For the past week I’ve had what feels like the emotional equivalent of a lump in my throat.  It’s that feeling of trying to hold back the flood of tears that threatens to breach the dam at any moment, even though you don’t know exactly what’s wrong.  Part of it is the late-autumn season which, for me, always hangs ripe and heavy with endings and goodbyes.  A few weeks before my mother died, at just this time of year, a friend’s husband died suddenly.  Although he had been sick he was very young, and the final chapter of his short life was not drawn out but abruptly slammed shut.  His death rattled me; it felt as if anything could happen, that life could pivot on a dime at a moment’s notice.  I remember sitting in a wood-paneled coffee shop near my apartment, the golden light of a late fall afternoon streaming through the long windows, and writing in my journal, “I feel as if the other shoe is about to drop.”  That’s a little what this feeling is like, as if my intuition is tuned into something that I can’t yet perceive rationally, its shadowy form lurking just beyond the horizon.

Abra is not a conventionally “easy” baby.  There are many days when she awakes in a bad mood for no apparent reason.  Today is one of those days.  I place her in the crib for her morning nap at the first sign of sleepiness, and she immediately began wailing.  Normally one to settle herself down quickly, her cries quickly escalate to frantic-sounding sobs.  I gently pad into the darkened room where she stands in her crib, her red, tear-stained face a crumpled mess.  I pull her from the crib and settle her in my lap on the creaky rocking chair, shrouding her in a soft blanket.  I think this will help.  These are the things I see mothers doing in movies and television shows, and it always works.  And maybe, if it was another Abra on another day, it would.  But today she will have none of it.  Instead, she alternates between nuzzling her head in the scoop of my shoulder and writhing like a caged animal.  She cries harder; I am making this worse.  After going through the typical assessment of what could be wrong and ascertaining that it is nothing obvious, that invisible dam finally ruptures.

As I continued to hold Abra – her sobbing, me gently crying –I realized that there is something scary and spiraling about emotions of an unspecified origin.  It makes us feel better to be intimately acquainted with the anthropology of our anger or sadness; otherwise, how do we make ourselves feel better when we don’t know what’s wrong?  Tears now flowing freely, I was overcome with a helpless feeling that there was nothing I could do for Abra, nor anything I could do for myself.  I wasn’t sure what this emotional lump was about except to say that it was lodged in a place of old wounds that will never be fully healed, pustules that flare up now and again.  Although I don’t feel consciously sad or grievous, as I listened to a friend tell the story of a coworker who suddenly died in the middle of his office, someone I didn’t know, that familiar lump rose from its resting place in my gut.  I’ve been greeted by bluebirds nearly every day for the past week, which has long been a powerful symbol of my mother’s presence.  Each time they swoop from the trees or flap their brilliant blue wings in my direction that lump makes itself known.

Soon this season will pass.  I will survive another Thanksgiving – my tenth – without my mother.  Then the effervescence of the holiday season will swallow me whole and spit me out on the other side of the New Year.  The lump will eventually subside on its own.  But today the only solution, for both of us, is to wait it out.

I decide to push us out into the world.  Normally an extrovert, it’s been hard for me to be out lately, as if the glare of humanity, glinting off my tender emotions, is a simply too harsh.  Abra continues to wail from the backseat and I know immediately that I’ve made the wrong decision.  Ten minutes later we arrive at the museum where a few of my friends are waiting, happily playing with their toddlers.  Abra has calmed down by now, but when I go to extract her from her car seat she, uncharacteristically, begins howling.   “I can’t do this today,” I whisper to her, and as soon as it becomes apparent that we are not going inside Abra quiets herself.  I point the wheels of the car toward home, that dam leaking again.  By the time I pull in the driveway Abra is fine, and so am I.  We spend a quiet afternoon at home looking at picture books, going on a walk, making dinner.  Just as quickly as the storm moved to shore it blew back out to sea.  There will be other storms, bringing fat tears that fall from the underbelly of their black clouds.  In fact, there’s probably one already forming somewhere just beyond the horizon, gathering its dark skirts.  Some storms we escape, some we seek shelter from.  Others we simply weather.

Last week The New York Times’ Travel section ran an article on Albuquerque that profiled The Church of Beethoven, described as “not church, much more than Beethoven.”  Founded in 2008 by Felix Wurman, a cellist who was seeking weekly ritual without religion, this Sunday morning chamber music series, interspersed with poetry and moments of silence, resonated with me.  All week I looked forward to going in sweet anticipation, having even arranged for a babysitter, but I awoke on Sunday morning in a foul mood, the previous night having been marked by fitful sleep brought on by another round of Abra’s teething.  When we arrived 45 minutes before the performance was to begin, only to discover that it was nearly sold out, my mood darkened.  We stood outside the converted warehouse space waiting with uncertainty for the possibility of standing room-only tickets, shifting from foot to foot as a duo of high school students played the accordion and oboe for spare change.  Everyone except me seemed to be enjoying soaking up the brisk morning sun and the music, and I wondered why I couldn’t do the same.

