Same As It Ever Was

For all the thematic tension I managed to milk from my looming 40th birthday in the course of this blog, as it actually loomed large, I barely mentioned it.

(Can anyone say denial?)

Well, anyway, it was yesterday.

Tra la la!

As for how it feels and all of that, I will only say, you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? You may ask yourself, am I right or am I wrong? You may ask yourself, how do I work this? And the days go by…

Dated

Me: Today, we listen to 80s music.

Chicken Little: What is that?

Chicken Noodle: I don't know.

Seven Candles, Burning Bright

Today is the seventh anniversary of the birth and death of my first child. There was a time when I thought it would get easier each year. Now I think, it doesn't.

First comes a frantic stemming of the tide. But it comes anyway—a massive tidal wave of grief. I cry for days. I mean, really, why not?

One of the most challenging aspects of this whole affair (yes, there are many) has been the inherent loneliness that comes with being the bearer of something so miserable that most people won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. From the get-go, the edges and depths of this experience were something only a few of my contemporaries even tried to comprehend, let alone address. I can count on one-and-a-half hands those who have really gone there with me in seven years, and several of them are bound to me by blood, married to me, or I had to pay.

Perhaps the death of a baby is just one of those life-situations irrevocably fraught with peril. I’ve always known that everyone did what they were able. But that didn’t make it any less lonely.

One silver lining of this whole affair (yes, there are many) is my chickens. Not just their blessed existence, of course, but their reaction to this day. I always intended for our family history to be something that was out in the open for them—not overly dramatic, but truthful. So once a year we go to the cemetery to visit the brother they never knew. And each year, I am surprised and delighted by the ways that Noodle and Little transform the experience for us all.

Last weekend, Chicken Noodle began the planning. “What will we bring to him? Ooo—candy,” she moaned, like it was crack cocaine.

“How about a bouquet?” said Chicken Little, who is three and prides herself on her growing vocabulary.

“Candy,” sighed Noodle, still lost in an imaginary-sugar-induced fantasy.

“Candy,” agreed Little with a reverent whisper.

“No, I know,” said Noodle, who is five and has to have the last word, even if it means trumping her own idea. “We’ll bake him a cake. But we’ll eat it! At his cemetery! And we’ll leave him one piece right there by his name. And we’ll put heart candles on it! And we’ll sing”—she broke into a warbling tune—“’Happy birthday, lovey boy!’”

All I’ve wanted was for someone to validate his existence, honor my pain, love me there, and make me laugh. I could never have guessed that it would be my own children who would do this the very best of all.

Off to bake a cake…

Happy New You! Part IV

The chickens turned three and five last week. I am still not sure how we all got here, let alone in one piece. But I suppose every parent feels that way.

At the park over the weekend, a father, while pushing his 20-month-old son in the swing, asked, “How old are your girls?” After my answer, he said, “Oh, so you’re on easy street now, huh?”

Easy street? Is that where I am? I do vaguely remember things being more difficult even just a year ago. But I wouldn’t say parenthood has morphed into a day at the spa.

Yes, there is very little ambiguous, ear-piercing crying in my life anymore. I gave away my stroller two weeks ago. If you hand the chickens a hairbrush, they just might brush their own hair. And never again in this lifetime shall I wear breast pads.

But these days, when Chicken Noodle finds my actions disagreeable, she lets me know with an ear-piercing and entirely unambiguous insult. “You stupid pooty booty head Mommy!”

And when I haul her off to her room for a time-out, she brings to the battle new advantages—40 pounds of muscle and a strong left hook.

And this morning after I started the bread maker and left the room, Chicken Little got into the cabinet, climbed up on the counter, and added several new ingredients, including dishwater.

And if I leave them alone together for too long, the scene inevitably transforms into four-star girl-on-girl wrestling, complete with biting, scratching and occasional nudity.

I suspected that Park Dad didn’t want to hear any of this.

I finally answered, “Things are pretty great, yeah. But they just change. Some pieces get easier, some get harder.”

