Boring and crazy.

Life for me as of late has consisted mainly of mundane days that blend in to one another with such ease that it's hard for me to recall which day is which, or even what I had for breakfast this morning. Winter arrived in one fell swoop (a blizzard, that is), and with it came these freezing temperatures that make it so painstakingly difficult for me to muster up the energy to bundle up and go anywhere. 

I'm still riding this colossal wave of hormones following my miscarriage. Certain days go by where it feels like all I really managed to accomplish was to quell the nearly insatiable desire in my heart to set fire to the universe and flush myself down the toilet. Needless to say, I'm waiting rather impatiently for my body and my hormones to regulate - and in the meantime, I'm crying over Christmas music and yelling at the boots sitting in my front foyer. 

Margot is growing up. I know this isn't news to anybody - least of all to me - but I'm really noticing it lately. She's sweet, she's beautiful, she's funny, she's curious, and she's all sorts of maddening, but she's this incredible person with ideas and opinions all her own.

She's starting to wean from breastfeeding. This is something that I knew would come one day, and probably someday soon, and my plan all along was for her to lead the way; but now that she is - oh, my heart... I'm sad about it. Just this morning I tried offering to nurse her, but "No, thank you," she said. 

"Are you sure?" I replied, as I sat down with her in my lap.

But instead of latching on, she again said, "No thank you," and then proceeded to push and shove my boob out of her face, saying, "Put it away. Put it away." 

...Oh. Okay, hilarious human being. Did you just turn into an embarrassed teenager overnight? 

Speaking of overnight, she's sleeping through the night. With this statement comes a wild and exaggerated dance number that I bust out every time I say it. Because SHE'S SLEEPING THROUGH THE NIGHT. You heard that, right? It only took almost two years... no biggie! 

I think in this picture you can see exactly how weary I am, how stupid-happy I am, and how in love with this girl I am. 

And the one thing you can't really see is the sweet little shiner I'm sporting on my right eye since Margot head-butted me last week. You know when something hurts so bad that you just instantly and uncontrollably burst into tears? That. My first black eye! 

Chaos and wild greatness

Sometimes I forget to eat and sometimes a load of laundry takes three days to process and usually I'm suppressing cuss words while I'm cleaning up messes and generally speaking I'm getting really good at putting a jacket on a moving subject and tying shoes onto kicky feet and in the last 12 months I've swept the floor probably more times than all the other times in my life combined.

The things that come out of my mouth most often are, "please stop throwing food on the floor" and "how do you ask?" and "what did I just tell you?" and "do not touch the computer" and "you sit on your bum if you're going to be in that chair" and "put the mustard back in the fridge" and countless other new me-isms but nothing do I tell my girl more often than, "I love you" and "I love you" and "I love you."

The days are long and the nights are just not long enough and the months and the weeks pass by at varying rates of speed but all of it, as it turns out, is just exactly my definition of perfect.

Sprouting little wings

If I haven't said it before, I'll say it now: not a day goes by that I don't acknowledge how grateful I am that Daryl and I have never had to send Margot off to daycare; how blessed we are that our employers give us enough freedom to stretch and bend our work schedules in order that she can spend her days at home with us instead of at a daycare facility. Our schedules are arranged in such a way that when one of us is at work, the other one is home with her; and in spite of how maddeningly frustrating it can be to operate this way when it means never having a day in the week where we're all together, it is, above all, a gift.

Cutting and pasting our work schedules, though, was obviously a direct result of bringing Margot into our lives; before she was born, my schedule was standard Monday-Friday, 9-5. So making all of this work meant putting my work hours on the chopping block - which, in turn, did the same thing to my paycheck. This isn't to say that we aren't making ends meet, but only to say that we've had to make adjustments where we can. And this past summer, after realizing our financial situation was altogether too uncomfortable (it's hard to say no to Chipotle) I decided to pick up an extra day at work. Well, this meant we were short on childcare one day a week; but by stroke of luck / divine blessing, everything worked out perfectly when Daryl's mom offered to come to our house every Wednesday to look after Margot. And as far as Margot is concerned, her Nana is one of the most magically wonderful people on the planet.

I digress, though. Nana works in the school system, so when the summer came to an end, so did our outsourced childcare services. Enter Marcia: one of my nearest and dearest and most beautifully talented and lovely friends (seriously, you guys: she's the mastermind behind t i b b e n l i t t l e s. You'll fall in love.) Marcia swooped in and offered to watch Margot when we needed her.  And yesterday just happened to be the first day that we had to bring Margot over there.

