It’s been said that to have a baby is to “decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” O has only celebrated 4 birthdays, but I’ll be honest, they always hit me right in the feels.
Somewhere right around 8:54am on this day 4 years ago, I was surrounded by a team of doctors and nurses in an OR after they “crashed” my delivery. I was shaking so much that my teeth chattered, and crying so hard that the anesthesiologist took pity on me, removing and wiping off my glasses while I was otherwise strapped to the table. I was whispering on a loop — I think inaudibly — “please, please, please, please, please.” A million simultaneous wishes for one outcome: please let the baby be okay. I will give anything; please just let the baby be okay.
In what I think is a psychological defense mechanism, I now view this memory as if outside myself, and it culminates in O’s anguished cries mixing with my relieved sobs. The nurse holds the red, wailing infant out for me to see and tells me not to worry; his swelling from his dramatic exit will “go down in a few days.” I continue sobbing, “what swelling?? He’s *sob* so *sob* beautiful.”
Sometimes I feel alone telling this story. I scrounge for words or similes or expressions to describe the fear, and they are — without fail — always inadequate. But the sad, or remarkable, or horrific part is I’m not alone in these types of parenting moments.
We had another close call with O just a few months ago. I’m not ready to put it all in writing because I can’t get past the image of my then 3-year-old’s light-up Spiderman shoes peeking out from behind the paramedic as they lifted him into an ambulance on a stretcher. But the danger passed; he came home. Days later, however, I still found myself periodically locked in the bathroom in order to have an uninhibited ugly cry where my kids couldn’t see me.
I reached out to a friend who has a child that combated and defeated the real deal: pediatric cancer. I spilled my guts, sheepishly acknowledging how insensitive it felt comparing this 36-hour episode to the sustained trauma she and her daughter were/are living through, but I had to know: how did she get through a day without being physically nauseated at the memory of her child in peril? She sent me a thoughtful, honest reply, highly recommending a good “shower cry” and assuring me that over time, I would be able to accept that he’s okay. When I tearfully asked how I could cope with the consuming thoughts of things that might have happened, she said that “you have to try your very very best not to let your head go there. You (and me) are allowed to feel ‘lucky’ that the alternatives did not happen.” I single-mindedly focus on this sentiment even now, months later, when I have intrusive thoughts about that day.
On the day O was born, my insides were opened — both literally and figuratively. Not a single day has passed between November 18, 2017, and now when I haven’t been consciously grateful that he’s here.
To November 18th, to my sweet son, and to all of the parents who manage to simply put one foot in front of the other as their hearts go walking around outside their bodies. Cheers.
cheers to my son who
loves all things monsters but still
answers to “sweetie.”
Despite the fact that it’s a Saturday night and the summer sun is still very much shining, the boys had an early bedtime tonight. I was scrolling through some of the photos from the weekend so far, and caught myself thinking how blissful it is to be this kind of tired at the end of a couple of wonderful days. The kind of tired that carries you sleepily from a well-earned shower directly to your bed and the soft drape of your top-sheet. The kind of tired that makes you actively aware of how good it is to (literally) put your feet up. The kind of tired that renders your mental ticker tape all but silent, and allows you to appreciate just how good it feels to close your heavy eyelids.
Yes, looking at the photos from the first portion of the weekend already tell a pretty compelling story. I picked J up from the bus stop with my bathing suit already on, pool bag packed, noodles in hand. Make no mistake: we were starting the weekend in the 87* heat at exactly 3:36 and not looking back. We headed over to our neighborhood pool, took a few silly selfies while waiting for our sunscreen to soak in, and then spent an hour+ swimming. Eventually Dave joined with O, A, and a host of new pool toys that provided another couple hours of entertainment. Because I was very much in on the pool action, my phone stayed stashed until we came out for potty and snack breaks, but we do have a few shots of the boys huddled on pool chairs in their beach towels, which is quintessential summer to me.
