parenthood

Sparks

After nearly a week of nonstop rain, we’ve been gifted the most perfect fall weather—sunny and cool, with a brilliant blue sky every single day. It’s been wonderful for the long walks I like to take. The other day I took the dog and walked along the wooded trail near our house. The main trail runs the length of a stream that connects into the Jones Falls and eventually ends up in the Baltimore harbor. Smaller, more rustic paths wind their way from the main trail down to the water and a thick curtain of tall trees and vines surround the stream on both sides. It’s very peaceful. I find it to be a little too buggy for my liking during the heat and humidity of summer, but this time of year, as the leaves begin to change and the breeze rustles through the trees amplifying the sensation of being near running water, it is one of my favorite places to be.

On this recent walk, I happened to look up at the moment a strong breeze blew loose a cluster of small yellow leaves from high atop an especially tall tree. The wind caught the leaves and sent them shooting upward like sparks flashing against the sky. They fell slowly then, swirling down and landing lightly along the path in front of me. I stood still and watched them fall, trying to take in everything about this moment that felt refreshing and uplifting.

I am not a person who can really meditate (I have tried and failed many times), but I am someone who can stop and notice a moment of beauty, catalog it in my mind and return to it briefly in times of stress as a way to calm myself, which is what I do with the image of these leaves when all the lights in our house won’t stop flickering.

I have an extreme fear of fire born from an early childhood experience that left my mother’s hand badly burned. (If you’d like, you can read more about that here.) Flickering lights for me signal fire—a fire that is soon to happen, or perhaps one that is already underway, lurking unseen behind the walls, sparked by a problem in the wiring. The lights flicker and in my mind the fire is already moving from room to room, taking over the whole house. I imagine that by the time we actually see smoke, it will be too late. The house will be overrun with flames and all we’ll be able to do is escape onto the street where we’ll stand barefoot in our pajamas and watch our home burn to the ground.

Our house was built in the 1840s from stone that is two feet thick. Sure the insides could be reduced to cinders, but this is not a house that can easily be turned into a pile of ash. When we first bought the place, all the utilities were kept in a small rundown shed attached to the side of the house. The hot water heater, the boiler, and the circuit breaker could only be accessed by going outside. At the time of our purchase the home inspector informed us that he couldn’t tell exactly how old the boiler was, but he did know that the company who made it had gone out of business in 1961. It needed a maintenance check every year. It wasn’t long for this world and during one routine maintenance visit when I asked what could happen to it apart from it simply breaking down and no longer being capable of heating our home, the plumber shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It could maybe explode.” This was my literal nightmare. I didn’t have a decent winter’s night sleep for years after I heard that.

We finally reached a point where we were able to afford a renovation on the house, the primary purpose of which was to upgrade these old systems and incorporate the utility space into the interior of the house. That we managed to get two additional rooms added to the footprint of our small home was just a bonus (and an absolute life saver when the work was completed in March of 2020, just as we found ourselves stuck in our house for months on end). The electrical work that was done with the renovation is only two and a half years old. It shouldn’t be flickering. The connections shouldn’t be loose. The wires shouldn’t be faulty. I shouldn’t be spending my evenings trying to convince my anxious mind that our house isn’t about to suddenly light up like a struck match and make us victims of a gruesome, fiery death. But alas, this is where my mind goes, so I close my eyes and picture the leaves.

We are trying to get to the bottom of the problem. The electric company has been out several times now, but nothing they’ve done has fixed the issue. My husband and I joke that perhaps it’s a ghost. It is almost Halloween after all. I would honestly prefer a ghost. Ghosts are not nearly as terrifying to me as fire.

I have done my best not to pass my anxious tendencies on to my child, which has not been an especially easy task given that his entire existence has taken place during either a Trump presidency, a global pandemic, or both at the same horrible time. I do not have a particular parenting philosophy. Most of the time, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to raising a kid. I just try to follow my instincts and wing it, and frequently remind myself that despite what our culture likes to tell us, as his mother, I am not solely responsible for determining how he turns out. But one thing I do believe when it comes to interacting with children, especially in this current moment when so much about our lives and our futures feels uncertain and scary, is that you have a responsibility to balance teaching kids how to confront and manage the hard stuff with sharing what is good and beautiful about the world. There is a lot of hard stuff, but there is also so much that is soft and comforting. There is a lot of sorrow, but there is also so much joy. Among the seemingly endless list of things to fear, there are reasons for hope and optimism.

