Long Silences are normal and indicative and symptomatic

It remains true and bears retelling that not-writing is destructive to my mental health, and also what I tend to do when my mental health is tenuous.

But the difficulty of self-expression has been amplified by the myriad of ways I've been humbled and forced to re-learn my lenses over the last year.  Oliver/Sir O was diagnosed with Autism, anxiety, ADHD, a written expression learning disability, an executive functioning deficit, and classified as 2E last fall.  It was not an unexpected diagnosis, but it knocked the wind out of me and forced me into wildly unfamiliar territory in aggressive and unexpected ways.  I've been having to reimagine everything I've known about how minds work to make room for the neurodivergent ways my children interact with the world.  I've had to become aware of and name the herculean effort I put in daily to co-regulate with each of my children and their lagging skills with self-regulation.  It's been massive.

Then, just as I was beginning to be able to tell which direction wa
s up, the pandemic and all of it's attendant drama, discord, and carpet yanking happened.  I have had so many aspects of my view of and relationship with my own reality shaken and stolen away that the sheer volume of paradigm reconfiguring I've had to do is staggering.  My brain cannot keep up, and I keep emotionally forgetting what I cognitively already know and have processed.  On a much less traumatic scale it's like that moment when you wake up in the morning and have to re-remember that someone has died, only for scores of less earth-shattering adjustments.  I never quite have all of my feet under me.

I've been struggling to sleep.  My brain starts racing around 10 pm, and usually my heart starts to race too.  Lately it's been vivid sensory memories from my time in London in 2002.  Mostly really good memories, but they feel so immediate, like I'm actively living them, and the melancholy of how far gone and away they are (and how impossible they'd be to recreate in a pandemic) makes them really acutely emotional, melancholy, even tragic. I weep from midnight on until I finally collapse.

It's hard for me (and everyone else) to navigate next steps forward.  Goal setting and relationship maintaining and healthy recreating are so impossible to navigate in a world of infinite high-stakes unknowns.  Not knowing what the next school year will look like, not knowing what the economy might even remotely look like, not knowing whose careers will be affected in what ways, not knowing what social activities will be safely available or when...... nobody can plan their life the way humans need in order to stay sane.  And all this on top of the most dramatic civil unrest of my lifetime, when the stakes of so many things seem insanely high, dramatic, unstable, and tragic.

I remember, in the aftermath of the 2016 election, when I was really struggling, finding helpful metaphors in the language of deep festering wounds being opened up to heal properly.  Lots of things (power imbalances) that we (the privileged) pretended were overcome in the 80s have been forced into the bright light to be reckoned with and hopefully dealt with more thoroughly and honestly this time.  I don't know that we will altogether succeed this time either, but hopefully progress will be made. Hopefully the arc of history will lean toward justice and will treat us with some mercy.

I haven't had much luck finding my place or my voice in the current BLM moment.  Most white influencers I follow are tripping over themselves trying to find appropriate and sensitive content to post, mostly finding and sharing black influencer accounts and resharing their content.  I haven't got a business or professional identity to keep afloat right now, so it feels more safe and authentic to just literally mute myself, rather than to post about how I'm muting myself and then still posting others' content.  But it also feels odd/off to be silent in a moment when "silence is complicit" is au courant.  But I'm listening and watching and doing my best to start conversations with kids for whom all conversations are hard to have.  I'm sitting in deep deep discomfort with every facet of every previous self. I hope it is constructive, it's certainly painful.

In which my life exploded and I'm having to learn how to climb out from under it.

I'm getting better at being intentional with how I use my time and resources.  I'm a goal-setting fool and I keep track of my progress tightly, but I still struggle to come up with two minutes to rub together in a row.

Life with six kids is essentially kicking my butt. (And yes, Bunny cut her own bangs a while back and no, I did not handle it well.  Also, yes, meet baby#6 who is also boy#5).

I have learned really thoroughly to not expect relief from pregnancy until after the 4th trimester, because life immediately postpartum is always relentlessly intense.  Newborns, at least my newborns, do not tolerate mama trying to use both of her hands.  Nope, baby must be able to sense mom's heartbeat in order to refrain from that certain newborn wail that makes every iota of a mama's body and brain freeze up and her milk let down.  So, there are a very few things that I can manage to do while baby wearing - some food prep and laundry folding, but all the jobs that involve bending over and getting up and down from the floor, or being near heat or chemicals?  Nope  Not happening.

