From the peak of Mt. Parenthood

I remember pregnancy and childbirth with all the warmth and fondness of that “127 Hours” guy who had to chop his own arm off, only I had nine months of it, and my parka wasn’t as fluffy. But, it turns out, I think other people’s “pregnancy experience” is adorbs, so go figure. The next-door neighbors had their first child a few months ago, and I had a front-row seat from my office window, which is conveniently perched just inches from their driveway (city living, an exercise in pretending you can’t see or hear what is directly in front of you). I saw the darling mom-to-be grow from adorable bump to clearly pregnant to “I think she’s going to explode,” all from the comfort of my swivel chair.

I was avoiding work and looking out the window the day she and her husband left for the hospital. I was avoiding yet more work and still looking out the window the day they came home, baby in tow. Frankly gawking, I noticed the dad taking a picture of mother and son, together in front of their house for the first of what I realized would be a lifetime of photos. It was very Normal Rockwell, but with an iPhone. I dashed down the steps and asked them to allow me to take their family portrait, and I didn’t even drop the dad’s phone. It was all so lovely, really it was, but of course I knew, even as I smiled at them, that they were about to be hit with the Parent Stick, the poor dumb things. At that moment, the thing I knew and they didn’t was that babies are like catchy pop songs. They’re utterly charming for the first few minutes, but then suddenly it’s the hundreth chorus of “I’m Henry VIII, I am,” and their welcome wears thin.

My baby gift to the new parents was the delivery of weekly Sunday suppers for the first few weeks, which might sound like a pointless present unless you’ve had a baby, and then you know that it’s the Best Gift Ever. As I knocked at the door each Sunday, I got a freeze-frame update on how parenthood was treating these two fine young people. Which is to say, I watched them slowly lose control of themselves and the world around them, as they melted toward the floor in a state of utter exhaustion. I saw it in their eyes, and I saw it in the circles under those eyes. Babies will do that to people. Of course the lack of sleep is a big factor, but complete lack of control and heart-stopping fear can wear a person down, too. I remember reading a bagful of baby books on the long flight to China, on the journey to adopt our daughter. It was pretty much a cram course in parenting, and here’s what I figured out after all that studying up: all babies want to do is choke or suffocate, and it’s a miracle any of them survive, ever. Thinking of all the things that could possibly go wrong with a newborn is the ultimate mellow harsher, no matter how cute the nursery has been decorated or how nice the onesies are. After a while, it takes a toll on even the most optimistic, high-energy sorts.

I completed my promised number of dinners, but found myself missing those quick updates on how the new family was doing. On a recent bearably warm Saturday, I ran into them in the driveway, just back from breakfast at a restaurant. As I cooed over the baby, the mom proudly told me their son was eight weeks old that very day. “We ran into someone at breakfast whose baby was only three weeks old,” she confided, “and I told him, don’t worry, it gets better.”

I snapped up to attention and saw her happy face. Clearly, she was so proud she had made it all the way to the two-month milestone, when there probably had been several moments in the past few weeks she wasn’t sure she would live until morning. Standing there in the crisp winter air, I had a crazy old lady moment of flashing forward through this kid’s life … toddlerhood tantrums and school-age hijinks and teen-agery in all its awfulness. She was feeling so proud she had climbed up this tiny little hill, and she had all of Mt. Parenthood yet to scale. 

Contradicting the commonly held belief that I operate without any verbal filters, I did not say, “Right, the first eight weeks, those are the hard ones. The next 18 years should be a piece of cake.” Instead, I remembered all the times when I had done the very same thing, and I recalled challenging times with my kids that, once gotten through, had given me that complacent, “Well, my work here is done” feeling. From sleeping through the night, to curing an incorrigible biting habit, to navigating the mean girls at school, to finally finishing the thank-you notes from the high school graduation party, parenting is just one damn thing after another. And maybe it’s best we don’t realize that, because if we saw, really saw, all that’s ahead, then I’m not sure that many of us would make it. I imagine myself sitting in an aisle seat on a Northwest Airlines flight to Beijing, poring over those baby books as everyone around me slept. If any of those books had even hinted at what was ahead, I might have hijacked the plane and demanded it return me to Minneapolis, asking for  just a few more weeks of sleeping through the night before I committed to Momhood.

