Not-beach-day Saturday

Maybe on a weekend afternoon, you decide you'll all go to the beach, because it's a nice day and your sleep-challenged toddler loves the beach so much, and it's well before his nap time, and you figure he'll toddle around on the beach a lot and tire himself out and fall asleep on the way home. And then you get to the beach, and you turn around and see this. 

So you stretch out all your parent-flexibility and decide to let him sleep. You park at the beach and, in whispers, devise a new plan: you'll take back roads all the way from Jenner to Petaluma, where you'll eat dinner at your friends' restaurant. The drive should take you a good ninety minutes, allowing him a nice long nap.

The drive is heartbreakingly scenic and, by necessity, quiet. Every so often one and then both of you peer over your shoulders, nervously, as though you are carrying a backseat full of illegal explosives, and then, seeing closed eyes and flushed face and tiny chest solemnly rising and falling, you grin at each other with relief so profound it borders on hysteria. He wakes up when you're almost through Sebastopol.

So you Google-map for playgrounds between Sebastopol and your friend's restaurant and end up at a beautiful park you've never heard of a few miles from your house. And the slides and sand and open spaces turn your sleepy-faced baby into a blur of joy.

Maybe late that afternoon there is the crispest, roundest moon you have ever seen in the pinkest sky.

Maybe the reddest trees.     

The End.

Yay, Offbeat Families!

When we were planning our wedding, I was all about Offbeat Bride, and I was so thrilled to rediscover Offbeat Families when Kamal came along. After feeling hugely burned out on online parenting communities that I found cloyingly precious/anachronistically heteronormative/kinda judgey, Offbeat Families has been none of those things--it's just been a refreshing, faith-renewing reminder of why I actually really like the internet.

So this morning I was scrolling through OF's blog posts, and lo and behold: our very own Small Kamal got a little spotlight action on Offbeat Familes' Monday Montage!  Holy moly, did it bring me a thrill to see his little face beaming out at me from my monitor.


Check it out!

Offbeat Families' Monday Montage, 12/17/12

Email dated August 5, 2012 (two days before going into labor)

sent to my very dear friends Jenjen and Mayumi:

I am, at this moment, literally SURROUNDED by teeny-tiny clothes. This is a serious dose of reality. This is more laundry than I do for myself in, like, six months. This is a giant puzzle: why do clothes labeled "3-6
months" look sometimes the same size as newborn clothes and sometimes the same as clothes for nine-month-olds? For that matter, why are newborn clothes a separate thing from 0-3 month clothes? How do I figure out how many of these from each stage to keep? Everyone says you can't have too many onesies, but there has to be a
limit, right? What about hats, how many hats does a baby need? Does a baby need a balaclava? I don't know! I
have a baby coming any minute now and I don't understand anything about his wardrobe and clothes are, like, my thing.

I am in over my head. Almost literally, the way these clothing piles are growing.

Halp.

Love,
Relle

A little over four months in to the parenting experience, I'm a lot (a LOT!) calmer about the whole infant-wardrobe gestalt. Turned out to be quite a bit simpler once there was an actual small person to dress. And as it turns out, a baby DOES need a balaclava--or at least, as Kamal proved today, it comes in really handy on a long walk with a lovely friend on a very chilly day. 

Nap time

These are the good old days

Today Kamal and I danced to Rodrigo y Gabriela while Adam vacuumed the house and then took pictures of us.

Later, after a Facetime chat with Adam's parents during which Kamal giggled and burbled and then fell fast asleep, Adam and I stole kisses.

When you have a baby, everyone tells you to enjoy every second of it. And some days that's really hard to do; some days you're barely able to keep your eyes open or from bursting into tears. There are days where trying to enjoy every second just feels like one more task to complete, on top of and simultaneously with cleaning spit-up off of everything and changing a diaper and breast feeding and returning work emails and scheduling doctor appointments. 

Today was not one of those days. Today was an ordinary day, no more or no less sleep-deprived and spit-up-filled than any other, but today was golden. I was with my family, we are all healthy and safe and sound, and I know that one day, when Kamal is too big to carry while we whirl together around our cozy cottage, I will look back at Sundays like this with wistfulness. I will remember clipping Kamal's tiny nails while he slept in my lap. I will remember Kamal screaming with laughter while Adam nuzzled his chubby neck. I will remember Toby swiping his huge tongue over Kamal's face before I could intercept, and Kamal's little hands reaching delightedly for Toby's big, grinning, furry muzzle. I will remember dancing with my baby, the impossible softness of his hair under my chin, his fingers wrapped around my finger, his unique Kamal smell, like cocoa and violets and vanilla and lambswool. I will reach back in my memory for this golden day, and I will find it and know without a doubt that even if I had only lived this one day, more joy was mine in my life than I ever knew anyone could expect. 

