Life in Chicago

Just Because it's Inevitable Doesn't Mean I Have to Carry it Around

I've had death on my mind again lately and I'm sick of thinking about it.

It doesn't help that I went to a conference last week on "Helping Parents Through the Loss of a Child." Ugh. I sat in horror with my hand over my mouth for the entire 5 hours I was there, just thinking about how unbearable it would be if we lost Veronica.

And then a couple of different people recommended this blog to me, and while it's beautifully written and I can't help reading it, it also just shoots me through with icicles of fear and sadness and leaves me lying awake at 3am when I'm nursing V, thinking about what it would be like if she were suddenly gone.

I know Greg thinks I'm crazy for dwelling on these thoughts. "Just don't think about stuff like that," he says, and while it's good advice, it's different for someone who is intimately familiar with loss. I still have friends who have never lost anyone significant in their lives and that's hard for me to wrap my head around. I became familiar with death at an early age and have continued to experience the death of close loved ones throughout my life. It's easy, at this point, for me to imagine what it would like if someone else I loved were gone.

I must have only been 5 or 6 when the first person in my life died. My parents were quite wealthy when I was growing up in Atlanta, and during my early years we had a nanny/housekeeper named Johnny who worked 5 days a week in our home. Johnny was lovely. She was in her 5os, African-American, and came from an old Southern family. She had a soft voice and gentle demeanor. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on her lap by the window in my room as she read stories to me. 

Johnny had been working for us for several years when she died, and by then I had become very close to her. I didn't learn the real story about her death until I was older. Back then, in the days surrounding her death, my parents took me for a drive in my father's big, black Lincoln Towncar. This is definitively one of my clearest, early memories. I can picture the smooth black leather of the backseat, the shiny pate of my father's bald head, and my mother swiveled around in her seat as we wound through the old, Atlanta neighborhoods.

"Johnny died and she isn't coming back," my mother said. "She went to sleep and didn't wake up," she said. There is no easy way to explain death to a child. They are literally incapable of fully grasping it until they are closer to the age of 10. The more concrete, the better. Telling a child something like, "she died in her sleep," can make a kid afraid of sleep. They might wonder if they themselves could die in their sleep. But again, there's no easy way to help them understand it. Honesty and direct answers to the copious amounts of questions children are bound to ask about the death are the best route. 

The real story definitely would have been more frightening for me to learn. My mother came home one afternoon that week to find the house quiet. She called out to Johnny as she set down her purse, her keys, removed her coat. There was no answer. My mother tip-toed up the stairs, her heart pounding, and pushed open the door to my room. I was in my bed deeply asleep in my afternoon nap. She pulled the door closed and began to peek into the other rooms, looking for Johnny.

In her bedroom the bed was neatly made and the carpet recently vacuumed. She noticed that the lights in the adjoining bathroom were on, and it was as she approached that she saw Johnny sprawled across the tile floor, an arm twisted beneath her, her body eerily still. She'd had a heart attack, the paramedics told my mother, before they wheeled her out of the room. I continued to nap soundly until after the house was quiet again, until after Johnny gone.

Johnny had a few old house dresses that she kept and wore when she worked in our home. After she died I slept with one of them, a faded, blue one, soft at its edges, and my mother let me take it with me to school for a while. I still think about Johnny some days, still remember her place in my life, and her absence.

I've given so much thought to death in my life. What it means. What it is. What I believe about it. What I know about it. Sometimes it seems like the most banal thing in the world. Some days I think I totally get it and it seems preposterous to view it as anything but a simple and inevitable thing. Other days it destroys me.

Whatever the case with it though, I'd like to stop thinking about it so much. As I write this, I'm one week away from finishing a class at Adler School of Psychology and I'm one month away from completing 2 years at my hospice job. The completion of both of these things mean that I'll be eligible to take the Illinois state exam for my professional counseling license. And THIS means that I can move away from hospice and towards a private practice where I can see a broad range of clients.And hopefully that means I can stop thinking about death so much.

