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the birthing of Joan Bea
Joan Bea was born on a Monday morning after twelve hours of serious labor. The labor began on Nantucket and ended in Cambridge Hospital in a room with enormous windows, their curtains pulled back to show first the stars watching us all night, and then the sunrise. It took me three hours to push her out after I had completely dilated and at times I believed I did not have the energy to do it. But I did do it, and the low moments only further buoyed my final high—a euphoric satisfaction fueled by the endorphins racing through my bloodstream, and a brazen pride in myself and what we had done.
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5 Links from under the dribble
I really enjoyed this pretty introverts on the internet essay.
Joe played Little Wings for me last night and it was so nice. (specifically the “Light Green Leaves” album from 2002)
I’m reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to completely check out for 15 minutes and its totally working.
My favorite part of Alice Waters’ ratatouille recipe (that I’ve made approximately 20x in my life) is when you drop a whole bunch of basil straight into the hot pan. My second favorite part is how it tastes better when it’s three days old.
Joe wrote up an article about diagrams and published it on the very hip Medium where it has been lauded and acclaimed far beyond our kitchen table.
An email from my friend Jordan about a new movie and a new show. We all need a friend like her to keep us appreciative and in love with good media:
…Oh I am SO glad you like Bling Ring! I just loved it, too! Whoever the girl is who played Chloe, make her a star RIGHT NOW! And the Thiessa Farmiga-dances-with-a-gun-
moment was actually disturbing. She really put on the disaffected girl with crazy eyes hat there and it just WORKED. I’m calling it Sophia’s best yet, as the highly dreary nature of Virgin Suicides does not allow for repeat viewing 🙁 What else do I love? Orange is the New Black! But in a much more well rounded way. I wouldn’t exactly stand on a box and defend Bling Ring to people as universally lovable, but Orange is the New Black… If someone doesn’t like it they’re an asshole. Seeing Natasha Lyonne as a heroin junkie turned inmate turned brassy advice giver could be too spot on to work, but instead it goes off just perfectly! And Laura Prepon really works for me in her role too. I think it’s her renaissance post-That 70s Show. Really all of the characters just weedle their way into your heart 🙂 And it’s so weird to see a cast of women, just almost all women – who aren’t particularly attractive either! The male characters really just exist to highlight the female story lines. That Jenji Kohan. A lady for ladies. -
oh life
Because each day of My First Week is uniquely woven with its own challenges, such as:
- go outside
- go outside and go to the pediatrician
- go outside, get caught in rainstorm, find out Joan hates rainstorms
- drive to the midwife and gently rear-end someone and resolve that midst newborn screams
- go the grocery store with one in the cart and one in the sling
- (and it’s only Wednesday!)
…I’ve been trying to jot down daily life notes more frequently. Of course this is the same goal I’ve had for awhile, and to that end I’ve used this easy set-up offered by Oh Life since last year:
Nice notes, but tragically widely interspersed, right? Once you sign up, Oh Life emails you at the end of every day and asks “How’d your day go?” Just respond to the email and they compile it all for you in a pseudo-journal (skeuomorphism!) style. Despite all our complaining, the internet is still full of great free things, I think.
It’s decompressing for me too. I find that the wonderful moments bob to the surface of my memory once I’ve written down a few of the more embarrassing and chaotic ones. For example, in the case of the unexpected rainstorm: after we arrived at our friends house totally drenched with Joan screaming, I settled on to their couch and watched Lux learn to cut out hearts and airplanes in sugar cookie dough. Soon it smelled like baking cookies and my sling, Lux’s shorts, and bunny (of course) were spinning in their dryer, and I decided I didn’t need to go to the grocery store that day after all.
And that’s really all this week adds up to, I think. Feeling embarrassed, exposed, disorganized, messy, and learning to love it or ignore it, as the case might call for.
