It’s a…

Posted in Asher, Motherhood, New Baby by

On Monday we went in for the 22 week ultrasound and found out first and foremost that, to the best of our knowledge, this little one growing inside of me is healthy as a clam. WHEW.

We  told Asher on Sunday that the following day was the big reveal, and come Monday morning, Asher was standing next to our bed whispering to me, “Mama, did you find out? Is it a boy or a girl?” It was such a great way to start the day and is one of the many glimpses that we’ve gotten of Asher as a big brother. Apart from starting super late, (why doctors of the world? Just, why?) the appointment went incredibly smoothly and we loved seeing the baby moving around like crazy in there. It’s so wild to be able to feel the baby move inside while watching it move on the screen, just one more ways that pregnancy is very surreal.

We wanted to make it fun for Asher, but of course I hadn’t really gotten anything together, so we stopped by a bakery on our way to his school and wouldn’t you know it? They happened to have a macaroon with a nicely gender stereotyped filling. Conveniently, they also package their treats in boxes, and so my lack of planning worked out remarkably well. We picked Asher up and told him that the doctor had sent home a special treat to tell us if we were getting a little brother or sister (which I didn’t really think through when I said this…we’ll chock it up to a Santa Myth moment and move on) and so Asher sat at the table and opened up his little box.

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He smiled so sweetly at Drew and I and said, “It’s a baby brother!” and then got busy with that cookie. He really liked getting to make the announcement, and frankly, he really liked getting a cookie filled with frosting. I would say that he likes both baby siblings and cookies before dinner equally well.

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Without any prompting, he got down out of his chair to give me a hug and then gave my belly a blue frosting laced kiss. Amazingly, my insane pregnancy hormones didn’t cause me to burst into tears as the angel choir struck all of its chords and the kittens and puppies started raining down from Heaven, but we were busy laughing at just how much Asher was digging on that macaroon. Asher has been saying all along that he would be having a baby sister, so we were very relieved that he seemed so stoked about getting a baby brother given that he had once threatened to sell a baby brother. (If you watch the video, listen closely near the end and you’ll hear it.)

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So that’s the big news! Two boys, brothers for life, a shared bedroom and hand-me-downs on the horizon. A special thank you to Pearl’s in town for making me appear to have my act together, and thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for this baby’s health. I’ve been saying it all along, but there never seems to be a big enough bucket to capture the gratitude that parents feel for their children’s well being  in all of its iterations. Thank you.

Number 8.

Posted in Holidays by

Yesterday morning I collected books, a fleece and an assortment of coffee cups and tupperware from the car as Drew buckled Asher in the backseat. I crammed them all in a reusable grocery bag and as Drew walked around the car, I passed him the bag and asked him to stick the tupperware in the dishwasher. He said he would, gave me a kiss and started to walk back to the house. It was all very normal, us moving through the normal motions of getting started for the day and doing the things that we do to keep moving.

“Hey Drew? Eight years tomorrow. Almost a decade.”

“Yeah, eight years. That’s crazy. Love you.”

And now it’s today, eight years ago today that we made promises to help each other get our mornings started, make our days work, braid our lives together. There were people sitting in chairs bearing witness then, now there’s a child in the backseat watching our every move, one in my stomach thumping into our lives from the inside out.

We had a fight last week about the garden fence, but not about that at all. And maybe it wasn’t even a fight. When we talked about it more we realized as we always do that we were pretty much on the same page the whole time. We just weren’t listening to each other. Or we weren’t doing a very good job talking to each other. We apologized, talked about going forward, talked about continuing to evolve and recognize that in one another. I cried because I’m pregnant and a little crazy, and Drew nodded and smoked a cigar while he looked at the stars in the black sky around our house. I wasn’t upset, I was aware that it’s been twelve years with him, eight years of marriage, and we’re still figuring it out, but we’re so much better at figuring it out than we used to be. We’ve learned how to get frustrated and move on, how to get to the root of the problem and not just think that we don’t agree about a fence. How to fall asleep in peace.

