p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px ‘Helvetica Neue’; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px ‘Helvetica Neue’; color: #000000; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000; min-height: 14.0px} span.s1 {font-kerning: none}
I’m going to be honest, I’m confused. This blog, what is it anyway? Is it a way to communicate with friends and family back home? (I love you Canada!).
Is it a way to crystalize my experiences and distance myself from them in the writing of them? A way to connect the dots and make sense of my life, week by week? (For sure).
These words flip into cyber space and they may ring down into your head like coins flung into a wishing well, winking sunlight and pinging off the sides of your thoughts as they make their way down to your heart.
Or more likely they’re winnowing out there in the great black emptiness of cyberspace, meeting nothing but silence, continuing forever without the interruption and company of a reader.
I just finished reading ‘A Tale for the Time Being’ by Ruth Ozeki. It was beautiful and terrible, and dealt with pretty timely issues like suicide and Japanese Zen monks, War, bullying, and family tragedies.
Not a light read. I finished reading it last night at 3am, because Benji was up most of the night. I finished it sometime between the times I walked the floor with him and Bill’s turn, trying to get him back to sleep.
Anyway – this week my blog, whatever it is, is really hard to write because I’m struggling.
And my quiet desperation and anxiety is only dwarfed by my guilt for feeling it. Am I doing this mom thing right? Am I scarring them for life? Why is it so hard?
Will they be healthy? Stable? Kind? Emotionally mature? Resilient? Why am I not enjoying them more? Why does it feel like it’s 80% struggle and 20% heart-melty moments of sweetness and baby cuddles? And 100% obliteration of me as a whole person, as anything other than ‘mom’. We’re so much more than that, am I right? We’re feisty, and smart, and we have so much more to offer the world besides being the primary bum/nose/chin-wiper.
Things will get better, I know that. I’m just coming off a week where Bill was in another country, and when he got back, he was working late every night this week except one. Jichaan left to go back home, which was good but it was also change, an adjustment for the kids to settle into. Benji’s getting his two year molars early. (Yah me!)
And then there’s the post-nursing hormones crashing down. Maybe that’s too honest? It isn’t fun. I found my phone in the vegetable crispier drawer of the fridge yesterday. I. Am. Losing. My. Mind.
Sometimes they’ll both be screaming and/or crying and I’m just like…I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing right now. So I go to the one crying the loudest. Inevitably the one I didn’t go to will crawl to me in hysterics and try to push the other one off my knee and climb onto my lap themselves.
And you want to hear something really crazy? They’ve both been asleep about two hours and I miss them. Their warm little cheeks. Their sweet baby smell.
The way they run to me and don’t stop until they’ve literally run INTO me, because they trust me to stop them, catch them before they fall, and make everything better.
I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. How many tantrums, how many baby rages, how many times I will question my own ability to reason logically. (Or find my phone). I do feel like if I can find the peace in my current situation, even when everyone is screaming about the yellow play-doh that Benji just ate, (yellow poop, yippie!) and I can forgive myself when I fail to live up to my own parenting goals (yellow poop=fail) and not beat myself up about it, I can evolve as a mom, as a person, but most importantly as a human being.
Mostly that involves me yelling at Ellie to stop kicking Benji, then me struggling with the guilt over yelling at all. Not to mention the guilt over the yellow poo.
“Man must evolve from human conflict to a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.” Martin Luther King Jr.
Yeah, ok. That does sound better than:
ELLIE IF YOU TOUCH THAT BABY ONE MORE TIME IT’S TIME OUT UNTIL YOU’RE 25!!!
I bet he wasn’t changing diapers full of yellow poo though. Just sayin’.
Angela Yeh - Fantasy Author. Dragon Enthusiast. Optimist. 