Thought I’d share what’s been keeping me so busy I haven’t had time to write. Or, who, really.
I’d like to introduce Norah. She’ll be six months next week!
Sherri Lynn is a fantastic photographer and a great friend.
Motherhood is astonishing.
This is a post for my mama, who has a birthday soon.
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When you are at peace with yourself you realize how much energy war took. The angry, terrifying voice in my head that used to run the show is pretty much permanently muted. I don’t think it would be smart to become a parent to heal yourself, but damned if that isn’t exactly what it does.
There’s no metric that could measure the love I carry for my daughter. It is of unfathomable depth. It is back breaking, bone crushing, painful love. I am consumed by it and grateful for it. And I am transformed by the knowledge that this is how my mother cares for me.
Now when I look at adult people, I imagine the babies they were. I think of them being carried by strong, tired arms. When you were just a minute human, someone carried you everywhere. Before you could communicate, you had a caregiver desperate to imagine your every need. When you cried, you were comforted.
That knowledge is life changing. I am rewriting my biography now. I am papering over the cracks with limitless, powerful, generous love. In my ugliest times, when I felt so alone I wasn’t sure I could go on, I simply was not alone. I was walking with my mama’s heart stapled to me. If only there was a way I could have known that my mother loved me so hard she could taste it. I was never, not ever for one second, living a life without love in it.
Our caregivers are selfless because they are giving us something we cannot comprehend. I feel so lucky to love like this, and so delightfully grateful to be so loved.
Mama, you did your very best. And it made all the difference. Happy birthday!
(Please pardon any strange formatting. Posting from my phone is a bit odd.)
I spent two years losing 90 pounds, and I approached it with the almost irritating earnestness that is my hallmark. I am an introspective extrovert, which means I think endlessly about everything but also share it. Community is important to me and I crave support and connection, probably because my inner monologue can be very cruel.
So, as is my way, I committed whole heartedly to my weight loss, and by all means it was an outrageous success. And I put every minute of it on display, gathering support and motivation from my loved ones. Every compliment was impetus to continue, every comment helped me view my physical body from a far less critical place than the lonely one in my brain.
I had a healthy pregnancy, gained minimal weight and lost most of it quickly. My body changed at a structural level and my figure now reflects my most significant journey to date. I am starting to ramp my cardio back up and have received a handful of kind compliments about my increasingly well toned figure.
Here’s the shocker, the twist I could never have anticipated: I want a private body. I want to own the physical space of my skeletal body quietly, with conviction and pride. I want people to notice that I am joyful and beautiful but I want private possession of my physicality. Which is not to say that the compliments are not appreciated but more that I want to love my body at such a base level that I don’t require compliments.
Much of this is the result of motherhood. My imperfect body, which has caused me such remarkable emotional pain over the years, is my daughter’s adequate and beloved home base. It has been a beautiful body for her and for my husband and now it is time for me to love this home privately, quietly, honestly and without hesitation.
Kissing you
In the few minutes we steal to reconnect
Brings to mind
summer afternoons growing up
The acrid, iton taste of water sipped
Straight from a crisply unkinked hose.
It shouldn’t be so easy to sum motherhood up in a phrase, but it comes to me easily and often.I am possessed. I have been sought after, desired, adored, loved, cherished. But now, now I am possessed. My tiny daughter weighs 10 pounds now but she is my behemoth; I am Sisyphus except I am delighted to push the boulder.
Norah is everywhere. When she eats, her nails scratch my breasts and her head strikes my collarbone. When I carry her she burrows her hands into my hair and I untangle long strands from her fingers throughout the day. I know the significance of every noise she makes. We are so interconnected that I often know she’s woken even if she’s in another room.
For 9 months I was Norah’s universe and it hasn’t changed for her just because she now sleeps down the hall. To become a mother is to be pressed into ceaseless service, to spend your days enthralled and dizzy, satisfied and numb, happier than you’ve ever been and sad you’ve never been this happy before. Motherhood is possession, glorious gruesome painful delicious possession.
Pregnancy is academic, mostly. You know you’ll be a mom, and it’ll mean a bunch of new behaviors and practices and events. But you’re a pre-parent, a meta-parent, a parent as newly hatched as the baby you’re growing.
That ends the night that you get a routine test result that would be a non-event if you weren’t allergic to the course of treatment. It ends when your previously planned hippie homebirth goes sideways and you need a new care team but can’t pull one together quite yet because all offices are closed. It ends when you are nervously eyeballing the clock, reasoning with your baby that she needs to stay put until you’ve got your (brand new) ducks in a row.
