i never thought i’d wind up here: married, at home with the kids.
(plural. more than one child.)
i just couldn’t see it. for the longest time i didn’t think it was in the cards for me, a husband, a family; motherhood. i was completely unprepared when they flipped and showed their faces, those cards.
a lot of the time i don’t know what i’m doing. for the most part i feel like i’m just making it up as i go along, riding the learning curve.
where i’m at, it still surprises me sometimes. like, woah. these are my kids! this is my husband! this is my family! and here we are, in the thick of it: love. togetherness. teaching, learning. clashing at times, weathering the ups and downs.
the good.
the bad.
the ugly.
this family of mine, we’re doing it, y’know? when i stand back a little and take it all in it feels like my heart will explode with love and pride.
then there are the moments when i want to scream because i am like, steps – mere steps – away from going completely. fucking. mad. and they’re powerful, those moments. powerful.
sometimes i look at dave and wonder if the same guy i fell in love with is still in there, or if he’s disappeared, worn down by two kids in two years and breadwinning and just, well, life. and then i see him peeking through, catch a glimpse of that sweet, goofy, sensitive guy, and my heart swells.
he’s there. he always will be.
and i think, wow. he’s mine too.
lots of times i look at my family and want to scream, HELLO? WHAT PLANET DID YOU ALL COME FROM? it goes from one end of the spectrum to the other, doesn’t it? from love –
bursting love!
and happiness and contentment to who the fuck are you people and how the hell do I get away from you?
i feel like a maid sometimes. a janitor. it never ends, the cleaning, the housework, ever. neverever. and i feel like an old nagging hag because i bitch about stuff like mud on the floor and dirty underwear dropped in the corner of the bathroom. or when the kids sneak their snacks into the den and get crumbs on the floor and then later, when i walk through the den, i see a small black mass inching across the floor and i bend down and realize that no, it’s not a very slow moving beetle but a hoard of ants instead, taking a crumb the size of small rock back to their queen.
and that shit right there, crumbs for the ant queen and dirty underwear in the corner of the bathroom and mud on the floor i just washed, for chrissake, drives me nuts, makes me go a bit crazy, and when i get all freaky about it i stop and think to myself,
this is the stuff that matters to you? clean floors?
but you know what? it does matter to me, dammit. it does.
clean floors matter to me. i’ve reached the point in my life where CLEAN FLOORS MATTER.
sometimes i think about my mum and what it would be like if she were here. my life would be completely, one hundred per cent different. some nights i lie in bed and imagine how it would be –
my life. our lives. what they’d be like.
i’m always thinking about her. it’s constant. how i feel about her and my relationship with her, it varies, but i always think of her. sometimes i am mad at her. other times i’m incredibly sad. lonely, oh god, i get really fucking lonely for her. achy, painful lonely, the kind of loneliness that comes from your bones. yet at times i’m content. i have spells where, for the most part, i’m okay that she’s dead. i can accept that. sometimes they go for a while, those spells.
then i’ll get stuck in a rut where all i can think about is stuff like the last christmas we had together.
the christmas i knew would be our last.
the christmas that was completely overshadowed by my miscarriage.
and i’ll think about how part of me hated, hated that glaring spotlight –
hated that it was taking so much away from the last holiday i’d have with my mother, one last celebration that was supposed to be twinkly and magical and meaningful –
but how there was this part of me that was secretly glad i had a diversion. something i could sink my teeth into, something else to get lost in, to blame the pain on –
the fucking excruciating pain –
without having to admit that she was slipping, further and further…
that i was losing her…
she was dying
and i was spending the last christmas i’d ever have with her losing a baby.
i stay in those ruts for a while. put them on and wear them like cloaks.
move around in them. embrace them, own them.
then shed them.
………
this is me and these, these are some of my rambling, disjointed thoughts
50 Comments, Comment or Ping
You know, sometimes it’s important to sit down and reflect like this. Take a moment or two or three, relive something that you’ll never live again, and remind yourself how you got through it and why you’re where you are today.
And as for laundry in the hamper and clean floors? Totally overrated, my friend. No one’s bio ever mentions their floors.
March 31st, 2008
I agree with SciFi Dad that it is very important that you are able to express yourself this way–it’s healthy!
