Accepting the Rain

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.

To Be Better

Having a kid makes you do some weird shit.

Like sometimes you wipe bodily fluids with your bare hand. That's one of the biggest cliches in the honest mom blogosphere but it's true. I mean you spend a relatively large percentage of your day cleaning another person's butthole. Most people's lives pre-baby have very little cleaning of buttholes, and given the incredibly abrupt transition between one and the other, it's pretty amazing how little thought you give it.

There are other, deeper things though. Deeper even than buttholes.

(Sorry.)

There are times you feel like you could explode with all the love you have for this tiny miracle of life and a second later you're walking to the mailbox and wondering if you could just keep walking into the forest and disappear.

And other times you come to fundamentally questioning who you are and what you've done. Every stupid or cruel or obnoxious thing you've said or done, no matter how distant in time or place, comes sharply into focus as though it happened just moments ago.  You become aware of how much trash you are responsible for putting into landfills, how much water you waste waiting for the shower to reach the right temperature or flushing bugs down the toilet, how little you have done to make a world with so much darkness into something better and brighter.

You look at your tiny miracle and realize that even if you do everything "right" you are constantly fucking it up.

I've always struggled with the pulse of failure beating in my brain, reminding me of all the stupid shit I said or did. I've dealt with imposter syndrome in just about every area of my life. But never has it been so strong or so fierce as when I realized that I am responsible for molding this human into someone who is better than I am.

Who agreed to let me do that? Who gave us permission to conceive and raise a child? When is her real mom coming to pick her up?

On the other hand, I suppose there's beauty in imperfection. Amelia doesn't know the difference since I'm the only mother she will ever have, and there's no rule that you need to have finished growing yourself before you grow a person.

All any of us can do is our best. I just hope I can make my best...better for her.

In Which I Compare Parenthood to Fictionalized Serial Murder

You know that scene at the end of Se7en where (spoiler alert, if you just time traveled here from 1995) Morgan Freeman opens the package to find Gwyneth Paltrow's head, and he realizes that Kevin Spacey has totally used him and Brad Pitt to complete his murderous tableau, and that in his words, "John Doe has the upper hand"?

I had a realization the other day that that, for me, in a nutshell, is what it's like to have a baby.

WHAT'S IN THE FUCKING BOX? It's my sanity.

I've written before about how prior to Amelia's arrival I had read and saved dozens of blog posts that ranged in topics from sleep to Montessori activities to raising an "independent" child. They were all centered around one key idea, that by performing the correct steps in the correct sequence, you could in turn determine the child and person that your progeny would become. 

This concept appealed to me, since as an anxious person the ultimate goal of worrying and obsessing is to control a situation that is fundamentally uncontrollable. 

I realized in short order that not only are babies not blank slates, they also don't read or adhere to parenting advice. Or at least mine doesn't. The little rebel.

Though Amelia slept through the night by 5-6 weeks, we have since "regressed" to full-time cosleeping. It's literally the only way she will sleep. Not only does she need to be in our bed, but it means I can't leave the bed (even when she's asleep) without her screaming. And it's real screaming, not just angry baby noises. Despite the fact that when she was a newborn I made something of an effort to not hold her constantly, she is currently at least somewhat unhappy unless she is in my arms all the time. 

I'm revealing my own naivete, perhaps, when I admit that I thought if I had a good sleeper by 3 months or so then that was it. My work was done barring the occasional episode of teething or developmental leaps.

Going back to my metaphor, finally coming to and accepting the realization that parenting advice is really more of a guideline assuming you have a certain type of kid was a bit like Morgan Freeman opening the box and realizing that he never had the control he thought he did. 

I know that a lot of my parental desires boil down to wanting Amelia to be independent. That isn't because I want to be left alone or that I don't want her thinking she can depend on me; rather, I know from personal experience how hard it is to go through life requiring validation, constantly feeling uncomfortable in your own skin, never feeling truly comfortable being yourself. I don't want that for her. 

Perhaps appropriately given my own mental state, I don't want her to be like me.

But that's not what parenting is about, is it? Once you get past the obvious initial stage, it isn't about creating a person from scratch. It's growing a person, shaping a person. And that's exactly what she is--a person, albeit a small one.  Who she is is largely beyond my control, and while it is my job to guide her during her formative years, it is also to love her no matter who she is or who she becomes. Not only that, but who she is at 7 months is unlikely to be who she is at 7 or 17 or 70. 

If she's like me, maybe she'll feel fortunate that she has a mother who can understand her anxiety beyond tired platitudes like "just stop worrying." If she ends up being more independent like her dad, maybe she'll cherish the fact that she when she feels vulnerable she has a mom who is well-versed in the ways of fear.  Either way all I can do is what works best for the both of us and try to let go of the illusion of control.

And that, I guess, is why parenting is like finding a bloody head in a box in the best way possible.