For starters, it turns out that on August 7, 2022, I wrote a blog post that I never published.
Before then, and since then, a hundred more written in my head while a baby or toddler naps or cries
I am now nearly eight weeks from the birth of our second baby, named August, who arrived on the first day of 2023. A new year baby! The freshest and newest of beginnings! Eight weeks of maternity leave, of adjusting, of healing, of trying so hard (ironically too hard) to slow down and embrace the season I'm in.
I say that as I also simultaneously have a note saved in Evernote that documents my current plans to run an ultramarathon before I turn 40. In some ways I am amazing at slowing down, but in many ways I am not.
And after nearly two years of finding myself again, after Leo was born, here I am starting the process all over. All week I've been trying to make a list of things that bring me joy or make me happy in the purest sense. Parenting young children, working full-time, moving over and over again - it is so easy to lose sight of those things, and I find myself here struggling to make the list. But the gut sense I feel each time I revisit my attempted list is that one of those things must be to write.
More to come soon, I hope, but in the meantime, here's what I had to say six months ago about why I did and do want to write (and write here):
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In the eight (eight!) months since we moved, it seems my head is constantly swimming with things I want to write about, mostly things I want to understand better. But I have been chanting the mantra of, “I don’t have time,” straight through. The first year of parenthood, especially working full-time, especially with a partner who’s often working nights and weekends, has been defined for me by the feelings of both being bored and also having no time. There is no denying the magic of being with a small child, watching them develop new skills at a lightning pace, watching them discover the world one small piece at a time. Feeling the intensity with which they love you and need you - and you love them and need them. A million people, I’m sure, have tried to describe it. It’s like plugging into a current in the universe that you didn’t know existed before.
But passing the time with a small child is also, often, excruciatingly boring. Sometimes frustrating. Sometimes you’re literally sitting on the toilet while the child is face down on the floor, sobbing, “shoooosh! shoooosh!” (which translates to “shoes! shoes!”) because they desperately want to put on their shoes and go outside at that exact moment and not any later.
Ah! The intensity with which I have thought and felt and struggled over the past 16 months! I wish I had found a way to better document all of the moments, each small struggle and triumph, the ways that I changed dramatically, or slowly, or not at all. Now, 22 weeks (give or take) away from giving birth to another little human, and the intensity of it sometimes overwhelms me. But more than regret over the lost months and moments I’ve forgotten, I feel urgency right now to keep a record. Several things I’ve read lately have lit that fire inside of me.
- Luisa Weiss wrote in her last Letter from Berlin substack about her childhood summers in Italy, going to the beach, and her summers their with her sons, going to the same beach.
- Jenny Rosenstrach’s now college-age children started writing posts on her Dinner: A Love Story blog, and I remember when they were small, and it’s clear that they absorbed a childhood full of love of food and words.
- Andrea, who has been keeping the blog hula seventy since 2005, wrote last month about the joy and sacredness of the record she had been keeping, and especially reading it back to her also now grown children. “something else I underestimated: the unmitigated joy of reading old posts out loud to the humans you wrote about. one post led to another and before long, we were swimming in stories and details I had long since forgotten. I cannot explain what it felt like to read these pieces out loud to the kids for the first time. the kids, who are now 18 and 22. I cannot explain what it felt like in the room that night-- story after story, their joy, my joy. I cannot overstate this.” I cried when I read that, sitting in a dark living room after Leo’s bedtime.
I’ve sometimes struggled with this deep urge to write, but not knowing who I’m writing for. The feeling that my voice is one of a million voices, and most are much more worthy of being heard. But suddenly I’m feeling clarity in what draws me back, over and over, to a place like this. I want to keep the record, for myself, for my family. I love (love!) the way a simple dinner journal, or a handful of photographs, can become an anchor for that personal - and familial - history. In the day to day, it feels sometimes a silly exercise. But when my child (children!) are 18 and 19, as long as modern society hasn’t collapsed and the internet still exists, I want to be able to hand this to them. A small window into who I was as a human being, and who they were as small human beings. Who we all were together. I’m writing for their future selves, and mine as well. I don’t know how to get at that, exactly, but I am desperate for some documentation, and I’m tired of saying I don’t have time.
I’m sitting in our damp living room, everything sticky after a humid day yesterday, and a night and day of rain to follow. It was 90 degrees yesterday, and barely reaching 70 today. I didn’t expect how different summer would feel in this part of the world, how temperate and glorious it could be, surrounded by water, far north into Wisconsin.
