Boundaries

The thing is, I want to write about everything you're not supposed to write about.

I want to write about work. I want to talk about what I do, and what it does to me. And so I write, and then I disappear the post a few days later.

I want to decipher the complex code that is work-life balance. How much of my identity is work? How much is motherhood? How much is being the specific child of my specific parents raised in the house where my father was raised, in a neighborhood that gets uglier every time I drive through it on visits to my hometown, the town where my parents no longer live?

I want to name names and streets, addresses, and the state of my heart when I see my childhood home sinking into squalor as the ghetto I escaped swallows it whole. My sisters yelled at me when I called my parent's move white flight, and I tried to explain it was a sociological term, but it offended their sensibilities.

How much of my identity is that I am my husband's wife?

I want to unpack that rather imposingly large baggage (larger by leaps and bounds than the bags that sit unpacked on the dining room floor for days after we return from a trip) but I shouldn't.

I shouldn't tell you how we fought today. Me, making empty threats to try to break through his refusal to acknowledge the plain, simple, fucking truth of what I'm saying. Him, with defenses so high they could protect Berlin, Gaza and the Mexican border, all without breaking a sweat.

I shouldn't tell you how he sometimes lets me down on the big things: that dinner to celebrate my new job, the hospital stays after the births of our children, the loss of the only job I ever loved, a couple of Christmases. How I forgive him every time because I love him so deeply I can't tell where he ends and I begin. How he pisses me off and how he brings me to my knees, humble and grateful. How he makes me better, and although it's what I love about him, how I sometimes hate it while it's happening.

How my mother, when I told her I was engaged, told me: Marriage will let you down.

I want to talk about who and what and how is God. That's what I really want to know, if we're getting down to it. I want to know who is your God, and how did you find him?

How much money do you make; what do you spend it on?

What happens in your bedroom? What happens in your marriage, your divorce, your solitude?

How do you feel when you drink too much? When you're scared?

I want to talk about when you look at your babies and your heart stops dead in your chest. How do you catch your breath, right then?

How do you do it?

To the Future

I have to say it somewhere and it's too soon to go to Facebook, so here I am.

My program has not been funded for another year. I'm out of a job in a month. Not sure what's next.

I just got back from a long weekend at the beach. I had a post in my head about the bravery of my daughter in the waves and the wind. Then I spent most of last night in the ER with her after Little Miss Brave fell backwards on to her head on a hardwood floor and then threw up a few times for good measure. She's fine--spent most of the evening charming everyone in the ER. 

But it looks like it's time for me to be brave. And smart. And a sober calculator of a risk-benefit ratio that resides in a future completely unknown. All the things I want her to be.

Here's to the future. The scary, scary future that just might be more beautiful than anything we've ever seen before.

Thirtyish Sentences About Today

1. I was up with the kids at sunrise, serving up popsicles and painkillers, but then we all slept until just after 10.
2. I worked a later day, afternoon instead of morning, to attend a training.
3. Today was hot as hell.
4. My husband was at home with a large number of unpacked beach bags leftover from the weekend.
5. The baby was fussy and napless.
6. My training at work was air conditioned.
7. But it was also super boring.
8. Draw.
9. Iced coffee with honey and whole milk happened.
10. Iced coffee with honey and whole milk happens almost every day.
11. It might be why I'm an optimist.
12. The boy was cabin-feverish when I got home.
13. We offered choices and he chose: go downtown!
14. We went downtown, walked around a fountain, walked around a block, greeted an exuberant homeless man who wished us a Happy Monday!, hurried through the beginning drip drops of rain, just missed the downpour with not a minute to spare, folding and stuffing the double jogger into the back of the car while fat, hot drops slapped my forehead.
15. I felt like there might be a perfect poem somewhere in there.
16. And then for lack of anything else to do in the pouring rain, we went to the mall.
17. Not a big fan of the mall, me.
18. But: there's a library branch there, which just happened to be open: score!
19. And: my husband had been wanting to go the library all day, but between the oppressive heat and the surrounded by unpacked bags and the fussy napless baby, it hadn't happened: double score!
20. Also: they have a climbing thing, and a certain little someone might just be in heaven when he's climbing: home run! Or something.
21. So, you know, it's not all about me. Or my tortured sports metaphors.
22. My boy said to me, at the climbing thing: Oh Mommy! I am having fun! 
23. He sounded downright rapturous, about the climbing thing, at the mall.
24. But later he fell into the (fortunately clean and unused) public toilet in the mall restroom, and he cried a little bit. But only a little bit.
25. We drove the long way home through the rainy city, yellow lights glowing on wet blacktop under a dark sky, my ability to find peace in the passenger seat ebbing and flowing with the sound of my daughter's cry in the backseat.
26. Bedtime kinda sucked.
27. But that's also kinda par for the course right now.
28. We're getting there with the bedtime thing. Slowly. It's summer, after all.
29. I guess if this day, or my life, had a message, it would be:
30. Every day has magic: moments of perfect poetry under a stormy summer sky. And every day has the mall, public bathrooms, spots of crying here and there.

Summertime Yellows (Cause it Sure Ain't the Blues!)