And this dysfunction is piling up on top of nearly 9 months of pregnancy neglect of my house and family management.  We'll call it discouraging, and leave it at that. No need to burden you with all the thought processes behind my daily pity parties.

But I'm trying to catch occasional footholds and allow myself the grace to start small, and start over small, and do what I can do and let it be enough, for now.

I organized the medicine cabinet the morning after Christmas when I wasn't the only adult in the house.  I purged one of the kids' bedrooms while Mr Renn took all the non-infant kids to see Luminaria.

I'm discovering that one of the keys to being an organized person is having enough garbage receptacles in all the right spots in your house.  (Because I don't have one in my bedroom, which also functions as my office, and trash seems to accumulate in here like breeding rabbits or field mice)

Also, I think I'm going to start scheduling regular purging sessions for once this baby more predictably allows me hands-free time.  On the calendar - the kids go somewhere else and I purge and organize for an evening an area where they would normally impede my progress.   Isn't that what most moms mean when they pine for a break?  Just a chance to speed through the tasks that weigh heavy on their minds without a litany of interruptions?  An opportunity to try out that productivity  phenomenon called deep work?  (Seriously though, I listened to that audio book and thought over and over again, "but what about small children and their constant, constant barrage of interrupting?"  The authors plainly showed their male privilege by being oblivious to this as a source of interruption and failing to address it.)

But I'm settling into the idea: this is my "one thing" for the year.  Possibly my "one thing" for a season of my life here.  I need to get my home and family life in order.  I need to do all kinds of damage control, we've jumped from one state of survival mode to another since moving to this house, and I've never gotten good systems in place and it's making life hard for everybody.  So, just as soon as the newborn survival mode begins to let up, I plan to use whatever time or energy I gain to purge and simplify and organize and plan.  And while I know time is set and finite, if my energy doesn't improve then I'll shift my resources to addressing that problem first.  The status quo is not sustainable.

Yet my outlook is actually much more buoyant than that probably makes me sound.  I am so relieved at the prospect of spending a year not being pregnant, and at the idea of managing to prioritize things that matter to me, and at the idea of being able to muster emotional energy to care about things that matter to me.... it's all very encouraging.  So, even if I can't tackle much of it right.this.very.minute, I know that things are looking up.

In which I discover that gender disappointment is diagnosable and has a name

When we found out Squishy (the Duke) was a boy, I was totally thrown by how gutted I was.  The (distinct) impression I was basing my life on since 2009 was one of 4 boys and 2 girls.  Still outnumbered, but still a mother of girls.  It felt like a compromise and I shook mental/spiritual hands with it and moved forward.

It meant about 4 more pregnancies than I really wanted to live through, but I learned after Sir O was born that it was possible to feel like it was worth it, once it was over.  And at the point I got pregnant with Squishy (the Duke) (pregnancy #5) I had 3 boys and 1 girl, so if I was 'expecting' one more of each, it didn't much matter which, right?  Only every time you have more of one gender/sex, your actual statistical odds of having more of that gender/sex increase.  So to find out I was having a boy then meant the chance of that last girl coming got slimmer.  So I struggled. I floundered, I surprised myself at how unnerved I was.

(I will interrupt myself here to aside that I am fully aware that being capable of birthing healthy children is a blessing.  Like really, really, really, shamefully aware.  It's a thought that beats me up about every 5 minutes of my life like a playground bully and threatens to punch me in the face every time I have a less-than-grateful feeling (over which I have really very little control.) Like so many things in life, it is possible to live with seemingly contradictory truths here.  Cognitive dissonance is my permanent roommate.  For life.  Get comfy with it. I cannot find a way around it.)

I have been saying since before this pregnancy that it REALLY needs to be my last one.  As much as I've become a pro at rolling with punches and lowering the bar, the bar is at rock bottom.  For the sake of my older children, I really need to be able to step up and parent more whole-heartedly.  Which is nigh unto impossible to do when one is mired in the pseudo-food-poisoning knockout known as the first half of my pregnancies, or the depressed and anemic quagmire known as the second half of my pregnancies.  Despite my apparent fertility, I am not a seamless baby making machine.  Every pregnancy kills me a little, in the very most literal sense. By my estimation it takes me 2 years postpartum to recover fully, which means I have recovered fully all of 1 time in the midst of 6 pregnancies.  My body and my mind are quite literally worn out, and to keep doing this would without a doubt shorten my lifespan significantly, to say nothing of the implications for my quality of life.

