re sad because you want to celebrate her life.” But that wasn’t it. It was that I was so close to losing her and never are you more aware of what you love than when you are about to lose that thing. I cried because maybe if I could give her the perfect party, the perfect life, maybe I could keep her with me a little longer.

I was reminded of this again a year later. Kevin was on 24 Saturday call (the worst kind) and I took the kids to the gym and the mall to kill time. We had Chick Fil-A at the food court and I took pictures of them sitting at the tiny table and chairs. As we pulled into the driveway I turned around to make sure Hazel was awake. She was unconscious, her eyes rolled back, head slumped to her shoulder. I parked and ran to her, watching her body convulse, her face turn blue. 911 arrived, and I held my baby on the sidewalk, thinking that I would always remember this, because it would be the last time I held her alive. I became someone I never thought I would be, yelling at the operator to have the ambulance hurry.  I screamed into the phone. I had a true out of body experience, watching myself on that sidewalk, the indifferent clouds gathering above me, Claire shouting at me from her carseat to let her out, neighbors, perhaps more than one - watched my grief through their windows.

All three of us rode in the ambulance - Claire chatting with the workers, me sobbing, my baby girl coming out of what would be her first febrile seizure. Kevin met us at the ED where they pumped her full of fluids, treated a lung infection that spiked her fever, then sent us home. Carly, a real-life angel, took Claire for the night and Kev returned to his shift. We played blocks on the floor together. I let her pad around the house as slow as she wanted, reading every book, her body, her face a miracle. I slept on the floor next to her crib, and it took everything in me not to climb inside and curl up next to her.

I don’t want to relive that night, or the other seizures. I don’t want to think about them ever again. I don’t want to remember her body in that hospital bed, either. They called it a nest. A nest! As though she were a baby bird, waiting to be fed. Or a mouse in a tangle of string. I want to forget her blue face, that sheer terror. The moment when I saw myself, kneeling on the ground, anticipating the worst moment of my life. But sometimes, remembering them reminds me of my love for her. She is the most wild human I have encountered. She is still the brightest and most beautiful. I couldn’t love her more if I tried.

~

There are three places in our time in Florida that deserve a medal - gold, silver and bronze, and I won’t wax too poetic here, but they are Gainesville Health and Fitness, Trader Joe’s and the Alachua County Library on Tower Road. Gold goes to GHF of course, mostly because of the two hours of free child care a day I took full advantage of. Since I am no longer a patron, I feel like it’s safe to recognize that while most of the time I did work out, occasionally I brought my book to the lobby and ordered a protein shake and got lost in Nora Ephron. Call nights were perfect for the gym, too, because at the Tioga location I would drop the kids off, order Cilantro Taco and read my book. I soaked in the hot tub more times than I should admit, and am still in touch with 90 year old Jane, who went for her carpal tunnel pain and may be one of the only people that reads this blog. I actually teared up when I cancelled my membership. 

 At Trader Joe’s, the manager Ron, introduced me to other employees, calling me “one of his regulars,” and opening bags of new items for me to sample. You know in movies how people walk into a coffee shop or a pizza parlor and the person behind the counter asks if they want their “regular?” Well, it wasn’t quite that but it was the closest I’ve ever come to that. And the library - the library where I would go to work after hiring a sitter, where I checked out nearly every French pastry cookbook, where I borrowed hundreds of children’s books, many of which we were forced to buy at an outrageous price because of tearing or water damage! Pam, our librarian for four years began to put books aside for me and Claire. She never called me a regular. But she hugged me before we left. She told Claire to keep reading. Nothing has made me feel like a place is home more than a librarian knowing my name.

~

I wrote three books in residency, nearly one a year. All of them were written in spurts - during nap time and quiet time and evenings when Kev worked late. I sent out a lot of queries. I got a lot of rejections.

Medicine, though it is long and strenuous and expensive, is also very certain. There is a clear path to success. Pass your boards, show up for work, jump through the medical hoops. As long as you work at it and you don’t get addicted to drugs, it’s almost a guarantee. (This is an exaggeration, but for the sake of my story, it’s the narrative I’m telling myself.) Writing is a different animal, maybe because it’s easier, maybe because it’s much harder to get right, most likely because the same people who aspire to be doctors are not writing creatively and are wired differently. I sent a lot of hopeful texts to Kevin. (“They asked for my first 50!) and even more disappointed messages. (“They said they published a mermaid book last year and it was a flop so will not be moving forward with me.”)

Writing is not a straight line. There is no formula, or path to success. Talking about failure is uncomfortable, admitting it is painful. Sometimes it is difficult being married to a successful person. His dreams are within reach and mine feel like trying to catch a cloud - flimsy and frustrating and only occasionally fun, in the right weather. Maybe I’m an insecure person or delusional, but I’d like to think I’m just a dreamer, who still believes things will unfold for me. I am very proud of Kevin, of course I am. I have had a front-row seat to the fatigue and slog and precision of his profession. But it’s hard sometimes, to always be in the audience clapping when inside I feel like I was born to be a star.

~

You know how in movies, lives flash before eyes right before death, and there’s these beautiful, tender moments with a child or a loved one? I sometimes wonder if those moments for me will be the crunch of my toast or that awkward moment before the water gets hot enough in the shower, or me nodding when someone is telling a long-winded story. When I close my eyes and think about Florida, I see it all. 

Waiting in line at Blaze for family date. Period films with Jamie and Brooke. Breaking up fights between Claire and Zoe and Emery. Sitting on the floor in the girls’ room watching them tramp around in too-big dress-ups and crooked bows. The rainbows that lit up the muggy sky after a fall storm. Glow-sticks in the church parking lot on Halloween, eager voices and tiny Woody’s and Elsa’s in the dark. Throwing up, night after night after Kevin fell asleep, wondering why they call it morning sickness. Bunco nights and girls nights and chatting with friends until late, stuffing my face with candy I don’t even like. The click of the door. The rumble of the dryer. Cards with the Goodman’s, our scores etched inside the box. Trees flung across the sidewalks after a big storm.

~

Back to residency. It gets a bad rap. I think, because it used to be largely unregulated and the older docs who went through it back then haven’t forgotten and some of them like to take it out on their residents. It’s like hazing, at a university, and some of them forget that in just a few years these doctors will be their equals. There was a surgeon in our neighborhood, for example, who always said hello and sometimes chatted with me when our kids played at the park together. But if Kevin was there he pretended not to see him and would no longer acknowledge me. Despite a few bad eggs though, it’s not as bad as you’ve heard - though there can be toxic programs, so if you’re prepping for the match be sure to ask residents about how they report their hours and whether they are told to fudge their numbers. 

There are good months and bad months, and knowing that both are temporary really helps you keep it in perspective. At UF, each resident does a month of mole, broken into two week increments. Their shifts go from 5 PM to 7 AM and I usually tried to visit family because I hated being around for it. Kevin would come home in the morning, eat something and sleep until 4, then wake up and shower and head back in. I felt like we had to be quiet during the day so he could rest, and then all night I was a stress case, wondering if he’d get relieved and come home at midnight or 3 AM or not at all. 

Some months he would working the pain clinic and be off by 3 or 4 and work M-F like a regular guy. Just like medical school, my friends understood when it was a good month and honored that. We’d do less park dates in the afternoon and understand when plans got broken because they got off early. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever be as seen as I was there, with dozens of women whose husbands had the same strange life.

~

I felt sad a lot. Kev called it sundowners, because it got worse the longer the day went on. I kept telling myself I would take something for it but I was always pregnant or trying to get pregnant or I felt pretty good that day so I never did but I thought about it a lot. I started seeing a therapist at UF. She had really short brown hair and didn’t wear makeup. I felt so overdone as I sat in her office with my straightened hair and eyeliner. Every time I left a session I had a lump in my throat. “I’m not even sure why I’m here!” I would tell her, every session. I have the best life! My husband is the best! My kids are the cutest! We have everything we need! This is crazy that I’m sitting here, when I don’t need to be!

But I would leave a session and a couple days later feel it all over again - that cramping in my chest, like someone was reaching in me and wringing out my heart. One time, a couple sessions in she said, “It sounds like maybe you are lonely.”

How could I be lonely? I thought on my drive home. I’m never alone. 

But I kept thinking about how I felt when she said that, how my first reaction was defensiveness, almost as though being alone were a disease. Social leprosy. An embarrassing pox. Only losers were lonely. People with no friends, no family. But my defensiveness nagged at me, and I brought it up again at our next session and it felt like such a realization to admit to myself that yes, all of that time in the green house with Kevin away, my small children whittling away my life with tiny demands, the friends who had their own lonely hours to fill, all of it added up to an ache that I couldn’t fix on my own. It turns out that years of living, mostly alone, is like a canyon whose sides erode by the wind after thousands of years. 

A friend emailed me a couple months ago, saying he was considering going to chiropractic school as a second career and would I recommend professional training, as they had three children? Ask me on a good day and I might tell you that yes, it’s wonderful and it’s not as hard as they say it will be, because it’s like anything that is truly difficult - you look back and you minimize it because you survived it. But ask the girl on the therapist couch and you might get a different answer. So I told him the truth. That there is a cost to it, and you may not recover. I would never try to talk anyone out of their dream, because I am a huge fan of dreams, cheerleader, burn the barn down fan of dreams. But at the end of it all, I cannot in good conscience recommend this path 100%, regardless of the good outcome. Only you can weigh the cost with the benefit. Only you can grapple with the physical ache in the center of your chest.