Three years later, when I got myself in trouble and was freaking out at the idea of pregnancy and labor, I was gabbling my worries to my friend Lorraine, who calmed my fears and told me I’d have no troubles at all with labor. A few months later, stuck at home with a newborn and an angry, angry three year old, I called Lorraine and shrieked, “Why didn’t you tell me THIS was the hard part?” She chuckled wisely and said, “A lot of times, it’s better not to know things in advance.”

Is ignorance truly bliss when it comes to what lies ahead? Probably. I’ve been thinking of that as I observe the recent Facebook adventures of another new family, two over-the-moon adoptive dads who post a stream of loving photos of their infant girl all with the hashtag #sheisperfect. Well, yes, she is, at least for now. But don’t hold too tightly to that idea, fellas, because she’s got more than “perfect” in her. She’s also got “human,” and that can get messy and exhausting and painful in some monumental ways. But that’s what you signed up for – the artfully posed family portraits are one part of the parenting trek, but so is the projectile vomiting at 2 a.m. So is the scorn, the defiance and the disapproval you might someday see from this same little person who rates her own hashtag right now, just because you love her that much.

I used to think that parenthood had an end-date, that there would be some moment when I had completed the assignment and could move on to my next all-consuming life obsession. Ha. I realize now that it’s a Job for Life in the ultimate sense. And if there’s a chance to be a guilty and worried mother in the afterlife, I wonder how many women snatch at the opportunity, even if it means sitting in the Uncomfortable Anteroom while everyone else frolics on fluffy clouds just outside the grimy, dust-streaked window.

I imagine my own mom, the dearly departed Katherine Clifford Kendrick, sitting on the afterlife equivalent of a DMV plastic chair with one broken leg, looking for a glimpse of me whenever she gets a chance, and nudging me to speak up or shut up or say thank you when she thinks I might be willing to listen. I wonder if I’ll get a chance to join her there, thumbing through old magazines, and trying to help my girls with what they need at the moment -- a great idea for which they give themselves credit, a quick heads up when they need a warning, or an open heart in a time when a little softness is what's required.

Job for Life. As if. 

The "Two" Candle Looks Back, and a Little Bit Forward

Since I never throw anything away (there is a container in my laundry room to save drier lint for compost, and that I think that pretty much says it all), of course I save all birthday candles, decorative or numeric. Last week, I had occasion to consider that little recycling policy, and how it might play out in the future.

The candle in question was the “two.” I first used it for a quick light-up-and-blow-out the year Emma turned two, the year she was crazy about Barney (although she now denies it, but I have photographic evidence). Then it made an appearance when Mary Katherine turned two, which was, I think, the year when everyone in the house suddenly realized that she had won us over with her “Go Mary” sweetness. The person we’d all seen as an intrusion had suddenly become indispensible.

I lit the “two” as a part of a double-digit pair when Emma turned 12 and declared herself a “Two Teen.” And just last week it was dug from the bottom of a bag for Mary’s 12th birthday, an occasion marked by a gaggle-of-girls salon visit. It was a glamorous day that featured plenty of sparquins. (Mary’s new favorite word, recently coined.).

Every feast, at least in our family, requires the significant labor of a pre- and post-party House Elf. Everyone loves to put up the balloons, but only I seem to be around when they have to come down, as they did this past Monday. As I was collecting and storing all the feast decor (how many “Happy Birthday” banners does one family need?), I picked up the four-times-lit “two” candle and thought about the next time that I’d use it. It would be, I realized with my mighty slow English-major powers of numeric observation, when Emma was turning 20. And then I realized that, mid-February in 2015, she’d be away at college, and not celebrating in this house at all. No impossible cake demands (“Checkerboard, but in my school colors. And sprinkles, but can you pick out all the pink ones?”) No custom word search puzzles, made by me. No thousands of pictures plastered all over by the trudging House Elf. It would be a birthday with a gift mailed a week before, a phone call and a posting to her Facebook wall.