Three days ago I asked the universe how I would know that I could be a good mama. Trust the universe to be listening especially closely when I’m asking stupid fucking questions, right? I got it, out there. I really do. Because I know, in the clear concrete way that I know I could find my husband’s face in a crowd of thousands, that I will do anything, ANY THING, to get this glorious baby here safely. The strength of this conviction could rip the sky down, it could split the entire universe in half, it could unmake everything and then remake it again. I will cross state lines. I will call every single doctor and practice in this country. I would ransack my savings account, sell my house and quit my job. There is no end to the list of things I would do to ensure that this human person gets here safely.
Look, it’s mother’s day, and you haven’t bought your mom a card yet. You don’t need to. Forget the fucking card. When she kicks into that melancholy mama monologue where she tells you that she loves you more than you can ever imagine and she’d do anything for you, don’t roll your eyes, or tell her you know, or say she doesn’t have to do anything for you at all. Just hug her, a real one with both arms, and thank her. Because she means it. Boy, does she mean it, and there aren’t words on earth that adequately represent what that experience feels like.
We’re parents now, us two. It’s official.
Oh, dumpling:
It was maybe three weeks ago that I had my first big pregnancy epiphany. At the end of a disastrous checkup, coming on the tail end of a terrible week, I cried pathetic, huge tears on your father. He stayed up late with me that night, rubbing my hunched up shoulders, combing my knotted hair, and he helped me fight dangerous, adolescent thoughts of self-harm. “You have to care for yourself,” he reminded me, kind even when he was absolutely furious at my behavior. “The baby needs you.”
It was then that I realized you’d taken everything. All my terrible, self-destructive, last resort responses were gone because none of them were safe enough for you. At that moment, everything felt null and void and I did not have space for that emptiness, that frustration, that sense that I had not signed up for this total invasion.
Yesterday, I realized how much I want you to take everything. You can have all of it. You’ve crowded every inch of my body, and you’re welcome to it. My first thought in the morning is of you, and you’re the last person I say good night to every day. You can have every piece, every penny, every moment and I will be delighted, absolutely thrilled, that you wanted any of it.
Baby, I’m not an especially generous woman. I am feckless and demanding and flighty. My husband, a man who has loved me for every moment of my complicated confusing adult life, never could contain me. He has grounded me, and given me the safest place I could ever ask for when I’m ready to land, but he has never tried to rein me in or keep me. You, before you have even met me, before we’ve even been eye to eye–it’s you who has changed my life. You’ve made me cautious and careful and generous, more wildly generous than I had ever hoped to be.
I am only just realizing that you are my scorched earth. You have ripped the lining of my horizon into shreds and I will never be able to repair it. When you’re born, there I’ll be, standing on a new planet, totally remade. And grateful for it, and thankful to you. From that minute on, I will just try to keep up, and try to give you every thing, and hope that you’ll want some of it.
Stay safe, and brave, buddy. We’ve got a whole world to explore, us three, and we’re going to need a lot of energy for the trip. I’ll bring the granola bars, and your dad will read the map.
Love you,
mama
So pregnancy is no joke. I don’t know where to start with all of it, even. There’s the easy stuff: weight gain, terrible sleeping patterns, outrageous hormones and completely irrational behavior. That’s the stuff everyone tells you about. There’s the secret stuff, too, like when your body fails to do successfully what it did prior to pregnancy, and that runs the gambit from athletic pursuits (no more crow pose) to regular every day living (sometimes getting off the couch is hard). Pregnant women get lots of mixed messages from everybody. Indulge! Enjoy yourself, they say! And you so want to, because pregnancy is such a golden time, that you open the gate to that top-of-the-line, pressure treated security fence you spent years building around your heart. And then, somebody just smooshes your most tender piece. Accidentally. Casually. With a comment, or an opinion, or an abrupt unkindness. Or it’s a bad blood pressure reading at the midwifery firm that sends you spinning into days of defeatist, self-torturing behavior that threatens to harm you and possibly the baby.
I think pregnancy, because of the sheer transitional nature of it, is a time for cobbling. Cobbling together the self-preservation strategies that will get you to the (first) end goal. Cobbling together a community of people who will support you when you are at your ugliest, your most vulnerable, your most dangerous and most human. Hammering together the strategies you hope will help you become a “good” parent, however you end up defining that. This flux is disruptive and distracting, but it is gloriously uncommon. I honestly think that the parenting part of this whole deal will be very different from the pregnancy part strictly because it has such a long timeline on it. I will have the space and time to develop patterns that I might be able to stick with. Over my 8 and half month pregnancy, it has mostly been the case that as soon as I figure out something that works, things shift again. There is no sure footing here, and you can’t determine the terrain. As soon as you think you’ve found a good pace, a mountain pops up, without warning. And there’s you, wearing flipflops, with your water bottle still on the kitchen table.