This morning, Dave took A out to run some errands and get some 1:1 quality time (read: walking around a nearby downtown at whatever pace A set + pizza lunch + ice cream). I took J and O strawberry picking for the first time (for all of us). We rode the wagon behind the tractor, picked 6# of fresh strawberries, impulse bought all kinds of strawberry-related jams and sweets from the shop, and then hustled back to blow through nap and quiet time in favor of attending a friend’s backyard birthday party. Said party included an inflatable water slide, a kiddie pool, a slip-&-slide, and 3 types of dessert. By the time we got home, it was after 4, and the boys plopped their soggy, bathing-suited bottoms down on the couch (oops) to watch A’s favorite rendition of Wheels on the Bus on repeat while Dave prepped baths and I prepped dinner.
Net-net, I have something like 50 pictures from the past 36 hours, featuring my beautiful sons having beautiful childhood experiences during a beautiful time of year in Michigan.
Until I thought about it, in fact, I almost forgot that part of the reason I was so determined to kick off the weekend with fun and pool time was because I had a miserable meeting at work that had deflated me on Thursday. Or that I got so frustrated with the boys’ behavior getting ready for bed on Friday night, that Dave checked in with me later to ask if I was “really that mad, or just putting on a performance for effect” (unfortunately it was the former). Or that we were over an hour late to the birthday party today because I grossly underestimated how unhelpful the boys would be at actually contributing to our strawberry collection, and therefore how much more time it would take me (who, at 31 weeks pregnant, is not particularly well-suited to bending over or squatting down for extended periods) to complete the activity almost entirely by myself.
Clearly, not every day is idyllic. In fact, I’m willing to bet that there were bona fide snafus in every. single. one. of our days for the past several years – with the odds exponentially increasing with each additional child and the myriad variables they introduce. These are almost never documented in photo form, despite their frequency.
But by the end of the day, when I scroll through the day’s pictures – frozen moments of our family memories being formed – all I can see are the smiles, the love, and the joy. And while I openly acknowledge that those are only part of the story, they sure do match my holistic feeling of hours well-spent.
So take the pictures of your favorite people doing their favorite things. Take the pictures of experiences in action. Take the pictures of bright moments that can provide you with a self-indulgent mental destination to visit later in your day (or month, or years from now). Let the internal narrative grow. If seeing is believing, if a picture is worth a thousand words, if perception is reality, then I am definitely in favor of creating a paper trail of all kinds of evidence that your life is that happy.
Or, if not strictly “happy,” then at least full of so much action and fun that you are as spent as J after our Friday evening at the neighborhood pool, captured in photo form below:
NB: I am really enjoying the title of this post, as if – after 6 years of practice – I have some secret cache of parenting tricks. I don’t, but I’m pretty confident a few of the things we learned to do on the fly, or habitually (but originally accidentally), can be helpful to others, so I’ll try to spot them and share along the way.
Hack #1: Snack Foods as Inspired by Still Life Paintings
We used to stock a small drawer with “snack foods” to encourage the boys’ independence. Unfortunately, however, those snacks that could be stashed without refrigeration were almost all convenience foods (read: not particularly nutritious and packaged individually in a way that makes me cringe at our ever-growing waste production).
One day, I bought a big, casual-looking bowl and stocked it full of gorgeous fruit: apples, pears, clementines. I left it right in the center of our kitchen table. The boys saw it and went bananas (ha). They ate so much fruit in the following days that I was able to catch up with Steve the Wine guy twice that week. We now buy 2 small bags of lunchbox-sized apples each week just to keep the bowl itself stocked. To the boys, they seem to enjoy it not just because they can help themselves to snacks, but also because there’s this choose-your-own-adventure component involved.
With very few exceptions, we make a point to give them the green light when they ask if they can help themselves to the fruit bowl. Does it interfere with dinner appetites sometimes? Yes, but then again, there are worse things than filling up on fruits and carrots (which we also dole out liberally if they simply cannot wait for the meal itself & their pleas for food are so intense that surely someone will call CPS if they find out in which conditions we force our children to live).
All that said, a warning: appealing though the fruit bowl may be for those of us that live here & have few qualms sharing germs with small children (which is to say, those of us who prefer not to follow in Sisyphus’ footsteps), a visitor to our home should double check their fruit selection as closer inspection of our beautiful bowl of fresh fruit does — on occasion — bear the signs of a certain toddler’s early efforts at eating in moderation.
