Lastly, Me

The nature of who I am means that my mind is always thrust between intangible times: pasts and fantasy futures. Now, is only important in how it relates to before. I am not a buddhist. I will never be in the now. I will always be dreaming of possible tomorrows and recounting (dwelling? agonizing over? deeply mourning?) the past. As such, I can only tell you about how I am doing right now, by comparing it to how I was a year ago.

It’s a little tough right now, but no where near as hard as it was this time last year. As the first anniversary of my trauma approached, I was so sad I could barely breathe. My daughter started walking and all I could do was feel sorry for myself, for the loss of my infant. I was in deep mourning for the me I was the previous year, happier than I had ever been, so full of purpose and optimism as I readied myself to give birth.

We all know how that story unfolds.

And now, some gory details that I don’t think I’ve shared before.

And at a year out, I still had pretty regular bouts of pain. I couldn’t feel my bladder when it was full. I was often incontinent. My pelvis would ache for days any time I had intercourse (never mind the fact that it took six months before I was successfully able to). My scar itched and burned. I had chronic gas and constipation.

Two years out, and I have regained much of my sensation in my bladder. I still leak whenever I have  a hard sneeze or cough. I may have a rectal prolapse, but don’t yet want to find out. A day of walking or lots of activity will leave me sore the next day, but it’s rarely debilitating these days, just generally uncomfortable. My scar still itches, and a flailing foot during a wild toddler diaper change has occasionally landed on my belly and caused me to well up. It hurts, but it doesn’t kill me.

Right now, I mostly mourn the finality of the childbearing question. The fawning strangers who tousle Lyra’s hair and say, “You have to have another one!” aren’t meaning to be cruel. They don’t deserve to have their faces flushed when I sometimes retort, “I would, if I could.”

I would. If I could.

Some days I hate the fact I can’t. I hate tamping down all those thoughts that pop up and say, “With my next one, I’ll do X differently.”

You only get one shot
do not miss your chance
to blow
this opportunity
comes
once in a
lifetime

You’re not going to believe me when I say that I’m doing okay. But this time last year I didn’t understand why I’d survived. Sometimes, my survival felt like a mistake. This year, I know that I’m here because there is one child in this world who was waiting to call me Mommy. And while it doesn’t sooth every hurt, it is: Enough.

And now the part, where I sound like I’m bragging

With the verbal leap has come a shocking intellectual one. Shocking to me, because I not one of those Alpha Moms who reads chapter books to her child before bed time, reads quality parenting books, and actively devises lesson plans. Rather, I am a mom who tries to disguise boredom when asked to read Brown Bear six times in a row. We actually own very few toddler books (I prefer to check them out from the library), and several of the ones we do own consist of nothing more than a picture letter or number on each page and a pretty illustration or photo. So, I was a bit caught off guard one day in May when we pulled up to one of our local grocery chains and she began to point and shout. “O! O! OOoooOOO!” from the back seat.

Since this occurred during The Period of Acquiring Many New Words, I assumed at first that her O was just a general sound of excitement. But she was pointing wildly, and continued to point and shout O as I released her from the car seat and plopped her into a cart. It was only then that I realized she was pointing at the large letters on the front of the store: V O N S.

How does she know that’s an O?!

Soon, O would be joined by A, Y, E, I, and U. By  mid-June, she would be able to sit on my lap and say almost every letter out loud (F, S, and R are the exceptions. She can point to these when I say them, but she lacks the motor skills to form these sounds yet). Pointing out letters and naming them is now her favorite past time. She also likes to write them, but her handwriting is purely imaginary at this point. It amounts to scribbles on a paper, and I’m honestly in no rush for it to progress any further.

On a similar note, she has decided in the past week that she loves to count to ten (always skipping seven, though. It’s a number she recognizes when asked, but I’m guessing it’s a pronunciation issue again). I don’t think there is anything worth noting about by-rote counting as this is merely recitation. What shocked me was that, like the alphabet, she has learned what the numbers 0 through 10 look like and she can name them as objects. she also has at least a rudimentary understanding of there being a sense of order and counting because we can tell her that she may have have two or three tomatoes and she attempts to count them (not always successfully).