Once inside we stood in another long line that formed a serpentine around the perimeter of the packed room, waiting for espresso, and my black mood dug in even deeper.  Standing outside of myself it was clear that I was casting a pall over what was supposed to be an uplifting outing.  As I watched myself, simultaneously observing and chastising my behavior, I felt as if I was witnessing a runaway train that I couldn’t stop.  Ensnared in a net of my own making, I struggled desperately to escape this swift downward emotional spiral.  But like a helpless bug caught in a spider’s silken web the more I struggled the more entangled I became, inflated expectation having gotten the best of me once again.

My eyes swept over the cavernous space, which looked as if it had been outfitted from an obliging thrift store.  The rafters were strung with twinkly Christmas lights, old globes bobbed from the ceiling, and frilly lampshades were slung over antique lamps, casting pockets of warmth around the space.  The room buzzed with life:  the strains of the musicians tuning their instruments, the whoosh of the espresso machine, a timpani of chattering voices.  White light seeped through a stained glass window.  Suddenly I look to my left and notice a small vintage nightlight.  A little ceramic dog tugs at the coattails of a little ceramic boy, and the words “Let Go” are lit up at the bottom.  I point this out to Maikael, laughing, and immediately begin to feel a small shift inside myself.

It was a unique setting to listen to Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring, not a grand concert hall but a spare space.  When the conductor introduced the piece he noted that, while it has been famously arranged for large symphony orchestras, the original work was created for a small 14-instrument group like the one assembled before us.  As the opening strains of the music floated through the air, soft and slow, I heard someone cough.  I heard a violinist turn the page of her music in a papery rustle.  As the music built I heard the conductor grunt for emphasis, his fist punching the air.  I even heard the silence.  It was easy to notice these details in such an intimate setting, and by the time we reached the piece’s most iconic movement in a deep crescendo, the Shaker tune Simple Gifts, any darkness I felt that morning had been suffused with light.

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight

After listening to a local poet we hear a two-person concerto, also by Copeland.  Coming quick on the heels of Appalachian Spring, the clarinetist remarks how that work always reminds him that less is more.  “As much as we like to think that things like iPhones are making our lives cleaner and simpler, they’re not,” he says, a wave of knowing chuckles rippling through the audience, causing the man seated next to me to actually put down his iPhone.  “Copeland always reminds me that all we really need are a few well-chosen connections and activities to make a life.”  These words settle deep into me, a sentiment I have heard a thousand times in different configurations, but which pierce me differently this particular morning.  When the clarinetist introduces the concerto, he notes that while a symphony is like a city and what we’ve just listened to is a village, this concerto is like being at home.  He is right.  It is quiet and intimate; I can hear each gasping breath he takes.  As he sways lyrically to the simple tune I think of the days when people gathered at home and listened to one another play music as evening settled in around them.  I have a dawning awareness that what I was searching for when I came here today was life like a concerto, a drawing in close filled with soft, humble ritual and simple rhythms.  And while this morning has offered the place of easy repose that I was hoping for, I realize that I need not have left home to access it.  The real “letting go” is learning to take a piece of this experience with me and carry it forward into my everyday life, where the concerns of the spirit are bound by nothing more than the modest walls of home.

Abra is taking her first wobbly steps into the world.  Like everything she does – from her delivery into this bright life, to the way she eats, to how she learned to crawl – her progress has been slow but steady.  She has been cruising for months, using anything at standing-height to help propel herself around a room.  For weeks I’ve listened to others’ declarations that she’d be walking “any day now,” knowing from past experience that she was nowhere near that milestone.  Although her personality is just unfurling from its tight coil, I can already tell that she is someone who must fully master a skill and feel confident in her abilities before moving forward.  This is nothing like me.  I have always crashed through life, leaping before I look, my head often lagging behind my heart.  I rarely read instructions, intuiting my way through thick problems.  I throw caution to the wind.  Needless to say I was a very early walker, and as parents are wont to do, I projected my own unfair expectations on Abra, assuming that she, too, would follow my trajectory.

After doing everything in my power to encourage her walking, I finally accepted the words that I had spoken so hollowly to every person who asked if she was walking:  Not yet, but in her own time.  As soon as I released my death-grip on the idea that she should be walking by now, she lunged from the coffee table to the couch, her little legs hitching forward.

I know that Abra has a great deal to teach me about patience and letting go.