A still, sweet, simple place

Last night, unbelievably, Kamal slept for eight hours straight. Of course that meant that after five hours I was startled wide awake by the unfamiliar sensation of not hearing fussing. I checked on Kamal, then tried to fall back asleep.

Instead, I started thinking about my father, and how difficult our relationship can be, and how much I want it to be easier. I thought about how my love for him is deep and loyal, but also muddied by guilt, tattered by anger, chewed by fear. Lying in the dark, I felt my love for my father fettering me to all those other awful feelings. I resented the fetters. I wondered why love gets such good press.  Thinking about how I love my father and what that love does to me, I got more and more agitated, and further and further away from sleep, and guiltier and angrier and more fearful. 

Then Kamal stretched and sighed in his sleep, and it was a like a door swung open to a clean, quiet room. 

Have you seen that movie, "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs"? In it, an entire town has nothing to eat except sardines, for years and years. And they're sort of okay with this, sort of making the best of it. Then one day, all kinds of delicious food starts raining from the sky, and the townspeople suddenly realize how hungry they are. 

That is how I love Adam. My love for Adam is the gluttonous, disbelieving hunger of someone who has always been fed enough love to live on but never, until now, given a good, square meal. Loving Adam is a gift instead of a sacrifice, as healing as bone broth, as decadent as truffles, as little-girl-hand-clappingly delightful as layer cake. As with any romantic love, it is sometimes haunted by the ghosts of past relationships, complicated by the catalysts of physical intimacy, clouded by the day-to-day realities of living a partnered life. Still, it is a perfect fit for two growing people. 

So if my love for my father is a battleground in a long and questionable war, and my love for Adam is an oasis from which I just barely glimpse the specter of a pitiless desert, then my love for Kamal is a still, sweet, simple place that I walked into before I even knew I was seeking it. Resting here, within this pure, easy love, my love for Adam rises up and away from the clutches of old irrelevant griefs, and my love for my father swells with the plausibility of forgiveness. Loving Kamal is the softest pillow, the gentlest bed, a blanket fort with room for all of us. 

Loving Kamal as he slept last night washed me clean of angst and sadness. I curled up inside that love and found a place to rest. 

Post-run refuel

After I came back from my run yesterday, Adam and Kamal were still, adorably, napping in the big orange chair. 

Kamal on a more active day in the big orange chair

So I took a nice long hot shower. And after I came out of the nice long hot shower, they were still adorably napping, and I was starving.

Since I've started breast feeding, protein is a really big deal. If I have a meal without protein in it, it kind of feels like I haven't eaten at all. This leads to situations like the time I put half a can of tuna on my plateful of Adam's amazing pasta alla vodka and completely scandalized him.

As far as I knew, I only had a few minutes before Kamal woke up and wanted to nurse, so I hustled to get a meal together. In a little bit of coconut oil, I scrambled an egg, a heaping tablespoon of live-cultured cottage cheese, and a huge handful of spinach. Then I cut a thin slice from a loaf of our homemade no-knead bread, cut that in half, and assembled a little sandwich. This is a meal that I make a lot; for its small size, it packs a whole bunch of protein--and it can be eaten with one hand, in case I'm breast feeding.*

*Sometimes I get crumbs on the baby.

Added a grapefruit, sprinkled with a teaspoon of sugar, from the orchard of our friends Ray and Barbara.

Kamal very considerately slept until I'd finished eating. Running, eating with two hands, AND blogging? This parenting thing is a piece of cake. Once in a while. 

Hero

Today was a big day for our Small Kamal, and he took it all in his usual mellow, happy stride. 

He rolled over for the first time today, from tummy to back, a week or so ahead of the earliest time we'd been told to expect this. Where our baby books have all cautioned us that this particular milestone could be very alarming for a baby, Kamal looked briefly astonished, and then just pleased. 

 Kamal's pleased face

Later we put him in his Amby Jump Jump for the very first time, and he bopped around looking pleased. 

Then we took a stroll down the creek trail behind our house to check out how high the creek had risen after the recent heavy rains we've had, and he watched the rushing water and a couple of guys speeding by in a canoe, and he looked pleased. 

