Life in Chicago

Autumn

Friday Morning Worries

Dear Bug,

If something were ever to happen to me, this is the letter I would most want you to read.

I think a lot about what it would be like for you to grow up without me, your mother. I suppose it has a lot to do with my having lost my own mother and the fact that I constantly fret about my own mortality. Well, actually I go back and forth between incredibly serene moments of understanding about the ebbs and flows of life and death and then extreme anxiety about having to leave this world before I'm ready. And your presence my dear, makes me feel like I'm not ready.

There are so many things I want you to know, so many things I could say. I could write you a letter every day for the rest of my life and probably not say it all. Nonetheless, there are a few choice things I would definitely want you to know if I weren't around.

I think a lot about how, if I were to die now, you wouldn't remember me. You would have no memories of our sweet, little relationship. I think about how that's true for the next three or four years. That in order for you to remember your mother I have to stay alive for several more years. I do know that even if you didn't remember me I know that I would have still had an effect on the person you are. I take comfort in the fact that all the love I've given you, all the care I've provided will always make you that much more of a secure person.

But enough of all that. Here's what I want you to know.

I love you like I've never loved anyone. I love you in a way I didn't realize was possible. I love you in this profoundly transcendent way. This way that, even if I weren't here, you would still be surrounded by my love. It's a love so big that it's never going away. Not when you're 20, not when you're 47, not when you're in your seventies and a grandmother.

I want you to know that I'm always going to proud of you. Even if I were to die today, you can be certain that when you're making your first science fair project or running your first track meet or graduating high school or college or losing a tooth or skinny a knee or taking your first step or going to your first dance or getting engaged or having a baby, that I'm proud of you. Even if it seems like I couldn't possibly be proud of you because I'm not there, I just will be and you have to accept that.

Death is such a strange thing, little bug. It happens to all of us. And it can be so sad and so scary and so unwanted. But the truth of it is that because of death, life is important. Think about it for a moment. It's true. Death gives us meaning. It gives us goals and aspirations and makes us think about just how much we love one another.

I don't know why I think about it all the time. I guess because both of my parents died so early. And because I work in hospice (really need to get a new job next year). But I do. I think about how long I have to live this life. How long I have to love you. To love your father. To be a mother, a wife, a woman, a writer. I think about places I want to see and things that I want to taste and feel. I think about having more babies and I think about you, you, you and your life and all the things I want to see you do and taste and feel.

And all those things make me certain that I just couldn't bear to go yet. And then I think, well, if I did have to go, I'm so very grateful for what I've done and felt and tasted here in my 31 years. You and your father and my mother and father have the height of it all. There's just nothing more important than the people we love.

But I digress. It's a drizzly Friday morning in October. You're 4 and a half months old. You weigh sixteen pounds (my aching back reminds me of this often). You love to suck on your big right toe and you've been squealing and laughing more than ever this past week. You don't have too much hair but you have the prettiest blue eyes and the softest rose-colored lips. You're nursing as I type this and one hand continually brushes against my shoulder, pulling at my sweater and grazing my face. Your eyelashes cast soft shadows on your cheeks and your warm little body is flush against mine.

There is no way I could love you more than I do in this moment. And it's something that will last forever.

I'm certain of it. 

Love,

Mom

The Space in Between

A few years ago I began practicing meditation. I was living in LA and in grad school and working two jobs as a therapist seeing dozens of clients. I was overloaded. Every day I left the house at 8am and didn't get home until after 10pm. The only day I didn't have work or school was Sunday. I'd never juggled so many responsibilities at once.

Sometimes I felt like I was drowning. At night, I'd return to my little apartment by the beach and set down my bags. I'd pour a glass of wine and take a breath, leaning back against the kitchen counter. I couldn't even think straight, one day blurring into the next without any seeming break or any real sense to it all.

My only saving grace those days was a dedicated yoga practice several days a week that I somehow managed to squeeze in between classes and clients. I think it was the only way I was able to keep it all up, that hour and a half in class somehow being more restorative than a good night's sleep.

At some point in the middle of all this chaos, I also decided to add in some meditation work. Once a week I began seeing a private meditation instructor and we sat in her little studio on tiny pillows and she taught me how to close my eyes, how to be still, if even for a moment, how to find the space in between.

I was shocked to find this space. Shocked that there was space. Until I began learning how to meditate I didn't realize that there was a way to turn off my endless streaming thoughts. I think I had just always assumed that my thoughts were all there were. But slowly I began to find that there was a really peaceful silence in there too. It was hard work, really challenging to find this little space. But even when I could occupy it for only seconds at a time it was so rewarding.