I’m noting this here because I know it’s unusual. I’m not placing any meaning on it, I’m merely noting it as a quality that is unique to her (much like her strange eye color or late growing teeth). Actually, placing any meaning at all terrifies me. I am too imperfect, too flawed, and often too self-absorbed to be a mother to an unusual child. The idea that my resources–financial, intellectual, emotional–may be inadequate to give her what she needs chills me to bones. I google “22-month baby recognize letters” and my results turn up nothing tangible. Like so many mothers who have searched longingly, but for very different reasons, I’m looking to see her placement on the milestone chart. I want to be safe in the knowledge that she’s somewhere n that curve, and just like everyone else. She can’t use a shape sorter. That evens things out, right?

At some point, she said, Momma.

I say that as though I don’t know exactly when it happened. As though I I hadn’t been waiting for that moment since I first peed on a digital stick and it said: Pregnant. She was 18-months old. It was the week before the Super Bowl, a few days after my birthday. She said it nonchalantly, as though saying momma were completely ordinary for her. As though she had been saying it for half her life, which is exactly how long she had been saying Dadda, which was eventually replaced with Daddy.

I loved being called Momma, but it wasn’t meant to last. These last few months have been marred by the constant arrival of teeth. From 12-months to 19, she had exactly four teeth. Sweet little beaver teeth in the front of her mouth. Plenty enough to tear off food and mash with her gums and jaws, but poor substitutes for the tongue controlling bicuspids and sound vibrating molars she has sprouted since turning 1 1/2. And with all of those teeth has come a slurry of words. She was a formidable gesturer and grunter (Ohhhh could she point, scowl, and squawk) for as long as I can remember. But those grunts and points have been replaced with This and That. Her musical Uhhh-OhhooOOhhh now has tons of explication. Things GO Up! They Fall Down! What was once merely Ow, is now Knee hurt. Hurt my leg.

And in all that need for clarifying her thoughts, for speaking so that she might be understood, for annunciating, Momma vanished almost as quickly as it came. Two weeks ago, she beckoned me from another room by shouting, Maaah-mee (she says it deep in the throat like that, the ah-sound coming out like the catcalls of brown-skinned day laborers). And ever since then, it’s been my name.

I will always be her mommy, but I miss being her Momma.

Wow. Things have been eerily quiet around here for quite a while. I hope to correct that soon. The “baby” is rapidly approaching 2-years-old. Maybe I should tell you what she’s been up to. And me, too.

Soon. Stay tuned.

I try, whenever possible, to sit in my house in silence.

That sentence is confusing in its grammar, prone to misinterpretation. I am a mother of a toddler. A toddler with few words whose primary means of communication is voice inflection. A toddler who loves the sound that aluminum pan lids make when they are smacked against ceramic tile. A toddler who learned to sing, long before she could talk. A toddler who thrives on rhythmic sounds and cannot suppress her need to conduct the air and dance.

I would be lying if I said I hated all the noise and chaos. Or that I would prefer her sitting quietly numb, staring at a television screen from a little ottoman. I love her energy and am often swept up in it. But there are other times, too. Times when I am tired, melancholy, or just plain low on energy. It is then that I need to recharge alone. It is then that I need to sink my hands into dough, reorganize a cabinet until it is just-so, or sit on a couch. In silence.

If I am lucky (and in Southern California I usually am), I will open a window and hope to hear little more than gossip or crows and the complaints of red-winged finches.

But last week I heard something else.

It was a strange treble. Almost like a bee’s buzz, but louder and deeper. It seemed to come and go but only for one to two seconds at a time. I ignored this sound for a day or so, until its repeat occurrence demanded that I at least look up, and out, to see what made the noise. I don’t know why it took me more than a day to be curious, but it did. I just wasn’t ready to pay attention.