We collect laundry, tupperware, toddler laughs, long looks, dishes, what ifs, bills, stories, people, books, each other, we collect all of the things and moments of our life and pile them into our shared basket. We revel in the normalcy, delight in the consistency of days spent with someone so familiar. We’re each other’s bare bones, at once the best and worst versions of ourselves because we can’t hide anything. We’re still finding out that marriage is knowing someone when they’re stripped down to the core and exhaulting that person not to get them out of that place, but because of it. We’re still finding out that being married is the most serious work of our lives, and also the most simple. We’re just here for each other, the sun sets and rises, and still we’re happily here. It might be a little too When Harry Met Sally to say, but he really is still the first person that I want to talk to in the morning and the last person that I want to speak to before I fall asleep. And I do, I literally talk him into sleep most nights because he falls asleep easily and I’m talkative, but also because there are still more words. More years. More of this. It’s common and it’s exceptional.

We sat on the porch last night and talked about baby names and schedule things and projects for the house, and had a little champagne and looked at the moon coming up. Drew made me laugh, as always, with his unexpected observations. It was the perfect way to acknowledge where we are right now, where the tide of our years together is taking us. We remembered the wedding, and I still get surprised by how unpredictable it is to make promises about an unknown future and how still, somehow, we keep arriving here. Together. Eight years and counting.

Revisiting

Posted in Asher, Holidays, Motherhood by

Hiya.

In (belated) honor of Mother’s Day, I thought that I would share a post that I wrote in 2011. I think that Asher was about 18 months old when I wrote this, but I’m pretty sure that I will be thinking about these car window down moments when he’s 40.

Car Windows Down

Yesterday when I picked Asher up I instinctively reached for the AC button, not wanting the car to be too hot or too cold and started to roll the windows up.  Before I clicked the button though, I looked in the backseat to see Asher’s downy red hair blowing straight up in the wind and he had both arms up in the air feeling the wind move through his fingertips with his eyes closed and the biggest grin on his tipped up face.  He was feeling the world, I could see it.

He was so beautiful in that moment.

So instead of rolling the windows up, I rolled the other two down and we drove on for 35 miles in the noisy sunshine filled cabin of our car singing the ABCs a little too loudly (me) and waving arms wildly in the wind (him) and as I was cruising down the highway a thought filtered through my mind that was so striking I had to stop in the middle of L-M-N-O-P to catch my breath.

I’ve known my whole life that this moment with my child was coming.

My mom used to pick me up from Mr. Ron’s (if you want to see my mama get all atwitter, ask her about Mr. Ron sometime) where I spent my preschool days doing the things that kids in Montessori preschools do.  One of my earliest and most distinct memories is of one of those afternoons in the car with my mom, or most likely a lot of those afternoons mashed into one golden moment; memory is broad-sweeping in its desire to distill.  Anyway, she worked as an educator in the hospital and so her workdays were marked in my mind with skirts and suit jackets, but in this memory I see her as I so often did, driving down the highway with all of the windows down in our blue Toyota Tercel (later dubbed the Blue Goose by my brother) both of our hair flying, her skirt pulled up over her knees, jacket off and in the passenger seat, fingers claiming a little of the blowing hair with her left hand and twirling it absentmindedly with her elbow crooked on the rim of the open window, her right hand on the steering wheel.  And that’s it, that’s the extent of the memory, but there we are, two women at opposite sides of the female spectrum, and I remember how free I felt, and I remember thinking how free she must have felt too.  I remembering thinking, we’re in this thing together.

Yesterday, in my own car, with my own son in the backseat, I could see the images of my mother and myself superimposed over the joy-filled bodies of Asher and me and it was one of those halting full-circle moments.  To feel that long-ago formed memory from the child’s perspective, I see my mother that I loved, confidently driving us home to dinner and bedtime kisses, patiently listening to me rattle on about all of the things that I never stopped talking about as a child.  To feel that memory now from a mother’s perspective, I think about my mom knowing that she was going home to an unraveling marriage, that she would have to cook for us, get a little girl settled for sleep, and a budding teenage boy settled from his own brand of divorced heartache, and I wonder what thoughts swept through her mind as the wind filled our car and blew us on home.

