How I Balance Books and Babies

 

  

While I pored over the second galley proof of the literary magazine I edit with one of my nearest and dearest colleague-friends and a too-strong cup of caramel coffee, I received the following text from my husband: “Evangeline just took her first step!” He and our three kids had been at Grammy’s house for the afternoon while I slipped away during naptime to take care of some emergency editing (there is actually such a thing, and it, as you might guess, falls squarely and surely under the heading of “first world problems”).

I’d just gotten settled into an empty house by clearing the dining room table, adorned with half a bouquet of flowers I’d stolen from my mother-in-law after she’d performed a flirty flapper’s rendition of “Button Up Your Overcoat” at a continuing education showcase program and asked me to put them in water for a while since I’d be going straight home.

I’d even prepared my apology in advance for the rest of the house. It’s briefer than ever these days: “You’ll have to forgive the house with the exception of this dining room table. I’m not gifted in housekeeping.” I sometimes work in the word “knack.” I find it charming and use it in hopes that it distracts from the dust. The idea that people dust and vacuum weekly really is so foreign to me. I applaud those of you who do it, and I’ll work the word aplomb into my language massage if it makes you forgive me for the dirt and dog-hair tumbleweeds lining the hallway in the meantime.

E apologizes sometimes. This is her right after she ripped a page from one of my books. Is it just me, or do her eyebrows slightly raise as if to say, “You know I’m only eight months old, right? You didn’t think I was just going to turn the page like an Oxford grad, did you?” She has a gift for the “shame on you” look. If she chooses motherhood someday, she’ll be brilliant at it. I could learn so much from this little (n.).

And this little, this eight-month, nearly nine-month wonder, walks as if it’s a brief wish in a line of longer, loftier ones. My son was dragging his legs military-crawl-style with two eager and determined elbows for months before pulling up. This is him.*

            He didn’t walk until he was fourteen months old, so the text was not only telling me our daughter had walked her first steps but also that she was some kind of superhero. The papers should have been notified that moment, actually. I’m not sure what I’m doing just putting it on a blog. This is actual news. Someone with a camera not in their phone should have been on call to photograph it.

            My colleague’s response, when I read the text, was one of regret, like “Oh, you missed it!”

I shrugged it off, “Oh, she’s the third. And she’ll never know.” We both agreed the story should go that I was there, and it was amazing. No one needed to know anything but that.

But the more the missed first step settles in, the more my heart goes in two directions. Half of me says that she should get ready for me to miss many more things. It’s just not possible for me to be two places at once, and I’m needed so many places at once sometimes. The other half of me remembers winning a spelling bee, among many events, my dad could not attend because of work, and knew that because it even came to mind, it mattered much more than I wanted it to.

My son calls me out on it often. He is nearly three, and he is incredibly bright. That fourteen-month-walking jig was up really quick when we realized that was his giving us a head start because he hasn’t stopped since. His brain doesn’t stop. Like my oldest, he is intuitively wise. He knows that the front yard is no place for a laptop when the weather is good, and we’ve got a bucket of sidewalk chalk calling our names.  

           

I thought I was killing it as Mom last week. Papers had to be graded; kids had to be raised. One beach chair on the front walk later, and boom—WorkingMamaPalooza. Lies. All lies. He walks up, presses a few keys, closes the laptop, and says, “No laptop, Mommy. You done.” Smart kid.

I have enough Working Mother’s Guilt for all of us, and I’m done being distracted with questions of semantics, like why there isn’t anything like Working Father’s Guilt, or speculating about the answers some churchly friends would say in response to my bringing up Working Father’s Guilt—questions I get all the time anyway, like “Are you still working?” and “Are you a liberal?”

            Guilty or not, I’ll say I feel being caught in the gap between books and babies some days. I am fully present and all in with whatever’s in front of me, but some days, it’s a revolving door.  In the past three weeks, we’ve had five sinus infections, an allergic reaction to medication, four trips to the pediatrician, three trips to the pharmacy, two days of missed work, a couple hundred dollars bet on recouping, and a thousand loads of laundry. Seriously, it probably would have been easier to just move or buy new children. But, we’re very nearly well, so things are looking up. This was E before she broke out in hives. The calm before the storm really only means a storm is coming. It’s nothing to relax or take a cocky selfie about. Yet, here we are.

          

            Sickness is a monkey wrench thrown into the Swiss clock of our household constitution. We cannot be sick. The whole thing goes to hell.

            I’ve been consumed lately with the notion of “breathing room,” or “adding margin to my life,” but the trouble is I’ve been living with time credit cards, and the debt piles up until we get sick, and it’s a feeling very similar to playing Level 10 in Tetris on no sleep while someone is kicking you in the face. I’ve been so consumed with these notions that my study of breathing room, margin, and recreational reading have begun eating into that margin that would have been there, so I’m maxed out again.

            When someone shakes a pity noggin or points a finger of shame in my direction, I want to tell them that it could be worse. I could be doing drugs. But honestly, I’d never waste money or time on drugs while hummus and Downton Abbey still exist, and they’d call my bluff. Everyone knows what I’m about: Jonathan and Jesus. Anything else is window dressing.

Still, how do I do it? I’ve never known how to explain it before, that sense that I’m busy but managing just fine, that I’m tired but not broken, that I’ll keep doing what I’m doing because I’m called to be here and there, that heavy hope that this is okay and we are fine, but the words came today, as they always do.

I focus on the honey, not the hive.