~

I fell in love with my OBGYN. She looks like a grown-up Doc McStuffins, headband and all, and truly, the highlight of my month was my visits with her. She woke up to deliver Hazel, 2 AM in a hoodie and glasses, and I resisted the urge to ask her to pose for a picture with us. Our daughters took ballet together, and I marveled that we were in the same social universe. During my pregnancy with Bowie she repeatedly told me I was her healthiest patient and though no one saw, I felt like the teacher’s pet and was much prouder than I should have been about it. 

My third pregnancy was my worst. Fourth year of residency, we planned to have him before we moved so Kev could cash in on his three weeks of sick leave he accumulated by never taking a day off. (This is pathetic to admit, but it is the truth.) I spent a lot of time on the couch. A lot of time on the floor, watching the girls make messes I knew I wouldn’t have the energy to clean up. I dragged myself to the gym every day for the childcare and put up with the weird comments from older men (why is it always older men?!) about my growing body and whether or not it was safe for me to lift weights. We planned to find out the gender on Christmas morning, and I asked the ultrasound tech to keep it a secret and write the gender down in an envelope. I planned to send it to my mom before Christmas so she could wrap up a gift to put under the tree. But the tech began talking to me about the adult daughter she recently lost, her grief tangled up in stories about her own pregnancy, the ache she felt for her daughter that she sometimes tried to text, forgetting she was gone. Before I left she said, “He’s perfect. Completely healthy.” Then she realized her mistake and her eyes went wide and I hugged her and told her I was hoping it would be a boy, and thank you so much. I stepped out from the office and it was better than any Christmas morning, ever.

Our Bowie came so easily into the world it was almost comical. I went into labor on my own eight days early, just as the COVID shutdown began. We got to the hospital and Kevin bought me a Starbucks blueberry muffin and they admitted me almost immediately, the red carpet rolled out for the darling of the department, (who would later win an award for best OBGYN resident. Proud wife moment.) For a few hours we watched shows and I took a nap. Around 1 PM the doctor came in and said she wanted me to deliver this baby during her shift and broke my water. Half an hour later I was ready to push. She knew Kevin, asked if he wanted to do the honors. I thought I would be mad that he wasn’t holding my hand while I pushed, but I loved that he caught our buddy, cut the cord, was the first to see his son. I told the doctor I pushed for 20 minutes with Claire, five with Hazel. “How long do you think I pushed with him?” I asked her. “Maybe five seconds,” she laughed. I ate an entire King-size bag of peanut butter M&M’s while they cleaned him up and felt a loss like I do every time I have the baby because we are no longer one person.

For centuries people have written poetry about falling in love, but having babies is what does it for me. Although in a way, I guess they are kind of the same thing. Love - no matter the form, is the universal muse. 

~

The last two months of our time in Florida was tainted by the virus that is still weaseling its way into every facet of modern life. I left so many friends without even saying goodbye. There were no parties, no last park dates or girls nights. Most of my friends never even got to see my new baby. It is a strange time for a transition, a terrible time for anyone coming or going, or dying or being born. My Mom wasn’t able to come for the first time ever after I had a baby, and I ached for her, especially that first night in the hospital. No matter how many times you do this, you want your mom.

Kevin was home for nearly a month. He took Claire to play tennis every morning in the heat. He picked up groceries. We drove around just for something to do, the streets eerie, apocalyptic even, with people out in masks and lines forming outside our grocery stores. It was the worst kind of goodbye to a place I came to love.

Most of my work, (freelance writing and brand consulting) dried up as the virus spread because most of my clients were in the now floundering, travel industry. I kept getting these emails from banks, retail stores, even Etsy shops I was somehow on the email list for and everyone was saying the same thing. “We’re all in this together,” “Stay safe.”

I would like to come out of retirement, offering up my services to anyone with an email list. Here’s what I want to say and more importantly what I want to read:

“This sucks. We don’t know how to move forward. We’re all terrified but equally annoyed. Here’s a massive discount because we want you to irresponsibly spend your stimulus check on hair bows.”

Available for hire immediately.

~

It’s hard to talk about residency, the four beautiful, brutal years we spent in training in one essay. It’s impossible to sum up. But because there are many who are uncertain about their futures, who are approaching training in any profession with fear of the unknown, I feel the need to share what I know after coming out the other side. 

What I have been trying to say here, is this: It gets better. You get better at being alone. You get more realistic about expectations. You learn to carve memories into spaces that you otherwise would have passed over. Residency isn’t the scary beast you were warned about. It is simply more training, but training you get paid for, and training your S.O. will enjoy more.

What I want to say is this: It will end, even when you think it never will. You will land your dream job. You will cry silently as your plane makes its descent into the Salt Lake Valley, your third baby nestled against your chest. Only you will fully understand what it meant to get there. Only you will understand the weight of it, the stretch marks that dot your stomach and your heart from the growth of leaving, and working, and returning. You did it together, but you also survived it alone. Your experiences will never be the same, which is something you will learn from years of solitude, and you will find peace in that understanding.

After years of our life being prescribed for us, four years here, four years there, four years here, it is finished. Or maybe - at the risk of sounding trite - it is only beginning. Because life, no matter where you are living it, is yours. You are the only person who gets to live inside your body, who gets to live your exact life. Because of that, only you understand each cut it took to carve you into the monument you are. Everyone else just sees the statue.

Baby Baby 2

“Hello baby. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of - you’ve got to be kind.”  - Kurt Vonnegut

See Baby Baby 1 Here.

I wish I had written sooner, but in so many ways I feel like I’m trying to survive the whirlwind that is a second baby. She is so beautiful in every way. Tiny, with long fingers and toes that are so narrow I wonder if they'll ever fit in a shoe. She has dark hair - nearly black, but I can already see the light hairs coming in behind them. I’m sure she’ll be blonde like her sister soon, but maybe she’ll surprise us and the dark will stick. It’s been seven weeks and she's changed so much. Her arms and legs are longer. Her tiny movements are more precise. I’m already forgetting what she was like a month ago. I need to get all of this down.

~

At 39 weeks and 3 days, my doctor told me to come in to get my membranes stripped. It was Columbus Day - a really unremarkable day, except Kevin was working at the VA and had a rare day off. He came with me to his first and my last appointment for baby girl. She stripped my membranes, told me I was 90% effaced and said, “I’m on call tonight. Come because you’re having ‘contractions.’” 

Kev asked, “Does that mean you’re going to induce her?”

She shrugged with a smile. “Just tell the nurse in triage you’re having contractions.”

So we did. Well, after we spent the day cleaning and packing and running last minute errands like cleaning the car and getting groceries and all of the things we felt were important, when we really should have been taking naps. 

I cried off and on throughout the day - not because I was nervous or anything, but because I understood that everything was about to change. I was okay with the change for me but it was Claire I was worried about. Claire, my first baby. My only baby. How was she going to feel?

Being pregnant is weird. You have all of this time to prepare and plan. Nine long months. But the growth is so slow and gradual that at some point towards the end you look down at the watermelon that is your belly. Then you realize that the baby has to come out somehow. So I dropped her off with our friends, and told Claire the next time I saw her she would be a big sister.

The nurse at triage was not amused. “We’re slammed today,” she said. I looked at my belly and willed the contractions to come. And, somehow, miraculously, they did. While she left us alone in the room I watched as paper rattled out of the printer, lines forming along with my pains. My doctor gave me pitocin later to speed things up, but the labor started on its own.

I sent Kevin away to get me some food and when he came back with my Wendy’s baked potato and frosty (the worst last meal ever) they were ready to admit me.

Before anything else, I asked for my epidural. I’d learned the hard way with Claire that waiting was a bad idea. A girl a year ahead of Kevin came in to do it, and it hurt so much. The needle struck a nerve and I could feel the pain vibrating in the spot where it was stuck. Fortunately, that was the worst pain of the whole experience. Eventually the epidural did its job, and I felt relief. This was 9:00 pm.

At 9:30 they broke my water. Then I fell asleep for a bit. Kev was watching Parks & Rec on his iPad on the couch when I woke up at midnight feeling nauseous. He grabbed a bag for me to vomit in. The resident came in to check me and said I was at a 7. “Call us when you feel like you need to push.”

Around 1:00 - less than an hour later I started feeling the need to push, but I thought it was too soon. Kev called the nurse in and she said, “Nope. You’re at a 10. We’ll grab the doctor.”

Doctor Green came in with glasses on and a sweatshirt over her scrubs. Clearly she’d been woken up. She got everything ready and had me do some practice pushes. I could feel the contractions through my epidural, which didn’t happen with Claire. It was strange to feel the pressure but not the pain. 

They told me when to push - and I was working so hard I didn’t notice the alarm on their faces. Kev told me later that the cord was wrapped around her neck, so if I didn’t get her out quickly they would have to do a C-section.

Doctor Green coached me through the labor the way I imagine a midwife would. She told me when to breathe, and where to focus my pushing. I love her so much I cry when I think about my labor. She was compassionate, but eager at the same time. I wasn’t aware I was pushing in the wrong place until she showed me where I should feel it. Finally, after 23 minutes of pushing she said, “Look down.”

I did, and she literally pulled the baby out of me. It was so strange and beautiful to witness my baby exiting. Immediately they laid a wiggling, warm and wet baby girl on my chest and I sobbed. I’d waited so long for that very moment.

I thought about the year we tried to conceive. The disappointment of each negative test, the struggle watching Claire get older. I thought about the miscarriage. The months spent on the bathroom floor - so nauseous I didn’t trust myself to drive. All of it, every part of it culminated in this one, beautiful, beautiful moment. 

Sharon Olds writes about the “air glittering with escape as it does in the room at birth.” 

