Don't even know where to start

I am in West Virginia by myself right now. While I wait anxiously for the thunderstorm that all weather programs swear is coming, I am cognizant that I am also waiting anxiously for so much else. Rain, as it often is, is a metaphor: for life-giving water; for baptismal cleansing; for clarity and a fresh start. Without rain, things desiccate, become crisp and brittle, turn inwards, die. The West Virginia panhandle is desperately parched; our pastures are becoming barren; all that I’ve planted is gone or barely hanging on; our well is dangerously low. If we lived here full time, we’d be in serious trouble. I’ve already had to buy water and have it delivered to our pool. It’s an expense, though less of one than is repairing a damaged pool liner. And so as do all who rely on water, you do what you can: let some things go to save others.

Last week, someone on this area’s Nextdoor site shared a photo of an emaciated deer dying in her front yard. It was utterly wrenching and despite my best efforts, I’ve not been able to stop thinking of that innocent doe, hungry and thirsty because her habitat is but kindling. The woman called the humane rescue to find it has shuttered because of funding; the next person she called said there was nothing that could be done but to put the doe down. Despite deer overpopulation and the destruction they wreak and the ticks they chauffeur, this doe was not of a nameless, faceless many but a lone creature at the end of her young life. My heart still aches, and I hope she passed peacefully.

I think about all we can and cannot control in life and how meaningful that makes it but also how tragic. So often, too often perhaps, controlling something exacts a toll, a cost, even when your intentions are beneficent. You choose to value one thing more than another. That calculus can be simple, or it can feel impossible. I would save my goats rather than the wild deer that bed down in my gardens at night; I might donate to a homeless shelter but neglect to distribute bottles of water on another day of record-setting heat; I will stay up with my sick child rather than sleep; I have gone to WV by myself even though we move our oldest to college next month.

Sometimes, choice is a joyous freedom but also an illusory one. Sometimes, the risk of inaction outweighs any cost.

While writing, the rain came. For mere minutes. And now it is gone again. How does this change my calculus regarding showering versus laundry tomorrow? Because we are dependent on our well, no more rain will mean one versus both. I’m ok with that, really. Humanity asks and takes and greedily uses too much. All of us could stand to behave more ascetically. Oliver is at camp right now, and there, joyful asceticism could be a motto. No electricity, lake bathing, composting toilets. It costs a small fortune to attend, but it’s worth every penny for the off-the-grid, total-connection-to-each-other-and-nature it provides. An easy calculus.

I seem to have last hit “publish” here in early December of last year. You can’t know the degree to which I’ve missed writing nor the extent to which I have felt muted. Not an easy calculus.

Tom and I were away recently, on a much-deserved 20th anniversary trip, and I swear I drafted a post along the way. However, a search of drafts, recently deleteds, and other such gray spaces showed nothing more than a “new post” from July 3. That post was rather like the “thunderstorm” we just experienced. A fleeting suggestion. Do the clouds feel nervous about bursting? Are they unsure about how and when to open up again? If so, I understand.

If you ask my mom, she will tell you that I always wanted to be a mother. One of my best friends from college, with whom I had dinner just a few nights ago, would say the same. I did. And yet, I admit that 18 years in, I feel very WTF about parts of motherhood. Like, gobsmacked. Astonished. Speechless. Not on my Bingo Card of Life stunned. Listing into the tragic versus meaningful. Done.

After 18 years of giving more than 100% every day from the me receptacle to other receptacles, well, let’s say this isn’t how I thought any involved receptacles would look. One is crispy and stressed; one is supple but lost. Where is the rain? What happened in the passage between vessels? For almost all of those years, I never saw, noticed, found, heard, was made aware of a leak. Where is the goddamn water?

It’s funny. There is no rain, but I can hear it falling softly. It strikes me that this may be what phantom limb syndrome feels like: a clear perception of loss and discomfort in something that is no longer there to feel or perceive anything. Is such a reaction a human attempt to understand the lack of what should be? At the root of my distress is most definitely a failure to, an inability to understand; a lack of understanding. Do I hear the rain because I so desperately want it to be raining? Do I miss a long-held connection because it is suddenly gone?

Yes.

It should rain. We should be connected. The loss of each is awful. I’d choose drought, if that were the calculus. Easily.

What we're loath to say

There are days in which the degree of highs and lows takes me clear by surprise. In my 40s, I increasingly rarely feel actual surprise. Disappointment? For sure. Disgust? Yep. A grim sort of foregone conclusion? Uh huh.