Leo is sleeping, finally having settled into a consistent routine of napping each day after lunch for a few hours. I’ve already completely forgotten the struggles of the spring, when naps felt impossible, trudging mile after mile pushing the stroller, driving up and down the county, all to get him to sleep. When he wakes up, we’ll have a snack, and then go for a rainy hike, or maybe to the library, or maybe both.
For the first half hour of his nap, I got dinner ready - a pregnancy craving that I finally caved on, tater tot hotdish (made vegetarian with faux-ground beef). It struck me as I was assembling it that it’s basically a shepherd’s pie, with tater tots in place of mashed potatoes. And I thought a lot about the humble-ness of midwestern food, which I grew up on. So many places in the US and around the world have a regional food culture that’s sought after. Clam chowder in New England, barbecue in the south, tacos in Los Angeles. But apart from the occasional Chicago hot dog, what are people seeking out from the midwest? Maybe it’s that people really don’t come to the upper midwest unless they’re from here. I’ve horrified many an east coast friend and co-worker at my love of tuna noodle hot dish. I can see the ease with which much of the staple food of the upper midwest might be dismissed. Meat and dairy heavy, often reliant on things that come out of cans. But the comfort I find in those foods, and the intense nostalgia I sometimes feel for them, brings me back.
And now I live in the upper midwest, and if I want to substitute cheese curds for french fries with my burger, just about any restaurant will do that for me. I can tell you the handful of nearby parking lots and gas stations that have brat fry’s on the weekends, and every restaurant (even the Mexican restaurant) does a Friday night fish fry.
Already I wonder what food Leo will remember from his childhood, or what he’s absorbing right now. For the first few months he was in daycare here, I used to pack his lunches - even though the daycare provided lunch. We’re mostly vegetarians, I told them (but truthfully, only Jacob is a vegetarian, and I eat meat at least once a week). I packed neat little containers of hummus and veggies, and pasta and veggies, and eggs and veggies. But they told me he wanted to eat what the other kids were eating, and finally I gave in, and he’s been happily eating canned fruit cocktail and mystery meat casserole and hot ham and cheese sandwiches all summer. He comes home to mostly home-cooked, vegetable-heavy food. But sometimes we eat a frozen pizza or a box of mac n’ cheese for dinner. I don’t know. My relationship to food and the right way to eat has been complicated my whole life, due to many things, but anyway I don’t even really want to write about food right now.
I want to write about the anguish of walking through the garage with Leo, who is currently deeply obsessed with the lawn mower (mon-mowr he says, making his little mouth extra round on the o’s) and Jacob’s bicycle, which has a bike trailer attached, and which Leo loves very much to ride around in. The second we pull into the garage, he starts chanting mon-mowr! mon-mowr! We get out and spend a minute inspecting it, him looking at me so hopeful that maybe this time I’ll pull it out, and fire it up, and let him sit and watch while I push it around the yard. Then we move to talking about the bicycle, him grunting hopefully that I’ll take him for a ride, while I remind him over and over again, dada’s at work, so we can’t go for a ride right now. Finally, I bring him inside, and up the stairs, and I take off his shoes, and he stands at the baby gate blocking the top of the stairs and weeps. I have sometimes just parked in the driveway instead of the garage to bypass this whole process, but it doesn’t really work. We still end up standing in the living room, tearfully talking about the mon-mowr.
The other night, Jacob at work, I took Leo out to play in the backyard after dinner. When Jacob is home, as the one in charge of our meager gardening efforts, he’ll usually unwind the garden hose and take Leo around from plant to plant watering it. Leo, now deeply attuned to this responsibility, would not leave me alone until I also unwound the hose and watered each of the plants. Last weekend, he decided to take over, carefully filling a cup with water from his swimming pool and carrying it across the entire yard to water a particular plant in the corner.
I think I’ve been looking for some easy or obvious or natural way to document this season in my life. I take pictures and videos of Leo, of course, but I want something more. And maybe the truth is I just have to write about it. The obvious truth! Maybe I have to forego the nap I could take while he’s napping (a herculean feat for a pregnant woman!) in order to make the space I need for this. So now it’s 1:47PM, and odds are that Leo will wake up in the next ten minutes. I could’ve finished the dishes or folded the laundry or made the bed or finished some overdue work (ugh!), but my body and brain wouldn’t let me do anything but come here and write.