Holy hell, it's July! How did that happen?

The baby is growing like the weeds in our overgrown yard. The boy is bossing everyone and everything around (NO kitty-ditty! You canNOT sit on my chair! It is MINE! That would be a VERY BAD idea!). The husband is home for the summer, slogging through slow mornings sans coffee, as is his summertime custom.

I race off to work, late almost every day. It's so hard to say goodbye to my family, sleepy eyed and pajama'd in the family kitchen while I dart out the door in (still rather ill-fitting) work clothes. Kisses scattered in all directions, bags hanging over both arms, and one eye on the clock to calculate the time I'll arrive at the office, add five hours, and determine exactly when I can come back home to my loves.

It's summertime, and while the livin' ain't exactly easy with babies and yard work and a house somehow always in need of reorganization, it is sweet. Sweet like raspberries, lemonade, and sweet tea brewing in glass jars on the deck. Sweet like weather that beckons you to forget all the items on the to-do-list-that-won't-ever-die, sit down in the late afternoon sun and take note of the perfectly still air. So hot it could conceivably be another hot day from another hot year in the still, hot silence of your memory.

Or it could simply be now. Just one moment in this particular summer, staring at the shimmery air beating off the blacktop and feeling as if anything is possible.

God, I love summer.

Flashback: Learning to Lift That Head

When Ryan, over at Pacing The Panic Room wrote about Priceless First Attempts last week, it immediately reminded me of a series of photos I took of my son shortly after he was born in 2008. His head was so big he had a hard time lifting it, and it was comical to watch how much effort it took him to try.

I know it should probably be baby pictures of the actual baby, but in true second-child style, the photos that have actually made it from the camera to the computer have not been converted to JPEGs or compressed down to user-friendly size yet. One of these days...

In the meantime, though, enjoy! He's almost three now, and while his noggin' is still super-sized, he doesn't seem to have any problems hauling it around atop his neck anymore!

How Things Are Now

The morning before grocery day, scavenging frantically for a breakfast I have to pack and bring to work because I don't have time to make it, I spot a lone bottle of beer, standing tall at hearty hops and barley attention in the vegetable crisper (beer's not a vegetable?).

I actually paused, like maybe -just maybe- it was a good idea to bring a beer. To work. For breakfast.

In the end, I went with a whole grain dinner roll and a jar of natural peanut butter, thick with oil and gooey nutty goodness (no time to scoop a single serving into a tupperware container; the whole jar tossed in the lunchbag; quicker), the best I could do on the way out the door the day before we replenish our food supplies.

* * *

We left the sandbox open at some point. I don't know exactly when it happened, but we left the lid off the sandbox, and between the neighborhood cats and the falling tree debris, it's just not fit to use for another summer. So we need to empty it out, but where to put this big box full of sand?

The groundhogs who used to live in our yard seem to have abandoned their abode. The first year we lived here we shared the space with a groundhog bigger than my ten pound baby. He was pretty confident the property belonged to him. The house sat empty for over a year before we moved in, and he had gone ahead and made himself at home, digging burrows closer and dangerously closer to our foundation. Last year we found one of his babies dead on the sidewalk leading from our yard out toward the street, flies buzzing over his tiny body decomposing where we imagined our children might one day play with sidewalk chalk. His family ate all our next-door neighbor's garden vegetables. We aren't disappointed that they have gone. They weren't the most pleasant of squatters to share the property with.

We threw our Halloween pumpkins in his hole to rot, and covered that compost with a thick layer of yard waste in the fall, and then again in the spring. The hole was near-full, but still not quite level with the surrounding grass. I emptied the sandbox, shovel by shovel, into the rusting metal wheelbarrow we found when we moved in. I dragged it up the grassy hill to the groundhog's former hole, and -shovel by shovel- I buried the remaining evidence of their existence.

There's so much work! my husband despaired, looking out over our property.

We're filling the holes, baby, I said as I rubbed the space between his shoulder blades with my hand. We're finally filling the holes. Think about what this looked like almost three years ago, when we first moved in. And now? We're filling the holes!

Damn, he said, you're right. We're filling the holes!

* * *

I meet with my boss, and my collaborating partner, and her boss, around a rectangle of conference tables. We have stacks of paper hundreds of pages deep: requirements for reporting our progress, rubrics for measuring our success against the other programs competing for limited funds, budget spreadsheets, and various pieces of a report that will determine our future strewn across the tables.

We look good.

It's on me to make sure we look good. And we do. We look good.

Maybe June will just be an early-to-rise, nose-to-the-grindstone, Puritan-work-ethic type of month instead of a clusterfuck of epic proportions. I can handle early-to-rise. Inhale. I can do nose-to-the-grindstone. Exhale. My Puritan work ethic is all polished up and pretty; it's in fighting shape what with all the practice it's gotten over the last couple of months. I'd make a fine farmer's wife these days with my ability to work dawn to dusk and then on and off overnight tending to a baby in need of mother's milk.

I can survive another month as a farmer's wife. Especially as opposed to a clusterfuck of epic proportions, which is what I was expecting. Another month as a farmer's wife is doable.

And there's always beer for breakfast, if things should come to that.