I’m so sorry you went through and are going through such a rough time. My thoughts are with you!!!
March 31st, 2008
I feel similar to you and at the moment its only me and Chris with kids on the horizon. I still wonder how i got here, got HIM. Sometimes like you say i feel incredibly lucky, others i just wish he’d bugger off for a bit lol but it passes.
So we’re running headlong into the life you describe. I’m lucky that my mum is still here, sadly my dad isnt and he never met Chris, he died a mere month after i started seeing him.
I’m glad you wrote this today, made me concentrate on the times i feel lucky rather than the others.
Pol x
March 31st, 2008
I love you! My thoughts are always with you!
I LOVE that you can write something so heartfelt and so hard and make it still sound so beautiful.
March 31st, 2008
Oh, mamaT, you say it so beautifully. I’ve been there, not the same situations driving me there, similar ones, but immersing myself in my history, in my pain, in last times spent, yeah, I’ve been there. It’s okay, and necessary, I think, to go there sometimes, to wallow for a bit. It helps keep us in touch with who we are and how we got there.
As for the carpets, well, I get that too since we got the new carpet. The new rule is absolutely no food or drink in the family room, no shoes in the family room, and yet somehow there are crumbs all over the place in there. I just taught my kids how to vacuum so they can clean up after themselves. I’m the Meanest Mom Ever.
March 31st, 2008
*hug* Your rambling thoughts aren’t particularly disjointed; they seem lovely and lucid.
March 31st, 2008
I feel exactly as you do about the husband, kids, holy-shit-is-this-my-family? stuff.
Only I never could have said it as beautifully.
March 31st, 2008
Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.
March 31st, 2008
Hug – I know how you feel.
March 31st, 2008
mmmm.
I like this post. A lot.
March 31st, 2008
babe, just look at you go, your wide open heart. i loved this post.
March 31st, 2008
i just sit here with the chills, wanting to give you a hug. (hug)
March 31st, 2008
I hear ya. Clean floors are important. Mine are never, ever clean. And if they do get clean, they get unclean about five minutes later. It’s maddening. I try not to let it matter, but it does.
March 31st, 2008
I call it waves of grief and regret. They come and go at different times in life – sometimes when they seem really appropriate, sometimes when you’re least expecting them.
The amazing thing is that you recognize that you have incredible love for and from your family and that it obviously came from and went to your mother also. Hang onto the love. Clean floors be damned with no love. (Although I can’t stand a fingerprinty coffee table myself….)
March 31st, 2008
so relatable – all of it. last night was a tough one; i couldn’t stop thinking about how lonely my dad’s death made me feel. and this afternoon at nap time i read ‘guess how much i love you’ and the last page made me cry, as always, and i wondered ‘how the hell did i become a person that reads this crap, let alone cries at it?’
but that’s who i am now, and that’s who you are now, and let’s just be awe-struck by it all together.
March 31st, 2008
oh wow.
i think we share the same cloak. only mine isn’t so heavy with miscarriage and dirty floors. its more like all the heaviness of things that could have been that will never be. and how that sucks. and how i wouldn’t wish cancer on my worst enemy because it chews a body up and spits it out with no regard for the life and love and beauty that it contained. and the thoughts about what that must have been like for him. how that journey FELT. how he managed all the feelings of hate, and anger, and regret…embarrassement, fear, hope, knowing his days were numbered and no amount of will or determination was going to change it. nevermind the pain. the physical pain – which i imagine at times is a welcome diversion from the baggage that is sorting out all the emotions. and then i think of a 6 year old little girl seeing what i saw – and knowing that i could barely hold myself together long enough to sit in that room those last days to hold his sweaty lifeless, bony hand – jacked up on morphine and in another world. what are her memories? how did she make it through? how did he look at her and have the courage to say goodbye?
and now im crying at work . AWESOME. because the whole losing a parent, child, sibling, friend…THING – is just fucking awful.
and im sorry for your loss -because i understand how those things linger in the recesses of your inner being…and when they come out – its ugly.
ack.
March 31st, 2008
THIS is just one of the thousands of reasons why I love your blog.
I think you are in my head more times than not.
March 31st, 2008
You make me breathless sometimes, you know?