My point in writing all of this is that I feel so far away from that space right now. If I thought I was busy and overloaded with grad school and jobs, that was nothing compared with the energy and space it takes to care for a baby. The thoughts in my head tumble over themselves minute to minute in a ferocious stream of information, panic, planning and anticipating these days.

I miss that space. I want to find it again.

This past weekend we went to Cape Cod for a really beautiful christening ceremony with about 20 of our family members. We walked the beach, ate endless meals, sat out on the screened-in porch catching up with each other and passed the baby around and around and around. On Saturday we held a really beautiful little ceremony, welcoming Veronica to the world and to our family.

But throughout the weekend I kept having to remind myself to breathe. There was so much to think about, making sure all of the out-of-town guests were happy and comfortable, making sure the baby was getting what she needed, there was fun and seriousness to be had, people whose eyes I wanted to make a point to look into. And there was everything else I'm always carrying around -- my job and an upcoming training I feel anxious about, my class that I have an assignment due for, freelance writing projects, money issues, childcare anxiety, eating right, sleeping well, things I want to write, places I want to go, people I need to see.

I kept finding myself tumbling over and over all of these things and forgetting to simply be present, to take in whatever moment I happened to be in. I found myself taking photos so I could at least look at those later and know that the weekend happened, even if I barely remember it all.

I need space. In my head and my heart. I need presence. I need room to breathe. I need to create these things for myself. No one else can do it for me. It's going to be challenging.

Moving Forward

Change is the only constant.

This is something I remind myself of frequently these days. I look back on the early weeks of Veronica's life and am surprised by how unequivocally I thought that this was the way my life would always be. The sleeplessness, the mourning of my old ways, the newness of it all. How had I thought that this would never change, that I would not someday soon find myself inhaling the sweet smell of my daughter's neck and unable to imagine any other life?

Sometimes I have to think about her in terms of loss in order to truly comprehend how much I love her. What it would be like if she was gone, if something happened, if someone took her, if I woke up to a life that did not include her. I can no longer imagine that, or if it happened, how I would ever survive. 

Greg's grandmother died last week. He is on his way to Ohio for the funeral as I write this. She was 93 years old, the mother of 11 children. Yes, I said eleven. She was Greg's father's mother and he cared for her selflessly these last years as dementia took over her life.

A lot of things seemed to collide in these last couple of weeks. Reminders of life and death and all the things in between. The things we forget can change so fast.

We leave on later this week for Cape Cod, for a christening for Veronica. My uncle David will lead the ceremony. A minister, he married my parents and me and Greg and he christened me 31 years ago. I like the gentle overlapping of family and ceremony, of dates and lives and intentions. Last week I uncovered my christening dress -- the one my mother picked out for me all those years ago. It's beautiful, Baby Dior from 1978. (Pictured in the last post.)

Greg and I are writing vows and intentions to V that we'll read at the ceremony and we've asked her godparents to do the same. A really wonderful mixture of both our families will be there and I'm looking forward to introducing Veronica to them and the world.

Another thing I didn't expect to change: for so long I felt resistant to being part of something larger, and to my extended family in particular. After my parents died there was no one else I wanted to be part of. If I couldn't have them, then there would be no one. But inevitably, that changed too. And never more so than with my marriage to Greg. I have wanted so much to be a part of each other's families and to honor those from whom we are made. Introducing Veronica into this fold is even more important to me.

I always want her to feel a part of something bigger than her. Whether that's through faith of some sort, or family, or some other path she creates or discovers on her own. I want her to know that she will never be alone and that life will continue to unfold in layer after unexpected layer.

Responsibility

Before I had children I used to think about what it would take to make me feel okay about bringing another life into this world. I still think about it a lot. On my runs through the park on Tuesday and Thursday evenings I look around at all these couples with two or three children trailing back behind them, lugging baseball bats and wobbling along on little bicycles and I wonder how conscious any of us are about bringing in all these new lives.

There are already so many people in this world and so many children who already need homes. Is it really responsible for us to just go on, blindly making more people? Should we have a better reason to do so? And a better reason than what? Do we even have a reason to begin with?

Al I know is that when I fell in love with Greg I wanted to create a family with him. I wanted to make a whole person out of the two of us and the love we felt for each other. And somehow that felt like reason enough.

Even now that Veronica is here though, I still wonder how responsible it is. But sometimes I look down at her face in my arms and I think about the incredible distillation of lives combined within her. I see myself and Greg, my parents and his, their parents and grandparents -- all these lives and lifetimes and coincidences and hard work and dreams pursued and failed and realized, all condensed into one tiny, new person. And then maybe I think that that's the point -- to keep taking the best of the best of the best of us and putting into a new life so that we can continue to evolve as a species and create the best population of people possible. 