I have never understood why parents spend so much time fawning over their child’s developmental milestones, the ones that every single human being passes through at one time or another.  Now here I am, snapping so many photos of her first steps in the world that I could create a flip book of her journey.  I have taken dozens of video clips trying to capture a significant sequence of sturdy steps, and I watch them over and over and over again, as if each loop will reveal something previously unseen.  Puzzled by my own behavior, it finally dawned on me as I was running this weekend – my old, practiced legs having carried me thousands of miles over a lifetime – that I wasn’t trying to memorialize a moment so much as I was seeking to understand myself.  Each time I see Abra working hard to master a basic skill that I tend to take for granted, such as eating or walking, I can’t help but marvel at the fact that I went through the same process.  I think of the years of slow and steady practice that were involved in allowing me to run for a full half hour around a sunny park on a crisp autumn morning.  As I learn to be a runner, huffing and puffing my way through the trees, I reach a point halfway through my run where I feel like giving up.  I remind myself to take it one step at a time, to concentrate on the slip of trail just in front of me and no more.

I love the motion blur.

On Saturday afternoon, as light streamed through our bedroom window, Abra launched herself from our desk toward the middle of the room, a clear runway of carpet stretching ahead of her.  Usually she takes a few halting steps, her arms raised overhead like a goalpost, a smile stretched gleefully over her face, before tumbling down.  But this time I stood in front of her with arms outstretched, urging her forward.  As I shuffled backward she confidently walked toward me, taking one and two steps, then a dozen, then a record twenty before falling down in a heap.  Struggling to understand the difference between this and previous attempts, I realized that she had been focused on me, that proverbial slip of trail just in front of her.  And in one gasping breath I suddenly understood a basic fact that had somehow escaped me all these years:  My own mother or father had been by my side as I took the same tentative steps into the world, agonizing as I teetered and threatened to fall flat on my face.  I was overcome by a rush of love and gratitude as I thought of the hundreds of hours that someone stood by my side, waiting to catch me if I fell, teaching me to move through life in the only way possible:  One foot in front of the other.  No matter what divergent roads our tired legs may have carried us down, despite the loneliness we sometimes feel, we all learned to walk with the help of somebody else.

We have had a hard day, filled with too much crying and too little napping.  Everything feels ragged and raw, as if we’re on the brink of disaster, ready to skitter into bedlam at any moment.  I am grateful when the clock ticks over to 6 pm, signaling the beginning of the end of the day.  I place Abra in the bathtub and, for reasons unknown, she begins wailing.  Her tiny chest heaves wet sobs, tears splashing into the lukewarm water below.  The shallow valley between her eyebrows glows crimson, a physical manifestation of how upset she is.  There is a visceral part of me that wants to scream back, stuff cotton balls in my ears, swaddle her in a towel and trundle her off to bed or, at the least, clutch my temples in despair.  But my overriding impulse is to slip into the chaos right alongside her.  The harder she cries, the greater my desire to sit with her and endure.

That evening I head to yoga class, my first time back on the mat without Abra since I was 40 weeks pregnant (which, as you can imagine, was not a very vigorous practice).  It is a yin style class, meaning that poses are held for longer periods, upward of five minutes.  I have never attempted this method, usually gravitating towards classes that move more quickly through poses, which seems “harder” and therefore, I reason, more worthy of my time, money and effort.  I sit cross-legged on the mat, simply breathing.  At first it is easy.  Then, after a few minutes, it becomes increasingly difficult to support my posture, and I begin shifting uncomfortably.  We swoop our arms overhead in giant circles, our palms coming together at the top in prayer pose, then easing down gently in front of our chests.  As we repeat this motion time and again the instructor reminds us that yoga is often a physical manifestation of our lives, this pose a tangible reminder of how we are often “brought back to ourselves.”

The next morning I go running.  I am halfway through a training program, working my way toward being able to complete a 5K run.  Unlike Maikael, who is a descendant of the Tarahumara Indians, a tribe of famed runners, my body is not built for running.  Whereas his long, lean legs could seemingly carry him forever, mine are drumsticks that begin aching almost immediately.  Within two days of starting the training program my ankles are throbbing with every leaden step, and I convince myself that I am not cut out for this.  After each run I do long series of complicated stretches, which don’t seem to help.  I have inquiring conversations with exercise scientists and long-time runners, wondering if I should throw in the towel, but the general consensus seems to be, “Take it easy, and keep going.”

Slung over the edge of the porcelain bathtub I “shh” over and over and over again, like a mantra, rubbing gentle circles between the scaffolding of Abra’s bird-like shoulder blades.  She stops for a moment, studying me with her doe eyes, and just when I think she’s finished she winds up again.  I continue my “shh-ing” and my patting for what feels like hours, but is probably only 10 minutes, breathing in and out, in and out.  For reasons unknown she suddenly stops, picks up the gauzy loops of the loofah sponge, and begins happily babbling.  We have made it to the other side.