I've actually loved my hospice job and I'm grateful for the experience. And I'm also appreciative of the person I've become in the face of so much loss. But I'm ready to move on from it all, ready to let go of the shroud of sadness and seriousness that I wear so often. I don't want to think about Veronica's death, just her life.

Free Fallin'

Life seems to have become more difficult to manage lately, underscored by the fact that I'm typing this with one hand.

It's just that Veronica has become more fun and engaging than ever. When she's awake Greg and I are both pretty busy keeping her entertained. Her personality is really starting to emerge, she's on the verge of being able to sit up by herself, and making her laugh is the best thing I've ever spent time doing.

That said, my cascading and ever-growing To Do list had me in a deflated and despairing heap on the couch last night. Writing projects have piled up, I'm behind at work, I'm struggling to complete a grad school class for licensing requirements, and I had this grand plan to start posting 2-3 thoughtful and well-written blogs a week (instead of hasty updates such as this one).

It's really just about making choices though, I suppose. And this morning, instead of taking time to write, Greg and I had a Tom Petty dance party with Veronica.

I suppose, at the very least, I can give you a funny picture.

Irrevocable Changes

Sure, maybe it's just because I miss him. Or maybe it's that they really do have the same eye color. Or perhaps it's simply that my little daughter with her jowly cheeks and practically-bald head actually looks like an old man. Whatever the case, sometimes I look at Veronica and I get a flash-sense of my father.

It's surely not impossible that she could resemble him in spirit or even features, but the apathetic 17-year old in me tends to discard any such notions, insisting that it's just that I miss the man. I have to admit though that if there's anyone in my family whom I would want Veronica to be like it would be my father.

And I do miss him. Profoundly.

My father was 57 when I was born. He and my mother had been married for three years. She was forty and they had met late in life and had both been married twice before each other. My father had three grown children who were in their thirties and my mother had none.

My Dad grew up in Michigan during the depression. He was a bomber pilot in WWII, a prisoner of war in Germany and he came home a changed man. He made a lot of mistakes in his early life, wasn't always a great father or a great husband and he tended toward the self-important. But by the time he met my mother, he'd owned up to a lot of those faults and was well on his way to being an incredibly good man.

My mother helped him with that. She demanded that from him. And he from her. They made each other better people. The best marriages do that, I think.

My father loved to tell me how it was him who convinced my mother to have a child. He would lean back in his chair, swirling a glass of scotch and peering out over the bridge of his nose at me, his daughter, as he would tell me that he knew, just knew, that having a baby would irrevocably change my mother's life. 

Thinking back on those moments with him, the resolution in his voice, as my own little daughter entwines her fingers in my hair, I can't help but gasp with emotion for this great gift he gave her. And how wild that he would be up for having another child after he had already raised three.

But here I am.

It wasn't until after my mother died that he and I truly became close and that I really came to know him for the man he was. Oh, I loved him so much. He was such a good man by then. When my mother died I was eighteen and he was 77. We made an unlikely pair, but sometimes those are the best kinds of anything.

About a year after my mother died was when he moved to California from Atlanta, where we had all lived as a family. I was living in New York by then but I flew out to visit him often.

It was funny to see him living alone. Sometimes it was sad but a lot of the time it was just interesting. My mother had been such a force, dominating the household in all areas. It was her taste in art and furniture that filled the rooms. It was her cooking that found our table and her hobbies that took precedence over my father's.

He was living in Garden Grove,  a patch of Southern California about 45 minutes south of Los Angeles. He was familiar with the area having lived in Pasadena in the 1950s and the climate was good for his health. The modest, 2 bedroom condominium he took over from his deceased sister suited all his needs and was the place where I stayed and thought of as home in a way, when I visited from New York.

The condominium was in a little gated complex, a pool at its center, with a plethora of young families living all around him. In the mornings and afternoons the place was noisy with the sound of 7 and 8 year olds going to and from school. My dad often kept the front door open out of loneliness, and he would wave to the families from his perch at the kitchen table where he scanned the LA Times and sorted through catalogues.