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at home
July babies. Both my girls have come in the heat of the summer. Their rumblings will forever be tied to clammy nights under the steady breeze of a fan, to walks on heated pavement ambling from shade to shade; the slow avalanche of their births both begun on heady evenings when the sun had only just blinked to dark. Boston is drifting under a week-long heatwave right now. I do so love these cooped up mornings: no expectation of leaving the apartment, the windows closed to the heat and one or two air conditioner units humming away.
I have mentioned before that I like to imagine motherhood as the lazy summertime of a woman’s life. With Joan Bea’s arrival last week, again I encounter the bliss of a day less full, a project not started, a voyage left for another time. We all have voices within us that speak louder and even compete at times: the creative urge, the rowdy adventuring spirit, the maternal leaning, the enthusiasm and passion of a new idea, the quiet tug to rest and be still. I am happy to tell you that it is significantly easier with the second baby to relax and enjoy, to listen to the voice that says cherish, relish, savor.
I know Boston’s isn’t the only city anticipating a heat index over 100 today and tomorrow. Let’s all have a tall glass of water and savor the breeze when you discover it.
I’m so grateful for this project from Sakura Bloom–I fear that many of these moments would not have been captured without it! I’m wearing the Sakura Bloom pure baby linen sling in twilight. -
the tiniest birthday party
We are honored and shocked to have a two year old in our midst. My weekly email newsletter about her age group (somehow every pregnant woman in America manages to sign up for these emails) switched over from “your one year old” to “your preschooler.” I don’t really believe in preschool, so STOP THAT NONSENSE, Baby Center.
I’m sure it’s no news to you all that two year olds are tiny wonderful gremlins who move into your home and bring havoc and delight wherever they go. They don’t fix up your shoes or clean your kitchen while you sleep, but they do find pieces of paper and tear them into a dozen pieces and leave a small trail of confetti across your living room. While you make dinner, they delight in hunting down a neat pile of folded blankets and unfolding them into a pattern only understood by their whimsical minds. They don’t bake cookies in treehouse kitchens, but they do accompany you on every bathroom visit, and bang down the door if you accidentally happened to lock it.
We love ours. <3 <3 Happy Birthday Lux. (and yes, it’s true: Joan Bea was born just two days before Lux’s birthday! Anyone have experience with very very close family birthdays?)
and, a birthday gift: a vintage tea set. bunny is appropriately attired because water was everywhere.
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babymoon
I pulled out my computer to write a post and the last window left up my screen was the ferry schedule to Nantucket. Last Friday we taunted fate and caught a boat to the island three days before my due date. On the boat I told people I wasn’t due for a week or two so they would leave me alone. I bought our tickets and the lady told me it was “outside seating only” so we sat in the sun at the back of the boat and Joe and Lux were misted with saltwater for the hour ride over. I kept looking over to see Lux licking her lips to taste the salt. When we left Boston the city was turning into something of a steaming bowl of broccoli fresh from the microwave, every day. We would wake up and it was already 80, with the threat of rain, which meant a sticky 90 degrees by lunchtime and even with AC going in the bedrooms you would find yourself torpid and uninspired for the rest of the day. The ocean breeze and dramatically cooler nights, plus just a little time with wonderfully refreshing friends, were exactly what we needed. Science still doesn’t know what starts labor (they think it’s the baby’s initiative) but I wonder if it might be a deep moment of contentment and peace that triggers the fusillade.
Our friend David moved out of his bedroom, the one off the kitchen with a window that is perpetually open to the sound of the backyard, and slept on the couch while we were there. We came with our pack n play, our bathing suits, and our books. I often like to bake things before we go out there and arrive with fresh bread or banana bread with chocolate, or snacks. But this time it was too hot and I was too pregnant to do any of that. So we arrived and bought what we needed from the grocery store–steak tips, marshmallows, corn on the cob, an enormous watermelon, fresh portuguese rolls, and those cheddar and peanut butter cracker packs that everyone should eat once a summer. Because of fog the island fireworks had been postponed to the 5th, and that night we found a spot on a dune atop an almost abandoned beach to watch them. They were downwind from us, so there was almost no noise, and it felt a bit like we were watching a light show on another planet, like the Little Prince. The next morning I woke up hours before Joe and Lux and went to get donuts from our favorite spot.