Back on the mat we are descending into “pigeon pose.”  My front leg twists into a hairpin, my back leg a rod reclining behind me.  Much like the breathing it is easy at first, but as the minutes tick by heat radiates into the deepest layers of my thigh’s muscle tissue.  The impulse to release the pose and seek relief is gnawing at me, but the instructor, as if tuning into my internal radio broadcast, urges us to, “Stay with it.”  So I do.  I breathe in and out, in and out, and soon I am riding the wave of the heat.  Rather than focusing on how much it hurts I find my mind drifting to other topics of mental chatter, and it’s then that I know I’ve pushed through to the other side.

As I run I huff and puff, a steam engine charging around the park.  The first couple of laps are easy, but soon my energy begins to flag and I can feel my pace slowing.  I am aware of every heel strike against the pavement that sends shock waves through my legs, and each sharp breath singes my lungs.  But like The Little Engine That Could I find myself repeating to myself, “I think I can, I think I can,” and I stay with it.  Suddenly I realize that my ankles no longer ache, and I know in a rush of adrenaline that I’m going to make it through the rest of the training program.  I am Charlie in his great glass elevator, crashing through the ceiling of the chocolate factory, soaring high above the world.  I am floating and free, not just riding but inhabiting the wave.  Just when things should be getting their most difficult I hit my stride, and what was agony moments ago is suddenly effortless.

I remember someone telling me toward the end of my pregnancy, “Just when you think you can’t take it anymore is when you know it’s time to push.”  I can certainly remember that moment in my own labor when I crossed the valley of despair and emerged on the other side, knowing with every fiber of my being that I could complete the journey.  There is something about having given birth that has changed how I move through the world.  It is not that things are any easier:  I still want to run screaming from the room when Abra wails uncontrollably, and release the yoga pose, and abandon the run.  The difference is that I don’t.  There is an odd satisfaction – perhaps even pleasure? – in going the distance.  Each of us learns this lesson a different way (I am aware that some run actual marathons to fully live what it means to go the distance, something I don’t think I could ever do), but for me giving birth is what shifted my perspective.  It taught me that I’m capable of running a marathon, even if I’m a sprinter by nature.  And I’m beginning to see the benefits of learning to approach life as the marathon it is.  I’ve spent a lot of my life tearing through experiences, never letting myself sink into the discomfort that is inherent in the “working through” stage of any long-distance race.  But I’m beginning to see that in doing so I’ve robbed myself of the euphoria you feel when you push through to the other side, that moment when you realize that, even though there are miles yet to run, you are going to be just fine.

Last week I wrote about how sometimes we just have to surrender in order for things to move forward; that “the moment we stop trying so hard things just happen, exceeding our wildest expectations.”  Thanks to the generous introduction of a mutual friend, I had an opportunity to meet the publisher of Edible Santa Fe, a local magazine that is part the broader, national Edible communities, that I have long admired and pined to write for.  I happened to meet her on the day the fall issue was going to press, a day in which she unexpectedly found herself with a blank page to fill in said issue.  I happened to have the impulse to send her a few pieces of my food-related writing, and she happened to like one of them enough to occupy that blank page.

I relate this story in detail because it’s a perfect example of “life in pencil” at work; sometimes I have a hard time explaining what “life in pencil” is, and it’s often best to illustrate its inner-workings through real-life examples.  I’ve always been fond of the quote, “Luck favors the prepared.”  There were a lot of mysterious, serendipitous circumstances at work in my favor.  But I was ready for this opportunity to come by way, and although I didn’t know it, I’d been preparing for this moment for years.  Still, I can’t deny that there is a touch of divinity at work, the never-ending dance of the rational and the magical that is so often my life.

Yesterday, after receiving word that the magazine had hit newsstands, I spent all morning running around town trying to procure a copy, to no avail.  Finally I dashed over to the editor’s house, where a tower of white cardboard boxes sat stacked in the carport.  I used my car key to slash through the tape, a tingle of nervousness and excitement coursing through me.  After reading and re-reading the article approximately a million times, I had Maikael take this photo, which I love.

I am holding a manifest dream in each hand, cradling my present and my future.  It’s a reminder that I can go after two things at the same time, that I need not put my dreams on hold, that there is no “right way” to go about accomplishing goals.  Just after Maikael snapped this photo we noticed a brilliant rainbow dissolving out of the blackberry storm clouds, as if I had literally discovered the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Today I am reveling in a feeling we don’t often get to celebrate in life:  that of a dream come true.  I’m particularly proud that my first piece of published writing revolves around my mother.  Although writing has always been an important part of my life, it was shortly after she died that I began writing in earnest.  The fact that this story concerns Thanksgiving, the day she died, feels like coming full circle.  My mom always believed in my abilities, and because of her life and her death, she is the reason I’m on this journey today.

If you are local to Central New Mexico, you can pick up a printed copy of the magazine at one of these locations.  If you live outside of the area, you can read an online copy of the article here (“flip” to page 50/51).