When he moved into the condo he got rid of my aunt's outdated, avocado green sofas and heavy curtains and replaced them with slick blinds and a set of black leather couches. He hung modern art on the walls and put up large, framed photos of my mother everywhere. He even picked up a couple of lava lamps for the credenza, their place there by the front door never ceasing to make me laugh.

One month, after I'd sent him some essay I wrote in a college creative writing class about not having a home to go home to after my mother's death, I arrived for a visit to find that he had completely redecorated the guest room. A sign hung on the door that said, "Claire's Room" and inside he had put a pretty feminine comforter on the bed and had dug all my old stuffed animals out of storage to put in an armchair in the corner.

I was also surprised by how much my father suddenly began to cook. He looked up recipes on the NY Times website on a regular basis and was always trying out something new on me or his neighbors. He made apple pies and marbled breads, he made meaty lasagnas too and he even canned a bunch of strawberries one summer. Those seven years we had together after my mother died were unexpected and as each one slipped by I found myself more grateful for this time allotted to us, even if I wasn't always up for admitting that it was my mother's death that granted it.

I loved my father, loved him like I hadn't loved anyone before. I think as children we all love our parents unconditionally, but as we grow older and come to know them for the people we are we get to love them in a way of our choosing. It's a different kind of love than the obvious one we first feel. I never really got past that adolescent love I felt for my mother, not with her dying before I escaped adolescence.

I've been thinking about my father a lot lately. And maybe it really is because sometimes I look into Veronica's eyes and see his. She has the most remarkable blue eyes, but they're not the same blue as mine (a greenish-grey-blue or Greg's, a pale seagreen blue) and when I look into them long enough I get this inexplicable flash of my father.

But maybe it's something else entirely.

This morning I slipped quietly out of bed, careful not to jostle her milky, warm little body still curled under the covers and I tiptoed into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. It suddenly struck me that a little over a year ago I was waking up in the mornings with a feeling of ennui, with an unexplainable flatness. My life, even with all its love and adventure still felt dulled and heavy.

And I thought about that again this morning, after she had awoken and I was holding her in my arms, her little hands clasped around my neck, her face nuzzling into my neck as I spoke in soothing morning tones, my cheek brushing against her soft, downey head. The flatness has gone away. It's been gone for a long time. Life, these days, feels the opposite of flat.

And it was then that I knew, just knew, that my father, wherever he is, is happy for me.

The New Me, The Mom Me

 
It's a cold, rainy morning in Chicago and, as I write this, LA couldn't seem farther away. The wind is whistling around the house right now and the tree trunks are black from the wet. Rain drops are beaded up on the windows and wet leaves have plastered themselves against the glass.

I'm finally feeling recovered from my trip but it took a day or two. Traveling alone with a 5-month old was one of the more ambitious things I've ever set out to do, and it wasn't until I was actually there doing it, that I fully realized what I had gotten myself into.

The anxiety set in the moment I saw Greg pull away in the Honda. There I was standing in the middle of O'Hare, a suitcase in one hand, the stroller in another, completely alone with my daughter, on my way to spend three days in Los Angeles, catching up with a dozen friends, none of whom had yet to meet Veronica.

I've traveled alone countless times. I've trekked through the Philippines by myself, gone off to Taiwan, the Grenadines, Sicily and Switzerland, with no one alongside of me. And I'd certainly been to LA enough times. But this trip was different and the moment I found myself alone at the airport my heart began to pound.

Being responsible for another person, when that person is completely helpless, is a big job. I kept thinking about that exercise where they used to ask teenagers to carry around an egg for two weeks, making sure not to break it, in the hopes of giving them a taste of what it might be like to have a baby. And it's true. Imagine trying to navigate the mess that is the airport, while trying carefully not to drop an egg.

Or upset the egg. Because if you do then it's just you standing there in middle of the busy airport with a screaming egg, er baby. And your husband isn't with you so when everyone turns to give you the death stare, it's just you that they give it to. And then you skulk away into the family bathroom, trying desperately to calm your little egg who just doesn't want to be in her stroller, all the while trying not to touch anything so that neither of you contract any kind of fatal airport illness.