Then, on Sunday morning I woke up with more serious contractions than I’d had so far, and I said, we’d better go.
We’ve been home for a few days and I’ve done little besides lounge on my bed, read, and eat. Medium rare steaks from Paramount and Toscano’s (also a banana caramel shake from Paramount….genius), eggs benedict and bacon from the Whole Foods breakfast bar, lots of kefir (attempting to make up for the all the probiotics lost with the two rounds of penicillin I had to get), several bins of blueberries, and chocolate chip cookies. My mom’s been to the grocery store a dozen times, and Joe and my mom alternate with taking Lux outside on adventures, doing the dishes, vacuuming, and cuddling Joan while I nap. In short, it is the babymoon we all hope for and I am relishing it. I’m quite sore, my milk rushed in which means now I’m sore in two places, and I swing from moments of complete contentment to moments of total fatigue and retreat. Lux has burst into tears more times in the last few days than in the last months combined. Joe and I are trying to be patient but we also find ourselves looking at it each other, wide eyed with befuddlement and shocked by her outrage over whether she wants help taking off her shoes. Like me, she has mood swings. She has been ignoring Joan, but in a respectful way, like “I don’t know what this is, so I’ll just leave it alone.” So far my best idea has been to ask her to “go check on her” which she jumps up and sprints off to do. The last time I asked her to do that, she stood in front of the crib and shouted back to me that the baby was still napping. : ) Joan just had her first night of trying to stay up at preposterous hours, but it makes it much easier to relax when you know you can sleep in the next morning.
This birth was everything I hoped it would be—without fear, without pestering, a climatic incredibly intense 12 hours within my own body with Joe at my side. If you’ve had a birth that wasn’t what you hoped, I can tell you that I’m right there with you and I know how you feel. I can also say that perhaps you will decide to have another, and perhaps it will be exactly what you hoped. It’s not too much to tell yourself that.…more on that, I promise. : )
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Nesting
This weekend was a nesting weekend. I had written up a list of all the things I wanted to get done, some of them enormous–ORGANIZE CLOSET, FINAL LIST OF NAMES, LABEL FOR DOORBELL– and some of them rather arbitrary–CANCEL CREDIT CARD, WASH CARSEAT COVER–though every last thing seemed equally important as its kin in my mind. Joe had a mental list of things he’d been hoping to get done in the next six months that he decided to accomplish immediately as well. We went to the South Bay shopping center, one of those awful Sim City big box outposts with a shared parking lot that you believe never should have been developed, but then when you frequent it once a year they feel like the answer to everything. Wood for pantry shelves, a little metal hook for the bathroom door, hangers for Lux’s closest, storage bins for baby clothing, a new electric toothbrush, nursing bras, a pair of shorts for Lux, lanolin…. One of those shocking lists that bridges three stores and you know you need everything on the list, nothing is whimsical, and yet somehow is there so much of it?
Halfway through our Saturday epic I shared a hot dog and a box of Pizza Hut breadsticks at the Target Cafe with Lux. Lux asked for a second hot dog and then decided she wanted to be carried to the counter while I bought it for her. I refused, and we had that moment, the one you’ve all seen: a crazily pregnant woman watching her toddler dramatically throw herself to the ground in front of a clear cabinet of fake-dough pretzels and weep as if she’s never had a good day in her young life. SOS, I texted to Joe. But we got through it and the breadsticks tasted exactly as I remembered them from childhood (did they trademark that spice mix in 1990?) and now I don’t have to eat at Pizza Hut, or (pray to God) Target, for another four years.