This morning in my gardening class Nissa talked about not getting too bogged down by creating the perfect garden.  “It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae,” she said, concerned solely with what the experts say is “right.”  “The important thing,” she emphasized, “is to enjoy yourself.”  These words, simple as they may be, are rife with complexity and contemplation, and it immediately got me thinking what good advice it was for living a life.  How often, I thought to myself, do I get mired in the day-to-day details that don’t really matter and forget the big picture?  How often do I tune in to others’ opinions before tuning into myself and my own sense of enjoyment?  Sometimes I feel like I am a radio dial being madly spun between stations, forever on “Scan,” never quite settling into my own groove.  It’s easy to spend our lives searching for the optimum and forget that “good enough” is usually just that.  Sometimes we are paralyzed into inaction, waiting for just the right moment, the ideal circumstances, to present themselves before moving forward.  But if that is our metric, most of us – myself included –might wait a lifetime to do anything.

Beauty in imperfection

I saw a great deal of this behavior at play in my work as a career counselor, especially with younger clients.  Having grown up in a world of so much choice and abundance it made choosing the “right” path an anxiety-provoking affair.  “Just do something – anything,” I would often say.  Although I often have a hard time living this simple truth, doing something is generally better than doing nothing, no matter how imperfect.  (Sometimes, I realize, sitting still is the best course of action, but even then we are doing something, even if the results aren’t outward or tangible.  Internal work, though largely invisible, is difficult and important.)  Because I am often disappointed when things don’t fully live up to (overinflated) expectations, during the past year my personal mantra has become, “Something is better than nothing.”  I don’t mean this to be defeatist and under-achieving.  Rather, this mindset helps me to accept and appreciate the moment for what it is.

Tomorrow I will head to the airport hours before the sun rides over the Sandia Mountains, bound for Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on a whirlwind 64-hour adventure.  It is a long way to go for the weekend.  The petulant part of me that wishes I was leaving today and coming back on Monday , that longs for a more leisurely getaway than I can afford.  But an even larger part of me is grateful to be going at all.  It is the part of me that is looking forward to the renewed pleasures of traveling light, reading a book in-flight, eating peaceful meals, having time to do yoga, focusing on my writing, enjoying the fall colors in a part of the country I’ve never been to, kindling online friendships in person, and simply being. And while I think the “old me” would have enjoyed this weekend, I don’t think she could have fully appreciated it.

Fall blew in over the weekend.  On Saturday morning Abra and I took an early morning walk, donning jackets for the first time in months as we braced ourselves against the wind and cold that stirred around us.  I noticed that, literally overnight, the trees had begun to shed their leaves, leaving a carpet of crunchy brown at their feet.  Although Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer it rarely feels that way in New Mexico, with hot days often lingering well into October.  But this year feels different, for reasons not just pertaining to the weather.  It’s funny to have a child born on the cusp of a season.  The turn toward fall has taken on added weight and meaning, as I am discovering that the years are suddenly delineated in new ways.  Waking up on September 8 felt a bit like New Year’s morning; change was palpable as the world opened itself to new possibilities.  As an adult I don’t feel this same shift on my birthday – the world operates in fundamentally the same way as it did the day before – but beginning year two alongside Abra opens up a world of freedoms that I’ve been longing for.

Fall is here

No one knows how they’ll react when a baby enters their lives, which is part of why making the leap to parenthood, in its enormity and permanence, is so terrifying.  Our fundamental beliefs about ourselves are both challenged and confirmed, rattling the delicate cage that encircles the core of our beings.  It can be grossly uncomfortable to discover that you are not the person you thought you were, capable of actions and feelings you didn’t know you were capable of, even if they are largely positive.  In the same breath, the rigors and stresses of parenthood reinforce personal truths which, while unsettling, has the potential to be deeply clarifying.

Although I might have listed “independent” as an auxiliary personality trait – important, but not at the top of the list – this past year revealed otherwise.  I visited a psychic many years ago who described my personality as a horse running free in a big, fenced-in pasture.  “Even if you don’t see the fences on a day-to-day basis, you know they’re there.”  In other words, I need to be free to roam wild while sensing the parameters, and most of my life has passed in this bounded-boundless way.  But this past year?  I felt as if I was constantly running into fences.   I remember when Abra was about three weeks old we encountered a day that I’ve come to refer to as “The Terrible Saturday.”  I spent ten hours in a chair trying to nurse a baby that didn’t want to eat.  After frantically calling Heidi, who wisely suggested that I get out of the house for a change to scenery, I took a late afternoon walk around our park.  The ill-fitting maternity shirt I wore was covered in vomit.  My hair was a mess.  I had hardly slept the night before.  Feeling a bit like Dracula emerging from his crypt in the midday sun, I squinted against the glare of life going on around — and without — me.  As I took in a park full of carefree people enjoying a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, fat, hot tears began rolling down my cheeks as I pushed the stroller around the park, for in that moment all I saw was a future of being tied down to an oversized chair stretching before me.