My son likes to let us know when he catches the lights flickering. We have made it a group project. “There go the lights!” we shout to each other across the house. We have turned it into a kind of game, one that I am desperate to see come to an end, but that my son may be disappointed to have to stop. The flickering grows worse in the evenings, as the sunlight fades and the air cools down even further. Or perhaps it is simply more noticeable because we have more lights on and we are all home at once, keeping an eye out, catching every small flicker as we sit together eating dinner or go about our nightly routine.

Some evenings, we’ll all head out together to take the dog for a walk. We create little treasure hunts where we have to look for different types of Halloween decorations, or I challenge my son to see which one of us can find the most colorful leaves. Each week, more and more trees are changing colors. Red, orange, and yellow are popping up everywhere we walk. One evening we pass a tree where only the tips of the leaves have begun to turn. Small, pointed green leaves like spears tipped in bright red. I stop and draw my son’s attention to them. I show him how the color is starting to creep its way down the length of the leaf. It is beautiful, the way we lean our heads close together to get a better look. The way the fading sunlight slants through the tree branches and dots the road beneath our feet. The way something so small can settle your racing heart and erase the worries and tensions of the day.

In moments like this, the love I have for my life is so strong it feels like it might consume me, like a fire building up beneath my ribs, unseen and unstoppable.

I surrender myself to its warmth.   


I always try to write a little something after my walks as sort of ritual or practice. After the walk mentioned at the beginning of this post, I quickly jotted down this poem that I will likely never revisit.

 
Autumn Walk leaves fall swirling golden yellow lit by sun slipping through outstretched fingers, hands reaching for beauty the path ahead disappears into trees twisting and winding toward water unseen though I hear it or perhaps that is the wind
 

How Am I Not Myself?*

I used to be a runner.

Before I was a runner I was definitely not a runner. I hated running. I made myself do it out of an effort to be healthy (by which I actually meant to be thin) but it was always an obligation instead of a desire. Then in my twenties something changed and running turned into an activity I loved. I felt strong and accomplished. Running cleared my head, my footfalls drowning out the perpetual whirring of anxiety and self doubt churning through my mind. Over several years I kept adding on mileage: 10k, 10 miler, half marathons and then finally a full marathon. Eventually when I got pregnant my mileage dropped dramatically. Then I had the baby and it dropped even more. I developed a chronic pain condition a couple years after my son was born and I stopped running entirely. If I were to set out for a run today, I doubt I could make it even a couple of miles before having to call it quits.

I’ve read a lot about how women lose themselves in motherhood. This is partly inevitable. Parenting an infant in particular is all-consuming. You can’t help but work your way through the dark tunnel of that first year and come out the other side irrevocably changed. It is true that in time, pieces of who you were return, but you can never go fully back to being the same person you were before you became a parent. I once described it like this:

my mind a blank slate
as though I’ve birthed a new me
along with the baby

That sense of loss is obviously not helped by how little maternal support there is in this country. Yes, parenting requires so much time and effort, but the lack of affordable childcare and paid parental leave, plus an imbalance in parenting expectations and commitment in many partnerships exponentially expand the difficulty of raising kids.

But I wonder if some of that feeling doesn’t stem from a problem with the basic way we define who we are. From an early age, we are encouraged to conceptualize ourselves by the things we do. What are your hobbies and interests? What are you good at? What do you want to be when you grow up? When our interests shift away from the activities that had previously defined us, or we have to take a break from them to make room for other changes in our lives, it often feels like we have given up a part of ourselves instead of, more accurately, simply changed the way in which we spend our time.

Even within the writing world we are asked to define ourselves in narrow terms. Are you a poet or a fiction writer? Genre or literary? Though you may cross over into a variety of mediums, there’s still the question of what best defines your style. In a world that increasingly demands we develop our own personal brands, what type of writing would you build your brand around? What kind of writer are you?