I was nervous. Not because Marce didn't have every ounce of my faith and adoration, but because I didn't put enough stock in my own little girl. My mind kept reeling, thinking surely we'd drop her off and say goodbye, wrenching ourselves out of her little arms, while tears poured down her face and she begged us to stay, calling out our names in despair.

It sounds dramatic. I know. But it's where my mind went. I know if you're a parent, yours has probably gone there, too.

I spent a lot of Tuesday evening telling her and re-telling her what the next day was going to look like; that Dada was going to drop her off over there, where she'd get to play aaaallll daaaayyyy loooonnnngggg with her favorite friend Wendy. I told her she'd get to play games, ride on Wendy's rocking horse, maybe go to the park, and anything else I could think of that'd help her (me) feel pumped up about dropping her off at someone else's house and leaving for the day. This was totally new territory for me.

And as it turns out, obviously, Margot was fine. Better than fine! Daryl told me that she was more interested in Wendy's feet than she was in saying goodbye to him.

"Wendy feet! Bye-bye, Dada. Wendy feet!" (Poke, poke.)

I've had Margot's independence on my brain so much lately. When hanging out with our next-door neighbors last week as we sat around a fire in their backyard, they talked about how big and scary the world has started to feel now that their son is five and they've had to start teaching him how to operate in the world without them. They've had to teach him how to navigate getting home on the school bus, how to watch out for cars on the street, and make sure he knows his address and his parents' contact information, and a plethora of other such considerations that just don't exist while our kids are young enough to constantly remain under our care. It's all just so much. I drive past kids waiting for the bus before school on my way to work every morning and my brain instantly zaps to their parents, thinking about how each and every one of them managed to come to terms with sending their kids off into the world on their own. How much trust they've all mustered up and put into their kids - not because they want to, but because they have to. Because kids grow up. Because we can't cradle them in our arms forever.

But it's terrifying. It's overwhelming. And it just boggled my brain yesterday when, after we were all home and went for a walk to the park down the street, I was asking Daryl and Margot each about their days. Realizing how odd it was that the three of us had days and experiences independent from one another.

Because...what? When did Margot get so big? Did I not just give birth to her last week? How has she gotten old enough to have her own experiences outside of our house and outside of our care? It doesn't make sense to me. It's amazing and beautiful and completely bewildering watching her grow so quickly.

And so last night, there was no bigger sigh of relief than while I was giving her a bath, and asking her about her day, and she just kept yelling, "Wendy house! SO FUN!"

My girl, when did you become your own person with your own little ideas?

Your story matters, and this isn't a contest.

I know how easy it is to feel overwhelmed. Particularly when I was going through postpartum depression, I spent so much time floundering to stay above water. It was hard not to look at my life as a big-picture piece and wonder how on earth I was going to make it through the next five minutes, let alone the following weeks, months, or the entirety of my life as I knew it. I knew it was important to take each thing as it came, baby steps all the while, but depression and being overwhelmed tended to find me compounding issue after issue on top of one another until I was roughly the size of an ant standing at the bottom of a mountain of problems that I couldn't see how I'd ever get through.

I remember being in elementary school or high school and having my parents' friends brushing off whatever it was that I was going through - like if I said I was involved in this or that, or that I was up against x amount of assignments or exams, I remember these adults turning to one another and almost laughing at one another over how petty these issues of mine were, that I was calling "problems", so to speak. They'd talk to me and around me as though it was cute that I was feeling stressed about a test or social hurdles at school, but that if I thought that life was stressful now, I had another thing coming. Because as I can only imagine they were thinking, I had no idea what stress meant until I was up against things like mortgages or marital problems or employment struggles or the like. I remember on numerous occasions feeling indignant when adults made my problems out to be non-issues, when I felt very legitimately upset about this or that.

And now that I am an adult (well...am I? I could argue strongly that I'm still six in my brain; or that I'm actually still every age I've ever been - but whatever) ...or I should say in spite of the fact that I am an adult now, I still remember that feeling so vividly. I remember thinking how unfair older generations tended to be - that just because I'm only 16 doesn't mean I'm not a real person yet, that my emotions aren't weighty or legitimate, or that my experiences are somehow lesser than anyone else's. I remember being 18 years old and making a conscious decision to always remember what it felt like to be that age; that when I grew older, I needed to fight the tendency that adults seemed to have to make light or make less of what an 18-year-old was going through, or what things are like at that point in a person's life. I chose to make note of the importance of acknowledging the personhood of an 18-year-old; or of any teenager, because it felt important to me. It still does. I knew there would come a day when my own teenagehood would slip away from my memory - and it did - but I remind myself that even though they look like puppies and often act like idiots, they're muddling their way through life no differently than I am today.