March 31st, 2008
Ok so I totally hear you about the house and an uncanny need to keep it just right.
Well I know why I feel this way. Cause it’s the only fricken thing I can feel like I have control with in this crazy tailspin (also known as parenting) in my life.
Hey just a little bug in your ear………..just because time is rapidly moving forward with many hectic moments and schedules, does not mean you are leaving her behind. Have you ever thought how she may have felt to have a moment for you to need her as much as she had always needed you, no matter how shitty it was?
March 31st, 2008
Hmmm… I was going to have kids ‘one day’… 3 girls each two years apart and raise them with both parents.
Four boys in five years with no multiple births and then as soon as I had the last one I morphed into a single parent. Didn’t see that one coming!
But eleven years on I wouldn’t have it any other way.
March 31st, 2008
i’ve never really seen any of it coming, either…or at least it still surprises me to find myself here, good and bad, fixating on my floors, amazed at what i have, still gutshot about what i’ve lost and stunned at how that’s always there, a little refrain.
i thought it was a beautiful, human post.
March 31st, 2008
Sweetie, I could have written the better part of that post. Eight years later I have days that I’m ok with mom being gone. Ok with it, knowing how much she missed my Dad and her own mother. Then there are the days, the long, hard days, of feeling as if her death is a huge weight on my chest. So many years later. I look at Tony and the kids and think, wow, look at all I’ve accomplished in those years, and then it hits me how much she’s missed out on.
Stop by the board when you can. We miss you.
March 31st, 2008
hang onto the good thoughts but never forget the bad – your work through them and allow them to help shape who you are and who you want to be. the good. the bad. the ugly.
I’m fairly new to your little corner of blog-land, but I’m sending you a *hug* anyway.
March 31st, 2008
Disjointed makes me love you more. I cannot fathom any of it, I can only try, because I want to for you my friend. Let’s be disjointed together.
March 31st, 2008
You sound completely normal to me. Life is all up and down.
I think it was the grandmother in the movie parenthood that said something along the lines of … I’d rather ride the roller coaster than the merry go round. All the carousel does is go round and round. The roller coaster is much more fun.
March 31st, 2008
This post made me want to come over and make you a pot of soup.
March 31st, 2008
Yes to all of that. To the wonder that this family could belong to me, to the boundless love, to the boundless irritation, to the ants on the floor, to missing my mom. The only difference is that my mom had been gone for five years already when I had my December miscarriage.
March 31st, 2008
You expressed yourself so wonderfully in this post. You took words out of my mouth. Not that I have lost my mother…but I get that lonely because she is 450 miles away….because I do not have a daughter…because clean floors DO MATTER and I am the only one who thinks so.
March 31st, 2008
Clean floors fucking matter to me, too, dammit, and I’m not apologizing for that ever again.
And that cloak, the one of pain and regret, I know it well.
March 31st, 2008
Ummm, I’m where you are: married, two kids, etc…. But, still, my floors DON’T fucking matter to me. I have a lot of maturing to do, Missy! ;)
My floors fucking matter to the hubby, though, and are the source of bickering.
I’m glad you’re able to open up in writing and “shed” the thoughts that haunt you…. They’re very beautiful. Yes, there’s beauty in them…. Poetry. Keep writing.
March 31st, 2008
I will one of the few who, though I know it doesn’t in the grand scheme of things, will admit that cleanliness matters. How long before I become one of those por saps on “How clean is your House”.
I wish I could say something that would help ease the pain of your mother’s passing.
March 31st, 2008
I love you.
Just for telling it.
((you))
:)
April 1st, 2008
OK, first of all, clean floors DO matter. So does picking up smelly socks and putting them in the hamper instead of leaving them balled up on the couch. And emptying the garbage instead of cramming it down tightly into the can for the next unsuspecting person to open, triggering a garbage explosion. Oh, and changing the jug on the water cooler if you’re the one that empties it.
I could go on.
Even with my mother still very much alive, I feel this loneliness you speak of sometimes. Only one couple in my group of “real life” friends have children. The rest don’t ever want them, they say. They do not place importance on the same things that I do. It’s very isolating. Then I read a post like this one, and the comments, and I realize that my feelings are not unusual. And I get teary-eyed at work. And write rambling disjointed comments. Hugs to you, T. I love these windows into your heart.
