the long bonds

An undoing.

I grew up poor in an upper middle class community and it taught me these three things, these three things I’ve spent the rest of my life actively unlearning:

1. learn to lie, believably, about where you come from

2. success = money = comfort in your own skin

3. be effortless in your mask

In all that time, when I was living by those three tenets of unhappiness (I will most certainly spare you most of the sad, dirty details), it never dawned on me to think about the good that my upbringing gave me. For all that was difficult - and so much was but so much is when you’re young and in the ring with the beast of what it means to exist on this rough and tumble planet - I was engrained with the courage to fight convention and brave a life that to so many, looks, smells, and feels - utterly impossible. Ludicrous. Shortsighted. 

I am braving a life of simplicity and devotion to my family because I know it’s not only possible, but right.

It’s true that I met the beast of difficulty in a very public ring, at a very young age, and thus, grew old very quickly. I fought my true self in that same ring and grew proud of the facade I had so tenderly birthed from a swirling, dark disaster of shame. A new me was cut and pasted on the world, transposed from an object of beauty into something paper thin, sliced just right for everyone to ingest just so - for imaginary and real judgements to sink into me like hot glue and contort me in all different directions.

Yet, here I am.

It seems that everyday I make the choice to be that much more honest. I take the tiniest of decisions and send them straight through the force field of my heart before I make another move. I remember why I am the most fortunate, because I got where I was going.

I’ve been in, around, and through the different sides of me and back again, with only me knowing who was shrinking away in silence, inside. But I never let her go, and now, she is me. I don’t have to convince myself anymore, or try and try and try to convince others that I’m someone I’m not. That work has been done and this here is what I’ve manifested.

These new mornings with my maniac baby boy alarm clock and his needing me so sweetly - and how everything, all wants and needs and next steps are now; how I can live. I can breathe. I can be here in this gentle feathered second, on the breath of a single new syllable, a soft cry, a thunderous wail. 

I knew more thoughts would come to me on what it has meant for me to sacrifice certain creature comforts by choosing to stay home with my baby, and there they are.

When I was 26, I found out we’d be having a baby. When I was 27, my feet found the earth. At 28, I’m undone, and I’m me.

A Fifteenth Month.

This has been a month of big, grown up, serious business decision making.

This was the month where…

1. I quit my job to stay home with Bastian, with the goal of freelance writing part time.

2. Adam took two new jobs.

and

3. We decided to move out of our house in residential North Portland and into an apartment in the city.

This, all on top of the normal, everyday, crucial decisions you have to make as a parent. Everyday.

Meanwhile, Bastian continues to learn and thrive. He has more words and tiny sayings than I can count now – some big ones being mirror (mii-wo), oh boy (ah-ba), hot tea (ah-te), thank you (da-do), please (peec), oh noooo, oops (ehps), uh-oh, hi (ah-yee), buh bye, Grandma (Da-Ma), Juicy (Jew-Je, Da-Ma’s dog)… the list goes on and on. He also started moo’ing, which is pretty much the cutest ever. Sounds more like meeeew, and once he gets started, I think it’s a little hard for him to stop.

I guess I probably shouldn’t gloss over the fact these past 16 days have also been my first as a stay at home mama, and my first as a thoroughly contented human being.

It’s quite a departure to feel completely OK with how I’m spending the hours of the day and who I’m spending them with. Entertaining and feeding Bastian all day and then ending it with cooking dinner for my family has been an adjustment, but one that I’m finding myself nestling down into very quickly.

Making dinners was something I was really worried about – it’s actually what I was worried about the most, I think. That may sound crazy, but Adam is the cook around here, and we had been eating so well for so long. To take that on was intimidating, to say the least. But as it turns out, cooking is pretty awesome when you have a skilled teacher at the ready, and it is truly turning into one of the more fulfilling aspects of my new lot in life.