I digress. Everything went swimmingly until I got on the plane. And even then, it wasn't so bad. It was just that out of a four and a half hour flight she only slept for 30 minutes. I spent the majority those four hours doing my best to keep her happy, which mostly involved standing in the back of the plane by the bathrooms so that she could make faces at the stewardesses who popped back and forth. This activity coupled really well with my general fear of flying.

As we finally touched down in Los Angeles I was filled, not with relief, but a new anxiety, one that I had not anticipated at all. I suddenly found myself worried that all my old friends in LA, particularly those without children, wouldn't like the new me, the mom me. 

This realization came out of nowhere. Ever since I'd bought these tickets to California I'd been nothing but looking forward to catching up with my friends and showing off my funny little girl. But it suddenly struck me, as I made my way through LAX with my suitcase and stroller and baby and diaper bag that this was not the Claire my friends were used to. Would they like the new me?

Of course they would, I reassured myself. My friends are my friends for good reason. They're wonderful, caring, and thoughtful people and they genuinely didn't seem to mind at all when we had to spend 20 minutes in the parking garage trying to figure out how to fit the stroller, car seat, luggage and baby into a Mini Cooper with three passengers.

But man, I minded! I felt so self-conscious. I couldn't help apologizing over and over, soothing Veronica in between sorrys, and all the while trying to act calm and helpful when all I wanted was to chuck the stroller into nearby traffic.

And so the trip went. I caught up with at least a dozen dear friends in two days, all the while trying to act cool and collected as I strapped V to my chest in the Bjorn or collapsed the stroller  into the trunk of a friend's convertible. Oh no, I'm fine! I do this all the time! Just give me one sec...

By the third and final night of the trip I was utterly exhausted and broke down crying in the parking lot of a restaurant as I tried to walk Veronica around in an attempt to calm her down while my friends sat inside eating dinner.

Being a mom is hard. It's hard because it requires absolutely ALL of you to do it properly. There's no slacking. There's no extra glass of wine or impromptu nap. There's no chance to blow-dry your hair, not when it means you might wake up the baby whom you desperately want to get some sleep because you've dragged her all the way across the country for three short days.

After three days of devoting all of my time to making sure that my daughter was getting absolutely every thing she needed (sleep, sustenance, sun protection, diaper changes, safety, smiles and love), what I had left in me was devoted to being present to my friends, to wanting to genuinely catch up on their lives. But nodding and asking about their writing projects and marriages and jobs while bouncy a fussy baby on my hip just left me feeling breathless and overwhelmed and insecure.

So far, motherhood has been one big lesson in finding balance and being present. On the flight back, as V finally slept blissfully in my arms for a solid two hours, I rested my cheek against her soft little head and knew that even though my life has changed painfully, dramatically, irrevocably, I wouldn't give up a second of what I've had with her to have any of the old life back.

Just Because

We had a really lovely weekend.

Yesterday was Greg's 31st birthday.  We started celebrating on Friday with a dinner with friends at Nightwood, officially my new favorite restaurant in Chicago. (Greg and I like to play this game where we ask each other what 3 restaurants we would return to if we moved away from Chicago and Lula is always my number one. Well, Nightwood is the latest feat by the Lula folks, so it was pretty incredible.)

On Saturday we drove out to the middle of Illinois and went hiking at Starved Rock Canyon. The drive was a little far and the canyon a little crowded but it was really nice to get outside and enjoy the fall leaves and crisp air. That night at home we ate tacos and watched Rosemary's Baby.

And yesterday was Greg's birthday. He shares his birthday with my father. My father would have been 89 yesterday (!). October 11 also happens to be my parent's wedding anniversary. They would have been married 34 years. My mother always said that she gave herself to my father as a birthday present and my father always said that she was the best gift he ever received. 

The three of us spent Sunday at home. I was in the kitchen for hours, working on a birthday cake and a lasagna to take to Greg's sister's house for dinner. Greg and Veronica spent most of the day following a football game on the computer and making each other laugh. And in the evening we had dinner with Greg's sister and her husband and their two kids.