This is actually a photo from three months ago, of the very first stroll we took with Kamal down the creek trail, when he was twentysomething days old. Look how small he is!

Later we put him in a Bumbo seat for the first time, and he sat in it looking pleased. 

I'm amazed, daily, at the gladness and calm with which Kamal confronts a constantly growing, shifting, leaping-and-bounding perspective on the world. His wise, patient, gracious, enormous soul looms over and surrounds his tiny, his perfect little body. Transition after transition presents itself to him, and he moves through each of them with grace and a joy that's beautiful to watch. 

Of course, I guess after surviving being shoved, squeezed and, in Kamal's particular case, vacuumed out of the cozy body that's been your only home for your entire nine-month existence into a glaringly bright, noisy, weird-smelling hospital room that as far as you know is the whole entire world, most transitions after that aren't going to shock you. Whatever the reason for the remarkable way he welcomes this life he's chosen, he's a hero to me. 

Ten years.

Saturday night, 2:00 A.M., 2002:  I sing my heart out and shake my booty on a stage at some club somewhere between Maryland and Connecticut; the crowd hollers and dances at my feet; the lights are hot and bright and I'm sure I'm the shiniest thing in the place.

Saturday night, 2:00 AM, 2012: Kamal vomits in my ear.

So, yeah. Ten years makes some difference. I'm proud, though, that the parts of me that really define who I am in the world are unchanged, that being a mama, while a profound life shift, still leaves me wholly recognizable to myself; that I'm me whether in hot pants and high heels or maternity leggings and Adam's old socks (or, for that matter, in my lab coat and take-me-seriously pumps). Resourceful improvisation; real interest and connection in the people around me; a perpetual readiness to view every unpackaged, unpolished and unconventional experience as an adventure and every difficult experience as the foundation for a fabulous joke; an unusually high tolerance for looking completely ridiculous: these qualities served me then and continue to serve me now.

This picture.

Our truly wonderful midwife, Colette, snapped this photo moments after Kamal's birth, and I'm so grateful that she did. It's only when I look at it that I really remember the breathless, astonished love I felt as he reached for me, wailing, like he was searching for something stable and familiar in the shocking new wideness he'd just found himself in.

With that memory, of course, comes a flood of other memories, all disjointed flashes. The exhaustion that pressed in on me after sixty hours of labor, so intense that I wasn't sure I'd remember how to eat or pee or even sleep. The metallic smells of the hospital stay I'd hoped to avoid by planning a home birth. The abject, shameful terror that surfaced whenever I thought about all the drama my lady parts had just endured, or wondered how on earth I was going to be a mother when I just wanted to sleep for weeks.

The vivid brightness and darkness of those early days seemed disconnected from any previously-known sense of time. I cried every day for a week, because I was fatigued, because I was afraid having a baby had been a mistake I couldn't undo, because I was frankly mourning the loss of our pre-baby life, and because I was deeply ashamed of all those feelings.

So, more than for anyone else, I'm writing this blog for the women in those first few days of motherhood. Those days are hard, and we don't talk enough about how hard they are, so when we struggle with them, we feel shame around that struggle. I had the great good fortune to be surrounded by a circle of other friends who'd recently had babies; when I reached out to them, they all assured me that I wasn't alone, that they'd all been where I was.

And most critically, they assured me that it would get better. It did, and that is the message I want most to  import here. I wouldn't want to repeat those first two weeks for love or money, but I wouldn't trade them, either. It was hard for all three of us, and bonded us in a way easier days couldn't have. It showed Adam and I how committed we truly were to the process of parenting and how committed Kamal was to staying and thriving in the world. Beyond the love we felt immediately for our tiny son, we learned respect for him in those hard weeks. We built a strong and balanced foundation for our new little family. And while our day-to-day lives with a now-fifteen-and-a-half-week old isn't what I'd call "easy," it's definitely easier--and it's really, really fun.

It does get better. I write here to show all the ways that it does.

Every day is a thanks-giving day.

Today feels like the right day to start a blog about one of the people I'm most thankful to know. Three and a half months ago, Kamal turned Adam and I from a happy, loving twosome to an even happier, loving-er trio. This small person and I have been heart-to-heartcore buds from moment one. We are on a journey together, one small, baby-socked step at a time, learning what works for us and ready to share it with you.

Happy Thanksgiving! May you have worlds and worlds to be thankful for. I know we do.