And if you’ve been there, and you’ve seen it, you know that it really does seem to glitter. 

It’s the closest to magic we get here on this earth.

~

When Claire came to meet her for the first time, I expected an instant reaction. I thought she’d somehow recognize the little koala bear squirming from the plastic bassinet from another life. The Grand Duchess Anastasia. But Claire just looked at her and agreed to hold her, but was more excited to see me. Finally, exhausted from our prodding and picture taking she asked, “Mom, can I watch a show now?”

Kevin took the baby and Claire curled up next to me, and we ate chocolate and watched Paw Patrol. And you know - I think we both needed that. This moment in the middle of the excitement and joy and overflowing love where we both said, “Things are different now and we both get it. But for the next half hour, let’s pretend like they’re the same.”

~

Of course we struggled with her name. I’d whittled it down to two - Charlotte or Hazel, but midway through my hospital stay threw a new one out there - Julia, because why not confuse myself even more?

Kev loved them all and told me to choose. So I tested them out. For nearly two days I would call her something different when I picked her up. I told different nurses different names. I tested nicknames. None of them felt right.

But I didn’t want to have to wait at the social security office a few weeks later when I finally settled on one because that sounds like the worst, so right before we were discharged, I decided on the one that felt the most right - even if at times I still wonder if it was the right choice. (Even if I may have Googled "How to Change a Name in the State of Florida," more than once in the middle of the night.)

Hazel Jane.

Hazel for Kevin’s great-great grandmother. She was an opera singer in the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  And Jane, for, well, a lot of reasons. But mostly after my favorite character in my all-time favorite book, Melissa Banks’ Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing. And Jane Eyre, who felt chronically misunderstood the way I used to. And Jane Bennett, fiction’s best sister. And Jane Austen too, I guess, and our cute little neighbor Jane who reminds me of Matilda and is precocious and intelligent. 

Those reasons seemed about as good as any. 

~

I thought it would be easier the second time, and I was right, but the transition to two surprised me. With Claire I felt this urgency for her to get bigger - less fragile, less dependent, less helpless. But with Hazel, I know what is coming and I am content. Content with her smallness and neediness. Content to let her lie on my chest for hours after Claire goes to bed. 

The hardest thing about having two is Claire, not Hazel. She wants to touch her all the time - her face, her feet, her head. She constantly pulls Hazel’s hand out of her swaddle so she can hold it. She “kisses” her on the lips with her toddler mouth. It annoys me, even though I know it shouldn’t. I know that Hazel is lucky to have such a sweet sister. But sometimes I feel so fiercely protective of Hazel that I forget that Claire is also small and also needs me and my love. 

I was at a baby shower once, long before I had kids. Everyone in the room went around and shared their best piece of advice for the soon-to-be-mom. Most people said things like, “Nap when the baby naps,” or, “Don’t expect the house to look perfect,” but my cousin said something that I’ll never forget.

“Don’t be afraid to apologize to your kids,” she said. It’s simple advice. But since Hazel was born, I’ve found myself relying on it. Claire has pushed me in ways she never did before. I feel angry with her a lot. For waking up the baby. For waking me up. For blatantly disobeying me. 

So I say sorry. And she says she’s sorry. And we keep trying. 

~

I feel differently about things somehow, than I did before. I realize that’s a vague assertion, but there are multiple things I’m truly more passionate about than I was before Hazel was born.

That shooting in Vegas, and then the one in Texas? They made me mad. Furious, actually. Not that I wasn’t affected by the shootings before - of course I was. But something about knowing those people were once someone’s infant like my infant, curled up in their arms, their milky wheezy breath in the night against their mother's face made me even angrier than before. So I called my senator. I told him I didn’t want to worry about my child going to the movies, or to a church, or school. I stared down at her and tried to imagine the hate someone must possess to do something so inane. I joined an Instagram group for Mom’s in favor of gun policy change. 

I’m also more afraid. 

There’s this poem by Ellen Bass. After Our Daughter’s Wedding. I’ve been thinking about it off and on when I watch my (two?!) girls day after day, scooting around our little house. I think about losing them. Not just Hazel, the most obvious, vulnerable choice, but her older sister too. I imagine my life without them in it until tears run involuntarily down my face. I try not to do it, but it keeps happening and I don’t know how to stop it. 

I’m 29 years old next month. I’ve lived the majority of my life without them - without even the notion of them. And I feel like my world would absolutely dissolve into nothing without either of them in it. 

~

I caught myself telling a friend that I was fat. I cringed as the words came out of my mouth and immediately wished I could take them away. I don’t believe I’m fat. It’s just something I said when describing the way my clothes fit postpartum.

The truth is, I’ve never felt more at home in my body than I do now. For years I was thin, but I didn’t sleep enough, I didn’t eat enough, I didn’t ever work out. I was chronically dehydrated. I felt terrible all the time, but I was thin, so I figured that was health.

I have hips now. Full breasts, a stomach that ripples with a dark line down the center. But it’s not the physical appearance that makes it feel like home. It’s that my body is put to good use now. I feed my baby. She rests against me, her sweet panting breath puff-puff-puffing in the dark. In the mornings I wake to a mouthful of toddler hair and reach for the crying infant on the other side of me.

I have an early memory of lying beside my mom during the day on her bed. I could feel her breathing, and tried to match it. Her breaths were slower than mine and I strained to meet them. To me, she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

We need to talk more about this. We need to talk less about the stretch marks, the sagging breasts, the “mommy pooch.” We need to talk about how we grow into ourselves over time. How our bodies and minds find each other if we let them.

~

I was fortunate to have three weeks of help after Hazy’s birth. The first week I had Kevin. His program lets him use his sick days as paternity leave. They are allotted five days a year, but he sprained his ankle playing basketball and had to use one in September so he had four left. Four of the most wonderful days. For the first time since Claire was born we were home together. He gets vacation days, but we never stay home so this was new. It wasn’t that we did anything spectacular. It was just that he was here. We tag-teamed bed time, meals, naps. He took Claire to school. He took Hazel to her one-week checkup so I could get my nails done. We ate a lot of Chick-fil-A and pizza. The night before he was scheduled to go back to work I fought a massive lump in my throat. His training is grueling and frustrating and I have to do most things on my own. Having kids is harder than I ever thought it would be but there’s still no one else I’d want to do it with but him.

My Mom came next. She cooked and cleaned for us. She held my new baby and told me how beautiful she is. But most of all she took care of Claire, which is exactly what I needed her for this time around. My sister Lacey has this idea for a nonprofit called, “Moms without Moms.” It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. New mom’s who don’t have mom’s themselves can get the help they need after the baby comes. I think it’s brilliant, because there's no way I could do this baby thing without her.

My sister Jessica came the week after her. She took care of me in the same way. She made me laugh. I hope that someday I can be the life raft for them that they were for me.

~

I forgot how messy it all is since Claire is actually a really clean toddler and has been for awhile. The poop and the spit up is relentless. I was so excited to finally wear my pre-pregnancy clothes only to realize they'd all end up stained or ruined so back to my sweatpants and Kevin's t-shirts it is. 

We went to Animal Kingdom last weekend since our Disney World passes are about to expire. While I was changing Hazel on Kevin's lap she performed some sort of magical poop explosion and it went everywhere. I mean everywhere. All over my pants, shoes, Kevin's pants, the ground, her blanket. Miraculously nothing ended up on her. (Houdini is what she is.) We laughed a lot, but I also felt like crying when I washed up in the bathroom and realized I had to wear those clothes the rest of the day.

When we got back to our group Claire cupped my face and said, "Sorry Haze pooped on you."

Ten minutes later she said, "Mommy you smell bad."

Kids are great. You should have them.

~

Again, maybe it’s the hormones, but I worry about what will happen to my girls if something happens to me. I keep giving Kevin bits of information, should the worst happen. “Make sure Christmas is absolutely magical.” “Have my sisters talk to them when they start their periods.” “Don’t make a banana bread recipe that doesn’t include cinnamon.” He rolls his eyes when I do it. I'm mostly joking, but sometimes not.

I want to be there for every Christmas morning. I want to be there when they start their periods. I want to make them banana bread for their breakfast. I want to do all of it. I’ve never cared so much about staying alive as I do now.

~

I really love this job. I don’t want to romanticize motherhood, because I’m pretty sure social media has done that enough for 12 lifetimes - even when people attempt to “keep it real.” Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I hate it. The other night when I was up with Hazel for the fourth or fifth time - I lose track, I sobbed to Kevin and told him that, “I hate this job. I love my kids but I hate this job.” So there’s moments when it’s the absolute worst. When I wonder if I’ll ever read again or work on my novels or go to the store without hauling a back-breaking carseat in. (How is it 2017 and we are still lugging those things around?!)

But I sincerely love the slowness of my days. How we move from meals to books to naps to games to errands, one after another, until another day has passed. I’m not as good at this gig as I imagined I’d be. We don’t have scheduled learning time. Our meals are far from balanced (we mostly live these days on bananas, chocolate and bread if I’m being honest), and my discipline is only 10% effective. But we take long walks every day. I put Hazel in a wrap so I can kiss the fuzzy hairs on top of her head and watch Claire zig-zag down the sidewalk with her pink helmet and bright blue scooter. We visit the library and load up with children's books. We attempt to nap, which is ridiculous, and every day I give up in frustration and sometimes anger, but then Claire makes me laugh just like her dad and I forget that I was ever mad. Kevin gets home and I’m still standing and I consider it a win.