Just a couple of years after those car window down drives home, my mom would fall in love with her life-long partner, my brother would disappear into the world of college, we would settle into the house that I came to know as my childhood home, and the car window down drives would be replaced with my adolescent desire to control everything with air conditioning and radio stations.  But.  I can’t help but think that I can still remember a little of that acute observance that young children possess, and that my 4-year-old mind was watching my mom closely to figure out how to be a woman one day.  I can’t help but think that the beautiful abandon that I witnessed twenty five years ago reared its head again yesterday.

Part of parenthood is falling madly in love with your child, falling in love with parenting your child, learning your own thoughts and watching them change as you start to think like a parent.  But another astonishing (and I mean that, I’m not being cute here) thing about becoming a parent is seeing your parents for the first time.  It’s not like I didn’t know that was going to happen as one of the clichéd rites of passage into claiming a child as your own, that I didn’t know that I would one day empathize more with my parents than I ever believed possible, it’s just that I couldn’t have possibly known what it was going to feel like until it happened.  It overwhelms me.  Feeling what my mother in particular felt towards me, feeling the shame of abusing that love 1,000 times throughout my life, having an acute awareness of how potent it is, how fierce it is, how all-consuming it is to love a child, and finally understanding that I am on the receiving end of that love is overwhelming.  It overwhelms me because it’s such a powerful gift, and because I realize that Asher may not ever know the depth of my feelings for him unless he decides to one day have a child of his own.

One of my wonderful friends has been talking recently about her strong desire to be able to genuinely and effectively express the breadth of her gratitude to her husband as they’ve become parents together.  I’ve been thinking about that a lot because the truth is, there’s no gift that says thank you well enough when those are the kinds of the things on the table that you’re trying to thank someone for.  What I’ve come up with is that the biggest expression of gratitude is in our actions, and in this case it’s in the way that we love.  The kind of partner or parent or child or friend that we are and the level of thoughtful respect and care that we charge ourselves with in those roles.  I will never know how to say thank you adequately enough to my parents, all four of you, but I do know how to love my child as much as I possibly can, and I can pledge part of that love as a devotion to all that you have given me in your own ways.  I know that I will make mistakes as a mother, but I hope that in my triumphs my parents see a reflection of themselves and know that they are being honored and that I am, in my way, always whispering thank you.

My final thought is this: when Asher is in the backseat thinking his thoughts, is he observing a woman?  Someone who rolls the windows down and sings badly and looks so grown up?  Does he also see a skirt pulled up to free knees, an arm draped casually, a level of confidence that children assume comes with height?  Sometimes I think he might, others I’m beyond sure that my shortcomings are palpable. In either case, I am reminded of what my little brain knew way back then, which is that if nothing else we’re in this thing together, wind blown hair and all, and then I just turn the radio up a little louder and marvel at my beautiful child and the inevitable truth that we are marching forward, steadily on.

Taking Care

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And now for a PSA:

I was raised by a nurse. My husband is a nurse. Several of my dear friends are nurses. Many of you are slogging through nursing school right now. When I gave birth, there were two people with us: our midwife and a nurse named Felicia who I still would stop in the street and hug (much to her horror, I’m sure) were I to see her again. In today’s medical system, nurses are becoming increasingly responsible for our care, and they have one of the most prolific, strange, and often gross jobs on the face of the earth. It’s true. I’m fascinated by it, but after hearing about even one of Drew’s work days in the world of Critical Care, all I’m left with is a sense of gratitude that there are people that are willing to do what he and many, many others do every day because…geeeehhhhh, you know?

At the dinner table when we talk about Asher growing up, he will boldly announce that he’s going to “work in the hospital with Popi and make the patients feel better”. My heart swells. I’ve said this a lot over the years, but Drew has insane days at work where he helps people die, grieve, stay alive, poop, eat, breathe…and then he comes home and says, ‘it was pretty busy today’. And that’s that. That completely blows my mind, but it’s his superpower. He’s at peace with everything the body is capable of, and because of that, he can give incredible care.

Over the course of his career, there have only been a few times when he’s brought work home, and it’s never because of what the body did, it’s because of the relationships that he witnesses as people are dying in the hospital. Most recently it was a wife saying goodbye to her husband, looking at Drew and saying simply, “he’s my best friend”. They were in their 70s. It shook Drew, not because the man died, but because he knew the grief that lay waiting for his wife. Drew does a lot of amazing life-saving blow-your-mind kind of stuff at work, but I think that so much of what nurses do is to be the one to hold a hand, accept a hug, and calmly bear witness to the unbearable truths of our humanness.