Well. The two candle and I sat down for a moment while I thought that over. I had used the candle for toddlers who were driving me crazy. I had used it for tweens who were driving me crazy. And the next time that “two” came back into service, I would be done with all that, the day-to-dayness that is so much a part of my mothering, and onto another phase of my life, and theirs.

Not exactly hit with a ton of bricks, I felt more like I was receiving a friendly nudge of melted wax and frosting, telling me that yes, it’s difficult to be the constantly toiling Birthday House Elf, especially with their birthdays a day apart (poor planning, I know, talk to the Chinese government and my uterus). But in five years, I’ll be down one kid, helping the second one to plan her escape, and what will be left will be a bag of half-burned number candles. Perhaps I'll start holding little birthday ceremonies for whatever dog is still alive then, or, more pathetically, a cat.

Happy Birthday, Fluffy. Here’s a “two” candle stuck in your bowl of Friskies, and may you have many more to come.

When I Miss My Mother

I can remember watching her nap, laid out on top of the bedspread, with one corner pulled up from the bottom and covering her knees. I can remember poking her, prodding her, and trying to wake her up. And, thirty five years later, I can remember calling her to apologize for that behavior. Home with a three-year-old on the verge of a nervous breakdown and a scrawny, hungry and ready-to-go-back-to-the-womb-please newborn, I suddenly understood the incredible sadness of missed sleep. I understood how tired she had been, and how thoughtless I was to wake her. “That’s okay, honey,” she chuckled. “I’ve made up for all that sleep by now. I forgive you.”

She was married to a man who believed he was born to deserve the best of everything, and he lavished himself with quantities of fine food, snappy, plus-size clothes and home décor that showed off what he considered to be his impeccable taste. If a desire flitted through his brain, he sought, in an instant, to chew it or buy it or show it off. All those treats for him meant not a lot for anyone else at 108 Constance Court, so things like classes at the Art Museum, or braces, or, eventually, college tuition, always seemed out of reach.

So she learned how to drive, at age 40, and went to work at the fancy hotel in the city as a Hat Check Girl, which required a dress, a girdle, high heels, and the ability to keep track of fur stoles, heavy overcoats and the foibles of visiting celebrities. She got enough tips, well-hidden from his appetites, to get children started in college. And if she dragged home at four a.m., carrying armloads of birds of paradise from a wedding reception and plagued with sore feet, well, she could take a nap tomorrow. If I didn’t disturb her.

My children are older now, and my deep unquenchable thirst for sleep, the kind that would lead me to rest my head on the check-signing area while my groceries were being rung up, seems to have happened a long time ago. Now, I wait. Outside school, outside the basketball game, after play practice. My days are planned around other people’s schedules, and I suddenly remember my first job, at our local library. I would get off work at 9 p.m., and there she would be, in her silver Ford, waiting. It never once occurred to me that she had been at a good place in her book, or on the phone with a friend, or wanting to slip into a hot tub. I needed her and she was there, and the thought that she might ever have needs of her own was not one that I cared to spend any time on.

It’s been 11 years since we stepped outside on a bright October afternoon. We were giving a party on Sunday, and she was going to help me buy champagne. Such a happy errand. “I don’t feel right,” she said, the last thing she ever said to me, and then she fell down. And the last thing I ever said to her, right before the chaplain came to deliver last rites and say a Hail Mary, was, “It’s okay to go. I’ll be fine here without you, don’t worry.”

I was lying, of course, and she probably knew that, but she went when it was her time to go. It took me the better part of a year to stop reaching for the phone in the evenings, ready for my nightly call of news and chatter, delivered to the one person in the world who thought that everything I said or did was just the greatest idea, ever.

I miss her when I take a nap. I miss her when I wait in the car. If there were one wish I could be granted, it would not be to see her, for that would be so much. It would be a wish for just one quick phone call, one more chance to check in with her and tell her that I’m doing fine, even if she knows I’m not.