Breathing room, or lack thereof

I've been issued a court-legislated restraining order from my dear darling daughter. And by that I mean Daryl just got home after a day at work, and having had received a number of texts from me containing a long list of expletives, he all but stuffed my feet into my boots and shoved me out the door so that I could take care of myself and pick up my scattered pieces. Today started out completely fine, and then transformed into an afternoon of me grasping desperately at straws in order to gather my Qi and become zen, then failing miserably, then opting out of even trying anymore whatsoever. This afternoon in its final form turned into an angry mess of noise while Margot bawled her eyes out on and off for hours, and I yelled back at her as if I was ever going to win a contest by making my voice louder than hers.

It's amazing how I can hear a voice travel through my head on repeat telling me not to let my own emotions rise up, match or rival those of a cranky toddler - and yet disregard it wholly while my heart screams back that I do not care - and it does so with great indignation - because right now I'm angry and she's angry and the angrier we are the angrier we get and yes it's very loud in here but WE'RE JUST BEING HONEST ABOUT HOW WE FEEL. And honest communication is the pillar of any good and healthy relationship, right?

And because correct me if I'm wrong, but is there anybody else in this house at this moment who's here to deal with this girl? Or to whisk me away to a cloud of pillows and feathers and billows of dry ice, then take over my role as mother and comforter and disciplinarian and supporter and teacher and nose-blower and tear-wiper and and and and and...?

And if a tree falls in the forest, will a toddler who only napped for 45 minutes today express any notion of level-headedness or rationality when there's a blanket touching her arm (the nerve) or when her sippy cup isn't placed precisely in the south-west corner of her crib? NO. The answer is no. So if another tree falls in the forest, ....no. I just don't care. It turns out that today I'm inevitably going to err on the side of extremely and overtly irrational in my response. I'll issue a formal apology later. But for now, I'm stewing and decompressing. Because I'm lucky enough to have a husband who throws me out the front door, throw a handful of cash at me, and tells me to take the laptop and sit at Caribou Coffee while he insists that I don't dare walk back in the door a minute before dinner at 6:30.

Okay. Deep breaths.

I'm still a post-miscarriage pile of crap. Did you get that notion? I'm not writing frequently enough, I'm not nurturing my heart or my soul enough, and I've essentially turned into a sedentary lump that wafts between feeling like a firefly trapped in a mason jar, and like ...like a sedentary lump.

And how dare I yell and stew and swear and frown and stomp and whimper when I share my home and my life with this person?

I blew the dust off my camera the other day and took pictures of this heart-stoppingly beautiful human being; of this little person who nuzzles into my neck and tells me of her own accord that she loves me "so muts" and who laughs and dares me to tickle her armpits and who eats her weight in yogurt as though it's going extinct tomorrow and who dances with fervor to Sia's Chandelier and Toto's Rosanna and pretty much anything by Justin Timberlake.

Being a parent is an overwhelmingly wild ride. Raising a child demands of us every fiber of energy we possess, and then squeezes us harder at exactly the moment that we start to relent. It calls us to exercise superhuman levels of patience and humility, and to show unending grace even at our very weary worst, and somehow - somehow - raises us up all the while to do every one of these things with great and tireless love.

Even when we need to put our boots and coats on and lie down in the street and roll ourselves along down the road and drag our bodies by our cold and determined fingers to the nearest refuge / coffee shop for a series of long, deep breaths.

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! 

Honesty is always the best policy

I know that generally speaking, silence is a bad thing when there's a toddler around. That is certainly no exception in this household. But as kids grow up, they're apt to avert punishment if they're doing something they know is wrong, usually by lying, skirting around the issue, or bending the story.

With Margot, though, I feel as though I'm stuck in this magically hilarious blip in time where yes, silence usually means she's up to no good, but she knows nothing yet about deceit - and to boot, she loves to talk.

So this morning, while I was toiling away at putting plastic up over our windows to keep the near-freezing outdoor temperatures from creeping into our house, there came a point where I realized I was too absorbed in what I was doing, and that Margot had disappeared. She'd been keeping me company up until that point, doing some doodling in Daryl's bedside notepad, using a little photograph as a telephone on which to call her Nana for a chat, trying on a pair of Daryl's underwear, sitting on her potty while perusing a copy of National Geographic ...that sort of thing... but then suddenly she was gone. I wasn't overly worried, as there were only so many things she could've been doing, but nonetheless I hollered out, "Margot? What are you doing?"

And thanks to this little blip we're living in wherein her great love for narrating everything she sees and does overrides any inclination to sidestep the issue at hand, she replied, "I'm eating lotion!"

And sure enough, I found her in her room, graciously returning the Aveeno bottle, little slobbery dispenser and all, back to its place on her change table.

Why, thank you so much for your honesty!

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?