My souful daughter, taken this week

Now, months later, I am able to reframe my situation as not tied down but tethered, and certainly not as intensively as those early months demanded. As the scope of her world widens, Abra needs me perhaps not less but in different ways – ways that, I’m beginning to see, involve a lot more independence on each of our parts.  And I can already tell that the wild horse in me is better suited to this stage of parenting.  So with the simple flip of a calendar, a new season of my life rushed in last week.  I finally feel as if I’m on the cusp of reclaiming parts of myself that circumstances have required me to set to the side.  I’ve got some exciting plans on the horizon that I’m looking forward to sharing with you in the coming months as I prepare to stretch my wings again:

• I am getting back into shape!  I just started a “Couch to 5K” program, and am reviving my lapsed yoga practice.
• The next four Thursday mornings I will take a class that my friend, Nissa, is hosting  in her beautiful backyard garden called, “Inside, Outside:  Exploring Ourselves Through the Garden.” (Isn’t that the best title?)  I look forward to learning more about myself and gardening.
• After years of intending to go, I am finally going to make it to the Festival of the Cranes at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge.  As I’ve written before I’m passionate, although largely uneducated, about winged creatures, and the sight of wintering sandhill cranes is supposed to be breathtaking.  In other news, I was completely delighted when one of Abra’s first words was “bird.”
• In two weeks I am going to Dani Shapiro’s memoir-writing workshop at Kripalu, a long-held dream.  As a bonus, I am rooming with my blog friend, Kristen, of Motherese.  It promises to be a magical weekend.
• Have you heard of Freedom?  It’s a productivity application for your computer that locks you away from the internet for up to eight hours at a time.  I think it’s what I need to help me cut down on my on-line time.  This may be my last “full-time” year with Abra and I’d like to create memories with her that don’t involve spending hours a day on Facebook.
• Now that I’m no longer operating in survival mode, I am going to start taking some tangible steps towards starting a writing career.  I’ve got some exciting news to share on that account in a few weeks!

Like my friend Meghan, I’m a big believer in putting it all out there and seeing what flows back.  While scary and vulnerable, there’s real power in concretizing your goals.  So, in the words of Meghan, “Universe, do your thing.”

What goals are you working toward right now?  Do you consider yourself independent, or is that phrase fraught?

“This is not how I thought it would go,” I say, propped up in my bed in triage, watching the light contractions ebb and flow on the monitor.  “It never is.”  It was still dark when we crept through the empty streets on our way to the hospital in the first hours of Labor Day, the significance of the day not lost on me.  The seasons of the world, and of my life, were slowly turning.  The swollen clouds that had made the atmosphere thick and unbearable the past few weeks had suddenly cleared, making way for a sliver of moon that shone above.  We were on the cusp of a new moon, yet another sign that my old life had begun its slow demise.  Our microwave, a stalwart companion that had served us unwaveringly for 10 years, suddenly stopped working two days prior.  My car battery had died twice in the past six weeks, most recently leaving me stranded in the grocery store parking lot nearly 41 weeks pregnant.

The night before we had eaten fried chicken and watched a movie before heading to bed, but I had been restless and wired and couldn’t sleep.  I sat eating cereal and checking my horoscope by the dim glow of the computer screen at the kitchen table before settling back down, only to be woken suddenly an hour later, a thin stream of chartreuse-colored amniotic fluid leaking down my leg.  Babies who are post-term frequently defecate in utero, turning the water that surrounds them frighteningly hyper-color.  While it doesn’t pose a direct risk to the baby, the chance of infection is elevated and a 12-hour clock toward delivery starts ticking.  As one nurse explained to me, “It’s way more fussy when your water has broken because you’re committed to doing something.”

It is amazing to me how quickly we get attached to an idea of how we think things will go, even when we know rationally that rarely happens. When I took my birthing class, the instructor warned us time and again that it was important to be flexible with our birth plan when the day came.  I nodded in understanding while secretly believing my best-laid plans were impervious to being rewritten.  Despite my efforts to remain open and flexible, a clear vision of how my birth would go had solidified in my mind:  I would labor at home for hours before going to the hospital, I would labor 100% naturally, and I would forgo the hospital’s standard post-delivery Pitocin drip, a common labor-induction drug that is also used to prevent hemorrhaging.  Oh, and that was another thing:  I wasn’t going to be induced.