Again, the tremble. I walk up to my open window and investigate. The long beak, teeny body, and invisible wings are the dead giveaway. It’s a humming bird that has come for a visit. The rich rains followed by days of warm sun have sent the Meyer Lemon tree in to bloom. The nectar is irresistible to those who feast on it.

Have I ever heard a humming bird’s wings before? Have they always made a sound?

Sound catalogued. Life went on. Days passed. I am given an unusual two hours alone to work on a home improvement project. I grab my paint brushes and rollers. I pull out drawers. I unscrew cabinet hinges.

After six years of living here, I have decided to move away from temporary decoration. This place will be our home for a while, for years. The oppressively neutral kitchen and dining room were a reasonable and conservative choice when I thought we would be giving this place over to someone else in a few years. I was reserving all of my creative energy for my next home. That one would have a great kitchen. That one would have bold color choices and creative furniture. This place was only temporary. We would be leaving here in a few years…

I spend most of this time working in silence. The window open to allow any paint fumes to escape. I am working, beautifying, talking to myself. And the beat of the hummingbird’s wings grabs my attention again.

I look out my window, searching for which stamen and pistil the long beak will be pecking. I find the long beak, but for the first time the hummingbird’s wings are at rest. She is perched on a branch, still.

Hummingbirds sit still?

I’ve never seen one at rest. I’ve assumed they lived in some sort of perpetual motion, unable to rest for a minute, as their To Do list grows long. And yet, here is a humming bird, resting. Sitting on a branch, as though there aren’t a thousand flowers that need to be suckled, a million little seeds that need to be fertilzed.

I watched the bird for just a few seconds, before the treble once again sounded and she was out of my sight.

Throughout the day I heard the wings again and again. Each time I looked up, I saw the hummingbird rest on a branch. I saw her take a break, collect her thoughts, and resume her work. Again. Every treble was a reminder to look up from the drawer or the cabinet door I was meticulously coating with paint, and to look outside, beyond the glass, and notice. We continued this dance until my work was done, my latex gloves pulled off, and my paint brush rinsed.

I thought nothing of it. Just a coincidence. A bird and a branch. Come and gone.

But she wasn’t.

The next morning I was surprised to open my blinds before sunrise and to see the hummingbird sitting there, quiet, in the blue-gray light of predawn. Then it hit me. What had looked like a resting to me had actually been work. She was building a nest, making her home next to my own, on a small branch of the Meyer Lemon tree. She, building a nest. Me, decorating mine. Perfecting, tidying, making due with what we have. The two of us, working side-by-side to create a nurturing space from which our little birds will someday fly.

The premise of the question assumes that I would be embarrassed to sing karaoke. Although I have only been twice, and my heart pounds before I do it in public, I love singing.

One More Try by George Michael

Not only would I sing this song at karaoke, I have sung this song at karaoke. I can sing the hell out of this song. I have been singing it since I was in 6th grade–in the shower and out–and I am crazy enough to think I sound good when I do.

Breathe by Anna Nalick

In the spring of 2006 I found myself in a, not unfamiliar, but miserable place. And, while driving to work on particularly loathsome morning, I tuned in to a radio station I rarely listen to (Howard was gone and NPR was probably doing a pledge drive). I hear this song. It’s misery and plea for moment to moment survival achieve simply by unclenching my jaw, unbuttoning my coat, and yes, breathing. I downloaded as soon as I got into the office and listened to it in a loop all day (I do this with songs I love, I listen until the song becomes the soundtrack of a period in my life). In any case, I cannot hear this song without belting it out, as loud as I possibly can. Windows down, tears sometimes falling. Yes, even now. And I would sing the shit out this song in karaoke.

Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead

I’m not going to let another music-based question go by without including my favorite band. Most Radiohead songs don’t lend themselves well to sing along, especially given my limits at the higher range. But this song is perfect mid-90’s angst. It eventually arrives at a wail, but finishes with a whisper. Yeah, I’d sing the ass off this song.