* * *

I scrub out the kiddie pool, hose it down with a jet spray, unscrew the nozzle and slowly let it fill while my son hops foot to foot with excitement in the soon-to-be summer air. I pop my baby girl's backside into the Bumbo seat, placed strategically in the shade of the conifer tree where she can watch me work and listen to the birdsong and windchimes hover in the humid air.

We've been walking over patio stones for going-on-three years now, never knowing they were there, buried under the grass, until our feet wore a path deep enough into the ground to discover them. I dig them up, one by one, and place them in a pile by the back deck. They'll need to be reset in the soil, somewhere higher where the rain water won't flow over them, burying the rock in mud and allowing grass to grow over them again.

Sinking the blade into the dirt at the edge of the stone, I place my foot atop the hoe and heave my weight forward. Again and again, I dig down into the earth -this piece of earth that we own! just imagine that!- and reshape it.

My children laugh in the background. Their voices mix melodically with birdsong and windchimes. And I work, and I work, reshaping the very earth upon which we live.

* * *

I am so tired that days and nights blur together. I close my eyes in my office and wish for a pillow in place of a keyboard. I drift off on the couch with my children crowded close to my body, listening to late afternoon rain, and waiting for my husband to arrive home from work. I pause in the early morning, gathering my bearings, wondering if a single beer is a suitable breakfast for a workday lunchbag before coming to my senses. Sometimes in the middle of the night I lie awake and watch my daughter kick her little legs and laugh like a banshee before cuddling her in and nursing her back to sleep. My life resembles a rushed montage from a movie more than a linear sequence of events occurring in real time.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel, fast approaching while I ride this wild wave to the end of June.

And I am reshaping the ground beneath my feet, building my future with my hands, digging through dirt and sheaths of paper to unearth whatever comes next. And it looks good.

It looks good, you guys.

Inhale. Exhale.

Can't Stop! Don't Stop! Won't Stop!

Click-clack. Click-clack.

All the trains rush down the track. Where is Thomas going?

Wait! That's not where I meant for this to go.

It was supposed to be my heels. My high low (I'm clumsy, with weak ankles; I don't do high) heels click-clacking on the hallway floors as I rush back and forth, over and over again, every day, delivering reports and reminders, escorting students and staff to the Next Important Event that Simply Must be Completed Before the End of the Year, checking post-its for phone calls to return, and the copier for copies to collate, and the fax machine for faxes to file, and the supply room for posterboard for parenting projects (we're out, don't bother to dig, I already looked everywhere yesterday) and ... And ... ANd ... AND ... itNEVEReverEVEReverSTOPS!

Can't Stop! Don't Stop! Won't Stop! Get it! Get it!
Can't Stop! Don't Stop! Won't Stop! Get it! Get it!

Sorry, thought we could all use a dance party break there. What? That was just me? Oh.

I knew when I came back to work at the end of my maternity leave that I was looking at the toughest three four (?pleasedon'tbefiveorsixorseven!) months I've ever navigated in this job.

I was right! I was riiiiiggggghhhhht!

And never have I been so dissatisfied to be so dead on. Can I get a refund on my right-ness? I want my maternity leave back! I'd like to take a moment to mourn, just a little jiffy to cry like a baby here in my own special space. Boo-hoo-hoo. (Babies don't say boo-hoo-hoo! Who came up with that?) WAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH! There, that's better. Life is sooooo hard, and the world's tiniest violin is playing a special tune, just for me and my first world problems.

No, really. I hear it somewhere in the distance.

Oh, that's just my ringtone? Another phone call I'm ignoring? Another voice mail I will reluctantly retrieve later with another little job I will promptly forget to do after jotting it down on another little piece of paper which will vanish into the ether (or more likely the mountainous paper pile that feels like it follows me around at all times, invisible, but there. Can to-do lists come back to haunt you if you've killed them without actually completing all the items? If so, I am so fucked.).

Basically, I'm drowning here. But it's Friday and lack of sleep along with a serious case of weekend-itis, topped off with an over-consumption of caffeine, has made me a little loopy. So rather than focus on the drowning, I would like to throw on some of those little arm floaties (they should fit my wrists; my upper arms are looking a little linebacker-esque these days and have no desire to be squished into floaties, adding indignity to the drowning! Plus fat floats, so they should be fine!) and call it a pool party.

Wanna come? Thomas the Tank Engine will be there, click-clacking down the track! He's going to Knapford Station! We'll have a lil' hip-hop dance party (Can't stop! Don't stop! Won't stop! Get it! Get it!)! And all the while, the world's tiniest violin will be playing in the background.

Pour yourself a drink! Toss it back and think of me! Nah, none for me, thanks, I can't afford to be hungover; my to-do list is ten miles long. You're going to have to party for the both of us.

Are you up for this challenge? I'm thinking it might require shots (for you, of course. I hate shots, but these are desperate times, and desperate measures might be required. Again: for you. I have quite enough desperation already, thankyouverymuch).

I would love to say I'll be napping while you do your party duty, but I'm pretty sure that won't be happening. If there's one thing I know, it's that: Life?

Can't stop! Don't stop! Won't stop!

Get it! Get it!