He looked at me like I was a three-headed alien bearing news of the world’s imminent demise. Then he chose to treat me as an unfortunate anomaly. “I can’t wait until he’s four!” he proclaimed.

The one thing I hope I’m learning after five years of motherhood is to quit waiting for the perfect tomorrow and start living the imperfect today. There’s always frosting somewhere, if you look for it.

Bend Film: Portal to Blissville

The Universe must have heard my siren call to the aging process, my little shout-out to 39, because last weekend was one of those rare times when the stars aligned and every single thing that happened made me want throw my arms in the air and sing like Julie Andrews.

Here’s how the hard facts lined up:
A) Birthday
B) Press pass to the Bend Film Festival
C) Captain Daddy willing and able to liberate me from motherhood for the better part of three days

Sounds pretty good, huh? But the hard facts never explain everything. Last year, the hard facts were that I was in New York City for my birthday weekend. The trip was undeniably incredible. But I will admit that on the day of my birthday I couldn’t help but feel a little bit sad that I wasn’t with my peeps (except for my main peep Captain Daddy). No reason to complain—it was 70 degrees and sunny, I spent the day walking through Central Park and visiting the Met. But something was missing.

This year the magic started with Bend Film’s opening night party and didn’t let up until the Chickens sang me “Happy Birthday” for the 15th time. In between were a hundred tiny miracles.

I drank Rainier beer with a filmmaker who made a movie about D.B. Cooper, my grandfather (okay, his movie (www.theskyjacker.com) was about the hijacker; my grandfather was just a regular guy with the same name). I met a woman who journeyed to Antarctica with the eco-conservation group Sea Shepherd to fight illegal whaling four years in a row; I sat next to her while watching footage of her in a Zodiac, zipping under the prow of a Japanese ship (www.attheedgeoftheworld.com). I met a trio of filmmakers in their 20s whose film was flipping brilliant and who swept the awards (no late blooming for these little buggers: www.theatticdoormovie.com).

I ran into friends I hadn’t seen in ages. I made all sorts of new friends. I saw amazing films. I saw one heck of a sunset from the roof of a downtown building.

I saw a movie about a guy and a bike and cancer that made me want to go right home and hug everyone I love. I did. Then I went back downtown and hugged all sorts of other people, because after four days of soaking up tons of energy and story and creativity in the company of others, I loved everyone. By Sunday I was on such a Bend Film high, I kissed the director of operations, even though I’d just met her.

I know! I don’t know what happened to me, but it was incredible. Like ecstasy, you know? Yeah, me neither.

Bend Film, which totally rocks the Kasbah, had a lot to do with my little trip to Blissville. It helped that my expectations for the weekend weren’t already sky-high (as they were for NYC, or my what-the-heck-was-that? class reunion (see The Lost Weekend)). Surprise rapture is always better than premeditated rapture. And it didn't hurt that it was my birthday.

But I finished those four days with such an existential buzz that I might venture to say that powerful joy and connection is always out there somewhere, should we just be bold and brave enough to go searching for it.

Happy New You! Part III

This Sunday is my 39th birthday. 40 has been looming large this year: A Hindenburg blocking the sun, inflated by the hot air of my 20th high school reunion, Facebook, an offer of anti-aging products from my dermatologist and the realization there is little chance I’ll publish a book by the Big 4-0.

If 40 is when the weight of the past is equally balanced with the weight of the future on a life-sized scale, all the taking stock and anxiety that comes with it might be utterly requisite. (I am a Libra; naturally I will provide a scale metaphor with overdramatized consequences). This mid-life crisis stuff is not to be snickered at. I see the two halves of life pulling at each other in a matched tug-of-war, the past desperately trying to justify itself and the future taunting with undivulged secrets.