An involuntarily primal love was tapped as Joe bustled alongside me on Saturday. It was the mess before the organization, each of us creating small piles of chaos only systemized to our eyes, dragging things from one end of the apartment to the other. He sorted through an entire shelf of excess cleaning supplies inherited from the previous tenants (there is nothing I like less than dealing with cleaning supplies as it is my personal opinion that none of them should exist, they are all toxic and harmful to our environment), built a hanging rod for Lux’s closet, outfitted and built a pantry into a closet, reorgnized our kitchen in some magical way that made it appear 10x bigger, and carted two loads of laundry down and back from the laundry mat. Nesting is the hormone you don’t ask for, and when it arrives, it’s a thirst that feels so relieving when quenched. Seriously, it was like a 7UP ad over here.
The Lux Clothes Archive is now housed in eight plastic bins, each labeled with a small index card. I think of these bins as I think my Gmail Inbox: it gradually grows with no foreseeable end and no cause for examination. Have you ever seen an ad for Gmail? Very clever—it shows how much gigabyte storage you get for free, and as you stare at the screen contemplating a new email account, the number keeps growing before your eyes. In my mind I can see 10 neatly stacked plastic bins, then 16 bins, all somehow lining the upper shelves in her room. This baby will use everything Lux did (though unfairly marked from the beginning with the avocado stains of her ancestors–the clearest visual of the phrase generational sin as I’ve ever gotten), and then–will there be another baby after that, using them again? And as that happens, Lux will grow and there will be more sizes, as yet unlabeled and unbought. I am more befuddled by this steadily accruing clothing collection than I am at our actual family size.
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weekend notes
This weekend I briefly thought strawberry picking sounded fun. Then I remembered that would mean me crouching in a field with the sun overhead.
Instead we walked over to the greenway fountains near the North End. I am a big fan of these fountains, except when it is really sunny because there is no shade for the weary over there. I picked out three pastries for us at the new bread + butter, including a “nutella danish” that was like a flattened cinnamon roll with nutella in the middle….um hello. After promising Lux blueberries from Haymarket to lure her into the stroller, we stopped for cappuccinos at Caffe Paradiso. It was noon and a man ordered a campari with lemon on the rocks–that’s when you know it’s authentic Italian spot.
I went to the library by myself and paged through the new Martha Stewart magazine. There was a feature on the Leelanau Peninsula where my family vacations every year. Of course the year that we can’t go and I’m sad about it, Martha Stewart does a feature on it. Whatever. Anyway, they didn’t mention Cherry Republic in Glen Arbor. Big oversight, ladies.
I made this one-pan-pasta that’s very viral right now. It’s viral because is the quintessential Pinterest recipe–it results in one great photo and involves one great tagline–“all in one pan!” I didn’t really like how it turned out. Because I am devoted to my cookbooks I’ve mostly avoided Pinterest oddities, but the number of times I’ve heard someone say something has totally flopped from there is amazing. I’m sure there’s a Pinterest fail tumbler out there, but I don’t even want to look.
If you don’t mind using two pans, I think this summer pasta recipe from Bridget is 5x more delicious and just as easy.
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joy, mine and hers
true story: the newborn days were not joyful for me. I know some women are able to love it and bask in their well earned status as new mother of a milky babe. I was pretty confused about what Lux needed, what she wanted, what I was supposed to be doing. Joy was a word a lot of old people exclaimed to me on the street. “What a joy she is!” they said. I scrunched my eyes shut and tried to imagine how they saw her. Where was that ethereal glow, that leapt into their eyes at the sight of her, coming from? They grinned at me expecting an eager nod of agreement, but received only a smile and few fuzzy blinks from my tired eyes. This rumored joy of being a mother felt like an elusive promise in those early days.
I suppose my greatest moments of joy have come from sharing the work of raising Lux with Joe. Watching how he responds to a situation when I am at a loss, learning what inspires him about her, and most especially watching their long-lost-best-friends reunion every evening when he comes home from work. And–that wonderful feeling when you think, “oh I don’t know if I have it in me for this right now,” but wait! Your partner appears and handles it for you, in a way far different from what you would have done. A sigh of relief, and you sit back, watch, and learn.