I didn’t really start writing until after I became a mother. In some ways, I suppose I was always a writer. From a young age, writing was a hobby of mine. An interest. It was a thing I was good at. But it didn’t become a pursuit until I became a parent. The limitations that parenthood put on my time and energy brought with them a clarity: If I had such little time for myself, I wanted to spend it in the most fulfilling ways possible. For me, that meant writing. At first I fit it in wherever I could manage, like during my son’s nap time or later at night, after he had gone to sleep. But as my sense of myself as a writer became more defined, the space I created in my life for writing expanded. I am lucky to have family and a partner who support this effort, but the most important part of forming a writing habit was choosing to write instead of doing something else, and then allowing other parts of myself to fall away. I suppose you could say I lost those parts, but I prefer to think I let them go so a different version of me could grow and flourish.

I don’t know if I will ever start running again. Sometimes when I am out walking the dog, someone will run past me and I’ll feel a pang of jealousy. We are less than a month away from the Baltimore Running Festival, and though I know this will sound ridiculous to anyone who is not a runner, a part of me is sad that I won’t wake up this Saturday morning and set out on an 18-mile training run. I was a runner and then suddenly I wasn’t anymore. I used to be one person and then I became someone else. I am nearing forty and I don’t expect the next decade to look exactly like this one. In all likelihood, my life as a runner will be confined to my twenties. When I was twenty-eight, at the height of my running fitness, I went to bed early and gave up my Saturdays to long runs instead of bottomless blood mary brunches. I made a choice and in time I turned into someone who would have been unrecognizable to my younger run-despising self. But I didn’t look back at the ways I had changed over the course of that decade and felt as if I had lost something. At twenty, we don’t lament that we’re no longer the people we were when we were ten. So why now, at the tail end of my thirties, does it feel like everyone wants to classify change as loss? It is true that I am not the same person I was before I became a mother. Hell, I am not the same person I was before the pandemic started. We can’t help but be changed by major life events. We can’t help but lose ourselves a little over time, shedding parts of ourselves as if we are snakes who have outgrown our skins.

My son’s favorite toys are what he calls cars with eyes and mouths. They are basically hot wheels from the Pixar Cars universe and they make them for even the most minor side characters. Having inherited his father’s collector gene, my son wants them all. We buy them in lots off of eBay and dole them out at holidays and his birthday. We gave him half a dozen this spring when he broke his arm and had to have surgery. He loves these toys and can tell you the names of every single character he has, even though some have less than a minute of screen time in only one of the three Cars movies. For a long time, he would “play” with them by carefully lining them all up on a shelf. Then the next day, he would slowly and gently line them up again in another part of the room.

“Don’t you want to drive them?” I asked. “Maybe make them race?” But he was too afraid he would break them. If they moved too fast their wheels might fall off. If he played too hard they could get scratched or dented. I sat down next to him on the floor and explained that though it sounded impossible, one day cars with eyes and mouths wouldn’t be his favorite toys anymore. He would grow up and something new would become his favorite. I told him he should play with them as fully as he could now while he still loved them more than anything in the world, and though he didn’t believe me that a day would ever come where he didn’t love these cars, I think it gave him permission to let go of his worries and really enjoy his toys. He started driving them all over the house. He now sends them smashing into each other and soaring off ledges. He is no longer afraid to let them get a little banged up, but he’s also not at all convinced that his love will fade. And why should he be. It is impossible to look ahead and see how many versions of the self can exist inside a single person.

“I am always going to love cars with eyes and mouths,” he told me one day.

“Oh yeah?” I replied.

“Yeah,” he said and shrugged, his palms turned up toward the ceiling. “That’s just who I am.”

You can read more about my shift away from running and the development of my chronic pain condition in “The Road to Here,” originally published in Red Fez.

* “How am I not myself?”

With Love

My son is on day five of a bad cold and we are sitting on the couch watching a nature documentary he has seen a dozen times. I am behind on so many things: I need to finish sending decision emails for submissions to the latest issue of the children’s literature magazine I operate; my massage therapy license is due for renewal in a month and I still have not taken any of the required continuing education courses; next spring’s tax season is going to be horrible because I am horrifically behind in bookkeeping for my business; I owe everyone in existence an email, or a follow-up text, or a check-in because it has been so long and I am terrible at staying connected to the people I love. Oh and also, I’ve pretty much completely stopped writing. The well is dry. I should probably get on that.