I spent the last year feeling 40 coming like a freight train, me the shrieking girl in red heels and fluttering skirt tied to the tracks. Count on me to get ahead of myself, fear the future when it’s still ten miles away. But now that here-comes-39, I am secretly a little bit excited about 40, and not just because I have another year until it hits or because I’ve been promised a massively awesome 80s dance party.

As my wise friend Rainie said on her 40th birthday last month, “My 30s were weird.”

Remember back in your 20s when you thought your 30s would be when you’d get it all together, blossom into your whole, fabulous, confident self? And then instead your 30s turned out to be about forgetting yourself altogether in the midst of new and utterly dominating identities as wife and mother? Then there was all of that grief—holy crap, who could have seen that coming? And how when you had two minutes alone with your own head all you realized—with an existential thunderclap loud enough to summon the dead—was how totally screwed up you were?

Wait, who am I talking to? Sometimes I slip into second person when I really should be in first person because I want everyone to feel the same way I feel so I won’t be so alone in the world and so I can pretend it’s really not about me, it's about someone else and therefore maybe I can get my head around it, seize control and fix it. This is because I have boundary issues. I just figured it out the other day. I plan to address it in my 40s.

(See Happy New You! and Happy New You! Part II for past birthday-inspired existential babble)

Happy New You! Part II

In the course of a weekend, Chicken Noodle turned four and Chicken Little turned two.

After wiping up the frosting and recycling the wrapping, I realized I have somehow become the elated mother of two gorgeous girls who drink milk from cups, walk on their own and sleep through the night.

I simultaneously feel my life expanding once more to truly include writing.

My only regret is that I never really learned to trust the temporariness of the trapped-under-a-baby stage; that I lacked faith that writing wouldn't feel like forcing gelatinous sludge through a paper pinpoint for the rest of my life. If I had worked frantically, fuzzy-headedly through fewer naptimes, would it have mattered?

Perhaps: perhaps not. There is something to keeping the wheels greased, and something to recognizing all you're good for is Vanity Fair (reading it, not writing it).

It’s not too late for a lesson to be learned. In nineteen months, Chicken Noodle will start kindergarten. Until then, I will fight to tend to my writing and mothering lives with equal parts passion and patience.

Happy New You!

The other day was Captain Daddy’s birthday. Presumably because it comes on the heels of the holidays, Chicken Little was confused and spent the day saying “Happy New You, Daddy!” Only a 22-month-old could come up with such a delightful way to announce the beginning of another personal year.

How many “new yous” are left for Captain Daddy and I, I wonder? Maybe because I am approaching 40, lately I have been feeling the weight of the doors which have closed behind me; the narrowing of the possibilities which define my current life.

Youth holds such potential. Even if you never do, in the back of your mind you know that you could always move to Argentina, quit your job and go to medical school, sell your stuff on the lawn and hitchhike to Europe, join the circus and learn the trapeze. (I never did any of those things in my 20s, by the way; I waitressed and earned two college degrees). By choosing other, more conventional things instead (which most of us eventually do)—marriage, parenthood, job, mortgage—those doors begin to close. Simply by growing up, we limit our options. The trapeze is no longer possible, even as a daydream. This process is as much reassuring as it is unsettling, which is why some people do it too soon and others never do it at all. (Other advantages of youth are taken from us with no choice of our own—beauty, for instance. Oh, the possibilities inherent to beauty, how powerful you were, how quickly you abandoned me. But that is another story).

I don’t regret one single thing that has happened to me (well, maybe the loss of beauty, and one or two other things unfit for print), or any of the circumstances which anchor me now. But those closed doors lately linger like ghosts in my mind. The fact that so many of the Ys in the road that I have encountered were one-chance-only is only really clear to me now, in hindsight.

What forks in the road remain for me now? Many, I suspect. First there will be the myriad this-or-that decisions to be made in the process of completing the herculean projects of motherhood and marriage. Besides that, I imagine my “new yous” will mostly occur in the arena of the self: in the fine tuning of my days and my work.

This, when you think about it, is pretty damn exciting. Perhaps even more so than the trapeze.