Meanwhile, toddlers spend at least five minutes every day in a state of sheer joy. We go to a carousal in our park quite frequently. It’s a treat, but not an exotic one for the kids in our neighborhood. The animals are nicked here and there from overlove, but glossy with paint and bedazzled with jewels, and in the evenings they turn on the rows of bulbs and from across the park you can see the ribboning lights spin by. Lux’s current favorite is a rabbit with a pink collar and blue eyes who is completely missing one of his ears. Anyway, yesterday, as soon as the gate opened, Lux took off in a sprint around it, her arms thrown back as she circled the wooden animals. She was completely overjoyed at the prospect of the ride and did a full lap of glee. I watched her mini celebration of the moment in awe. Learning from her, learning from Joe, that’s where I finally stumbled on the promised joy.
This is the third in a series of posts for the Sling Diaries. I’m wearing the Sakura Bloom pure baby linen sling in twilight.
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On not waiting
I have always been one to strive forward, ready for the next thing and the next level, breezily leaving the past behind the bend and looking to the future. The woman we’ve hired as my doula suggested I try to cherish these last weeks with only Lux by my side; to focus on the ending of something instead of the impending beginning. The three of us were sitting next to each other with our feet in the murky duck pond of the Public Garden. It was 90 degrees, and Lux was periodically jumping up to gather sticks and then tossing them into the water, joyfully shouting “stick!” with each throw. She was almost completely soaked with pond water and she was loving it. Lorenza said words like “cherish” “dwell” and “relish.” I was sweaty and thinking about how many diseases Lux might be contracting from the water which contained at least three different kinds of bird poop.
But later, when the heatwave finally broke and as the rainy days have come, I have engaged this intention. We stroll through June’s afternoons, rainy or not. We stop to sit on stoops along our street. We pet whatever dogs have the time (according to their owners) to stop and talk to us. We wander on for ‘treats’ (one of Lux’s first firm words), trying chocolate croissants across the city, lemonade from a street vendor, a new box of cereal at the grocery. We climb into bed with a pile of books and share the pillows. (Somehow our hand sign for share turned out like most people’s ‘hang loose’ so I find myself reminding Lux to both share and just relax, dude). We sit in the garden behind our building and meow, hoping the nameless neighbor cat will hear us and climb over the wall, as he does every now and then. “I wait,” she says when I ask if we should give up and head inside. “I play,” she says when I suggest it’s time for lunch instead. We buy strawberries and melons and eat the whole thing in one sitting. We finish our dinner so we can have popsicles. We discuss when Dad will be home, and how he took the train to work, and how he’s probably going to be all wet because it’s raining.
It’s a season of receiving advice, most of it terrible, some of it is gold. My midwife Connie finally told me to quit it with trying to talk to Lux about the baby.”You’re just stressing her out.”
What a relief. I thought back over the times I’d attempted the conversation, all of them met with confusion, anxiety, or denial. The future is a frustrating concept to someone Lux’s age. It better be five minutes away, or don’t bring it up.
And it’s a little hilarious to imagine what I thought all that prep work might ideally add up to: was a screaming infant going to arrive in our apartment and Lux was going to walk up and say “soo good to see you! at last! just what I’ve been waiting for, someone to completely screw with my life and schedule!”
Connie also suggested I encourage Lux’s interest in talking about the baby growing in her belly. A parallel imagination game that, I’m really sorry to say, I’ve so far been correcting. “No, I have a baby, you don’t have a baby,” I’ve actually said. In hindsight, I feel like a real jerk. Now, we’ve started talking about the baby in bunny‘s belly. It was Lux’s idea, but to me this feels like a very wise and safe proposal: a tiny fluffy baby from bunny could hardly do us any harm, right?
So here we are, we’re not waiting. We’re relishing. One of us might be a little tired, a little sore in the back, and little overstretched, but we’re relishing all the same.