Everything Happened | vol. 157
“What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?”
“Keep it to yourself.”
-Broadcast News
The main takeaways from “Siblings Without Rivalry”: avoid comparing your children, avoid trying to make things equal. That equality between siblings is a myth and a tyranny. I mean, I’m pretty sure those are the main takeaways based on the summary PDF I managed to find on Pinterest. This is the book about parenting siblings that my friends seem to like, but I rarely read parenting books. I do the work of parenting daily, and after we finally get our kids down for the night, I’m gonna crack a beer and read about it? That’s how they get you.
Occasionally, I feel totally out of my fucking element and I ask my friends what the book on [whatever] was called again and I request it at the library. By the time it arrives, the crisis, real or imagined, has ebbed and I don’t bother to walk down the street and pick it up. I briefly chastise myself for making a library staffer push a media cart across a room for no reason and then I forget all about it until the next crisis. He’ll either be a psychopath or a decent dude, I think, and it probably has little to do with a script I might crib from a book. Someday a girlfriend or boyfriend will sneer at him for not eating vegetables and he’ll become a born-again salad guy. He’ll come home and talk suuuper casual about how to cook cruciferous vegetables so they don’t smell farty. And it will take all my willpower to not tease him, my former beige-atarian toddler, for daring to grow up. For being an adult who was once a child.
The comparisons started from the moment I laid eyes on the youngest. When Jane used her very first gulp of oxygen to rattle the walls with her fury, I thought, “that’s different.” Desi had whimperled like a baby goat at birth. Was I comparing them or comparing my experience? Is that the same thing? (In twenty years, you can ask their respective therapists that they mind-Skype from the coastal trade school colony of Tennessee.) I feel more certain by the day that oldest children cast the parenting die and subsequent children’s personalities are determined relative to that first child. The first baby is a baby, and subsequent babies are an aberration, a defective version of the first one, even if pleasantly so.
***
The week between Christmas and New Year’s in a remote college town is a dramatic lonesomeness. It’s as impossible to ignore as the winter chill in an old house that comes up from the floors, seeps in through the windows, and hangs in the air all around like breath. The students are away, halving the town’s already tiny population. The Christmas decorations that made the main square look like a Hallmark movie had been struck already by the town quaintness committee or whoever oversees these things. There was an emptiness to my surroundings I had scarcely ever experienced, having grown up in the suburbs and lived in cities as an adult.
We were intensely, stiflingly indoors. Desi, age three, was climbing the walls. The weeks leading to Christmas and the holiday itself had been a toddler bacchanal of grandparent spoils and toys and sugar and late bedtimes and auto-queuing Netflix shows. He was broken, motherboard fried, and we couldn’t even send him outside to sweat out the evil because it wouldn’t stop raining. I wanted to sell him on eBay basically. Late model person, low miles.
My son’s preschool had been closed since before Christmas, as was the college that employs both me and my husband. I was too pregnant for us to stray very far from home in case labor started, so popping up to Philly or over to Baltimore for the day was out. And too cold and wet to do much outdoors. Quickly, things unraveled to the point that instead of feeling weird that was no one around, it was weird to encounter people. When other patrons deigned to enter the Mexican restaurant while we were eating there, I was irritated and on edge, like they had walked into our living room and asked to be fed.
In Columbus, where we used to live, an unseasonably warm winter day meant the playground in our neighborhood was mobbed. Big kids stepping over younger kids if they took too long on the ladder, sexy moms in wedge boots with arms crossed supervising from the perimeter, Crossfit dads doing the odd pull-up on the monkey bars, Syrian families gathered around stainless steel dinnerware on the picnic tables, the air outside just warm enough to transport the rich fragrance of their meal directly to my nose.
But during that long Sunday of the year between Christmas and January, we were the only people at the playground when the mercury hit 50F. We’d been playing there a while when I saw a dark SUV pull into the narrow drive that leads to the park. It moved slowly through the long shadows of the trees. I felt afraid. The isolation had bred a paranoia, and in paranoia there is self-centeredness. Surely they were coming to talk to us! It felt like my family had been stashed here by the government because we had witnessed a murder. I was getting pretty fucking spooky, in other words, and I really needed to have the baby already. The SUV drove past us without stopping because this isn’t “The Walking Dead.”
A nagging thought during my pregnancy: how were we going to physically manage having a second baby at home?? We muddled through with Desi, who never was a good sleeper and who, frankly, still sucks at it. When I think back to his first year, I don’t know how we did it. He was miserable unless I had him in motion. I paced our apartment, I walked him in circles around the block, I drove the 270 outerbelt in a loop just to get him to fall asleep. Sometimes I think that the combo of adrenaline from being awoken at night by his screams, and the coffee I mainlined during the day, created a Weekend at Bernie’s situation. Hormones and caffeine put sunglasses on my corpse and shuffled it through my child’s infancy. How the fuck would I do that again? I’m a million years older now and I have to care for another child, too. I tried not to dwell on it because I didn’t have a choice. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. The thought was like a helium balloon that moved slowly into my field of vision, which I jabbed at with one finger, sending it drifting elsewhere. I jabbed the balloon over and over again.
