I am a mother

 Sometimes I find myself repeating "I'm a mom" in my head, over and over.  It's been 5 months, and I still find myself doing this throughout the day/week/month.  It's not because I forget, or need assurance, or have to hype myself up for anything.  But it's been 5 months and I still marvel at it.  

I am a mother; a mom; a mama.

What a strange, yet so very ordinary, transformation.  Every Mother in the history of the world has gone through what I have, in some form or another.  Yet for me, it's the very first time and it has been nothing short of magical.  

3 days before Dylan was born

It's hard to explain how I felt before Dylan was born.  In the years before I was pregnant, I was always very tepid about the idea of having a baby.  It felt like there were so many other things to do, see, experience, and even living children that needed loving homes.  But mostly - we had a life that already felt satisfying and full, we savored our "we do what we want" ethos, and luxuriated in the peaceful tempo of our days.  We have been so very happy and fortunate in our life together and I didn't feel like we needed a baby to make it meaningful or more.  

And in full disclosure, I've always been quite daunted by how difficult it seems to have a baby and raise a child - how all consuming, complicated, emotional, disorienting, exhausting, full of doubt, expensive, body-wrecking, romance-ending, etc., etc., etc.  The resounding impression I had of having a baby was: it's beautiful and you'll love it...but sometimes it's also the worst thing ever.  And no matter how many people I love and trusted told me it was wonderful and worth it, I wasn't sure I'd feel the same. 

So I couldn't really place this tiny little life coming from ours, without also imagining the disruption of what we had enjoyed for so long.  And because of my hesitation, we waited...and waited...and waited.  Even after several years ago, when Steven gently told me that because of my age, we might be waiting so long it becomes physically improbable, or even impossible, for me to experience pregnancy and childbirth firsthand, I waited.  For years I've felt that urgency of time, and that slight panic of coming loss...yet I still waited.

And now, however many years later here I am, a mother. 

3 months

And it's both everything and nothing like what I expected.  The mechanics are exactly how people describe - the tiny, helpless being that doesn't know how to do anything (not even poop without crying!), the initial pain and ongoing effort of nursing, the staggering number of diaper changes, the surrender of your free time and sleep, mountains of laundry that seem to multiply overnight, uncertainty about whether your baby is sleeping enough even though it seems like she is sleeping all the time (and yet maybe not enough?!), and thousands upon thousands of google searches for things I've never even considered before.  All of that is exactly how it's described and I think because everyone talks about it so much nowadays, we had fairly accurate expectations for how we'd be spending our time.  

But what really surprised me, and what I marvel at repeatedly these days, is how it feels.  Everyone tried to tell me how it felt for them, but of course that's problematic because no two people are the same inside.  How can you tell someone how they will feel about their tiny being in the midst of months of sleep deprivation, painful boobs, and not knowing whether what you're doing is correct/enough/the best thing for this tiny creature you love so much?  And even if you could predict how someone will feel, as I learned in the last 5 months while hemming and hawing over this writing, it's also incredibly difficult to accurately capture and portray the dimension of these feelings.  But I'm here to get it down while the feelings are fresh, so I can snapshot them forever in time, and use it to pull these specific memories off the shelves in my brain later when there are rooms and rooms full of Dylan and motherhood memories.  

Even now, I struggle to describe it to myself.  But perhaps the best way is to summarize what I've said in text conversations during the very early days after Dylan was born, when I didn't have time to over think and curate my responses: 

At 5 days when asked what it feels like to look at Dylan: 

I always felt like meeting and getting to know my nieces and nephew was this huge explosion of emotion for me.  Like BOOM all the sudden my heart was bigger and made room for these tiny new people in our lives.  But I don't have this explosion of butterflies and heart-expanding fireworks like I did when I met my sisters' kids. It's not nearly as...I don't know, crushing?  When I look at Dylan, it's this really simple, quiet, incredibly deep belonging.  There's no fanfare or explosion or loudness to it.  It's just there.  Dylan is just a part of me now.  

At 6 days when discussing the serenity of the love described above:

I don't think my body is trying to protect myself after birth, or that the trauma of the event is muting how loud/large the feelings are.  I think there are so many different kinds of love and this is just a new one for me. 

At 10 days:

(In reference to my years of hesitation about having a baby:) I still understand those feelings. I still think we would have had a great life without having children.  But now that we have Dylan, and her specifically, it's different.  She's ours, end of story.

Motherhood is still abstract to me in a lot of ways.  But I figure it will build and become less and less abstract over time, as my mothering experience and relationship with Dylan grows.  It's only been 10 days.  We're still getting to know each other on the outside. 