But outright surprise is harder to come by these days and is usually reserved for horrors like untimely death. Or the continued cancer of the current “president.” How that man gets grosser and grosser is truly astounding, but maybe that’s my naiveté and ever-hopefulness.

In any case, what I will say is that there are moments in which parenting cuts you off at the knees so brutally, so painfully, so egregiously, and so quickly that it takes your breath away. The method of harm, the size of the input force, is not directly correlated to the degree of issue or transgression; that, further, is part of the gasping pain.

I have largely stopped writing about parental challenges, recognizing that my boys, as they grow up, are more aware of what I do and share, more private and rightfully so, and more distinct as formed (forming) humans. Their voices are theirs; their lives belong to them. The space I have left as their mother, in terms of writing and public processing, is increasingly small. This is as it should be, in my opinion. What remains is MY experience as their mom, what I can capture as personal experience distinct from theirs.

This terrain is less charted with regards to the “mommy blog” and pediatric spheres. Sure, you have a general sense of tweendom, but each tween is such a unique being, interplaying in such specific ways with their hormones, family, peers, school, classes, personal struggles, interests, identities, and so forth. What you can expect at 12 years is infinitely more complicated, generally speaking, that what you can expect at 12 months. Perhaps this is actually what makes parenting adolescents so vexing: each of us is always dealing with a new challenge.

I’m actually not much interested, tonight, in delving into research or generalizations. What I am is tired and furious and in love and sad and over it. And tomorrow looms. And that stops for nothing.

What I want to say but am sometimes shy to say; what I think so many of us want to say but are loath to for a variety of reasons that irk the shit out of me, is that sometimes this whole parenting gig just sucks. It sucks and blows so hard that it takes my breath away and renders me speechless and pissed.

It leaves me having spent all day making a special meal to find myself standing in my pjs with the show I’d been wanting to watch all day on pause because a note from a teacher just came about a missed assignment that was now a zero and suddenly, everyone is screaming and in tears. Is someone kidding? It’s both real and absurd. It’s the complete opposite of how I envisioned tonight and so very much wanted it to be.

At the end of the day, the gumbo was one of the best I’ve made, and the fighting and crying probably made us closer, and that show isn’t that good anyway. But still. It all felt so damn fraught and not remotely easy and also not remotely efficient or timely, and seriously, WTF?

The gumbo was loved and there is more for tomorrow. The banjo was played, and lovingly so. The paper will be better, but still a deserved zero. The book remains forgotten at school for another damn day. The Bach on the piano is being studiously avoided. The wine bottle is less full. We are all tired. And maybe this is the best of family, and the worst, and real life. But sometimes I sure wish it was easier.

On any given Momday

Y'all, I cannot even believe how exhausting parenting is. Daily, certainly, but sometimes even hour by hour. It's like an absurd vortex of love, fatigue, revulsion, excrement, boot camp, servitude, diplomacy, and groundhog day. I think this is what, my seventh year of writing about this? my twelfth year of feeling it? The shock never wears off.

You know not when the whirl will touch down. You know not where its eye lies. Are your levies strong? Did the Army Corps bungle the job before these spawn were even twinkles in your eye? Do you have plastic gloves? The ability to set your brain and insanity meter outside of your own physical self? Are you an improvisation genius?

When Oliver was little and had made clear that his preferred sleeping schedule was literally anytime until 4:45am -DAILY- I started putting him to bed at 4:45pm. It's one thing to wake up at 4:45am one day or two a month, but every day and with a 3-year-old, two pets, and a husband in tow? Hilarious.

I hired a "sleep consultant" immediately, had her on speed dial in place of 911, and spent a small fortune attempting to sleep. 

I did not sleep. But the good news is that now at 9, Oliver sleeps until 6 and does not even think to wake anyone until 6:45. Nonetheless, I am still making up for eighteen months of daily pre-dawn, ready-to-play rooster calls. 

Who knew that poetry would be such an extreme nails-down-the-chalkboard-24/7 for both boys? Whoever tells you that your children, at 2 years and 9 months apart, will probably one day, when you wonder if finally you've made it to 8 minutes in Easy Town, be forced to intensively study poetry for months at the SAME TIME? You are immediately Deloreaned backwards to the many years of your adolescence during which your mother tried, bless her heart, to make you feel her extremely ardent love of poetry. 