Another nagging thought: how was I, A HYPERSOCIAL DEPRESSIVE going to cop with being at home with a baby in a RURAL SMALL TOWN in WINTER far from my support system? Jab jab jab jab jab. I mean, look how spooky I was just eating Mexican out with my family? Jab. Jab.
***
I fortified myself for what I thought would be a battle. I bought CBD gummies online, I talked with Nick about having him do formula at night to protect my sleep, I signed up for an internet therapist that we couldn’t afford. I preferred credit card debt to the windpipe-crushing force of unaddressed post-partum anxiety. This time I would know, or at least be able to repeat to myself, that I wouldn’t feel like this forever. Someday I wouldn’t feel like my skin was too tight, or had been boiled off, or that considering anything beyond the current moment was oppression. We would get through it.
The intrusive parade of balloons that visited me during the final months of pregnancy were for nought. They were worth little more than the energy it took me to mentally bat them away. The baby who howled after being forced out of the private hot tub of my womb turned out to be one of those babies who only really cries if they’re hungry or need a diaper change. Who might chill in a bouncy chair so quietly while you type a newsletter that you momentarily forget they exist and when you look over at them, it startles you. Is she actually an easy baby? Or do I just have the relief this time of being able to offer formula if my nipples are raw, or if I just want to sleep more? Is she an easy baby or did I just not go off Zoloft this time? Is she an easy baby or have I just done all this before? Both and both and both, probably.
***
The last thing I expected post-partum was to feel like a ball of radiant light. I wonder if maybe the depression over the past few years had set in so gradually, that I had just become that frog getting slowly boiled alive. I tried to remember the last time I felt energetic like this, by which I mean, energetic at all. It was May 2016, when Nick was in Australia for a month and our baby started sleeping through the night and I was doing it all solo and getting off on the sense of competence. That was nearly three years ago. It’s a long time to feel a little bad.
I can’t begin to imagine why I feel this good. Was giving birth some sort of hormonal shock therapy and all my bad brain chemicals were shook up like a snow globe? I think the stress of Nick’s grad school and moving and my job search and all the bullshit of the last few years had deadened me more than I ever realized. Did you know that Nick submitted the final edits of his dissertation hours before I went into labor? It’s like my body knew we were finally, really, truly into the next phase of our life, and my brain told my uterus to kick out the jams.
I Kondo’d. I started making the bed. I cancelled the hell out of internet therapy. I became very fastidious about laundry, something that has been my bane for my entire adult life. For the first time in fifteen years, there is not a waist-high pile of clothing somewhere that needs to be washed, or folded, or put away. When the kitchen trash gets full, I empty it instead of putting stuff on top of the lid like a monster. If these things seem like simple “adulting” to you, you probably don’t have depression. It’s a big deal for me put clean laundry away instead of leaving it folded in a basket in our room until the heat death of the universe. It feels effortless now, like I’m in a sci-fi short story where I’ve gotten access to a drug that makes me act normal. I worry I might run out of it. In the meantime, it is exquisite. I wish to rub it into my gums.
***
I can’t stop “noticing” my body, with that detached awareness you’re supposed to have in yoga class. You know, when you’re told to do a body scan. Notice pain! Notice strength! Notice tightness! Notice notice notice! We’re making our way through Game of Thrones for the first time and I am noticing the hell out of the bare breasts. They are captivating to me. Nick is tired of me noticing the breasts. They are so pink, so buoyant, so thoughtfully portioned! My nipples are the color of a bruise, my breasts are so goddamn heavy. Overall, my gear looks like it belongs to a different, but similar, species. It’s fine! I’m just noticing.
My skin is like Nickelodeon Gak, it doesn’t easily get stretch marks, but with Jane, I got some to the left of my navel. They look like this: / / . I genuinely like them, I hope they stay. They’d make a good wrist tattoo, but I already have a wrist tattoo. My torso is like a Ziploc of soup. Again, just noticing!!! I estimate there to be forty more pounds of soup on my frame than I’d prefer. With Desi, all the soup vanished without me having to think about it. Maybe because I had to pace my apartment all day with him in the carrier. I prefer soup and sitting down, by a landslide. I prefer soup and feeling this good.
I feel annoyed when I try to put on clothes that are not leggings and there’s not enough room for me. Then I feel let down by my body. Do you wear pajamas for the rest of your life or buy new clothes that fit? Do you just stay at home on the couch gawking at perfect breasts? Did you know most leading actors use boob doubles and butt doubles?? What’s wrong with me that this feels like a rip-off? That I feel entitled to anyone’s “real” boobs?
***
If this is my last baby, (is it btw????? Please decide for me so I can stop thinking about it, it’s very dumb) then I feel so lucky to get to enjoy her newborn days like this. When Desi was newborn, the idea of having a second consumed me with dread. I would probably force myself to do it, I thought, because I loved growing up with siblings. The thought sucked the breath from my lungs, though.
But there’s me comparing them again, comparing my experiences. What a treat to be surprised by my dumb little life. What a juicy baby with whom I pass my days.
yr mate,
Evie
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