After rushing out of the house – so confident was I in my plan that I hadn’t finished packing – I was now being monitored while we waited for a room to become available on the labor and delivery floor.  My contractions plodded along as the hours dragged on, slow and steady, just like everything else in my pregnancy had.  But I was still only one centimeter dilated and my broken, meconium-laced water had set a clock ticking.  Hours after arriving at the hospital, my midwife and I had a heart to heart conversation.  I could continue to wait for labor to begin on its own, but should I need to be induced — as I likely would, given how things were going — starting an induction late in the day might mean laboring long into the night, at which point exhaustion often sets in.  I went deep inside myself to a place where I could clearly see the handwriting on the wall:  this labor wasn’t going like I thought it would, and the quicker I accepted this new reality, the better.  I surprised myself by how quickly I released my death-grip on my idea of the way I thought things should be.  Six hours after arriving at the hospital a cervical-ripening “balloon” was inserted and a Pitocin drip was started, and within 30 minutes my contractions were reliably strong and suddenly just two to three minutes apart.

Early labor, final smiles

Like everything else that had happened that day, active labor came as a complete shock.  Despite the weeks of prenatal yoga classes, the birthing course, the books read, the countless conversations shared, nothing could have prepared me for the next 13 hours.   My memories are spotty, bright moments of clarity piercing the darkness, and at times I felt like I was looking at life through a funhouse mirror.  In the early hours I intently watched the clock and studied the contractions on the monitor, each rise and fall charting my course.  But as I fell deeper down the rabbit hole – for that is the closest feeling I can compare it to – I became more attuned to my interior life as the outside world slowly slipped away.  My intuition kicked in in powerful ways, my body seeming to know exactly what it needed.  Time took on a bizarre quality; there were hours that felt like minutes, and minutes that felt like hours.  As the clocked ticked life became smaller and smaller, such that my existence felt as if it was balanced on a pinpoint.  For the first time in my life I understood what it meant to live completely in the moment, shouldering my way through each crippling contraction, sinking fully into the rest between, setting a steady rhythm of holding on and letting go.  I remember someone asking me to make a decision about something inane – the temperature of the room, the firmness of a pillow – and responding firmly, “I can only talk about right now.  This moment.”

I was running a marathon of indeterminate length, in which the finish line was unknown.  And it was this uncertainty that rattled me to my core, eventually leading me to feel that I was on a runaway train.  After languishing in the “transition phase” – often the most intense but shortest part of labor – for six hours, panic set in as I felt my contractions slipping out my grip and my labor began spinning out of control.  While I had prepared myself fastidiously for the physical rigors of labor, I never accounted for how mental the process would be.  As soon as I lost my mental grip the physical part followed:  the contractions slowed down, their reliable pace becoming ragged and uneven.  Like any good marathoner, I knew I needed a brief pit stop to regroup if I was to continue the race.  A low-dose painkiller that took the edge of the contractions, providing 30 minutes of reprieve before wearing off, was just enough to bridge the valley of my despair.

Once I made that slow, jagged climb to 10 centimeters, I felt like I had summited the mountain.  Perhaps it tells you something about me that the physical act of pushing was far easier than the mental acrobatics of active labor.  Like most things in life, the thinking about something is far more difficult than the actual doing.  One of my crystal-clear memories is being quietly ringed by a small circle of people and feeling the quiet focus of everybody who surrounded me, silently urging me on.  After an hour of productive pushing Abra emerged, her lusty cry filling the room.  She was pink and healthy, a shock of coal hair matted to her head.  I had been plagued by a nagging feeling throughout my pregnancy that something wasn’t quite right, and when she was placed on my chest moments later I incredulously cried, “She’s perfect!”

First moments

Even in that overwhelming moment it struck me that, as is so often the case in life, I had worried about all of the wrong things.  And yet, despite all my worrying, I had still managed to be broadsided by the sheer force and intensity of labor, with its mental traps and pitfalls.  As a natural-born “sprinter” I hadn’t bargained on the relentlessness of the experience.  I didn’t know that I was so strong, that my intuition was to be trusted implicitly, that, as my doula said to me at one point, “you have what you need in every moment.”  I never could have imagined last September 7th that the lessons I learned in labor would continue to reverberate through my first year of motherhood and, I imagine, for the rest of my life.

Last moments of the first year

Happy First Birthday, Abra!  This past year has been an altogether different marathon than how I spent my last Labor Day, but you are teaching me daily, your reluctant student, to pace myself, to trust myself, and above all to live my life in this one precious moment.

I’m not going to lie:  it’s been a hard week.  A really hard week. Maikael has been out of town on business and, like clockwork, Abra always chooses this time to cut new teeth.  The days are punctuated by crying, screaming, wailing, shrieking and fussiness that persist for hours on end, and the nights don’t offer much reprieve.  Despite my best efforts to stay calm, I am frayed.  As the author of an article I recently read said, “I don’t speak crying.”