~

People told me that once my new baby came my love would expand so I could love them both. I think that’s true in a way, but a little inaccurate. Of course as soon as Hazel was born I loved her. I think that’s innate - primal even, born from months of sacrifice and curiosity and gratitude. But I don’t love her the same way I love Claire and I think that’s okay.

I know everything about Claire. How she likes her toast cut, her favorite colors, all of her different phases. I know how to make her laugh. We’ve spent days reading together, making up funny songs. I love her, in part, because I know her so well. I think that’s how love for our children is born - at least for me. From thousands of unspoken memories, from days and weeks and months and years of time spent together. The cupped hand we clean with a wipe, the six cries we alone can decipher, the lost toy, the pride, the way their eyebrows rise and fall. The details, the sliver-like moments that make us realize how deeply tied we are to another human.

Oh Hazel Jane, I can’t wait to know you. 

But There is This

They told us it was coming a week before it did. This rage of wind and air, racing across the sky.  Hurricanes come and go when you live in Florida. Last October, it was Matthew.

That was a bad week, but not because of Matthew. I miscarried that week. They told me my pregnancy was likely ectopic. They thought the baby had formed somewhere beside the home that it should have grown in. Another organ claiming that honor for itself.

We were supposed to go to Switzerland and Amsterdam that week. We had tickets to the Anne Frank house and I spent those agonizing days leading up to it re-reading her diary for the first time since 8th grade.

“I have often been downcast, but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time.”

Things got so bad my doctor told me I could no longer fly because of the uncertainty, around the same time the airlines canceled our flight. I stared out at the wind through my front door windows the night it hit. It whistled and stung and in the morning it was gone.

The baby was gone.

~

Irma, they said, would be a big one. Irma - a name I’d never given a thought to before. Who names these storms? Who decides that a name someone might give their child should also be the name of a weapon of mass destruction? Why do we humanize this event?

In literature we assign themes to the stories we read. Man vs. Man, Man vs. God. Man vs. Nature. 

That last theme keeps resounding in my mind. After viewing the coverage of Harvey in Houston, and seeing the devastating effects of Irma in parts of Florida and the Caribbean, I have decided that the theme in all of this if there is one, to such devastation, is Man vs. Nature. Because it is not God. It is the world He created, but I do not believe it is God.

~

For a week we prepared for it. I went to the grocery store nearly every day. They called me when new shipments of water came in and me and Claire raced there. They allowed each of us two cases of water. 

The shelves were bare. Long lines snaked around the corners, people waiting to fill their tanks with gas.

We considered getting out, but where would we go? 

Kevin is a resident and can’t go far from the hospital. I’m 35 weeks pregnant. And in some strange way, this is our home. I watch footage of people who won’t leave - even their houseboats in the harbor in the eye of the storm. And we call them crazy and we mock them from the safety of our homes, tucked into a blanket in front of a television.

But in the end, it is their home. A place that can be transplanted, of course. A place that can be destroyed. But home, nonetheless.

So we stayed and we waited, as a swarm of color and light made its way to us. The freeways were jammed with people making their escape. The panic was felt in every encounter.

“Stay safe!” people called out to each other for days before the storm. Not “Goodbye,” but “Stay safe!”

And that broke my heart.

~

I saw my doctor two days before the storm. She gave me literature on what pregnant women need to know before a natural disaster. Pack your medicine. Stay hydrated. Consider going to a shelter.

“It’s not a myth that more women go into labor during hurricanes and a full moon,” she explained. “So get to us if you have to. We’ll be here, all night.” But then she also gave me literature on a home birth. Pictures of a baby exiting a womb, along with step-by-step instructions on what my husband would need to know.

When I asked him later if he could do it if he had to, he shrugged. “What other choice would we have?”

~

The night of the storm we ate dinner with friends who then slept at our house. It was a good thing they did, because when they returned home in the morning, a huge tree had fallen through their fence.

Then there was nothing left to do but wait. 

By the time it made its way to us, it was a Category 1 storm. But the wind was so strong I thought our house would shatter. Windows rocked. The trees behind our home danced. Something, repeatedly, kept hitting the nook by the kitchen but when I looked out to see what it was it was black.

The power flickered off, leaving us in a home we prayed would withstand this nature. I began to have contractions. Shoots of pain down the center of my belly - yawning and stretching into both familiar and unfamiliar pangs. I took deep breaths. I squeezed the arm of my snoring husband. I willed them to leave.

Claire began to cry because it was dark. I fell asleep, finally, in her room, my arm extended to her tiny bed, our hands clamped together.

I needed her, possibly more than she needed me, though we might call it a draw. It wasn’t the first time my love for her sustained me. It won’t be the last time.

~

We woke to a changed world. Lakes formed where none were before. Trees were flung from their roots onto their sides like tin soldiers, falling flat onto their faces, muskets raised to the square. An eerie quiet hung in the air. Humility, maybe, or fear. Possibly a combination of the two. Maybe an acknowledgement that at their core, they are the same.

~

It might seem strange to write about a storm that really didn’t change my life. We did not lose our home, as so many have recently. We did not have to flee - to join the mass exodus of fellow humans, the stop-and-go on the long streets away from the storm. We did not lose our lives. I did not have my baby.

But I feel profoundly changed, somehow, by this storm. Reminded, not for the first time, but for the first time in full consciousness, how small I am. How a rippling circle of color and light can descend on us and crush everything we have built.

There is no power at my house as I write this. I may venture to Starbucks, or the hospital, as we have been doing daily to get internet, to post it. Sweat is beading at my forehead. Everything in our refrigerator has to be thrown out. 

In the evenings, after Claire is down, me and Kevin look at each other and shrug. What do we do now, with no light and no electricity? No television or football. Not even books. We have only one flashlight to light our pages.

The first night we laid in bed. We talked about our daughter, and the one who will join us soon. We talked about living in a place with hurricanes. We played a game of Life on his phone, passing it back and forth. I was Berta, he was K. Berta has five sons, is an accountant, visited the Grand Canyon. K is a veterinarian who found buried treasure and won a game show. 

I went to check on Claire, who I thought would be fast asleep. But a glow surrounded her face instead. She held her beloved kitty light in one hand, turning the pages of a book with the other. When she was finished, I watched her put her book on the floor, and carefully, tuck the light by her face and pull the blanket over her resting feet.

Thank you Irma, I thought. For one of the most holy scenes I have ever witnessed.

A game of Life played on a phone. My daughter, who put herself to sleep, surrounded by books. And the stars, that shone through our open windows - the only light left.

~

A new favorite poem is by Barbara Ras. “You Can’t Have it All.” 

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. . . 

And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.

There is the voice you can summon at will, like your mother’s, it will always whisper, you can’t have it all.

But there is this.

~

I think of those words when I look at the still-bare shelves in the grocery store. When I pad around my dark house in the middle of the hot night, my swollen belly keeping me awake. When I watch people who have lost so much in my city and the people on the television as they attempt to restore what once was.

You can’t have it all.

But there is kindness splayed across the wet grass like dew. There are loved ones who call for the first time in a long time, to make sure you are alright. There are still the stars, a sun who rises in the morning, a baby who continues to grow. 

There is a husband, whose arm you can grasp. A daughter whose world remains unchanged, the magic of childhood the only reality you want for her - intact, unchanged by this frenzied storm. 

You can’t have it all.

But there is this.

currently

There's a lot to say. I'm not sure where to start, but time moves so fast that if I don't start consciously trying to remember certain things I know I won't. I don't remember much of the past six years. Claire as a baby seems so distant that when I see pictures I hardly believe it's her, even though I was there for all of it. She has always been a two year old. An eternal two year old.

On a walk the other day she said, "It's too high!" When I said, "What's too high?" She said, "The sky is too high." I think about that sometimes now, how far away the sky is. How this world we walk and move and rest in is just turning slowly, all of these houses slowly rotating, blurring into whites and pinks and blues all lit by the same sun until the thought makes me dizzy. 

I'm working on a couple books and querying a couple books. It worries me that I don't have as much faith in my projects as I used to. I love starting them, love the plotting, love the characters who begin to do things as I breathe life in them hour by hour. But then their story is done for me and I just sort of shrug and halfheartedly send them out to agents. I wish I had more fire for the publishing part, but I don't. I like the writing part. I like the living in the story part. I'm afraid that all of these characters will never be known by anyone but me. I'm afraid of getting lost inside the stories when the outside feels like too much. I'm afraid that if I'm not careful I'll get swallowed by this love I have for something that doesn't seem to love me back.

Kevin works long hours. 12, 13, sometimes 15 hour days for weeks at a time before a day off. I feel so sorry for him in the early mornings when he carefully wakes up. I hear him in the shower, rummaging in the kitchen, locking the door, before returning back to my sleep. The other day one of his patients told a social worker he didn't have the bus fare to get home. He asked if he could stay in the hospital a few more days. Kevin gave the social worker money for him and asked her to tell him it was from a special hospital fund. It was one of a dozen things he told me about his day, really an afterthought. He asks for nothing but gives so much. He's good to the bone.

Lately he's been telling me stories about his mom. She used to tell him when he complained about being hungry that he, "could have all the apples he wanted." She would sing to their parrot. She's still in her coma-like state. It's so heartbreaking we try not to talk about it but it's been almost three years. We visited her at Christmas and sang songs and held her hand. She doesn't know he was there, so I try to love him the way I would want someone to love my child. I'm not the best at it. I try.

Claire hugged me the other day and said, "I so much you." And I knew just what she meant. We move away from home and marry strangers who become family. Before we know it, we have this whole life and it's so much.

On Writing and Ambition

Elisa Albert wrote this article, and I found myself just nodding along with everything she was saying, so I am going to stack her words with mine, because I really can't say them any better.