But when your sick child asks you to keep him company while he rests on the couch and watches a nature documentary, you drop what you are doing and join him, which is why I am yet again watching a pair of bald eagles fight over a scrap of carrion instead of making any headway on my ever-growing to-do list. I have not seen this particular documentary as many times as my son, but I have watched it with him often enough to know all the animals it features. There are Siberian tigers and African elephants. There’s some strange cat-like thing called a fossa that my son calls a fusser. There’s a great section with hornbills that always reminds me how much I like hornbills. They are so funky looking. It’s wonderful. There is a part of the documentary that is about forest fires, and another about how wildlife is slowly returning to Chernobyl. It really is a fascinating hour of television, especially the first time you see it before forced repeated viewings have turned its more educational elements into tedious lessons.

I can feel my son watching me watch it. “Here comes the tiger,” he says, glancing over to be sure I am paying attention. He signals when it is time for the elephants. “Remember this about the forest fire?” On and on, his eyes darting back to me throughout the show, hoping to confirm that I am not missing a single second of its many delights. It’s endearing really: no matter how young we are, we all relish sharing the things we love and desperately want other people to love them too.

I find it hard to talk to non-writers about writing because the conversation inevitably turns to whether or not I’m working on something new. If I haven’t been writing, it is hard to explain that no, I haven’t been working on anything, but I’ve been thinking a lot about things I could or should be working on. There are always ideas floating around in my mind, but they are not anything I can describe in a coherent or interesting way. They are not fully formed or cohesive enough that I could offer them up as some form of action, some evidence that though I am not actually writing, I remain writing-adjacent. If I have been writing, it isn’t any easier to describe my work-in-progress without feeling like it comes off as silly and slight, as if I have no better handle on its plot and themes than I do when trying to describe a book I read years ago and only vaguely remember. This is of course, entirely a me problem. Friends who ask me about my writing because they know that’s how I spend much of my time and they want to demonstrate an interest in my life and passions are lovely people and I appreciate them tremendously.

Perhaps surprisingly, I do not find it any easier to talk to other writers about writing. I always end up comparing myself to them in ways where I fall short. Take for instance this recent interaction with the dad of one of my son’s Kindergarten classmates when we found out we both write:

Him: What do you write?

Me: Oh, you know. Stuff hardly anybody reads and that doesn’t make any money. How about you?

Him *proceeds to tell me about the book he has coming out soon and how he needs to get working on his next proposal for his publisher.*

His publisher. Oh, right. He’s a real writer.

I know, I know. We are all real writers. But let’s be honest, some of us feel a lot more real than others.

I like to talk to my son about writing, though. He is in full-time school for the first time and though it is glorious in so many ways, it is a big adjustment for both of us. Suddenly we are not together most (if not all) of the day like we have been for the last five years. It feels odd to spend so much time outside each other’s orbits, unaware of what the other is doing all day. We’ll catch up on the time we spent apart and I’ll tell him I worked on a new story (without needing to elaborate on what exactly that means on any particular day) and he’ll say, “Cool!” with the same genuine enthusiasm he has for sharing a new fun fact he learned about caterpillars. We are both sharing a little bit about something we love and hoping the other will recognize its inherent greatness.

I am trying to find my way back to writing simply for the pleasure of it, divorced from any specific metric of success or realness. To seek publication as way of sharing what I love with others, rather than a form of validation, a reward for my efforts. That is in part why I am going to try to get back to blogging regularly—a thing I used to do simply for the enjoyment of it, back in the early days of LiveJournal and Blogger. Writing that is just about sharing ideas, memories, the thoughts kicking around in my mind.

And I’m going to try to share more of my work that I love, things I have published in the past and maybe even bits and pieces of stuff I am currently working on, or work that has been languising half-finished for months or even years. You can feel free to read it or ignore it—I won’t be sitting there watching you take it in, quietly whispering, “here comes the tiger.”

Speaking of nature documentaries, this piece, “In Spring When We Couldn’t Leave the House,” published in my chapbook Mother Nature, begins with another much-beloved nature documentary in our house, and shares some of my favorite interactions with my son from the long, tiring days at the start of the pandemic.