It was a really nice weekend. The kind of weekend you dream about when life is giving you harder ones. It was the kind of weekend you wonder if you'll ever have again when you're dealing with a loved one who has an illness or when you've just gotten laid off from a job and you wonder if life will ever be normal again. It was the kind of weekend I used to dream about when my mother was throwing up from chemo or when I was brushing my father's dentures before giving him his nightly dose of morphine. Just one of those classic-life-is-good weekends.

And while I'm glad that my past experiences ensure that I appreciate these weekends more than I might otherwise, I also wish they didn't leave me with such a morbid edge to all things good. The more that I love Veronica, the more that I fear losing her. I remember going through this when I fell in love with Greg too. Before we were engaged and married I worried constantly that for some reason or another I wouldn't live to see those things happen. I used to beg some unseen force to please, please just let me live long enough to marry this man whom I love so dearly. And now I find myself begging again, please, please let me see my beautiful daughter grow up.

I don't know if this is normal. I don't know if my other mom friends experience this or if it's just a result of the loss I've experienced in my life. The moment I find myself loving something, I can't help but think of what it would feel like to lose it. I want to get past this. I want to be able to simply enjoy a perfect weekend, not because I know its opposite, but simply because.

Letter

Dear Veronica,

You are still asleep as I write this. In our bed, where it is warm still from my body and your father's.

Last night you awoke around 2am, as usual, and I brought you into the bed with me and nursed you until we both fell back asleep. I awoke a while later, your restless body pushing and kicking against mine and I took you back to the nursery and put you in the crib. I watched you stretch, your arms reaching high above your head, your cheek nuzzling the sheet, and I mourned the nights when you slept comfortably in my arms.

Ever since the first night you were born you've slept with me at least part of the night. That first night in the hospital, after I'd nursed you for the first time and after they cleaned you up, the nurses swaddled you and placed you in a bassinet between your father and me. I immediately fell into a deep sleep, exhausted from the labor, but awoke instantly a couple of hours later when I heard your soft little cries.

I remember how dark the room was. I could barely make out your father's sleeping figure on the pull-out couch. I called to him, unsure of whether I could even stand yet and he got up and brought you to me in the bed. I tried again to nurse you but I don't think either of us really knew what we were doing yet, little bug. So we fell asleep again, you in the crook of my arm, my life forever changed.

For the next 6 weeks you slept in my arms every night. I didn't know what else to do with you. You refused to be swaddled and if we put you down for any time at all you would begin to wail, so each night I tucked you into the crook of my arm and we slept like that, waking on and off through the dark hours. Gone were my comfortable nights of changing positions at leisure, of stretching out across the mattress, of snuggling with your father. I now had a little creature nestled up against me, your snorting and snuffling ensuring only the lightest sleep for us all.

Finally at 6 weeks you began to allow us the slightest reprieve by sleeping in your bassinet in our room for the first few hours of every night. After that you would join us in bed until morning. And then when you were 3 months old you grew too big for the bassinet! And by then I was so used to you in our room, in our bed, in our sleep, that I had to fight to keep myself from crying the first night we put you in your crib in the nursery.

And last night, as I watched you stretch out comfortably in your own little bed, I was reminded of the little person you are swiftly becoming, of how you are happy to be on your own sometimes, happy to have your own little space in the world, just for you. Albeit one with purple sheets and stuffed monkeys.

Someday soon the day will come when the only time you join us in bed is when you run in on Saturday mornings, waking us up and leaping around. And I'll love that too. But for now, I cherish the little hours you allow me to snuggle with you, your snuffles and grunts and kicks letting me know that you are you.

Love, Mom

p.s. We are going to show this video to your first boyfriend.

Last Night

It was windy last night, great torrents of it rattling the windows and pushing around the corners of the house. The leaves in the trees blew so hard that they sounded like great sheets of water cascading down around us, rather than the thousand papery selves they really were.

And now it's morning. Cloud ridges scud by and the wind continues to blow. It's cool out and there is no longer any denying that fall is here.

Around 3am last night I lay awake in bed, listening to the wind blowing and to the tick-tick of the ceiling fan above. Greg was next to me and Veronica was asleep in my arms, her warm, little body pressed against mine. I felt the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest and I thought about how I don't think about my life so much anymore. 