I'm referencing this because I still very much notice this tendency when it comes to parenthood; whether it's brought on by people making passing comments, or even just by my own habit of holding my situation up next to somebody else's, I realized that this still exists today. We still have the inclination to belittle certain feelings or circumstances because we're holding them up to a greater standard - to think, "Oh, just you wait. This is nothing." It can be a mother of three telling a mother of one that she doesn't know what busy or exhausted means; as though a first-time mother feels even for an instant that she's got it easy. Or it can be a mother telling a mother-to-be to sleep now - sleep while you can - because as soon as that baby comes, you won't get a wink; as though they've forgotten completely how cumbersome it is to be in the final stages of pregnancy, and how little sleep she's actually even getting at this point - not to mention the gamut of emotions she's experiencing, notwithstanding total fear at what parenthood is going to end up being like.

Why aren't we investing more energy into supporting one another, and into reminding ourselves that the hurdles we face, no matter how paltry compared to someone else's, are not unimportant?

My struggles and your struggles are real, no matter how insignificant they may seem up against another person's; and that just because one person has fewer babies or a smaller workload doesn't make their struggles any less significant or staggering. We adapt, and we adjust, and life primes us for greater issues that we'll encounter along our way. So what someone else is up against, or what you might find yourself going through in the future, does not in any way belittle where you are or what you're feeling today. Don't let anyone make you feel like what you're going through is insignificant based on anyone else's situation. Your story matters.

You are home.

You matter. You are enough. You are a giver and sustainer of life; and you provide exactly what your little ones need of you. You are kind eyes, soft kisses, strong arms, and steady breath.

Remember: to those who matter most, you are home.

On wanting what the heart wants.

A friend of mine just recently made a leap – she left her $100K+ career because it occurred to her on her morning run that, as she said, “the human heart is worth more than that.” I said to her with deep envy that it had just occurred to me that it seems her heart and mine had been holding hands all this time, and I just hadn’t realized it – but that hers had just made this wild and glorious jump off a cliff, while mine is still standing over the precipice peeing its pants.

I’m not saying you or I or anybody needs to quit their job in order to follow their heart – but can you imagine that freedom? I mean, I actually can’t, really. I’m too busy sweating at the thought of all the worries that would crawl into my brain like cockroaches – how would we pay our mortgage? How would we keep food on our shelves and shoes on our feet? When we had Margot we decided to adjust our work schedules in order to forego daycare services, so as it stands I cut my income in half and that makes me antsy enough on any given day. So going cold turkey in order to spread those heart-wings? And MY heart-wings, no less, which I think could rival those of Falcor from the Neverending Story...? Oh no wait… Falcor didn’t have wings. (But if he did.)

I know how easy it is to slip into the almighty role of Mother and accidentally inadvertently lose the equally important concept of Self. I only have one child – so it’s a mystery to me how women with multiple children find the time to follow even little pursuits of happiness – because I know full well how hard it is to even find the freedom to pee with the door closed, let alone unload the dishwasher or do some other such task that I feel obligated to do in order that the household doesn’t inevitably fall apart.

I’m getting off track; and Margot is crying over the baby monitor, which I’m feeling inclined to chuck out the window (the monitor – not the baby). She so graciously allowed me just enough time to eat two massive bowls of Alpha Bits that I bought on a whim today, then she decided her nap was over. Thanks, babe.

Anyway. So I’m trying to imagine what indulging my heart’s desires would look like. Or even what they’d feel like. Have you ever mustered up the guts to shift your life in a totally different direction? I’ve only ever daydreamed about doing it, then accidentally let a slew of discouraging thoughts slip into my head – about how I don’t particularly have anything to offer, about how there’s no discernible reason as to why my writing would affect anybody more so than somebody else’s, or about how I likely just don’t have what it takes to be successful. But WHY do I have the audacity to think those things?! Step one is garnering the confidence to put one foot in front of the other, in the name of reaching toward exactly what it is that the heart wants.