Is poetry concurrently taught/mandated in 3rd and 6th grades some sort of karmic retribution? 

You do wonder. 

No one tells you that at the same time your children start to do private things in their rooms, they will both refuse to clean those rooms but also still desperately want you to come in there and check on them and tuck them in. Holy stale air, people.

No one tells you that just when middle school-puberty-geekness-coolness-fad item'ness kicks in and thus you, parents, are exhausted AF by 6pm, you'll actually have to stay awake listening to and feeding your offspring until at least 9pm which is an hour after you want to go to bed and all the hours past the time you and your partner could actually have some quality catch-up time. 

It is unclear to me that even once during the "best thing in the whole world, all my heart" biz I was told about being a mother, did anyone say, "Sometimes you will absolutely wonder if you can go on. You will wonder how you will swallow another worry, another frustration, another iota of insane boredom. You will wonder what of you will come out on the other side." 

At least a quarter of every day is inane. Why is old poop still in the guest room toilet? Is it possible to wipe your face clean OF THE ICE CREAM FROM TWO DAYS AGO THAT I'VE ASKED YOU TO REMOVE 983 TIMES? Have you done your homework? What does procrastination mean? Are you trying to tell me you don't know how to put the Legos into the Lego bin?

And then there are the big-ticket items? The ones you knew were part of adulthood but also the ones you thought you'd left behind with high school graduation or hoped your child would bypass completely? How will we afford X, Y, or Z? Is this something to worry about? Yes? So, who can we call? What help can we get? Why does that child/parent continue to act in such ugly/hurtful ways? Why is that parent so competitive? Am I doing it wrong?

And then there's your own attempt at self-definition. At boundaries. 

And then there's a marriage to maintain. Friendships. That book that's been beckoning to you for months. 

The funny thing is that when you think you cannot go on, you do. And then you get a break, and you miss them. Miss them? Yes. You miss the egregious Hansel trail of gross crumbs that leads all ants to your living room. You miss the sticky hands that clutch you tight and whisper "Thank you" amidst snotty tears. You don't miss flushed toilets, but you do miss the silliness of naked runners and dog houses and spy-like sprites who have been cloistered in your closet forever even though you'd checked there and still changed into pajamas. 

Today I taught one to make pie. I cleaned up and enjoyed a wonderful client. I taught one how to GooGone a gummy blade, and I raked compost over my to-be vegetable garden. I vacuumed and wrote a grocery list and finally screamed "I cannot hear about this poem ONE MORE TIME." I filled out forms and fed the cat and washed dishes and thought about how hard it's been for me lately, to own and share all this shit. For it does seem mundane and dull. But it's also real, and sometimes I cannot fathom how we'll get them to college. It's so many years away.

But then I panic. It's so few years away. And then they may need to snuggle but they probably won't want to. And they'll still leave trails of crumbs but be attitudey about cleaning up. And they won't need me to teach them about GooGone, and they might not laugh over dumb jokes that are funny simply because of the potty humor element. They may not hear me when I try to teach. "Exposing yourself is a crime," boys. "Really?" they said. As if they would ever do that but also, god, don't leave anything to chance. #boys

Last week, the dental hygienist who takes such good care of me and for whom I feel true affection was racist, classist, and trans-phobic, all in one cleaning! Her efficiency! I was so taken aback. And so sad. The only thing I managed to rebut, in between her scraping my stains and gums clean, was by saying I believed it was exceedingly rare for men to pretend to be trans in order to take advantage of women in female restrooms. 

The man "who exposed himself in the women's restroom...well, you know, he was black" comment as well as the "a janitor at the college. You have to wonder who takes a job like that. Maybe mental illness?" commentary did not sit well with me. But as with so much in parenting, we are ill-trained to immediately and effectively respond to such statements.

I wrote a letter to this dear woman. I hope that she hears me, or least doesn't shut me out. I hope she might see that exposing oneself has zero to do with skin color. And that many people work the jobs they can get to take care of their families. And that maybe her own fears -for her children, herself, her world- are actually at the heart of these biased, ugly statements. Not race. Not class. Not mental status.

It seemed germane tonight, round about bathtime and snotty tears about poetry and jesus h christ the end of the weekend, to mention that exposing oneself is a crime and that standing up for what you believe to be inclusive and fair is the best path forward even when it's scary because the recipient is a lovely middle-aged woman who really loves her children and fears for their welfare, as we all do for ours.