SO it has been, and has felt like a very real, very valid and valuable sacrifice on my behalf to try to live up to that 6 child impression from 8 years ago.  I felt like I was expressing my faith by cooperating with it when it was so hard for me.

Today ultrasound # 6 showed boy #5.  Not only that, but the ultrasound tech said, "that's a boy all day long..." just to let me know that there was not an iota of room for doubt.

Remembering how the rug had been pulled out from under me last time, I had been trying to prepare for this possibility for months.  I had never once allowed myself a verbal expression of a hope for a girl.  Despite the dozens of inquiries about my preference (because what else do you talk about with a sick pregnant lady?) I had firmly stuck to my "you can't have a baby because you want a boy or a girl, you have to just want a baby" mantra.

But the truth of the matter is that the moment Squishy was revealed to be a boy, the words that popped into my head were "well, I guess the girl will have to come next."  As hard as that day was (and it was hard, and I cried then too), there was still an open, if unlikely door.

Today, as hard as I tried to avoid repeating that struggle, the door appears to have actually closed.  And it's totally eclipsed the struggle I had last time.  This time, it actually feels like someone died.

Do you have any idea how much shame lies inherent in feeling like you've miscarried when you're actually carrying a perfectly healthy baby?  To be swallowed by these huge and awful and unexpected feelings and to be shocked and horrified by them?  The compounding, complex awful emotions that swallow you whole, and you rock violently from one to the other?

So today has been a relentless ride on waves and undertows of sorrow.

That daughter, that I hoped would give me the peace of mind that my journey through rough pregnancies was an acceptable and complete offering to God, is gone.  She doesn't exist.

That impression of my completed family, on which I based my willingness to go through the most excruciating months (accumulating to years) of my life, is shattered, is false.

My faith in God is stout enough that I'm not totally thrown overboard, but I'm shaken.  This is the 3rd such experience in 4 years that has left me totally upended regarding my relationship to and interpretation of divine influence in my life.  Today I totally get the idolic interpretations of deity as capricious characters willing to play cruel games with men and women's lives.  (Looking at you, Aries) In the thick of it, as things are happening that just can't be made to not hurt, it's the only easy way to make sense of the pain.  God has betrayed me, made a fool of me, let me make a fool of myself.  I know all those feelings will sort out over time, and that it's even possible that I'll arrive at a place where having only one daughter will make sense to me.  You know, before I die.  But today I'm not banking on it.

So today, as I quickly realized that Mr Renn is good for many things, but he's not much good for emotions so complicated that you can't even talk about them out loud because you cry so hard, I found through the wonder of the internet, that I am not the first person to ride in this horrid boat.  It's so common that it has a name and is considered a consistent and relatively common factor in postpartum and antenatal depression.  Gender disappointment is common enough to be shortened to an acronym: GD.

Unfortunately for me, the majority of discussions around it revolve around parents of only a single gender (i.e. mothers of all boys) and don't address the huge heaviness I feel about my failure to give Bunny a sister.

I know it was pinning all my hopes on the agency of others, but I had hoped to give all of my children, through siblings close enough in age, a support system of people who'd be going through similar stages of life through adolescence, adulthood, and hopefully to sustain them once I'm gone someday.  While Bunny can still have a great relationship with her brothers, they will experience life and the world differently than she will.  While I have hope that the world will continue to treat women better in her lifetime, there will be a difference.  She may have stellar relationships with sisters-in-law someday, but she may not.  She will not have a sister who will have shared the quirky family background and know her from the ground up.  It's something I would have given blood and guts to have provided for her.  And I tried.  But it's not happening.  It's a huge, heavy thing to grieve.  She may be fine, this may not be something that even matters to her.  But I've been lonely for a sister my entire life.  ( I got a sister when I was 13, we lived in the same household less than 5 years, and we've never yet been in similar stages of life, so we'll see if we get closer as we age).  Having someone to reach out to who was already permanently invested in me would have made a world of difference in my life thus far, and I'm not charismatic enough to have filled that void with friends or mentors. So this is a grief I feel for Bunny's future that is far heavier than my own personal disappointment in not getting to have a group of girls to do girly things with.  (Though that's real too.)

So yes, there's this nonexistent girl who's lived in my head for 8 years, who was going to signify so many things for me.  My girls were going to take care of each other.  My family was going to feel peacefully complete.  I was going to get to have "girls" and amidst the ferality of our wild boy house, we were going to put on plays and have high tea and wear aprons and watch foreign films .  Poof.  Gone.

So yeah, nobody died, but it's a grief like someone did.