All I know is that I want, more than anything, to raise her in a responsible way as possible. I want to teach her to be kind, to contribute to the world in a meaningful way, to help others and to not take for granted this life she has here.

Missing

V is going to see her grandparents today and they couldn't be more excited to get their hands on her. Greg's parents are wonderful grandparents. They're so involved and interested and generous. I think if we lived in the same city they would be over every day, wanting to spend time with Veronica and give us a break and even doing chores around our house. They adore their family and make all of us their number one priority. It's really quite amazing.

Veronica is their 5th grandchild and one of my sisters-in-law is due with number 6 at the end of this month. But you would never know that she's number 5. With each new one that comes along they act like it's the first all over again. I think Greg's dad tries to video chat us every night, just so they can sneak a peek at V. We prop her up in front of the webcam and she snorts and fidgets and fusses and they coo and clap at her through the screen. It's pretty endearing. I constantly feel lucky to have married into this family.

Still, every time I say "Veronica's grandparents" or tell her like I did this morning while she lay, smiling up at me from her changing pad, that she was going to see "her grandparents" this morning, something feels like it's missing. I think it's that when I say "grandparents" I am only referring to two people, not four.

Veronica will never know my parents. She'll never know what it's like to have them fuss over her or scoop her up after arriving from the airport. My father will never hold her on his lap and my mother will never teach her how to make cookies. She probably won't ever really think about them, except in an abstract kind of way, as mommy's parents who died a long time ago.

I wonder what kind of grandparents they would have been. I bet my dad would want to teach her weird tricks like he did with me -- funny card tricks where you fool someone into believing that you can guess every card in the deck or tips for how to hold your breath extra-long under water. My mom would make her dresses and knit sweaters and constantly send food in the mail. She would spend long hours in the kitchen, patiently letting Veronica experiment with recipes of her own fancy, letting her squirt food dyes into dubious cake mixtures and baking them, even though they're bound to be inedible. She would make treasure maps for her too, burning the edges of the paper for authenticity and hiding a bag of coins somewhere in the yard. 

I miss them not just for Veronica, but for me too. I miss the support and guidance and reassurance they could provide. I miss how they'd be proud of me for becoming a mom, a wife, a grown woman. I miss them for their smiles and wisdom and light and laughter -- all qualities I hope to see emerge in little bits of pieces through my daughter now and then. She'll know them, even if it's only by knowing herself.

Out in the World

Well, we had our first family vacation last week and it went better than expected. The three of us traveled to New York City (for a wedding), upstate New York (to visit my cousin Ron) and then to Cape Cod (to see my family). We were gone for a week and took a lot of airplanes, bus rides, taxi rides, car rides and walks. V was a stellar traveler, to say the least, and it was heartening to find that we could go out in the world as a little family.

Our first stop was New York City for the wedding of a childhood friend of Greg's. After a delayed flight, during which we had to sit on the plane for an hour after boarding and then descend into JFK through a thunderstorm, we got into NYC late Thursday night. Veronica was a trooper on the plane -- she didn't cry once, even though we kind of wanted her to just so that she could annoy the guy next to us who spent the delayed hour yelling into his cell phone, much to everyone's chagrin.

We stayed at my cousin Ron's apartment on Lexington & 25th and thankfully Veronica kept up her sleep-pretty-much-all-night-except-when-waking-up-to-nurse routine. She slept in the bed with us throughout the whole trip and it worked out pretty well.

It was great to be in New York again. It had been almost three years since I'd visited the city -- the longest in my adult life. I moved to Manhattan when I was nineteen and lived there until 2002. I went to The New School, bartended in a restaurant in Union Square and lived in a little 5-floor walk up on 5th St. and Ave. B.

After I left NYC to move to Los Angeles I still returned to visit 2 or 3 times a year, thus kind of extending my connection to the city. But now that it's been a few years, my life there finally felt like an encapsulated experience. My time in New York felt like a million years ago -- I was so young and so much has changed since I left.

It was great fun to be back though. The three of us took a lot of long walks and I got to give Greg a kind of tour of my old haunts. I was able to meet up with a few friends (not enough of them though, given our wedding schedule) and introduce Veronica around.

I loved being back. I loved walking through the East Village, loved ogling all the crazy people, loved strolling Union Square farmers market and buying flowers and shots of wheat grass. I loved the gritty sidewalks and grimy bodegas, loved the soaring buildings and endless sidewalks. I don't think I could ever live there again but I left feeling nostalgic for a life once lived among those streets.

After a few days in the city, and the wedding which was lovely, we went upstate for a night to my cousin Ron's house. It was beautiful there, lush and green and we swam in a river and ate dinner outside among the fireflies, and we asked Ron to be Veronica's godfather. The next day Ron drove us all to Cape Cod where we finished off the trip.