The nicest thing you can tell a pregnant lady is that you’re proud of her. If she’s anything like me, her inner monologue is an endless harangue, a constantly updating list of the ways she’s failed herself and disappointed her loved ones. If you can hang with her, and remain kind even when she maybe hasn’t earned your kindness, you are doing a remarkable thing for a vulnerable person.
I wouldn’t trade any of this wear and tear. As our sweet baby is on her approach (come on, late May) I can’t help but feel like my whole life has been leading up to this. The human being inside of me has taught me a boatload about what it is to be a human being at all, and I am stretched tight and stuffed full of a compassion for all of our humanness. Maybe we are all in flux forever and this is just the first time that I’ve realized it, but every single human story is compelling to me now. I am jammed so full of love for everything that I ache. I just wish I could get back to a point where I extend that love, again, to myself. If you find yourself where I am, be kind and move slowly. You deserve the respect and compassion you are handing out to the rest of the world, so freely.
I’m woefully behind on my blogging. But I am posting this because I feel like it illustrates exactly what pregnancy should be. Pregnancy is the hardest thing in the world, but when the fog clears, the good days feel exactly like this.
That’s my mama, talking to my daughter. To be a conduit between generations is the most profound experience.
I’m a little over 6 months pregnant, and it dawned on me this morning: I have not gone to bed hungry in 6 months. In the 2-year weight-loss frenzy that led up to my pregnancy, I went to bed hungry all the time. Gleefully, with delight and pride in the narrow, dizzy feeling that was the result of too few calories after three hour workouts. That’s not to say there weren’t days that I totally prioritized food over everything else–and usually not great food–but those days were few and far between, bracketed by weeks and months of dinners consisting of a bag of salted edamame and a glass of skim milk.
Any idiot knows that you need to consume calories commensurate with your aerobic output in order to continue standing up and moving around. I knew that, too, but I was so wrapped up in the glamor and excitement of my weight loss that it was easy to ignore. At least, I chose to ignore it.
I’m happy about the changes I made. I love my body more when I am paying attention to it. Weight Watchers is an excellent program, and I think that my weight loss was much healthier because I was following a plan that kept me accountable for things, mostly. But I am learning so much about what my body needs, now that I’m pregnant. And I am learning that I didn’t have to spend two years avoiding turkey sandwiches, which I love, or bagels. I hadn’t had a bagel in two years, guys. That’s a long, dark, bagel free cocktail hour of the soul, let me tell you what.
I am gaining weight. And that’s okay. I can feel that my thighs are a little rounder, and my chin might not be as pointed as it was at the height of my weight loss. But I can also, suddenly, feel that it doesn’t really matter. The people looking at me in my life are not judging chin pointiness. They are noticing my smile and my good, healthy glow and my general happiness. They are delighted that I am healthy and happy in my pregnancy and in my life. I can choose not to let the number on the scale define what it means to be Sarah.
It’s amazing to eat to feed the baby. She’s big enough, now, that I feel her kick all day, and I would swear to you I can tell what foods she especially likes. She is enthusiastic about avocado. She loves apples and spinach. She is energetic after a meal that is full of protein. She likes chocolate cake. All of these things, all of this fuel, is growing that child: building her skin, strengthening her nails, building hair and strong arms and kidneys and a resilient heart. Food, to me, is no longer good or bad, and discipline no longer means that I need to restrict myself of all of my appetites for fear that I can’t control any of them.
I don’t need to judge my appetites, either. They can just exist. I can indulge a hunger or a desire in a judgment free space. If I want to put in an eight mile hike because my body craves movement, I can. If I want to spend a day in my pajamas, avoiding piles of laundry while I watch sitcoms on Netflix, I can do that, too. Balance is key in everything, and I suspect that living joyfully is much easier when you are not your own harshest critic.
When this baby is born, I will return to a more careful diet. I will more carefully monitor my calorie intake. But I will set the intention of this practice in a more holistically healthy mindset. I need to care for my body because it feels best when it is properly cared for. I will maintain a high activity level because athleticism brings me joy. I will try to feed this body, a body that will still be feeding my child, with the things it needs to feel full, satisfied, and comfortable. But I won’t torture it, for feeling desirous. I will honor those desires and use them as sign posts, indicators of the things my soul needs to feel nurtured.
Curves and Sass 