In this country, we’re quick to get misty eyed about our various heroes (as we should) but during the month of May, National Nurses Month, I hope that everyone will take a minute to find a nurse to thank for their service to your community. While they may not be running into a burning building or arresting the bad guys, they are doing the unthinkable minutia that it takes to keep our sometimes very disgusting human bodies up and running. They’re the ones that sit with wives and watch a husband take the last breath that ends a 58 year marriage. They’re the ones breaking up fist fights among grieving family members (I’m’ not joking about that one), holding down hallucinating patients that are trying to find their shoes to ‘jump over the fence over there’ in the hospital room, administering chest compressions until they can’t feel their arms, giving your baby her first gentle bath; nurses do all of the medical things that we think of nurses doing, and then the work starts.

I’m supremely proud of Drew and all of the nurses that we know. I’m proud of them for giving up weekends, nights, holidays with their families to take care of the rest of us. But more than that, I’m thankful. We all are.

So that’s that. End of PSA. Go hug a nurse.

Week 19: Reckoning

Posted in Asher, Motherhood, New Baby by

There is a pinhole in the bottom of my cup and it seems that my two options for getting the contents out are letting them continue to slowly drip out of that tiny hole, or to completely punch out the bottom, and neither of these options feel very timely. I forget though that I’m a glass-all-the-way-full kinda gal and that my third option is to try to capture some it all as it proverbially runneth over. So I’m there. Somewhere between a pinhole and a floodgate. Holding a bucket. Totally normal, right?

I think the thing about this pregnancy is that I keep waiting for something to click, but second pregnancy love is a little more multi-faceted, maybe less simple. I stayed up all night the night that I found out that I was pregnant with Asher. Immediately I started talking to his little soul and the camaraderie was fast and intense. It was quiet and powerful, me and baby first, everything else second. Then between Asher and this little one, there was another one, the one that got away, and it bruised my baby-meeting optimism. And so with this pregnancy, I spent the first 12 weeks on my hands and knees, somewhat literally and figuratively. I was sick as a dog (another first) but also sick with worry that I would fall in love again, hard, and be left with a hollow core yet again, the weight of those displaced feelings anchoring me back to that isolated doubt.

Here we are at week 19 and I am ready to change my narrative. What I’ve been holding on to is not the loss of the baby, I do think that I’ve made peace with that, but it’s the betrayal that I felt from my body, the insecurity that’s come about in its wake, and it’s time to let this last little grief go. I’m almost half way through and still I get surprised every morning by my swelling shape, I still breathe a sigh of relief when I feel the first fluttering kick of the day, and I am still coaching myself along to trust the life-making process that happens inside of us. I’m converting my anxiety into a fake-it-until-you-make-it bubble of enthusiasm, and it’s working. I’m less enamored with the pregnancy perhaps, but almost ravenously excited about the end goal. The weight of this child in our arms. A gasping, air breathing, here-I-am-world cry. In many ways I think that the connection that I have with this child is one of reverence and a deep sense of being in it together.  Asher was a call, this one is an answer.

So there we have it. I am filled to the brim with absorbing these final months of just being a family of three, of negotiating Asher’s cycle of 3-year-old 8 minute emotional highs, mediums, and lows. Of navigating life with a growing child inside my body, and another one hanging all over us on the outside, of wanting to grow things in our garden, of riding the tides of my own crazy hormones, of loving this opportunity, and of finding gratitude for another day where it all seems to be working. It’s hard for me to know if what I’m experiencing is the universal experience of second-time moms, the universally silent experience of women who have lost a pregnancy, or, more likely, all of the above. I’m trying to patiently pace myself for this marathon, but the truth is, I want to sprint to the end, fold my arms around this little one and give thanks again and again for his or her presence in our lives. I want to be on the other side of this, watching those unexpectedly tiny fingers curl around ours. I want to see Asher smiling his shy smile when people ask if that is his little brother or sister. I want to be there. But for now, until September, we wait.