It's a lot of broken sleep and I'm tired a lot.  But it's not forever and it's a choice I'm actively deciding to make each day.  It's definitely something I couldn't have understood until I went through it.  And even then, my experience is my own - entirely different than how some other person might feel given the same situation.  But I'm feeling pretty good.  I'm not as broken, tired, or blue as I was preparing myself to be/feel - which has been a pleasant surprise in itself.  And I am deeply content. 

At 10 weeks:

I'm continually surprised by how good it is.  I had been expecting so much chaos and anxiety and misery and crying (on Dylan's part and mine).  And it really hasn't turned out that way at all.  I keep telling myself it's still early and things could change, almost like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.  But I think it's a bit damaging to think that way all the time.  And it's not like it's all been easy. There have definitely been multiple hard things. But it just hasn't affected me as negatively as I thought it would.

And now, here we are at 5 months, where I am a little more settled into motherhood but still completely in agreement with everything I expressed above.  

There is now a deep yet serene undercurrent of love that exists in every moment of every day.  It hasn't turned my life upside down in the ways that I feared, and while the mechanics are what everyone says they are - experiencing it has been something different altogether.  And I tell myself over and over again that "I am a mother" simply because I love this new part of my life.

15 days

Late to 2019

First: Happy 2019!

Second: I've been here EIGHT MONTHS!??? 

Steve and I used to play a game where I could accurately guess the time (within a few minutes) at pretty much any moment of the day. From the moment I woke up to the moment I slept, I always knew the time. It was a fun trick I learned in childhood, but perhaps also an indication of how measured and meticulous my days have always been. 

Upon arriving in the UAE eight months ago, I simply turned off my internal stopwatch. Convenience aside, I wanted to know what it feels like to not to track every waking moment in the back of my brain. I assume it's a pretty normal (and only a tiny bit crazy) habit but I've been really trying to pare down on all the unnecessary brain buzzing in order to 1) focus on what's important, and 2) calm the F down. But that's the funny thing about ingrained habits - even when you want to it's hard to stop. I had to constantly remind myself to just enjoy the moments as they came without trying to count them, at whatever the hell time they occurred. And the result?

In short, it's different kind of life. One where I feel less controlled (in a good way), my brain is a little more free, my sleep is much more sound (sometimes I counted in my sleep), I never had any idea what time it is, and I'm late for way more things...like brunches, birthdays, and this post. 

But enough about my super weird habits that sound a hundred times worse when I put them in a blog post, it's time for New Years-ish things!

Let's take stock of the proclamations I made when I wrote this post at the beginning of 2018: 

1. Steven and I start living under the same roof again,    DONE!
2. I embrace all the things that scare me about starting something new,    I wouldn't say I've fully embraced all of it yet, but I'm pushing forward and starting something new in 2019. 
3. I read all the books I'm longing for,    I think my appetite for books will always exceed my ability to consume them, but I love that about reading. Last fall, I finally pushed through a mental roadblock and can finally read 'fun stuff' for hours at a time again. 
4. I balance all my cooking inspirations with not having 10,000 random ingredients on hand all the time, and    Ehhhh...I'd say 1/2 DONE (I have like 2 dozen items in my pantry right now where I'm like whyyyy?)
5. Phoebe makes peace with the all the squirrels (highly unlikely)    THIS IS THE SURPRISE WIN. Squirrels are not native to the UAE so we don't have any in our neighborhood. It's amaaaaaazing.

Dang, now I feel so accomplished, even if a tiny bit trivial.

Today, standing on the other side of 2018, the year feels bigger than I could have known going in.  Mostly, it was grounded in love - for better and for worse - in all it's humbling and terrible beauty. It's the year I put our marriage before my career and moved back to the UAE to mend our weary, long distance hearts. The year I finally practiced some long overdue self care, and in doing so realized I trusted Sven more than I ever thought possible. In many ways, it's another year where I learn how much lighter and brighter the road can be when it's shared. Yet also, forever the year our hearts broke in different, individual ways with Shawn's passing and then expanded and fractured in everything that came afterwards with and for Katie. 

In looking at the year ahead, I'm filled with so much excitement, and hope, and joy for things to still to come. For the first time since graduating college 10+ years ago, my year isn't scripted and I don't have an office with my name burned into it. It's thrilling and and a wee bit scary, but I'm so very full of optimism knowing that 2019 will be whatever Sven and I choose to make of it. 

Happy 2019 my loves.

*H

6 months: New Eyes

YOU GUYS - IT FINALLY HAPPENED. It took an entire 6 months (almost to the day), but the dark circles under my eyes have disappeared!

I know this is completely trivial, but I'm still so darn pleased. I think it means this break is as good for me as it feels (or at least that's how I choose to interpret it).

From now on, I will not participate in anything that jeopardizes my new under eye bliss.