On becoming someone else

Dear Blog,

When I was younger I was braver than I am now, and I was more selfish, and I was stupider, and I was more fun. I would have laughed at your jokes, even if they weren’t funny, not something I can promise anymore, but if you were a stranger crying in a corner I might have pretended not to notice, whereas now I would go over with a tissue and ask you if you were OK.

I would have been appalled, at fifteen, at twenty, at twenty-five, if I could have seen what my life would become in my thirties. I think I understood even back then that Domesticity had its eye on me. I spent my twenties gallivanting all over the world, eschewing a real career or any real responsibility for / to anything / anyone because I was On The Run from dreaded Domesticity. Not that it mattered. I ran far and wide and had a great many adventures but the run-on-sentence of my adventuresome youth came to a full-stop in a hospital in New Jersey when I looked into the startled eyes of my first child. He looked back at me and proceeded to scream his fucking head off.

I had a baby and everything changed. I changed. I stopped laughing at bad jokes and started carrying tissues. My worst fears expanded with my capacity for love, and it feels sometimes that it is all love and fear now, tangled together like shadow and light. The worst case scenarios now are beyond what I can bear to imagine, it makes me shake just to write that down and I have to stop and breathe, stop and breathe. And maybe I wasn’t very good at love before, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s true for every mother but I think it is often true, and it’s true for me, that this love I have for my children dwarfs every other feeling I have ever had. I see ridiculous headlines sometimes saying things like, “parents are happier than non-parents”, or “the childfree are happier than parents,” and I think that it is so laughable and so absurd to try to frame it that way.

Look, I was happier before. I didn’t have kids because I thought it would make me happy. I kept running around and boarding planes with my visas to this country or that country like get-out-jail-free cards, but as I got older there was more often than not this hilarious, clever man with me – that was a clue, but I didn’t catch on. We shared bed after bed in country after country so how I still thought I was going to escape I don’t know but sometime after I turned thirty this longing opened up in me. I was on a mountain in Peru and I put two leaves on the rock, pointing to another mountain peak as directed, and two rocks on top of them for two wishes. I wished for healthy, happy children. There on top of the world, free as I had ever been, adventure before me and behind me, I wished for children.

There are people who go gallivanting and adventuring with their children and there are people who balance fulfilling (or unfulfilling) careers with parenting, and there are people who are truly happiest giving their days over to the constant care that small children require. But becoming a parent, for reasons logistical, financial and emotional, stapled my feet to the ground, filled me up in ways I never expected and left me starving in equally unpredictable ways. There was a year, after having my second son, when I didn’t sleep. Someday, when it is less raw, I will write a blog post about severe, chronic sleep deprivation and what it does to a person, or at least, what it did to me – how it undid me. Emerging slowly from the other end of that tunnel, I don’t really know who I am anymore, besides mother to these boys, anchor of their world.

But the surprising (to me) thing is that my writing took off with parenthood. I mean, I was writing all along, but I didn’t have much discipline or much ambition. There were long stretches of time when I didn’t write, because I was busy laughing at bad jokes, marveling at the stars in the desert, drinking too much and boarding trains and whatnot. (“I think we’re on the wrong train,” I said, and he said, “There is no wrong train,” and it was true back then). It didn’t matter to me so much if I was writing or not. It was something I liked to do and wanted to do, but I didn’t need it the way I do now. I didn’t need an answer (for myself, because “I’m a writer” is something I have a hard time saying to other people) to the question “What do you do?”

Now, not a day goes by when I don’t write. I complain too much about not having time and kind, sympathetic friends say to me oh it must be so hard to find time to write with the kids and I say oh yes it really is, but the truth is that writing and parenthood have been, mostly, a pretty stellar combination for me. I’m finding time I didn’t find before I had kids, because I need it in a way that I didn’t before I had kids, and because my days and weeks are structured in such a way that there is this time and this time only that I can choose to use in a self-centered way, and that time is so precious I can’t bear to fritter it away.

“Look, you can watch more TV!” I say desperately, and they shout, “No! We want to play!” Kids these days, pfft. I can tune out most of it. The crashing and smashing and shouting and whooping and laughing and even the crying, if it doesn’t go on too long. I pretend that this is a time for them to learn self-sufficiency, and I hear LittleJ adopting my tone and my words when comforting LittleK, kissing his bumps before urging him back to the game, whatever it is. When I close the computer and look up they are grinning at me, having wrecked the apartment, these two gorgeous boys. They say “Do you want to play hide-and-seek?” and I do, and also I don’t, same old story. I say “yes” and go curl myself into the bathtub while they count. I hear LittleK saying “thirteen, sixteen, thirteen, sixteen, thirteen, sixteen” while LittleJ tries to get him to count properly, yelling with frustration. I lie there in the bathtub like the shell of who I used to be or maybe like something that came out of the shell that I used to be, I don’t know which it is most days, and I wait for them to find me.

Yours, stapled to the ground but in reach of my computer,

Catherine