If you can’t tell, I’m having a very difficult time putting into words how happy this has all made me. Those of you who know me, or who have been reading The Long Bonds for awhile, know that this is all I’ve wanted since I had to go back to work when Bastian was three months old. I never knew that I’d want to stay home with my child – the thought never really crossed my mind. But when that little boy was born, a side of me was born that would do everything I could to never leave his side, until he needed me to.

All along, as I made it abundantly clear to just about everyone around me, including my readers here, that I wanted to stay home with my child, I didn’t really realize what it would mean to me until it happened and that first morning we said buh-bye to Daddy and started our day.

This child is a force. He’s so breathtakingly gorgeous sometimes that it nearly stops my heart. The gold snuggled in the center of his blue eyes is ever-increasing and the green materializes now and again to make for his most shocking feature to his dark brown eyed mama and papa.

His copper hair is getting soooo long; I had to chop his bangs while he played with a toy a few weeks back because the poor child could not possibly have been able to see. We have no further plans of cutting it, but vision is important.

Also, so much for a baby that loved to be carried on walks, who could be distracted by cars and bicycles and flowers just enough to stay calm. Now it’s all down, down, down as he hurls himself out of your arms. He’ll still hang in the stroller pretty well as long as it’s facing outward and he can’t see us. I actually feel this constant nagging guilt whenever we’re running errands, like I’m transporting and restraining his wild little body from one vessel to the next, never letting him down, never letting him roam free. But he’s in this awkward place between stationary baby and little boy who can wander a bit on his own. If we put him down, it’s all eyes and hands on Bastian as we try our best to herd him out of trouble. It will certainly be nice when he can understand that, yes, he has to hold a hand and that he can’t just yank on and eat everything around him. I feel that this is very soon.

How do you all feel about constantly strapping your babies in? For us, it’s out of the stroller, into the grocery cart, out of the grocery cart, into the stroller, sometimes into the car seat in Grandma’s car, into the bike trailer, etc, etc. I’ve really been craving a day where I can just let him run around a park completely unencumbered. I think we’ll do that tomorrow. Since we’re moving on to a very busy street, this summer I plan to spend very little time indoors and hightail it to the park nearby as often as possible. A baby needs to run and play, and I don’t foresee having anything better to do than just that.

Anyway, this has been month fifteen. Another dynamic chunk of our lives, where big decisions were made, and once we’re over a few hurtles, we get to enjoy them. Then on to the next. I love change. It’s transformative, refreshing – it keeps us on our toes, it keeps the grass green, it keeps us engaged in this life.

PS: I am allowing myself the time to adjust to the new apartment before I start functioning creatively again. I went through a good year or so where I was working on something nearly every single day, and to stop that has been mildly disconcerting, to say the least. But I need this time to find a rhythm, and I’ll need a space I love to do so. But I’ll keep checking in here because I need to. I want to.

An odd, an end.

Get this. It’s time for Bastian’s 15 month post. Seriously. We also got an invite in the mail for Bastian’s cousin Calvin’s first birthday, which is really just insane. He’s supposed to be a tiny 7 pound newborn, and Bastian is supposed to be, oh, I don’t know - around 6 months or so.

My, my, my.

Unfortunately, I’m preparing yet another piece of furniture for a Craigslist buyer, so I’ll have to postpone that post - I just have too much to say and not enough minutes to reflect on this past magical month. What I will say is that we are moving. We found out yesterday that we got the apartment of my dreams. Well, the apartment of my attainable dreams. It’s in the city, it’s in a beautifully and tastefully restored 100 year old building, and it’s full of grace and charm. Not so full of space, however, so we’re downsizing yet again. It never hurts to purge, people.

I really don’t want to turn The Long Bonds into a space of apologies, like so many other blogs out there, but let me just tell you that I do plan to one day be back in blogging spirits again. First, I was adjusting to being a SAHM, and now my butt is being seriously kicked by a doozie of a cold. I NEVER used to get sick before Bastian, and I feel like I’ve been sick so often lately. Sickly, sickly, sickly. I’m wondering if it has anything to do with breastfeeding. Whatever it is, it blows. Being sick is the pits, especially when you’re used to being healthy.