Thanks for capturing some of what’s in this cup with me, let’s take a stab at getting back to our regularly scheduled programming, shall we? Here are some more scenes from our world of late:

Asher’s Birthday Present

Posted in General, Motherhood, New Baby, pictures by

First I’ll let him tell you about it:

And then I’ll show you this:

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And finally, I’ll say this:

To borrow from Paul McCartney (and for the record, one of my least favorite Beatles songs) it’s been a long and winding road to make the leap from a family of three to a family of four. On the one hand, I anticipated this happening much, much sooner and on the other, it’s overwhelming (but exciting!) to be thinking about a new person in our lives. In the way that these things go, we are getting exactly what we’ve dreamed about, but we also have no idea what that dream means. I remember feeling this way when I was pregnant with Asher, knowing that we were realizing a shared hope, but also having the sense that I was searching in the dark for a flashlight every time that I tried to imagine our new life ahead. That seems to be the way with pregnancy, we wait and wait, and then there’s a first breath, and suddenly the flashlight is in your hand and all of the answers are found in the beam of that new-life light.

I remember my sweet friend Katie visiting us when Asher was younger and as I was giving him a bath and she asked me how I learned how to bathe him. I didn’t have an answer, because as it turns out, we stitch together a heavy blanket of knowledge about our children, embellishing with shared stories, research, observation, what our children teach us about their needs, and intuition. Before having one child I had no idea if I knew how to give a baby a bath. Now I will have two, and all I can do is wait patiently to discover what else it is that I have to learn, and then laugh at myself one day when I realize that I’m doing exactly the thing I never knew I could. My clever cousin told me over Easter weekend that he’s removed the phrase, “I can’t imagine” from his speech because we can always imagine…perhaps not accurately or with great clarity, but we can always tap into that possibility, and we undermine ourselves when we assume that we can’t. I would have loved this conversation any time, but I don’t think that he could have known that he was giving my pregnant brain a little life boat by reminding me that all this daydreaming that I’m doing is just another joy of being human.

So in September, on or around September 23rd to be exact, another little light will click on in our lives and we will start down the path of siblings and nighttime feedings and deep breaths of that newborn aphrodisiac, and just like that, three will become four. Here’s to you little one, to your days ahead on the inside as you prepare for the world out here, and to the great imaginings of this life. May your journey continue to be a safe and peaceful one.

And yes, I promise that I will keep feeding you watermelon.

February

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Every year I think that I want to break up with February a little more. I feel bad being so hard on a month, but of the whole year, this is the one month that I could just skip, and with good reason. It’s the dregs of winter, the no-(wo)man’s land before the promise of spring, because even if March is in like a lion, we all know how it goes out…with buds on trees and greening grass. The little lambs of spring. I don’t have any particularly hard feelings about Valentine’s, I generally like love and chocolate and we had fun sharing it all with Asher, so my distaste for this month has everything to do with my impatience. I’m impatient to leave the door open and step outside without clinching up my body, I’m impatient to gain back our outdoor living space and lifestyle, I’m impatient to see green again, I’m impatient for the car to not need to warm up, I’m impatient for bare skin and sunhats and the charming work of warm weather.

Looked at another way, February is part of the unspoken series of lessons on patience that Life seems to be certain that I need to continue to explore. I am someone that catches a whiff of a cusp and instantly I’m pushing through to the other side. I don’t enjoy being in between, and though I regularly think about the important role of ambiguity, the truth is, I don’t feel all that comfortable with it. And no month is more ambiguous than February.

In spite of this, we’re of course having a fine time and here we are at the end of the month, just two days away from March, and I am again getting excited for the month ahead, and the months that will follow. At the end of March there will be a wedding and I will be gaining one of the sassiest girls on this good (almost) green earth as a cousin-sister. Tender sprigs are poking through the frozen ground, early morning fires still fill our kitchen with a warm charm, I’ve been making biscuits, and Asher suddenly has a keen interest in dragging me to the couch for a quick snuggle from time to time. I feel much like the Virginia landscape right now…a bit dormant, but the rumblings of the new life of a change of seasons is rattling around in my core and because I can sniff the change on the horizon, I’m itching to get to it.

That’s not really such a bad feeling after all.

Maybe I don’t want to break up with you, February. Maybe I just want to see other months. You know, have some space. It’s probably not you, it’s me.