Even though I'm not where I want to be with my writing career yet, I understand the chasm between the work and the recognition. We're always trying to close it up, like somehow they equate. I published a successful book and have a lot of social and media attention = I'm a great writer.

But that's not real. I haven't even gotten to that point and I already know it. Because the work is the work. And if there's one thing I've learned from being an author for 4+ years, six novels in, it's that the work is what matters. And I've learned that even if the rest of my books never get published and even if I never get recognition and gold stars and high fives for what I do - I would still do it. And to me, that is a very important thing to know about myself.

Kurt Vonnegut said, "Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow."

We're a global world, thanks to the internet. I see so many things on a daily basis. Films of people and their families, professional films, well-edited photographs, beautiful clothes, blogs, people who pour their souls out, people who preach politics, people who embroider flowers on their t-shirts, people who make art out of spray paint and gum, and people who recreate photographs of their ancestors. I read poems that used to send chills straight through me and keep scrolling when I'm done like a junkie - on to my next high. On to something, someone else, always on the hunt for anything fresh or new. 

And I know I'm not alone in that. I know I'm not the only one numb to the fact that there are creators - people who spend hours making this stuff - for what? For likes on it? For recognition? For brands to collaborate with? For people to give them hearts and comments and follows - but what else?

Those things can possibly allow you to continue to create the work, which is great. But the work still has to be the work.

And for me, there has to be more than the dings and hearts. There has to be soul in it. There has to be the passion behind the work always. The person who could flip numbly through Instagram while watching Project Runway with their hand in a bag of chips but instead decides to practice poetry, or knit a mural or freaking tap dance. There is so much beauty in the uncelebrated. We need to celebrate that. We need to encourage our sisters and parents and children and friends that to create for the sake of creating is reason enough.

"Maybe we are misguided enough to believe that what’s most important is that people care, regardless of whether or not we get it exactly right. Maybe getting it right doesn’t even matter if no one cares. Maybe not getting it right doesn’t matter if everyone cares. If I write an excellent book and it’s not a bestseller, did I write the excellent book? If I write a middling book and it is a bestseller, does that make it an excellent book? If I wander around looking for it on bookstore shelves so I can photograph it and post online, have I done good? If I publish a book and don’t heavily promote it, did I really publish a book at all!?" 

I'm not perfect at my art. I hear critics in my head. I hear teens reading it and saying, "We don't talk like that." I hear agents who think my first sentence is "Too slow" or I'm "Trying too hard," which I will continue to take as a compliment every single time. Because I'm trying. I'm practicing. And dammit you self-absorbed agents, it's not always about you. Maybe this whole thing is a practice of becoming. Maybe the work is the work is the work and that is enough. Maybe my soul is growing. Maybe not everything is for you and your taste, but for the misunderstood junior high girl who I know because I still am her. Maybe it's not about the fame, but about sharing a piece of our souls with someone else who might recognize themselves.

"And anyway, haven’t we collectively imbibed sufficient narrative about the perils of success and fame already? Haven’t we seen how fame can destroy and corrupt, how ambition and greed are twins? How recognition can pervert and compromise? We’re all struggling with our own unique little demon conglomerate, and we all have some good luck and some bad luck. Nobody can tell you how to be happy because being happy is one of those things you figure out by figuring it out, no shortcuts. Or maybe you don’t figure it out, maybe you never figure it out, but that’s on you. Everything worthwhile is a sort of secret, anyway, not to be bought or sold, just rooted out painstakingly in whatever darkness you call home."

"Everything worthwhile is a sort of secret, anyway, not to be bought or sold, just rooted out painstakingly in whatever darkness you call home."

I think of everything I am. Everything I care about. My work matters to me, it matters to me tremendously, and any day I don't write seems to not count. That is how I recognize its importance to me. But other things matter too. Picking Claire up from preschool on time. Her lunches and playdates and fears. I think about Kevin and his lack of sleep. I collaborate with clients, and have other work - that I don't consider the "work" but is still work and is still important to me. There is God, and sisters to call and my Mom to text back and piano and music and my cakes and my friends. I am more than my work. But I am not whole without it, and I think that is an important distinction. 

“Real” work is often invisible, and maybe sort of sacred as such. The hollering and clamoring and status anxiety and PR two inches from our collective eyeballs all day? Not so much. So tell the gatekeepers to shove it, don’t play by their rules, and get back to work on whatever it is you hold dear. Nothing’s ever been fair. Nothing will ever be fair. But there is ever so much work to be done. Pretty please can I go back to my silly sweet secret sacred novel now? Bye. Take care.

Home in Florida

I suppose it happens every time I move. The lost feeling. The sense that I'm here, and I'm not. The notion that home is where the heart is is laughable, because we can't always have our home - our life neatly tied up in the same place, the same people, the same existence.

Perhaps in an attempt to realign myself, I like to get lost when I move. I let my GPS take me there, wherever I'm heading, and then I bravely turn it off on the way back, hopeful that my mind can retrace its steps. I test new roads, unfamiliar to me on routes I have learned. Some of them surprise me - rows of neat houses, white shutters, manicured lawns with no one in sight. And others are less tidy, littered with debris from the bushes, but children playing - more of them here. Why is that the case?

I came expecting to spend more time with Kevin. After six weeks apart I began to feel like we were no longer married. More like good friends who were looking forward to getting reacquainted. But his days and nights bleed into one long, continuous string. He is neither here nor there. Well I suppose, he is there, not here, but when he's home, during those rare, brief patches, I remember. We were married once. We still are. And I like it that way.

Claire has begun to feel less like the needy, restless baby I once had and more like a dear, quirky little friend. I schlep her to new places - school, the library, stores, the church. She grips my sweaty hand. She thanks me for absolutely everything. A cup of milk, a high-five, a "bless you" after she sneezes. I thought, the other day, how before I had her in my life I felt chronically misunderstood. But she reads me, she watches me. She takes care of me even, which is the sweetest surprise of my life. At each new age I think, "This is my favorite." I hope I say that until she's sixty-five. I hope each new age is my favorite, each discovery of hers such a gift.

I meet people. Kind people. They're everywhere until I need them, and then they are nowhere. I remind myself what it's like to make friends. They take time. And then I call an old one, to remind myself that I have people who love me somewhere in the world. 

"It will start to feel like home," Kevin told me the other night. "I want you to write down how you feel right now about this place, because in four years when it's time to leave, you'll come back and read it, and you'll remember that you can build and rebuild again."

I suppose he's right. We are not perennials, left in the same place to resurface year after year, born new, whole and green. We are transient, moveable. Our bodies tied to one another, tied to survival, scattered across this world that feels at once minuscule and vast. 

But the love? At times it hits me that it is the only perennial thing left. A miracle, budding in each new place, with the same people, some new ones too, resurfacing after a long winter.

Australia

Despite having swum with piranhas and sky-dived over the ocean, I'm adventure-adverse. I like security. Crave it. But a year ago when Kev suggested we pack up for a month to do Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, I was all for it. This year would never end. We'd never really go. But now we're here, (with an insane and wonderful 20 month old) and I have to admit, there have been times when I wish we were home (or had a home, I guess) instead of hopping from place to place. I told you, adventure-adverse.

But there have been moments of beauty so far, and I don't want to forget them. Claire's jet-lagged head, resting on my shoulder - something she never does. The rare moment in the hell-pit of a flight, when she reached for me in delirium, one hand cupping my chin like I was the truest thing in her life. 

Her startle as the kangaroo she was petting sneezed. A moment of catharsis after attempting to reconcile feelings about our marriage to Kevin, only to realize that it was about me all along - that it had nothing to do with us. Our lost camera and the $1.25 call to the crowded Kings Park in Perth, and being told our $700 camera was turned in to the lost and found, all of the pictures from our trip saved.

Waking up on a landing plane, and catching my first sight of the Indian Ocean.

The world is so big, but it offers itself to us - to our imagination as Mary Oliver says. We're allowed a small window of time to see it and use it, before it's someone else's turn.

I'm grateful to a husband who has made my life richer and fuller and riskier than I ever imagined. Grateful to have a daughter who is learning this from him too, because I may not live forever, but I love the thought of my child, my blood, traipsing through this beautiful world long after I'm gone.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

first spring

 The eternal winter is finally ending. I believed it would of course, since it’s my 27th winter/spring relationship, but this time I started forming doubts. How is it that I’ve lived in Utah for the majority of my life, and yet it felt like this was my first real winter? It could be since this is the first winter I have a toddler— the first winter I’m a mom, really, since we lived in Arizona last year. Either way, it is starting to warm up and more than the snow is beginning to thaw if you catch my drift. (Two snow puns in one sentence!)

All winter we would stare out the window and point out the deer to Claire. “Deah, Deah,” she says, like a British girl. It’s the only animal whose name she can say. The rest are all the sounds. We ask her what a dog says and she says “woof woof.” Cat is this sort of “me no me no yup yup yup." Elephant’s blow, and fishes make kissy faces and monkeys say “ooh ooh ah”, but I didn’t know what dear say, so it’s “deah.”

Of course, deer don’t really make sounds, do they? They slake along in the grass, one minute absent and the next they’re there. Sort of like the sidler on Seinfeld. We’ve stared at the deah so many times that she’s started calling our bluff when we say we see them in an attempt to calm her down. 

Every day we take long walks— multiple long walks, and no matter how much patience I try to have or how long I let her go, she ends up having a breakdown when we have to come inside.