Just a quick sickie tip - don’t make homemade Nutella, as seen on The Friendly Fox, with a nasty head cold. You will not smell the hazelnuts burning until it’s too late and will thus end up with charred Nutella, which is cool and all, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Anyway, I’m off. Off to purge. We also need to gain some things, like a new to us, smaller velvet couch and some perfect curtains on top of everything I have yet to find for the wedding. So much to do.

Thanks for listening to this dribble while the good side of my brain is on vacation. I promise to be back soon enough with Bas’s 15 month post. Hang in there, will ya?!

xxoo!

A quick hello from the other side of things.

Well. Here we are. I think I just unknowingly took nearly a week off from all things that are not Bastian and suddenly realized that - wow - it’s Thursday. And I’ve done nothing but wake up every morning to a sweet, gorgeous baby; read a lot of books many times over; make breakfasts, lunches, and dinners; ombre some sweet matching mama/baby duds; and let our darling boy know in as many ways physically and mentally possible that mama is going to be around a lot more often.

It’s been glorious.

For about a second, I worried that I would panic. That I wouldn’t know how to juggle it all, or that Bastian and I would sit around staring at each other. But the transition went swimmingly - better than I could have hoped. From second one on that first morning, we were one and we knew just what to do. Together.

One thing I have been mourning a little is Bastian and papa’s connection. I don’t know if the change has anything to do with it, but Bas is suddenly in a serious mama phase. When Adam gets home, Bas clings to me. When Adam tries to take him out of my arms so that I can start cooking dinner, Bas locks his freakishly strong baby claws into my shirt. It’s heartbreaking, to say the least, but I know I’ve heard that babies go through pretty dramatic phases and the foundation those two spent building from the minute he was born is disaster proof. Totally solid. We know this, the three of us.

This is probably a pretty weak hello from the other side of things, but I’m still adjusting to this monumental shift. Peeping around the corner at my juju, making eyes at it, letting it know that I’m still here. I’m just being mama right now, and that’s all the magic I need to muster for the time being.

A graceless goodbye.

I guess today is kinda like when you finish a book, but you can’t be all that excited about it because you know you zoned out on a few long, boring paragraphs, so you didn’t really read the entire book.

Today is my last day of work. On Monday, it will have been three years. So, I won’t have exactly made it to three years, and I think that’s pretty indicative of the note I’m leaving on.

I won’t say that I’ve been bitter about having to work this job since day one, but it’s been a while. And as soon as I found out I was pregnant, it became really hard for me to compartmentalize and change my way of thinking about the fact that I was working a full-time, dead-end job.

So I pouted, and I let my negative feelings overcome any positivity reserves that I might have otherwise had access to because it felt so wrong and I felt so trapped.

And guess who bore the brunt of my entitlement issues, my sometimes puerile outlook on conventional employment, my bohemian aspirations – as per the usual? Adam. When the system was knocking him down, trimming down his many hard earned and well deserved qualifications to nearly nothing, refusing to fit him – qualified, wise, employable Adam – into the tiny rigid box of being granted the fortune to work for a living, I was sermonizing him on how I needed out.

So, today is a good day. But today is also bittersweet. Hindsight is 20/20, and sometimes when you’re feeling like your quality of life is seeping through your fingertips onto the keyboard, dripping down the cracks in your desk, and saturating your cubicle carpet with everything that makes you, you – you act like a graceless horse’s ass.

A vague and heavy stop off.

If you can’t tell, I’ve been decidedly absent, trying my best to make it through these last two weeks of cubicle arrest, all while trying to tie up feet upon feet of niggling loose ends for the poor souls who have to shoulder my work in between now and when the new sap starts. When he or she eagerly picks up from where I so eagerly left off.

But, I did read a gorgeous blog post over on longest acres today, and felt so very compelled to share a shimmering part of it with you. I think it speaks volumes to mama anxiety - how so many of us take on the weight of all the suffering in the world when we welcome our babies into our arms.

