Our July 4th weekend was complicated.
The Fourth of July is a pretty important holiday to both my and Rob's families, so we decided to travel to Maine this year. I planned on taking Amelia swimming, enjoying time on my dad's boat, and checking out the festivities in Rob's oceanside hometown. If I'm being honest, I got my hopes up a little bit.
One thing no one told me about parenthood was that a lot of the fun stuff is delayed by at least 6 months, and in some cases even longer. I had visions of sharing holidays and new traditions with Amelia, but have found up to know that most of my holidays have been spent hidden away in a room begging her to sleep and seething with rage at the joyous noise my family was making without me just a few rooms away. The noise I used to participate in, the noise that has defined my holidays for my entire life.
Amelia is in a period of serious--and I mean serious--stranger anxiety right now. I've never seen anything like it. From the second we arrived at my dad's house I saw my image of a "perfect holiday" shatter into a thousand pieces. Amelia in a group of new people is a completely different person than the Amelia that is with just Rob and me. I watched my funny, goofy, curious, sweet baby shut down into a shy, closed off one within seconds. I saw her crack a smile in the company of others maybe once--the rest of the time she spent frantically trying to get to me and clinging to my neck.
One night I was nursing for what felt like forever, praying to gods I don't believe in that she'd fall asleep and give me even an hour to enjoy the late-night remnants of my family's celebration. I thought a thought I've had many, many times since she was born: one day I will get time to myself. One day this will not be so hard.
I was struck in that moment by a quote from one of my favorite authors, Tom Robbins. I couldn't remember it exactly, but I knew it had something to do with the rain as a metaphor for acceptance; acceptance of nature and acceptance of things that we couldn't change. It hit me that neither my nor Amelia's life can't be measured in what will happen one day: this is our life, all of it--right here, right now. I thought about how I needed to learn not to simply grin and bear the "rain" we may go through now--stranger anxiety, clinginess, teething, what have you--but to accept it, and to accept my daughter for who she is and for the path her life will follow.
This doesn't mean I enjoy the difficult times necessarily, just that they shouldn't be seen as a means to an end. The future is not guaranteed to us and the present--with all its difficulties--is all we truly have in this life.
This isn't a new concept, certainly, and it's something I've struggled with a lot throughout my life. I've been a generally negative person for as long as I can remember and I'm sure that won't change overnight. Never has the desire to change been so strong, however, as when I had a child and wanted to be the best person possible for her.
When we came home I did some research and after a surprising amount of work (I'm from the Google generation and we expect to be able to find everything) I finally found it. It's a bit different than I imagined it that one night, alone with my daughter thinking of how I failed her that day and trying to think of ways to do better the next day, but I still found it in its true form to be beautiful and poignant.
"The sky was still blue, the sun still beaming when they locked me up. But during my incarceration it had begun to rain. The legendary Seattle rain. It was a thing gray rain; hard and fast and cold. In it, we had to walk four blocks from the Public Safety Building to the Zillers' Jeep--we were at its mercy. As was my custom in such elements I hunkered against the rain, drew my head into my collar, turned my eyes to the street, tensed my footsteps and proceeded in misery. But my hosts, I soon notice,d reacted in quite another way. They strolled calmly and smoothly, their bodies perfectly relaxed. They did not hunch away from the rain but rather glided through it. They directed their faces to it and did not flinch as it drummed their cheeks. They almost reveled in it. Somehow, I found this significant. The Zillers accepted the rain. They were not at odds with it, they did not deny it or combat it; they accepted it and went with it in harmony and ease. I tried it myself. I relaxed my neck and shoulders and turned my gaze into the wet. I let it do to me what it would. Of course, it was not trying to do anything to me. What a silly notion. It was simply falling as rain should, and I a man, another phenomenon of nature, was sharing the space in which it fell."
The quote is from this book, if anyone is interested. I'm a huge fan of everything by Tom Robbins but this book was a lovely one.
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