the beast

Photo from here 

What do you do when a good cry is catapulting around inside your body but won’t come out? When the beast of anger has stormed in and is now wrecking havoc, throwing plates around in your head, pounding on your guts, squeezing your lungs… Sucking patience and reason out of you through its fetid mouth, taking over your movement and latching onto your spine all “body snatchers” style? Yuck. It’s probably just one of those days, one of those carry-your-son-football-style-out-of-daycare, screaming, after-literally-wrestling-him-into-a-one-piece-snowsuit, then-into-his-car-seat kind of days. The kind where you are also carrying a deeply overtired 8-month-old in the other arm, whom you have baby-tortured enough already today (in and out of the car, making him wait to nap a second time so you could pick up his dear brother). There is nothing that pushes the rage button harder than having different agendas than your child/dren, especially when it comes to getting the heck out of Dodge quickly in winter.

I use the beast metaphor with great care for it feels like something that is not me has taken over and is now overstaying its welcome, its gift of grime smearing an otherwise lovely day (albeit overfull). I am not relinquishing responsibility for my actions. I know the beast is me, the shadow part of me being pushed beyond reason as a parent. I just hate its ugly face. I want to stamp the life from it. The best way I know to ride myself of these feelings is to cry, but no window has opened, no tears fall. It’s just me and my ¼ lung capacity, my fingers looking for salvation through typing. Maybe that’s enough for now. Maybe there’s chocolate.

E

It always rains in England

May 11, 2011

Or so we thought. This is a photo of Ben prior to our wild adventure across the ocean for him to meet his Great-Grandad, who is 96 (and maybe, coincidentally, to watch the royal wedding live in the Motherland!). How could I resist this completely unnecessary raincoat at Value Village? I dare any of you to resist it! Suffice it to say we scored the balmiest and sunniest April in recorded history in the UK. I even got a light sunburn. It was global warming at its best. Spring was in a full riot of color and Ben was positively gobsmacked by seeing trees with leaves! He watched them swaying in the wind both with the fervor of a World Cup fan and the romance of a poet. He lay in the grass looking up, miniature daisies crowning his sweet head. Heaven. The little bugger also learned more about the powerful instrument in his throat, much to our amusement and bewilderment. A constant string of happy chatter accompanied our daily doings, with a particularly cute gurgling sound accompanied by an inwardly curled lower lip. Since everything has its shadow, our precious little baby also learned to HOWL when he wants something (let’s remember he is a quarter Italian and a quarter Russian and has started teething). Holy cannoli, he goes from 0-60 in 3 seconds flat! And, as many of us can appreciate, a boob in the mouth (if anything; not vodka) was his only solace for such a cry. I often felt so helpless. I can occasionally calm him down with a variety of tricks (mainly patience, determination, bouncing on the exercise ball and making this weird motorboat noise with my lips), but it helps if Ben can’t see or hear A. Poor A is more stuck at home than ever before! Or at least, she can’t be without him for too long in case of a sudden tear-tsunami. I hesitate to use that destructive nature metaphor which has so ravaged our friends in Japan. Sometimes though, this new cry of his feels like a force of nature, coming out of the blue and ripping through our house with wave after wave of noise. I actually ran home from work to help A deal with a particularly potent session yesterday.

Anyway, we count our blessings that Ben was so good on the plane (boob was always available). He also completely seduced Grandad. I think the feelings were mutual. We can’t believe he’s 4 months old on May 17th. Every day is so different, every favorite onesie is getting outgrown to be replaced with new favorites, and now we are officially retiring the bassinet. Today. With no immediately implementable back-up plan. It just crept up on us! He’s been wiggling out of rather tight swaddles, and then flaying his arms around smacking the basket-woven sides of his bassinet. He’s also too long for it. In England he slept in a foamie-lined dresser drawer on the floor. Hmm…

E

late period blues

My period was a few days late. I don’t know if it’s A’s pregnancy hormones rampaging through the house and my bloodstream, but it must be. You could set a bloody clock to my regularity. The only times I’ve been off schedule before were on months when I was trying myself. A cruel joke from the universe, or the mischievous sprite Murphy whose law is well known? Probably just stress. Imagine thinking you’re pregnant even though super fancy early detector kits say otherwise, and then being late!! Yes, perhaps I had been pregnant and it was too faint to detect and it just wasn’t viable and so on. I doubt it. And now that I am definitely not pregnant (baring acts of God/dess), it just means I am as cranky and moody and hungry and hormonal, if not more, than my pregnant gal, and for so many more days than most cycles as the layers of hormones build up momentum. I wept for no apparent reason Sunday. At the time it seemed to be sparked by how much sun I had gotten picking berries (sun phobia plus redhead equals really fun neurotic behaviour, ask A). 

Plus there is the art course I am doing on rediscovering that pre-pubescent girl in me (the photo above is one I took for the class; info about the class can be found on the sublime site). Our last assignment was to look at photos of ourselves going through the “vortex” of early adolescence, and I looked so sad and tight and empty. I sat apart from others. I came through those years eventually and later pictures show me radiant, arms entangled with good friends. But the 12-14 range is when I got my period, and first started really thinking about fertility and my capacity to procreate eventually. It’s when I started my lifelong pastime of making baby name lists (seriously). Looking at me then was a heart breaking exercise. I wish I could reach out to that girl through time and tell her, well, I don’t know what. Hug her perhaps, love her more. Love others more. Relax and send warmth to my midsection, the bodily area of so many traumas for my mother and her mother. I guess my big cry Sunday was for that lonely girl, dreaming of that someday life filled with the mind-boggling mix of love and fear that is parenting. Maybe my instincts knew then what a hard road I would travel to get there.

E