It's not like there's nothing to salvage here.  I have to start the really painful process of peeling off charred skin and evaluating the carnage beneath to evaluate what can be saved.  What's actually not necessarily incompatible with my real life?  Where can I graft?

I tried to look up ways to enjoy being a mother of boys, and I didn't get the kind of answers I was hoping for.  The advice this kind of search gets you is to find the beauty in their wild, forgiving, fiercely alive ways.  And I've been playing that game for years now.  I've got to figure out which of my "girls" daydreams can be transplanted into my real life where there's a "strong-willed girl surrounded by a grundle of boys with wildly different temperaments".  There can still be baking, and if I can get my health and stamina under me, there could still be plays (probably with more gore), and I can share Hedgehog in the Fog with all of them.  It will just take more work than I was planning on.  And I will have to learn to go with the flow of their personalities and interests, which is a fact of parenting regardless of boys or girls.

I have never properly bonded with any of my babies before birth, and sometimes even then it's taken a day or two.  The ultrasound has always helped though, to make them seem more human to me.  I was alarmed when that didn't happen today.  This boy baby didn't feel any more a person for having seen him and his parts move.  I'm attributing that to the ultrasound tech showing and announcing his boy-ness before even sharing his profile with me.  I had to put up my "I'm totally cool with this" guard right off the bat, which stifled my vulnerability and bonding mojo.




The other clincher is the weird, societal anathema of being pestered to make a public announcement of some sort of "gender reveal."  This would have been easy if it'd been a girl.  Tada!  Our family is complete and makes sense and everyone is excited and happy and aren't we cute?  Pop a confetti-filled balloon and call it a day.

But this is my real life and nothing in my real life lends itself to being cute or making sense.

So instead I have confused children who thankfully didn't take it too hard, but aren't the least bit excited, and a self/pregnant lady whose hormones aren't helping her out as she hasn't been able to talk without weeping bitterly for 16 hours now.  And Mr Renn, trying to manage us all and trying to minimize my ocean of emotions into a single palatable sentence so he doesn't have to think about it too long, and wishing to God that his wife could just function again because he's so tired of living that second shift that every working mother knows but never gets to chuck.   We are not the stuff of viral instagram feeds.

And here I am (it's 3 am now), sitting forlorn at the bottom of the barrel, hoping that when the sun comes up tomorrow I am able to function better than today (despite not sleeping) and that I can find some bootstraps.

I am absolutely certain that I will get over this, but I'm also certain that it will take me some time.  This is why we did this today.  I knew that I would need time to adjust, and the kids would need time to adjust and that we needed to get that adjusting out of the way before there was an actual baby in our faces.  This because I locked myself in the bathroom and cried for hours when my 3rd brother in a row was born (when I was 8) and I didn't want my kids having that experience on what I hope is a very happy day for our family.

Anyway, where is the value in writing this all down and posting it in a public-ish place?  Well #1: I need to be work things out in my own head and #2: It would have been valuable for me to find a post like this today.  I found a few that helped a bit, but felt like most of what I found excluded the possibility of a mother who already had children of each sex/gender experiencing this intense whiplashing ride. And most people who mentioned religion/God at all seemed oblivious to the possibility of feeling a little abandoned by/peeved at Him.

Thankfully my best preparation for today was reading (and almost finishing) ReReading Job years ago, wherein I discovered that A) extolling the patience of Job totally misses the point and that B) God would rather have my honest messy struggle than my pious martyrdom.  So I'm comfortable talking to God about how I honestly feel today.  I have trust that those feelings aren't permanent.  I feel comfortable being honest that I felt them.  My identity isn't every emotion I experience.  I can recognize them, try to honor and learn from them, and then let them go.

I am not a horrible person or a bad mother because I am dealing with grief today.  I have lots to be thankful for and I know it and I know that will be the long shot take away from this stage in my life.  But at this apogee, we have grief to deal with and expectations to adjust and that takes time and work.  We will do the work and the time will pass and I will outlast pregnancy and life will take on color and buoyancy again.  I will adore my untamed children and I will find renewed energy for teaching them how to stay fully alive in a world that expects manners and conformity.  I will feed and teach and cloth them and read to them and pray for them.

And God will laugh, as He does.

Deeper Dog Days

Last Pregnant Summer
Last Pregnant Summer
Last Pregnant Summer

I am bored to tears of my own broken records, but it's been rough.  My kids who have historically gotten along pretty well have become prone to teasing and bickering, and there are just no breaks for the tired pregnant lady.  So far this summer everyone's home all the time, minus two weeks of swimming lessons, which gave some structure, but not much that I could call "breaks."