My aunts and uncle were thrilled to meet Veronica and it was so nice to be around my family, it having been a year since we were there for our wedding. We walked by my grandmother's old house, which still bears the Chatterton name (Veronica's middle name) and snapped this picture for posterity. I cried when we left, realizing that I hadn't seen enough of everyone, but soothed by the fact that we'll be back in September for V's baptism.

I also cried thinking about my mom. I don't think I've missed her as much as I did since V was born until we got to the Cape, my family and this familiar place evoking such a sense of her. I wished so much that she were here to meet my little daughter.

On the way home, the three of us squashed into the very back row of another delayed flight, I had a fleeting moment of feeling like a family for the first time. Greg's hand was in mine, V was asleep in my lap, her head nuzzled up under my chin, her breath coming in little puffs against my neck. I stared out the tiny airplane window at the lights below and felt, however briefly, like I have a little family again.

The New Me

Ever since V was born everyone has been saying that she looks like a "little Claire." I have to look at her in some kind of M.C. Escher way to really see it. Mostly she just looks like Veronica to me, but if I squint in the right way I can suddenly see how she really does look like me.

Yesterday while Greg's parents were over we looked at an old album of my baby photos. Turns out she really does look like me. It's strange to see this miniature version of myself (with less hair) but really amazing too.

(Below I've alternated photos of me and V, beginning with one of me.)

 

Letter

Dear Veronica,

Today you are one week old. I can hardly believe that just days ago I was walking around with you in my belly, that I didn't yet know you.

I already want you to be an infant forever. I spend whole hours just looking at your little body, your lips and eyelashes, your little hands and expressive toes, running my fingers along your upper arms and neck, all that soft, soft skin. It already brings tears to my eyes to think that one day I won't get to do these things, that you'll be big and on your own in the world somewhere.

I did, in fact, weep yesterday as I held you in my arms in bed in the late afternoon. The rain was coming down outside and a cool breeze pushed rhythmically through the windows. You made soft little sighs and pushed your hands around my body as you slept and I wept for all that it means to have a child.

I thought of my mother and my father and their first week with me. It’s so easy to imagine my mother in the same place, in bed in the afternoon with me , running her fingers across my little cheeks and hands.

I thought about how much I want to spend the rest of my life watching you grow up, about how I never want to say goodbye to you. I thought then about each of my parent’s deaths, about those quiet moments between when they were here and when they were not.

And I thought too, about what’s been missing in my life all these years since they’ve been gone. About how, if they loved me nearly as much as I love you, then that’s been the thing that’s been missing all this time, such a heartbreaking thing to lose.

And lastly, I thought about how happy my parents would be now, to see me here, you in my arms, my husband peeking in on us now then – everything I would ever want for you. And something then seemed complete.

Love,
Mom

A Different Kind of Family

We found out yesterday that one of my sisters-in-law is pregnant with her second baby. Hers will make grandchild number 6 for Greg's parents, all in the last 3 years. Ever since I've known the Booses, there have always been two girls pregnant at one time. One of my sisters-in-law gave birth last August and one in December. I'm due in June and the newest one will be here in August.

It's strange to think about how different the family environment my child will grow up in will be from my own. My own extended family has always been incredibly scattered, not just geographically but in terms of age as well. I've never had any cousins close in age, most of them about ten years older than me -- which meant that I never really got to know them until I was in my twenties. I also didn't have siblings and the half-siblings I do have are all at least 30 years older than me. But I guess this is what happens when your mother is 40 and your father is 57 when they give birth to you.

So to imagine that my child will not only probably have siblings, but also a whole slew of cousins that are incredibly close in age, is really interesting. I can only imagine that those factors will make for such a different kind of person.

My background served only to reinforce my independence and solitude. The classic image of my childhood is one of me sitting hunched over a book in a chair at a table in a fancy restaurant while my parents eat dinner. I was perpetually found myself in a world of adults and I made sure that I always had a book to lose myself in for that exact reason. I was definitely lonely and, for a long time, I simply lived in a whole other world in my head; long stretches of my childhood spent playing strange solitary games and making up stories.

I'm glad that it won't be the same for my child. I definitely hope to have more than one, but it's nice to know that even if I don't, the one I have will always have all these cousins and aunts and uncles.

--

On another note, I'd love some recommendations on parenting/baby books. I know this request will make some of you grumble and say that I don't need any books, that it will come naturally, and I agree with you to a certain degree. But all the same, I'd love to read a book or two about the first years and about sleep methods, etc. Any recommendations would be appreciated!