We wander all over the place, going much farther than I ever plan, looking at the rocks, which she picks up in collections, handing them to me for safe keeping, and side-eyeing me to make sure I don’t toss them in the bushes which I do eventually but she doesn’t miss them. We sit on the grass, petting it like a dog, pulling out the loose clumps and forming a pile. “The grass is green,” I say to her. We lay on our backs and look at the sky, the bright blue sky that seems like a softer blue here than anywhere else I know. We walk along the river my dad and Kevin made, and she gets dangerously close, but knows not to get in the “wah-wah” because it’s “Coldy cold.” 

There is mud to scrape up with her fingernails, which she later thrusts into my hands, wanting to hold. There are birds she chases like they are holy messengers, watching until they disappear with grace. There are rocks to perch on, just for a moment, before scampering off to discover something else that is fresh and wholly thrilling, the way everything is to her.

It is the first real spring of her life.

It is the first spring of mine.

Gate C22

Stuck on this poem by Ellen Bass. Stuck on all of her poems, actually. But this one. This one.

(See my other favorites here and here.)

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching–
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after–if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now–you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

time punch

I'm getting older. And I don't mean that in the rickety bones sense, although my eyes have creases that weren't there before, and there are some around my mouth, too. I mean that I'm starting, finally, after five years of marriage and a year of being a mom and several more of being a college graduate and working professional, to realize that others view me as an adult too, and not just as a kid or entry-level. 

I spoke to some teenage girls in church and they were telling me how strange it is to no longer be the kids in primary. "I know!" I said. Because I am just like them, right? I am just as young and fresh as they are - aren't I? Are we ever the age we feel we are?

I have dreams about the weight of adulthood. Dreams where I have nowhere to run and I have to protect my family and myself. I tell Kevin about them and he shrugs, used to bearing this weight of responsibility. "It's just life," he says, but it's terrifying in ways that I'll never again be as young as I am right now, in this moment. I'm always getting older, and along with that so is my baby and my parents and everyone else I love. We're all getting older at the same rate.

These are not new things to say. If anything they are the naive words of a twenty-something who in three years will be a thirty-something, but they are still my realizations. Blank, terrifying and sweet somehow, the knowledge that our biological, chronological, spiritual clocks tick-tick-tick, and we, as humans, can only tip our heads to time, and promise that we will do more in the unknown space ahead. 

this is how poems are made

"Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red."

                                -Kait Rowkowski

NanoWriMo

For years I've wanted to participate in NanoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month, but I was afraid to commit to it. Writing an entire novel (50K+ words) in just one month seemed impossible. Most of my novels are longer - much longer than that. Closer to 85-120K words, but they take me at least nine months to write. I decided to try it though, since I am unemployed, have just one little tot running around, and with three other novels under my belt, thought I was qualified to give it a try.

It blew my mind. I had no idea that writing a novel so quickly would be so good for my writing process. I found myself working every spare minute, the looming deadline pushing me to find time. I wrote in 15 minute spurts sometimes. I wrote long into the night while Claire slept. I wrote notes in my phone on my morning run. The important thing is, I was always thinking about my story. The constant work, the constant pull to put something, anything down, forced me between writing sessions to think about what would happen next, so no time would be wasted. 

And the joy - the joy is what I really want to talk about. I think the writing slog before NanoWriMo was beginning to wear on me, and even though it still made me happy, it wasn't fulfilling me the way it had before.

But writing a whole novel in a month brought me so much joy, because I stopped being such a perfectionist, and just wrote what happened as I saw it. It was so liberating to work without fear.

So the million dollar question - is it crap?  I don't think so. Maybe I'm still riding the post-book high, but I think it might be one of the best things I've done. It is funny, (at least to me) which I'm not accustomed to writing. It is romantic and dramatic and it is a fun read.

Here is an excerpt for those who are interested. I do think I am going to query with it when I'm ready, so can't make it into a Kindle offering or anything, but I'm hopeful that it will make its way into the market someday.

One more thing - we were encouraged to design a cover for our book, so I came up with this. It's nothing fancy, but I like it, and I think it represents the book well.

SYNOPSIS:

Ruby McCoy is a child prodigy who published her first journal at eight years old. Now, at 17, she is an international celebrity. But her life is not as perfect as it seems. She's struggling to write her last journal of her youth, to figure out who her real friends are, and is looking for true love. This book is about her search for the marrow of her life, and her own struggle to tell the truth.

EXCERPT:

“Nick told me you got detention yesterday,” Kirsten said breathily, her voice tickling my ear through the phone, “Is that for real? I hardly believed him. Who would give Ruby McCoy detention?” I could hear Nick in the background, singing out loud to some punk band. It was 9:00. What did they do together all day after school? How could you spend all day with a boy at school, then all afternoon and evening with him after school? I got sick of myself after all of that time but being with someone like Nick—or worse, Kirsten, sounded unbearable.

“Yeah I did,” I replied. “Marnie is taking it to the school board though, she has an appointment with Headmaster Zhang in the morning. I didn’t end up going anyway.”

“Ahh, I see.” Then I heard her cover the phone, “Nick stop!” she cried, her high-pitched laughter shrieking into the phone, “Nick that tickles!” I rolled my eyes while that carried on for several more minutes, rearranging my books and hanging up the shirts that always found their way to my bedroom chair, the phone starting to feel hot on my ear.

“Well that’s too bad,” Kirsten replied when she got back on. “Mr. Jackson is a loser. A pretty hot loser. So did I tell you about my new campaign?” she went on, before I could respond. “We’re going all white. White screen, white clothes on me, white everything but my skin. It is going to be perfection, Rubes. We’re done with clear face - white face for the human race is more like it!” I didn’t bother telling her how completely racist that sounded. Hopefully she would come to that conclusion on her own, or at the very least—the marketers running the campaign.

“That’s great K,” I muttered. “I can’t wait to see what you do with it.”

She paused, “Oh and Rubes – I can’t believe I forgot!” she shrieked again, but not because of Nick this time, I think. “Your party! I got an e-vite to it like ten minutes ago. It sounds amazing! Why didn’t you tell me about it sooner?” I could sense the Kirsten pouty voice coming on. 

“I didn’t even know invitations went out,” I replied honestly. “Marnie is handling the whole thing.”

She laughed a little. “I should have guessed. She always does everything so well, doesn’t she?” Kirsten had been fascinated with Marnie since the third grade when Marnie so generously gifted Kirsten the half-used tube of Chanel lipstick Kirsten complimented her on. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kirsten still had that tube somewhere.

I rolled my eyes, and flopped onto my bed. “She sure does.”

“Well you can bet that Nick and I will be there. He has some cute friends too that I have been meaning to introduce you to, but you know . . . with my big campaign and all of my modeling shoots, it’s been tough to find time.”

I bit my lip so hard that it drew blood. “Rubes?” she asked, her pouty voice back, “Rubes did you hang up on me? Are you mad at me?” 

I could hear Nick in the background, “Babe just get over it. She’s fine, now get off the phone.”

“I’m not mad.” I lied, “Not mad at all. We’ll talk soon, alright?”

“If you say so,” she replied in full pout mode. “Make some time for your best friend if you can, promise?”

My eyes widened in disgust, “Sure. Talk to you soon.”

“LOVE YOU!” she wailed, before hanging up promptly.

I put my phone down and wandered into the kitchen, opening the fridge to see what we had. Ever since my mother became thin again (cough, lipo) she only filled the fridge with healthy snacks. Things like pre-sliced apples that came in a low-calorie bag, as if you could get fewer calories than an apple and light string cheese. We lived on rice cakes and carrot sticks thanks to her. Even our peanut butter was all-natural, so we had to keep it in the fridge. Luckily, I knew where she kept her real stash. Behind the boxes of canned tuna in the pantry, she had a secret cubby where she kept her emergency supply of junk food. I rifled through it, finding a half-eaten bag of Cheetos puffs and some M&M’s in the back.

“Ahh,” dad said, stepping through the door. “You found the good stuff.”

“Hey daddy,” I said with a smile, looping my arm around his waist for a hug. “I didn’t know you got in.” He was still dressed in his suit, his hair just starting to gray around his ears. It felt like I was seeing him for the first time in a long time, even though he had only been gone a week. 

    “Just barely,” he said. “I had a driver come, I didn’t want your mother to have to worry about driving in this rain.”

    I nodded. She hadn’t gone to the airport to pick him up in months. Years for all I knew. “How was your trip?”

    Even though I would never say it to him, I knew my success had been great for my dad’s career. I remembered the long stretches of time before I published. He was absent for most of them, not unlike now although I got the feeling that those trips were different – harder. One trip in particular I remember waiting up for him to get home. He had been gone for weeks this time, selling pots and pans in the Midwest. I forced myself to stay awake – fighting through the waves of sleep with a vengeance so I could greet him when he came home. Jane snored softly next to me, her chest rising and falling in syncopation. I was just beginning to lose the fight, sleep overcoming me when the door clicked and his footsteps – those familiar footsteps shuffled in. I slipped carefully out of bed and cracked the door open, hoping to surprise him. Through the sliver in the door I could see them. It was mostly dark in the kitchen where they stood, my mom and dad with their foreheads pressed together. They didn’t talk or cry or anything, they just stood there with their foreheads pressed together, the dim flicker of the fluorescent bulb casting a moody light across their bodies. They stood there forever it felt like, and it didn’t seem right to interrupt them so I didn’t. No one said a word, and even Jane’s snoring seemed to stop while they just touched and let themselves exist together. Eventually my dad kissed her cheek and she led him by the hand to their room. I went back to my bed instead of running out and pretended like I hadn’t seen anything the next morning when my dad gave us another goodbye hug, because he was leaving to go out on the road again. 