It also speaks to the will to survive, and being hard wired to struggle - two strings of words surrounding infancy that have been both comforting and plaguing my heart as of late.

I’m going to leave you with that, and the following quote of course. All that heavy vagueness, because this time of day on the other side of tomorrow, I will be rounding the corner to full-time mommy-hood - busy, frantic, fitful, glorious, baby-run freedom. I simply cannot wait.

“This sounds cold and cruel, and I thought in writing this I would elicit the emotional response I have come to expect of myself with such things. But a truly new and rather unsettling me is emerging. Surely, I blubbered and stumbled and asked Nick to find me another solution. But at their death I was able to keep in check and not allow myself to think about their little faces and their little souls. I write this, not with pride, nor with peace, just with a vaguely deadened realization that I cannot save every creature that comes to me. That I don’t have the space, in my heart nor in my body to help them all. And I, quite honestly, hate that. I am not at peace with this. Yet, I know I need be. I know my past actions cannot be sustained on our future farms. I know I will need to pick the battles more wisely.” - kate from the longest acres, taken from her post, death and the equinox

A new dawn.

I went to sleep last night with a renewed heart, on a Sunday no less, because I knew that the next morning – this morning – I would be tending my resignation.

I worked all throughout my pregnancy up until the last two long weeks before Bastian Wilde became all ours. I struggled to hang on to the 12 weeks of Maternity Leave I considered necessary because my company, like most companies, would only grant 6 weeks of Short Term Disability Pay at 60% of my salary. I used up every last minute of my vacation and sick time to keep that promise to myself and my family – 12 uninterrupted weeks with our brand new baby boy.

I realize that my struggle is not unique – but I feel that it should be. I’ve talked a lot on here about how I feel that families are neglected in our culture, how the dominant paradigm guilts new working mothers into getting right back to where they started, ignoring the fact that by giving birth to a newborn, they have been transformed into newborns themselves.

It has been a year since I came back from leave – a year of five days and forty hours a week away from my growing boy. No vacation – no reprieve.

A year of not feeling comfortable doing anything outside of working and coming home to my baby.

A year of short weekends where I start to feel reconnected to my home and my family just as the clock rolls over into Monday again.

A year of being bullied and guilted in a workplace that doesn’t even recognize that their employees have families.  

A year of me burying my own personal friendships and pleasures to tally the minutes I spend with Bastian and hope they add up to enough.

A year of going to sleep early, despite being in the most nourishing of conversations with my partner, because I knew I would regret going to work the next day on even less sleep.

A year of obstinate sacrifice for –what? For more money than I need to spend on things to patch the holes of me having to work a soul-sucking job?

I’m a resourceful girl – I got my wedding dress for $40 – $90 with alterations. I grew up poor; and despite my best efforts, you can take the girl out of poverty but you can’t take the poverty out of the girl.

This was all made possible because Adam was offered a temporary job making about 10,000 less than I do now because the market doesn’t recognize his years of education and graduating with high honors as the minimum experience required. But we’re still doing it; we’re taking that leap of faith. I have a basket full of priorities, principals, and values in this life, and not a one of them involves getting ahead financially. But the top ones, well, they involve me going to my deathbed not wishing that I had done anything differently when it comes to raising my child. He is my heart, my purpose, my reason for being better, my reason for being whole and happy. He is my son. And I will die knowing that I made the right choices with him in mind.

Though it feels bizarre to leave “work,” I know that I am leaving this job for my most worthwhile yet, and I know in the core of everything that is me that our family will always triumph in the end.   

A letter to soon-to-be mamas.

I didn’t write this. I didn’t need to because Bridget over at tales of me and the husband did, and she did it so well. Sure, there’s more that I could add, and I’m sure I have and will in many different ways, but this is just so bare and simple and essential that it should be shared with all those who are about to become brand new mamas, brand new people, brand new women.