I used to spend long moments contemplating my existence, the whys and hows and all the unending possibilities for it all. On nights like last night, with the wind blowing like that, I would have lain awake for hours, just wondering, wondering.

But now that Veronica is here I don't think about it so much. I don't have time. And when I do think about life, I think about hers, and what I can give to her, what I can do now to help pave her path. Last night, lying in bed at 3 in the morning, listening to the wind howl around the house, all I thought about was how glad my body was there and warm for hers.

Recent Thoughts

I'm leading a hospice orientation this week and I had to work until 9:30 last night. It was officially the longest I'd been away from V since she was born (about 9 hours).

I'm happy to report that she fared better than I did. The nanny has been working out splendidly and is really very sweet with Veronica. She's also been going to bed between 7:30 and 8:30 every night so she was already asleep by the time I got home.

I really can't stand being away from her though. For short bursts of one or two hours it's fine, but a whole day just feels....wrong. I can't think of any other way to describe it. Something just feels drastically amiss. I spend those hours trying my best to concentrate on my tasks at hand but all the while combating this underlying feeling of anxiety.

I watch the clock a lot, counting the hours until I'm home again. I wonder what V is doing, if she's sleeping or happy or getting a diaper change. I miss her. I think about her soft downy hair and her warm little body. And sometimes if I think about her too much my milk comes in and then everything really feels wrong. To have all this milk with no baby to give it to? Of course I pump but it doesn't leave me feeling any less unsettled.

I think, given enough resources, I would choose to be a full-time stay-at-home mom until she was at least a year. I never imagined that I'd say that but I never realized how much I would love this little creature. Sure I get worn out by her and sometimes I definitely need a break from her but overall, I love being with more and more every day.

I've been thinking about all the years like this that I had with my own mother. In this really amazing way they feel like recovered time, rediscovered time, all these years I didn't realize I had with her. My memories of her only kick in at age 3 or 4 or 5 but now I realize that there was this incredibly sweet and profound time that I never knew I had with her.

When I'm holding Veronica just after she's woken up from a long nap or when she's laughing and cooing at me from the crib or when we're lying on the bed together making faces at each other, I think about how I did all these things with my own mother and it fills up my heart that much more.

Sometimes I get irrational pinpricks of fear about being separated from my daughter. Not so much that I'll die but more that she'll get taken away from me. I can't imagine anything more horrific than that. I remember watching that Angelina Jolie movie Changeling when I was pregnant and now I know I could never watch it again because it would just destroy me now that I have my own child.

Another thing I've been thinking about a lot lately -- and I know that all of these thought patterns and feelings are just evidence of the close bonding I'm doing with my daughter -- is my pregnancy. When I look back on being pregnant, when I look at the ultrasound photos or my big belly in those last months, I'm just amazed. Wow, that was Veronica in there all that time, I think. Now that I know her I can't imagine the time when I didn't. I can hardly fathom those days when I was hugely pregnant and terrified of having a boy...and all along it was my little, sweet Bug in there.

I think that getting pregnant a second time will be really fun because I'll have such a different understanding of what is coming. I was so nervous about what was coming with V but the next time I'll know that the little creature in my belly causing me tons of discomfort will be a little person that I'll love more than I ever thought possible.

How about this for a sappy mom post? Geez.

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.

Motherless Mothering

I have missed my mother more since Veronica was born than I have missed her in years. Every single day right now I wish I could talk to her. I want to curl up next to her on the couch with a cup of coffee and talk about this amazing thing of what it is to be a mother. I want to hear all about her experience of it and I want to see her anew, now that I am a mother myself.

I want so badly to show her my beautiful daughter, wish more than anything that I could see the two of them together. I want to be able to call her on the days that I'm driving to work and crying because I miss V so much. I want to be able to tell her about every single, new, little thing that V does.

And I want to thank her for being such a good mom, for teaching me how to be a mother too, even though she's not here anymore.

I wrote about this recently for Mamapedia and the piece went up today: Motherless Mothering