*(It should be he, not him, because it’s a subject complement, but honestly, who’s doing that these days. If I would have put in he, half of you would have thought I were wrong and roughly the other half would have thought I were pompous. It would be only that sweet spot of 1% that championed me and my whole grammar fight, and with my slack-jawed and mostly intentional word mangling [I call them letter butterflies sometimes], I doubt you all read these things. Thanks to those who hang in there despite me.)

The Cost of Being Bookish

According to the Facebook fish flow, I am supposed to write an assigned number of true things about myself and be thankful for a unique thing each day of the month. 

Me: Daina, how many? 

Daina: How many what? Kids? How many animals? 

Me: Just a number.

Daina: Okay, fifty chickens.

Me: What? That's too many.

Daina: All right. Five chickens. 

So, five is my number, but I don't follow arbitrary instructions well, so here are five lies instead. 

1. I am originally from Kansas, which explains my penchant for red shoes, root cellars, and twirly things. 

2. I collect antique German thermometers, but always tell people they're French because I don't want to sound cocky. 

3. I am certified as a baton instructor, the kind that sparkle, not the kind British bobbies beat you with for sport.

4. When too much recyclable Tupperware collects in my cabinets, I melt it all down and make yard flamingos to decorate my eggplant garden.

5. Every time I've broken into someone's home and found their bed unmade, I've made the bed with hospital corners and left two Andes mints on the left pillow. 

Okay, here's one true thing:

1. The thanks I'll dole out this year won't fit on Facebook. It's too heavy, too deep, too wide. I'm writing thirty letters--private ones that strangers will carry from town to town and hand-deliver to mailboxes, where they'll settle and wait for fingers braced only for bills and eyes that will open, electric, at the sight of handwriting--a sign of life in an otherwise dead and ordinary pile of paper automatons. 

Okay, another true thing:

2. If I were to say what I'm busy being thankful for, I would, as you might imagine, breathe the word books. Those letters would fall right out of my mouth, as if readied from my birth, the B stepped up to the ledge of my lip first, followed by the O's linked arm in arm, inseparable. The K would follow, hooked to the swoosh of the S, and my mouth would close, as if putting two palms forward to shove off a you're welcome I didn't believe I deserved. 

With every love, there is a loss, or at least a sacrifice. We push some parts of life away to pull some others closer. Every day we choose something, and in that choice, we don't choose something else. We can't choose everything. We just choose some things instead of others. We can choose those other things, but not at the same time as the first things. 

Books are one of those sacrifices for me. They are on what I call "life layaway" indefinitely at this point. Students, friends, and colleagues constantly recommend books. I nod. I say I'll put them on the list. I take them. I stack them up, one alongside another, alongside another. I want to reward them with orange Tic Tacs like I give my son when he's waiting patiently in the carline at the bank. I'm busy living the things I might put into books one day. 

My well-intentioned life has become a bit of a joke around my house. I work hard to keep the jealousy at bay when I read about friends who have already finished their Christmas shopping (although I'll admit to being a bit of a pre-Thanksgiving Christmas crab) and others who make everything from scratch--especially those who post public reprimands to those of us who don't. I have a host of friends who sew clothes, paint Mason jars, give people "just because" gifts, take their kids to Disney four times a year and make scavenger hunt riddles for weeks beforehand, which they send to school in homemade bento boxes with "I love you" origami in the shape of owls and Hello Kitty.

I can Pinterest with the best of them, but it's a digital fantasyland more than a real, live plan that will ever get executed. More and more of my friends have begun designing these elaborate wreaths to decorate their doors for each season, birthday, and holiday of the year. As with most mom projects, I can make it about halfway, so I made a wreath that reflects it--my too busy life, full of books and words and paper and children and praying and diaper rash cream and formula and algebra and nail polish remover and tangles and library visits and coffee creamers and frozen P.F. Chang dinners and writing and reading and grading and telling and washing, folding, sterilizing, stain-treating, drying and toothbrushing and refilling and buying and returning and committee meetings and dressing and changing and closing my eyes and pretending to sleep from two until about four. 

Choices were made. Other choices weren't. This is how it goes.

Advice comes my way often. I listen but seldom take it. I lean in. I nod. But I know they don't really know, and so I hum in my head--any ditty will do.

I'm many things to many people. Many days I feel like the circus performer with the sticks and the plates spinning overhead, only in my case there are a couple dozen plates, and every one of them is over another person's head. I'm more of the facilitator, your happy host.

Some people know the cost of being bookish--and not just bookish in the sense that there's a love of literature (although that's addiction enough sometimes)--but bookish in terms of immersion and devotion, of being a writer or being an academic, the compulsion to spend so much of oneself on what seems to be an individual, maybe even selfish, pursuit.

Because that's just the thing--it's anything but an individual pursuit. Engaging through the written word and poring over language is a key way that we connect with others and begin to comprehend the connections between others. It just looks lonely for a while, like the contents of a cocoon. Then, at once, the fuzzy worm blossoms, then flies.

The cost of being bookish ends up being the inability to communicate with those who don't ever climb into cocoons, those who don't understand that, for literati, the release comes only from periods of temporary retreat.

Harper Lee's Jem Finch comes to mind when he says, "Turtles don't feel, stupid" and Dill replies, "Were you ever a turtle, huh?"

But every once in a while there's a kindred one that comes, like a friend who picks books off your shelves as though your home were a library--and keeps them because it's like an insurance policy on your friendship--or the husband who goes to bed before you because, when the sentences are perfect, you'll come to bed and wake him up to tell him how well the story turned out.

Or it's the mother-in-law who already keeps your children on Mondays so that you can do the thing you were born to do for a few hours and then, because you've spent the best of yourself doing it, makes the family dinner and even sends home poundcake with you because, sometimes, mamas need some sugar, too.