I did break down and buy a $30 inflatable pool, which has been good for giving kids something to do, but has not done a thing to reduce the fighting.

I'm sure I'm not done evolving, but I am so much more able to let life roll like water off a duck's back than I would have been 5-10 years ago.

This morning the baby (who got pseudonynm-ed the Duke, but I call him Squishy in real life), pooped in the tub, and I just sang a song about how it's not an emergency if it doesn't require an ER visit while I cleaned it up.  It's extra work, it's exhausting, but there's no resources in me to turn it into drama.

Anemia and low blood pressure are back with a vengeance.  I get short of breath and dizzy just standing up.

So, in that state of "I can't think of anything more unpleasant than trying to find clothes that won't hurt to wear and spending my energy getting into them," I indulged in some long-term planning in my pajamas this morning.  It was a really rough, loosely shaped 7-8 year plan.  But I'm giddy about it.

Because if I can make it to the other, more human, side of a last pregnancy, I can go on being human and having ambitions and goals without ever being T-boned by a pregnancy again.  6 pregnancies have pretty well decimated the last 12 years of my life, as far as personal goals, dreams, and ambitions go.  I do not manage to have them, let alone foster them, while pregnant.  So, is that worth it?  Well, I wouldn't ever change anything to un-have any of my kids.  I absolutely would make different choices to re-prioritize my education and goals way back in the days of being a newlywed though.  If, for example, I had insisted on prioritizing my own goals as a newlywed, I could have completed a masters degree instead of working a soul-sucking desk job for 2.5 years.  That would have left me eligible to apply for a PhD program while Renn was in Dental school.  For most of that we would have had one 1 kid, which is hard, but consider that now I'm having to manage 6 kids if I go back for a doctorate.  Doesn't compare.

It was dumb, fear-based decision making that led to 4 of the roughest years of my life, holed up in a cave of an apartment trying desperately not to atrophy beyond recognition.  Treating myself as nearly less-than-human and waiting for things to happen to me in order to start living.  Top that off with the skeletal and shrinking support system we had as a family at that time, and it was just unnecessarily rough. I would never advocate for anyone to replicate my path.

But, hey - I can still control/influence the future.  So sometimes I explore options and their timelines instead of adequately supervising my zoo.  It gives me just enough buoyancy to feel a flicker of hope and resiliency.  22-ish weeks to go.

22 minutes left in Mother's Day, and how I feel about it.

First of all, lets just put it out there that my Mother is a stellar human being, and a tremendous support to the many people who rely on her in order to function at all. I don't know whether she self-identifies as a feminist, but she was born with an indomitable spirit, an has always known that she was capable of absolutely anything she put her mind to.  She just happens to be extremely accommodating toward other people in deciding what she will set her mind to, which pretty much makes her the most ideal employee on the planet.  I know her bosses know how lucky they are to have her, I just hope they remember to let her know that they know.  Sort of like what we, her 5 children, ought to do more often as well.

Gee, I wonder where I get my squinty eyes from.... 

There's a meme going around Facebook today (Mothers' Day) saying "post a picture that makes me proud/happy to be a mom."  I'm not quite far enough out of postpartum land for those to be the first two adjectives I'd attach to my motherhood, but I can attach them to my recent graduation, which is so tightly wound up with motherhood in so many ways.  I mean, I spent a year writing a thesis about (blogging) mothers.  I am like a high priestess in the order of over-thinking all the complexities of motherhood.  So here's the thoughts I do have about motherhood today.  They aren't super glossy, but they are coming from my authentic place of wanting to find a way to be honest and still find beauty in things.

We pulled Sir O and the Captain out of school to take this photo.  They were not about to miss class parties for mom's graduation.  After 3 minutes of having my feelings hurt, I figured fewer greased pigs to wrestle during the convocation was probably a good thing for Mr. Renn. 

I am really grateful, but mostly just awed that I've been entrusted with the care and keeping of such giant, unwieldy personalities as the ones that have landed in my lap. These kids have so.much.energy. You would think God would have sent them to a less-easily-overwhelmed mother.  Someone who found tremendous fulfillment in keeping their days filled with structure and wholesome recreation and silly songs and who didn't want to crawl into a cave at the end of everyday just to have some time to be alone and not be so tangibly needed and touched every, every minute.