    Until this moment with my dad in the pantry I hadn’t realized how much I would give to see them stand like that again, back in that two-bedroom apartment on Juniper in Stamford. 

    “The trip was great,” he replied, interrupting my memory. He still looked young for a dad, but the space beneath his eyes were beginning to grow dark just like my mother’s. “We closed a big deal, I got to see some of my best clients… I really can’t complain.” He paused and reached into the bag of Cheetos I was holding, popping a few into his mouth. “How has your week been? I heard about the whole debacle with your detention. That’s too bad.”

    “Who told you?” I asked, leaning against one of the shelves. “Mom?” It wasn’t a small pantry, but with two of us in here together it was getting a little tight.

    “Marnie.” he responded—a little too quickly. “She emailed me,” he clarified softly, as though to stop himself from sounding too eager.

    “Marnie ruined it,” I said, my mood changing drastically with the mention of her name. “She’s going to try to get Mr. Jackson fired.”

    “That’s too bad,” he replied absently, “I wish she wouldn’t do that.” He changed the subject quickly, “How is your writing going? Are you making progress?”

    I shrugged, “Yeah I guess. It’s been difficult for me to write lately though. I can’t figure it out. It’s like I have these ideas that I want to put down, but all I can hear in my head is Wink and Marnie and my critics and I can’t get around it.” My openness with my dad surprised me. For the most part, he left the writing and my career to my mother – focusing on his own job instead of mine. I always liked that about him. I knew my franchise made plenty of money for him to never work again, but he would never accept that. He felt a lot of pride in what he did. 

“Just write what you want to write. It’s always worked in the past, hasn’t it?” he said, already making his way out the door. “And I’m glad you got out of detention, sweetheart.” 

    I started to follow him to see where he was going and what he was doing then changed my mind. I had nothing left to say to him. I wished I had more – I wished that I would feel that same desire to wait up for him to come home like I did before. That he was the kind of dad I could tell everything to, that I was the kind of daughter he would want to tell him everything. 

    I sat in the pantry on the floor and finished the entire bag of Cheetos before I finally said what I wanted to say. 

    “I love you dad,” I said out loud—to an empty room in an empty house.

what i want to tell every wife whose husband is starting medical school

The first night I ever spent alone in our apartment without Kevin was when he attended his first medical school interview. I was so afraid I kept the lights on the entire night, not just in my room but in the entire apartment, as though it would somehow ward off a predator-- not realizing it was a blaring advertisement, a beacon that advertised my fear, my vulnerability, my utter alone-ness.

Now I sleep in the dark. I start the dishwasher, I lock up. I kneel to pray and I put my hand on the baby's chest for a moment, feeling it move up just an inch, then settle back down. Finally I climb into bed, turn on my side, and flip off the light. I used to be afraid, but now I am not. 

~

First year was difficult, in that we moved away from family and friends, were forced to create a new life in a hot place, and began that pull away from our reliance on each other. He spent ungodly amounts of hours at the library. I remember calling him and asking him to come home for lunch, even enticing him by making him his favorite meal, only to be texted two hours later that he turned his phone off to focus better and he was sorry, and would most likely not make it home for dinner. I stopped leaving things out, stopped planning on him and began to make plans by myself. 

I went to a games night with seven other couples, boredom winning over social graces. The teams were uneven because of me. We sat in a circle, some on the sofa, some on wooden chairs brought in from the kitchen, and me on the floor, my legs extended and my ankles crossed. People asked me where he was. "In bed," I said. "He wakes up at 4 am to study, it's when he can focus best." It was 8:30 pm and my husband was at home in bed.

When I came home he was snoring softly beside me. It took everything in me not to shove my elbow into his mouth.

Instead I went into the bathroom, sat on the floor, and cried.

~

He came home from anatomy lab smelling like a dead horse. When he reached to hug me I shook my head, stepping back as if burned. "Take off your scrubs and throw them in the washer," I said.

"Is it that bad?" 

"How long have you been down there?" I asked.

He shrugged. "It's a vortex. You lose track of time."

~

For awhile I tucked him in every night at 8 pm, our ritual for him to come home at 6:30 for the night, eat dinner, watch a show with me, then go to bed. Someone told me when we first got married that their best advice was to go to bed at the same time, no matter what. We would pray together and I would lie down next to him, let his arms come over me, and count the seconds before he fell asleep. 

Sixty, sometimes ninety seconds, and he would be snoring, his arm limp around me so I would have to lift it up, and place it back down to wriggle out.

In the morning when I woke, he was gone.

~

The summer after his first year he had off. I worked at home and was surprised to find him in the mornings, eager to run with me, make breakfast, go out. He offered to fix things that I had grown accustomed to fixing on my own. He suggested he do the grocery shopping, and I send him a list. It was as though the man I married had returned from the dead - eerie but welcome.

He took me to Italy and France that summer, spending all of his free time to meticulously plan each location. We ate croissants and Kouing Ahman at the foot of the Eiffel tower. We stood in museums and cathedrals for hours, until our necks ached from the constant pull upward. We hiked around the hills of Italy on our third anniversary and I relished in the beauty of our life together.

The night before his second year began I cried until my face swelled. He was in bed again, at 8:00.

~

Second year was my favorite of the four - although it is renown to be the hardest for most. Second year they begin their most rigorous book work, taking classes like Pharmacology and Neurology and BioChem. He worked from 4 am to 6:30, as before, but I was used to it now. I was in a place I was familiar with, had made friends with other women whose husbands were in the same situation. 

Those women became my closest friends. Together we discussed everything - work, children, sex. We lamented the lack of money, the hours spent away, and it was done in the complete confidence of people who understood what very few do. The strain is unrealistic to most. "It will all pay off in the end." This phrase was repeated by well-meaning relatives and parents, and friends, but became dross to our ears. It would pay off perhaps, a secure salary, a new location. But only we understood the cost of the process. Only we understood the crushing weight of debt, the fear of failure and displacement. Only we understood that the schedule would improve, but not disintegrate into a regular 9-5. It would always take away more than it gave.

We were sisters, because we would never judge each other for canceling plans with friends when our husbands decided to come home early. There was no judgement for rifling through the mailbox trash to unearth dinner coupons. Clothing, and meals, and children were shared freely. It is true that families are born out of necessity and not blood. I witnessed it every day.

~

In January of second year I discovered I was pregnant. I planned to tell Kevin in a creative way, but ended up collapsing into tears when he came home from school, showing him the positive tests. The pregnancy was planned, I'd wanted a baby for months, but the longer it took him to come home, for me to get the chance to tell him the news, the more daunting the task before me felt. 

"We'll figure it out," he said, over and over "We'll make it work."

The click of the door surprised me the next day as I sat at my desk. He came in at lunch with my favorite takeout, a bunch of hydrangeas, and a bottle of sparkling cider. 

"Cheers," he said, clinking my glass with his. "We're a family of three now."

~

For months I laid on the couch, watching episode after episode of Parenthood, making the occasional run to the toilet to vomit. Morning sickness became all-day sickness. Again, I was grateful for the friends I made. Lyndsey brought me gatorade and homemade rolls, the only thing I was able to stomach, and went on long walks with me, both of us relishing in the excitement of a new baby. Annie made me laugh, calling me over every day for some thing or the other, the two of us eating sometimes all three meals together. Collin and Meredith and Stacey were the strongest women I knew, raising toddlers in an apartment while their husbands were away. 

I was comforted, knowing that they had done it and so could I.

~

Kevin's mom fell six weeks before his boards. That night I stayed up, waiting by the phone for any news while Kevin slept fitfully, exhausted and bereft. 

The Dean encouraged him to defer. Take off a year and process events, but he refused. He buried himself in his work for her. Doctors saved her life, and he understood that it wasn't luck or chance or happenstance that they had the ability to do so. 

It was hour after hour of dedicated study. It was the 4 am wake up call, the dark walk to campus, the vortex, and the defeated slog home.

~

Claire came one month into third year. I was induced the day before her due date - not because of a medical necessity, but because it was a three day weekend and Kevin would have some time off. 

She was so beautiful we couldn't contain ourselves, so fresh and new and ours that I feel love surge through me again at just the memory of it. My doctor was late leaving for a family vacation because of my induction, and I thanked him repeatedly. "Tell your wife thank you as well," I added before he left the room, my minutes old daughter in my arms. 

~

Third year was consuming. The first few months after she was born, she woke every hour or two, her cries piercing through our unconscious, rousing, it seemed, only me.

Whereas before I felt frustration, sadness maybe, at his lack of time and his schedule, I now felt anger. I continued to work full-time for nine months after she was born, compelled to do so by both duty to my long-term employer, and necessity. Fatigue was my constant companion. Her cries crackled through the monitor and I waited for several minutes to see if he would budge, finally elbowing him, waking him to take his turn with her. It didn't matter if he did though. I would still be awake, listening to see if it worked. Eventually I stopped waking him at all. 

~

His scheduled improved from second year though, at least until Christmas when he began going to bed at 8 and waking again at 4. Instead of classes and studying all day, he rotated through different specialties. Some months felt like a regular job - usually family medicine, or other primary care rotations. Others though, were intense and consuming. 

He had surgery two months after Claire was born and I spent my first full night alone without him. Bravely I cooked dinner for just myself, bathing the baby, putting her down, and watching every shadow that crossed the window by my head. I finally pulled her in with me for some company and felt like a martyr, my own hyperbole not lost on me. 

By the fourth night, I was an old pro. The baby slept in her room and I slept in mine. No lights were left on. 

~

We both slept tensely the first night he was on call for OBGYN. I left him a sandwich and a banana on the counter before bed "Just in case." 