April 1st, 2008
How does Dave react to your life musings?
I’m 26 years into my marriage, 16 years into life without my parents, and whenever I pause to reflect over past pain, choices made, the direction of my life, the shape of it now, what it could become, my husband gets vaguely annoyed. Why am I rehashing the past? He always says I “dwell” on things, as if this is a crime. So I don’t tell him what I’m thinking because I don’t need his judgement on the terrible “character flaw” of being a thinking, feeling person. And then I get complaints that I’m “disengaged.”
But here’s what I’ve figured out. He’s an engineer inside and out and EVERYTHING to him is a linear progression, a moving forward along a track. Once you pass a point, it’s over. I’m a creative type–not linear at all. For me all time exists at once. My experiences aren’t something I pass and “get over” but something I live with every minute of every day. All of my life is there bubbling in my head; I never know what will rise to the top on any given day, but I know whatever it is, it deserves my attention. It’s my LIFE. I dwell IN IT, not on it.
Hmmm. This is turning into a blog post. Maybe I ought to take it out of your comments section and onto my own site!
April 1st, 2008
I lost one on the 4th of July.
I would imagine that no matter when you miscarry it is something that you would remember, but there is something about losing a baby on a holiday – maybe the ease of putting it in a time frame – that seems to make it so easy to remember.
I’m sorry for your losses.
April 1st, 2008
“i’m always thinking about her. it’s constant. how i feel about her and my relationship with her, it varies, but i always think of her. sometimes i am mad at her. other times i’m incredibly sad. lonely, oh god, i get really fucking lonely for her. achy, painful lonely, the kind of loneliness that comes from your bones. yet at times i’m content. i have spells where, for the most part, i’m okay that she’s dead. i can accept that. sometimes they go for a while, those spells. ”
I could have written those exact same words. I have often said, I miss my mom more than words can express. The hardest part of being a mother? Not having mine to share it with.
((HUGS))
I am glad you were able to write this, it helps, it really helps.
April 1st, 2008
Is this what you mean?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYbUCvz1LYE
April 1st, 2008
Motherhood has made me care deeply about clean floors, too. That and barking dogs. I never knew that I would be filled with rage by one measly bark until it was 4 am and the baby was finally sleeping and the damn dog barked.
Great post.
April 1st, 2008
And it’s beautiful, painful stuff, mama. Thanks for sharing.
On a lighter note, my husband probably wants me to reach the point in my life where I care about clean floors as badly as he wants me to hit that mythical 30-something sexual peak.
April 1st, 2008
I get pretty worked up about the clean floors too and then like you start to think about what is really important.
April 1st, 2008
That fucking sucks that Christmas.
And I mean it in the most tender of ways.
That universe. She is a harsh bitch at times.
April 1st, 2008
Hugs to you in all your bravery and honesty. Thanks for trusting us to share this. Big big hugs to you. xox
April 1st, 2008
This is a post that expertly captures all there is to experience in family life: the giddy highs, the god-awful lows, the okay in-betweens. All in one gooey, lovely, shitty mess. Great job.
April 2nd, 2008
you say such pretty words, even in the midst of sorrow and despair.
April 2nd, 2008
I love posts like this from you. Brutally honest.
xo
April 3rd, 2008
The posts about your mother are sticky, Mama. As in, they get stuck in my heart and mind and stay there for the longest time.
Just this evening Mom and I were working on some projects, and I was telling her about you and some of the stories you’ve written about your mum and your grandmother. I hadn’t been to your blog in days, maybe even a week. But the stories were right there.
That’s because you’ve totally got the goods. Love to see you take them out for a spin like this.
April 3rd, 2008
All that stuff about loving your family but wondering why the hell you have to deal with all the crap that they bring.
Yes, yes, oh God yes.
Your writing is stunning, as always.
April 4th, 2008
Clean floors are nice because you can CONTROL your clean floors. Unlike all that other horrible stuff you had to go through. Here’s to fucking clean floors!
April 4th, 2008
What absolutely freaken crappy luck. Last Christmas and miscarriage. That is some heavy writing for HBO or something, not for real life. I like your honesty.
April 16th, 2008
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