way over yonder in the minor key: vol. 49

here i am again, at the end of another long month. the initial inertia of having a baby has worn off and i am now entering the next phase of infant life, which entails just trying to maintain and remain optimistic about waking up two times a night to nurse a baby.

i am writing this on my phone while my first kid is watching an old disney movie called the rescuers. though he’s watched the movie several times already (apparently it was a favorite of my partner’s in childhood and i can’t help but try to psychoanalyze how a movie about a little girl needing to be rescued fits into his schema for the world) i’ve had to just now try to explain an orphanage to my son and why children without mommies or daddies end up there and my sweet son can’t really understand why a child wouldn’t have a mom or dad, which makes me a sigh a deeply sad sigh for all that he has yet to learn about our world.

in laura olin’s latest newsletter she links to an essay written by a writer named ann friedman. i am familiar with friedman’s name but have not been reader of her, or her weekly newsletter, until now. olin’s teaser for the essay said something about friedman’s take on unexpectedly becoming a parent. though i knowingly became a parent, both times, the recent one took me by surprise and in a way was very, very unexpected. because of this i have felt hungry for accounts of pregnancy or motherhood that have felt complicated or compromised and accounts by older, literary moms really hit the spot.

introduced to the last essay in a ten part series friedman was writing in advance of giving birth, i am struck by something a friend of friedman’s, who is six weeks into motherhood, says to friedman before her own baby is born, and is the lynch pin of this tenth essay: “i am learning the difference between grief and regret.” i, much like friedman describes herself to be, am “jolted” by this statement. the difference between grief and regret? what a brilliant friend friedman has. i had never stopped to consider that there might be a difference between grief and regret. i had never broken out and broken down the two emotions before, but of course, they are two different things, and reading this statement made it clear to me in an instant that i have almost always bunched up all my grief in regret, unconsciously transforming it, as a way to not have to face the grieving. 

this is definitely true for me when it comes to reflecting on our move to the suburbs a couple of years ago, which has been a deep, deep grief masquerading as regret. but the blurred line between the two is an easier place to hide. if you shove everything into the regret bucket you can go about pitying yourself and expecting others to take pity on you instead of dealing with a sadness that you can’t quite get your hands around. this is relevant now, in the face of a new baby, because there have been a few quiet conversations between my partner and i that have started with, “i don’t regret having another baby but…”, both of us dealing with the grief that was our previous existence in our own separate ways.  in this case regret is absolutely the wrong word, but i didn’t know that i could admit to the word grief in conjunction with a new baby until i read friedman’s essay.  it’s not an understatement to say how freeing this decoupling is.

but why grief, you may wonder. and the answer is that i am not so sure myself. sure, getting up night after night to nurse isn’t great. and trying to get a baby to stop crying while you are also trying to get a four year old to listen to you when you tell them to not go into the refrigerator and help themselves to another string cheese, is maddening, these are ultimately passing things, small moments, here today and gone tomorrow. i know that.  but there are bigger moments to reckon with. like watching my older son’s face as he learns to understand that mommy is not able to help him with x,y, or z in the way she used to or, and here’s a big one that i’ve been grappling with a lot lately, understanding myself to be so far away from the poet and writer i wanted to be with each passing rejection. though my second book was accepted last summer the press itself sort of ghosted for awhile and resurfaced recently to apologize and say they wanted to move forward with the book. of course i’m happy but also wary, and weary. what if this press doesn’t end up working out? then i have to start making the rounds again, looking for a press that will give my book a good home and the thought of that makes me sigh a deep sigh of exhaustion.

in the last year and a half, i had felt my mind and my time start to come back to me in ways that were familiar and reassuring and now i am starting that particular clock over again by having had a new baby. i have often told friends in the last couple of months that the anxiety i felt about caring for a baby the first time is gone. instead i just feel inconvenienced and impatient, which is so unfair to my little dude. he’s just a baby! the first time around i willingly gave it all to my baby. this time i am having a harder time doing so since i have a sense of the consequences and i already have another kid to care for. how hard i had to work to get “it” (fill in the blank for whatever in particular i am feeling bad about that day) back, is what i have thought.  but even writing this i know that it is wrong. that to believe that there is something to “get back” means i am limiting my chances of evolving into something new.

i should make clear that i love being a mom. like, i truly do. a good friend of mine and i were talking recently and i said that despite loving being a mom that i miss “some thing”about me. my friend replied that maybe we all lose “that thing” but that maybe parenting lays it bare or that we are always losing “that thing.” to which i replied, maybe thinking of it as “losing” is wrong. maybe it is just changing instead of losing or as my friend says, transmuting. after all it is only my ego that makes me believe that i should be more successful with my writing, that makes me believe that i am deserving of recognition.

in season five of the sopranos when tony is in the hospital recovering from being shot someone tacks up an ojibwe saying on the wall near all his get well cards that says, “sometimes i go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky.” tony doesn’t know who put up the quote but you can tell that it gives him pause. so much of the sopranos is about the extreme brutalities people inflict and endure in order to get what they want, what they feel they deserve or are owed. it’s easy to pity yourself. i know i do sometimes. but all the while a great wind is carrying me across the sky and if i’m not careful i’ll miss it.

in her essay, friedman references the sculptor beatrice wood and wood’s autobiography i shock myself. friedman finds the concept of shocking herself, like with a mid-life pregnancy, “deeply aspirational.” i have continued to (brutally) shock myself in myriad ways in the last five years and never did i perceive anything aspirational about it and yet, the concept of being able to shock oneself is another useful one that i am grateful to consider.  i have been in a perpetual state of shock since the baby has been born and i appreciate the suggestion that being able to shock myself is actually a good thing.

~

for anyone who may be keeping track, last month i made reference to the second neopolitan novel by elena ferrante by the wrong title. the second book in the series is called the story of a new name, not those who leave and those who stay.

my poor mom brain.