At times like this, I search hard for life’s small but unexpected pleasures.  Luckily for me, they’ve been offered up in abundance this week.  Upon the recommendation of a friend who used to be a local librarian, Abra and I made a point to attend the Ernie Pyle Storytime.  Set under the leafy arms of an old tree, toddlers plopped down on colorful blankets to listen to stories, poems, and songs.  We played finger games as the sun peeked through the branches, casting a dappled kaleidoscope on the ground below.  Abra was more interested in the little girl sitting next to her, but I was content to sit in such a lovely spot for half an hour.

Afterward we peeked inside the tiny library, which is actually the former home of Ernie Pyle, a famed foreign war correspondent.  Inside, memorabilia from Pyle’s life is cleverly displayed amongst stacks of books.

Looking like a bibliophile’s dream house, old closets play host to towers of books.

The converted living room, which still boasts the original fireplace, houses the travel section.

We passed through the old kitchen to get to the children’s reading room, undoubtedly an old bedroom packed to the hilt with literature.  It had the feel not of a library but of a small town bookstore, an edited collection suited to browsing.  Completely charming, and a tangible reminder that bigger isn’t always better.

As we left the house, I noticed a beacon of green at the end of the street, a shimmering mirage in the late summer heat.  I was delighted to discover Hyder Park, a shady expanse of undulating emerald hills dotted by mature trees.  What a find in the middle of this high desert city!  Certainly a place to return with a picnic lunch.

One afternoon I went to the thrift store in search of picture frames, and as I was pawing through bins I stumbled upon a tray of old Polaroid cameras.  A number of my friends are Polaroid aficionados, and while I don’t consider myself a photographer, I’ve long admired the dreamy, ethereal quality of the images that the camera produces.  On a whim, I picked up a $6 Spectra and decided to buy it.  I don’t tend to do things just for fun; my inclination is to spend time at tasks that are part of some larger, productive goal.  I am also apt to invest my energies in activities that I feel confident or proficient in (i.e., not photography).  There was something thrilling in purchasing a piece of equipment that I have absolutely no clue how to use (seriously: I don’t even know how to turn the thing on), in pursuit of a pastime in which I hope the end result will be pure, idle pleasure:  a hobby in the truest sense of the word.

Finally, I am grateful to Trader Joe’s Spinach Ricotta Ravioli.  Abra devoured an entire bowl at lunch, offering the only smile of the day.

What small and unexpected pleasures are YOU grateful for this week?

Last week I had lunch at a friend’s house, and as we munched on chicken salad sandwiches she asked me what I had been up to since I last saw her.  I stared at her blankly.  Not only could I not remember the last time I’d seen her, I couldn’t recall a single thing I’d done, my memories an inky smudge.  Time has taken on a funny quality this summer.  Even sitting here today, typing these words, I struggle to remember how I spent the days – which felt so full and packed at the time – that made up this season.  I know I’m not alone in feeling that summer has disappeared before my eyes like a clever magic trick, all of the goals, dreams and best intentions having slipped through my fingers once again.  Every May my friend, Meghan, and I excitedly share our summer plans through letters penned on milky sheets of stationery, and every August we regret everything we didn’t get around to.  (I wish I’d planted a garden!  I never made it to the summer concern series!  We didn’t take a single road trip!)

Working back through time, my friend and I finally calculated that it had been a month since we’d last seen each other.  So rattled was I that an entire month of my life was a complete blur that I sat down at my computer to thumb through the photos I’d taken on my iPod to jog my memory:

Adventures in eating

Dinner and drinks on the patio, enjoying the sunset

The children's museum

An early morning at the Botanical Gardens

Taking a breather in Santa Fe

Learning to stand

Summer storms

Two exceptionally good books

What struck me is what I suspected all along:  life had been full, but unremarkable.  There were were no major mileposts to mark my journey.  My camera was crammed with everyday moments, small but special.  When, I wonder, will I finally adopt the mindset that those moments are the mileposts?

Despite my sadness that the summer has passed me by, I’ve spent the past few weeks moaning incessantly about the heat, which presses down on me from all directions.  At the grocery store I skip the strawberries, which have passed from small and succulent to overly large and dry, as if they’re trying unsuccessfully to hang on to the season.   As I took a walk around the park this morning I felt a chilly bite in the air, the first blush of fall.  A small thrill shivered through me when I heard the rumble of a big yellow school bus as it wended it way through the streets, marking the first day of school. I am ever-conflicted, lamenting what didn’t happen, wishing away what did, pining for what’s to come.  Here I am, singing summer’s siren song before Labor Day is even here.  The truth is, one of my favorite things about living in New Mexico is that we will be blessed with warm days well into October.  There is no reason to write off the season quite yet, and in these waning days I can keep reaching for those delights I haven’t gotten around to (yet):

homemade ice cream
making a peach pie
a trip to the local pool
an early morning walk in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains

The garden can wait until next year.