In Spring When We Couldn’t Leave the House

I cried in the bathroom. Sat down on the Sesame Street step stool, dropped my head onto my knees and sobbed for a full five minutes. It felt amazing. My son was watching a nature documentary at the time. The same episode he’d watched every day for two weeks, because he was in that stage where he wanted to consume everything over and over again until it imprinted on his being like a sense memory. Years from now he won’t remember anything he learned about orangutans, but perhaps he’ll feel a momentary calm whenever he sees an image of one swinging through the trees. I like thinking about that. About how this moment will fade into the past and jumble together with the rest of a life he was too young to remember. It’s a small comfort, but I accept comforts of all sizes these days.

Like these, for example:

The gummy bears my mother purchases from the mill shop at the bottom of her mountain road come in twelve different flavors. A nonsense rainbow of sugary excess. Teals, and pinks, yellows both wheat and buttery, three different shades of blue. He likes to cup his chin between his thumb and forefinger, give careful thought to his dessert time decisions. “So many good options,” he says to me. Yes, I agree. Life is full of difficult choices.

He has named his crane truck Mary. She works so hard. All day lifting brightly colored wooden blocks and beams. Mary has built three dozen cities, watched them razed to the ground, and calmly started over again. I have so much sympathy for her, constantly observing her world’s heartbreaking cycle of progress and destruction. Mid-build I tell him I’m going to make some tea. Would he like some too? “Tea sounds delicious!” he replies, and it is—his cup of warm water with a heaping spoonful of honey. We sip our tea quietly, and then I set down my mug and help Mary pick up another beam. “What are you doing?” he asks. I am helping Mary work. Is that not okay? “No,” he tells me. “The construction workers are taking a break for tea.”

“When I was a little kid,” he says, and what follows is a rundown of the aching, tender moments of his sweet, short life.

Why couldn’t I sleep when we were in Maine?

Why was I sad at Aunt Leah’s wedding?

How did I hurt myself that one time when I got that scrape?

(and the time after that, and the one after those, and so on)

Why did I yell when you told me I couldn’t have those things?

Why did you tell me I couldn’t have them?

Why was I sad when I yelled when you told me that?

Why was I nervous at school?

Why didn’t I like being in a strange place?

Why was I scared of Curious George?

Why was I scared when that fan made that zzzt zzzt zzzt noise?

Why don’t I like scary noises?

Why did I cry that time when you cried?

Because you feel sad when other people are hurting?

“Yeah, that’s why.”

We hold dance parties almost daily. He runs upstairs to put on his tutu and then tells me to play “love keeps lifting me.” We spin. A swirl of blue tulle and pink-cheeked joy. “Have you ever seen anyone dance like this?” he asks, as he twirls on one foot, throws himself to the floor and kicks both legs up behind him. I have to admit I have not. The Degas poster from my childhood bedroom hangs on his wall. I watch it as I spin in a circle, the colors blending together even more than the artist intended. Around and around, feeling higher and higher.

On a Monday he pours a bucket of water over a pile of dirt and digs half a dozen holes in the mud. What are you doing? “Burying my animals,” he says, and I decide not to read anything into it about his understanding of death. On Friday I suggest we pretend to be paleontologists. We carry a handful of paint brushes out to the dirt pit and gently free the animals from the earth. I find a gorilla. He finds a rhinoceros. Halfway through uncovering an elephant he pauses and laughs. What’s so funny?

“I almost forgot to remember all the things I’ve been hiding.”

The walls are covered with drawings of cars and trucks. An ATV with purple and green tires, a blue stripe, and a bunch of red lines that are meant to be flames. There’s a truck with fourteen wheels. I heard him counting them out. He says thirteen in a way that sounds like fourteen. Ten, eleven, twelve, fourteen, fourteen. He is learning to write his name. The B, two circles stacked one on top of the other. He creates a mixed media piece of a building on fire. Stamped fire engines and emergency vehicles. Thick lines of black crayon for the fire ladder. Wild strokes of orange marker for the flames. “Here is the smoke,” he says, furiously scribbling a gray colored pencil across the top of the page. It looks just like a fire, wild and chaotic, background images slowly emerging through the blaze. He is learning so much, I tell him. “I wake up every day and I learn something new,” he says. “I can hardly believe it.” I know. It’s amazing.