I think I slept less peacefully than he did, hearing imaginary phone calls, startling me from sleep. At 2 am he was summoned, pulling on his scrubs, slinging his stethoscope around his neck.

"You know," I called to him before he left, "This is the only time I'm okay with you leaving our bed for another woman."

~

With a baby and both of us working full time, there was less time to spend with friends. The same women I found myself drawing near to first and second year now felt further away. Kevin consumed himself with grief because of his mom, and I felt spread so thin as a working mom with a commute and a nursing baby. 

"Is this my life?" I sometimes wondered, setting the trash out for the valet on a November night that still felt unfeasibly warm. "Did I pick this?" I would think.

~

There was joy, of course. Moments of joy between us and Claire. We took long walks together when we both got home, because she loved to be outside. Those walks were the only dates we had, the candlelit dinners, the exotic evenings. We shared about our days, about his preceptors, his commute. We discussed our finances, but mostly we talked about Claire. What she did, what she ate, how much she made us laugh.

In hindsight, having a child during medical school was like throwing a fiery log into an already kindling pit. Crazy, and stressful, and a little irresponsible. 

But we both agreed that given the chance, we'd do it again. We'd choose her over and over.

~

We were given permission to do Kevin's fourth year in Utah, so we could live near family - which is where we are now. Our main intention was to be closer to Kevin's family to help out during a stressful time (from his mom's accident) but there were other draws too. By the time fourth year came, we were out of money, and my company was out as well. In May we moved into my parents basement, despite a personal vow I'd made never to do so, and are grateful every day we made that decision. It's been our saving grace.

~

Most people don't understand the level of debt and direness of finances. Since I had a good salary our first three years we were able to live relatively comfortable, and chip away at the frankly, offensive tuition amounts. Once I left my job however, we really understood what it meant to be poor. There are always more loans to take out, but the interest rates are crushing, and we opted to do what we could to live frugally. 

At the risk of sounding all-knowing, I will say, that I have been surprised at how things have worked out in this aspect. It is hard to be poor, but it is okay to live without. I look forward to being able to splurge, to purchase items I want for myself someday but also recognize that I don't need it. I don't need expensive candles for our house, or new shoes, or name-brand makeup. 

I have learned to count my blessings. Health, safety, freedom, God. At the top of my list is always my baby, and my husband, who, despite his flaws, remains a true companion - a friend who makes me laugh, and keeps going, not for the benefit of his own life, but for the benefit of mine. Our family. 

There are times when I want to cry because of our lack of things. It is real, and to other wives who may be struggling with this, I will say that I think it is okay to feel this way at times. We live in a consumer culture - we are creatures of habit. But jealousy, coveting, and misplaced anger have no place in our lives. It is the daily exercise of gratitude that will save you.

~

We just finished our third month apart. During fourth year, medical students do "auditions" which are, literally, a try out for residency. They are gone for four weeks at a time, living and working in the facility, and hopefully leaving with a foot in the door and an interview. Many describe these months as the worst of medical school, but I disagree. You learn to live and love apart. It doesn't get easy, but it gets easier. The hardest thing to manage is the resentment.

Claire learned to walk while Kevin was in Oklahoma. She was just shuffling along the sides of the couch and then she suddenly sprang forward, bravely reaching for me with a gummy smile and her arms stretched out like a monster. 

He missed that. He missed her first tooth poking through, and the agonizing days I spent with her at my hip, her wails rising up, her burrows into my shoulder in an effort to control the pain. She calls the phone "Dada", because Facetime is the only space she recognizes him.

Sometimes I resent that he's not here. Other times I resent that he doesn't make any money and he's not here, since I cannot afford a nanny or sitter. I resent that we have no control over where he does residency and where we will end up. Still, other times I resent that I married him without knowing this would be my life. That I would be so alone, so poor, so forgotten.

Then I slap myself in the face and laugh. Because, at the end of day, it's not so bad. There are worse things, than to be married to someone who commits himself to a lifetime of healing others. There are worse things than parenting mostly alone, your child who has your husband's eyes and an infectious laugh. There are worse things than being poor, and indebted, and alone because there is the hope of a better life. It's a blessing, not a curse.

My mom always says to Kevin, "You're going to be 30 anyway. You might as well be 30 and a doctor."

And to you, dear wife, or husband, or girlfriend, or whoever you are, whose significant other is entering or in this hellish and heroic profession - I would say the same.

You're going to live anyway. You might as well be happy.

Best Scene

Whenever I'm feeling uninspired, I turn to YouTube. Where else? 

There's so much junk on there, but there's so many beautiful things too if you know where to look. This clip is my go-to. I used to tell people my favorite movie was Wicker Park, but then realized it wasn't the movie I liked. In fact, the movie itself I didn't really like - but I was willing to sit through it all just for the feeling I had when watching this final scene. So here you go. I saved you 2 hours of your time. It is so, so beautiful.

p.s. my favorite movie now is About Time. I watched it on the plane on the way to Thailand and then immediately watched it again. I've never done that before, but if I wasn't so jet-lagged I'm certain I could have watched it a third time.

overheard

My grandfather died a couple months ago. He was a wonderful person. He was a basketball player and a shepherd and a soldier and a great dad. My mom laughs just like him. 

At his funeral my uncle shared this quote from his personal history, and it sums up what I hope I prioritize in our little family of me and Kevin and Claire and whoever else joins our brood.

"We went without paintings on our walls, but our home was always filled with music."

a book could be written about any one of these feelings

23 EMOTIONS PEOPLE FEEL, BUT CAN’T EXPLAIN

1. Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.
2. Opia: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
3. Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.
4. Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.
5. Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops.
6. Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
7. Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.
8. Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like.
9. Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.
10. Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.
11. Vemödalen: The frustration of photographic something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.
12. Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening
13. Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out.
14. Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.
15. Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire.
16. Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.
17. Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone.
18. Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.
19. Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.
20. Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.
21. Liberosis: The desire to care less about things.
22. Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years.
23. Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective.

Sonder and Onism especially, for me.

The Science of Improving Performance

So, I'm obsessed with this Time article. Please read it. It's so fascinating to me, but of course the writing portion was the most applicable to my life, seeing as I'm not an elite athlete or musician at the moment.

Here's what it says about improving writing:

Ben Franklin intuitively grasped the concept of deliberate practice. As a teenager Ben received a letter from his father saying his writing was inferior: “in elegance of expression, in method and in perspicuity, of which he convinced me by several instances,” as Franklin recalled.

From Talent is Overrated:

Ben responded to his father’s observations in several ways. First, he found examples of prose clearly superior to anything he could produce, a bound volume of the Spectator, the great English periodical written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Any of us might have done something similar. But Franklin then embarked on a remarkable program that few of us would have ever thought of.

It began with his reading a Spectator article and marking brief notes on the meaning of each sentence; a few days later he would take up the notes and try to express the meaning of each sentence in his own words. When done, he compared his essay with the original, “discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.

One of the faults he noticed was his poor vocabulary. What could he do about that? He realized that writing poetry required an extensive “stock of words” because he might need to express any given meaning in many different ways depending on the demands of rhyme or meter. So he would rewrite Spectator essays in verse. …

Franklin realized also that a key element of a good essay is its organization, so he developed a method to work on that. He would again make short notes on each sentence in an essay, but would write each note on a separate slip of paper. He would then mix up the notes and set them aside for weeks, until he had forgotten the essay. At that point he would try to put the notes in their correct order, attempt to write the essay, and then compare it with the original; again, he “discovered many faults and amended them.”

Off to practice my prose Ben Franklin style . . .

overheard

"True innovation comes in pairs. It takes two people to really create something good."

momhood

..."you’ll have a baby. An amazing little being who will blow your mind and expand your heart and make you think things you never thought and remember things you believed you forgot and heal things you imagined would never heal and forgive people you’ve begrudged for too long and understand things you didn’t understand before you fell madly in love with a tiny tyrant who doesn’t give a crap whether you need to pee. You will sing again if you stopped singing. You will dance again if you stopped dancing. You will crawl around on the floor and play chase and tickle and peek-a-boo. You’ll make towers of teetering blocks and snakes and rabbits with clay.” - Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things

Last mother's day I was 22 weeks pregnant with Claire. My mother-in-law had just fallen and was coming out of neurosurgery. My husband was grieving. My belief that I would raise a perfect child was still solid. I was capable then. Now I am humble. Motherhood - the foxhole trenches of it, has brought me to my knees.

I think it comes easily for some women - in fact, I've seen that be the case firsthand. That instant selflessness. That hunger, that need for our children to have everything their hearts desire. But for us mortals, becoming a mom is like having a mirror held up to our faces, wherein we look through the glass, and deep into our weaknesses. I did not know I had so much anger before I became a mother. I did not know I had such a lack of patience. But I also did not know I had so much love.

What Cheryl says above is true. While becoming a mother has been extremely difficult for me, I have also found that I experience more joy in my day to day than I did before I had Claire. I laugh a lot more. I sing and I dance much more. I prioritize my time differently, because time away from her has to be worth it - and most often, it is not. 

I'm a different person because I am a mom. Maybe not a more beautiful or impressive individual, but a more empathetic, more forgiving, more intuitive individual. I think I like myself more now. I no longer mourn the loss of my freedom or the person I was, because I'm beginning to feel comfortable with myself - confident. I'm not a Saint and I'm not an angel, but I am brave and willing and Claire at least, thinks I am funny. 

I had Claire because I wanted someone to love. I just didn't realize how important her love would be to me. I love that tiny human, and I love being a mom.

Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers, however and whomever you are mothering.