I mean, motherhood is deeply, deeply humbling.  And not just because the world talks about mothers as angels when we all know very well we are human, human beings.  Motherhood is humbling because when you love these little ruffians so fiercely you want the very best for them, then you continually catch yourself being unable to give them the very best mother.  You can only be you, and you are invariably selfish and short tempered and irritable and tired and burnt-out.  Or whatever your particular shortcomings may be - those are mine.  I wish my kids could have a parent who never lost her temper, and was always level-headed and able to think before she spoke.  But, instead, they have me.  I sometimes manage to make progress toward being the parent I wish I was, but there's a lot of backsliding on my journey toward being a saintly mother.

I mean, I love my kids, and I love spending time with them individually.  Collectively they tend to run me ragged.  I do not love feeling like an unpaid maid, being ignored, bearing the brunt of their anxieties and frustrations, and being the only place where the buck stops most days.  (Nor am I enamored of sleep deprivation.... which makes all those other things that much worse.) Kids save their ugliest behavior for their parents, and unfortunately we, their parents, tend to reciprocate that favor.

So some days I despair and become convinced I'm raising a small army of psychopaths.  And because of my personality and the way I (and most other women) have been socialized, I internalize failures and give credit for successes to others or to good luck.  When my kids show a stunning lack of capacity for logical thinking, my first reaction is to try to figure out where I failed. When my kids exhibit repellant behaviors in public, I am mortified for myself because I assume everyone will use their insanity to index my worth as a human being.  There's all that cultural baggage of womanly virtue being tied up in trying to control things that aren't entirely controllable.  A virtuous woman will have her house in order and her children will be well-behaved.  I mean, crimony.  I will never have enough 'virtue' in me to stay one-step ahead of my children's capacity for entropy.  I am forever and ever trying to figure out what makes each  of their vastly different personalities tick and how to leverage that toward better social graces.

My favorite features of myself, and the things that make me like myself as a human being in my less-depressed moments are virtues of quite a different stripe.  I like my willingness to consider the possibility that I'm wrong.  I like the extra effort I take to say meaningful things (and not quip deepities) when I think people are in pain.  I like the delight I find in making things fancy or celebratory when they could just be plain and serviceable (you know, when I feel well enough to find energy to spend on such things.)

I even kind of like some of my features that are on the verge of being vices.  I like my penchant for dramatics, because it opens up space for vulnerability and honest talks about feeeeelings.  I like my advocate heart that speaks up when people voice ideas that are incomplete, and need to expand to include ideas, people, and experiences that are uncomfortable for them to acknowledge.  There was probably a time when Mr Renn would have changed these things about me if he'd had the choice, but I think they've grown on him.

See, no matter how much my life revolves around being a mother, I'm still a person first.  A real, whole, messy person with my unique set of gifts and failings.  And when you hand me the stewardship of a grundle of other such complicated persons, and the responsibility to train them to function within a cultural framework that often runs contrary to their natures, it's just not always a pretty process.

So I hope we can value motherhood without having to say it's pretty.  Sure, I love my mother because she was endlessly patient with me and cheered me on, and other platitudes, but I also love her because she made lists she never managed to check off, occasionally played solitaire when real life was just too-much, couldn't resist reminding me what a hard time I'd given her over her inability to force my brothers to keep their rooms clean when I turned to her for solidarity over my discovery that kids are gross, and probably gave me a therapy-worthy complex with her struggle to embrace healthy vulnerability (she's getting there).  I love her not just because she was a great and dedicated mother, but because it was dang hard for her to be a great and dedicated mother.  She knows what it's like to realize that your kids aren't going to cooperate with your preconceived notions of what motherhood is, and to slowly, painfully peel yourself away from those preconceived notions (which were reasonably pleasant and modest and circumspect, we were smart enough to know were were raising humans, not creating stock footage.)  I love that when I criticized her as a 9-year old for not being imaginative enough, she entertained my attempts at giving her imagination lessons.  I mean, she accepted criticism from her bratty kid, because she was so keenly aware of her own failings that she acknowledged the truth in what I was saying and discarded the hubris of it without a thought. I catch myself responding in the same way to my children's complaints.  We both probably needed to be kinder to ourselves and tell our kids to cut us some slack, but there we are being human and broken and keenly aware of it.

SO anyway - I'm happy and proud that I graduated.  I mean, it was insanely hard to push that project to completion.  I did grad school while raising 4 kids, through a nasty pregnancy, and through a move to a new house.  It was not pretty.  I tell that to everyone who says "I can't believe you (did grad school and x,y,z.)"  And you know who found the most delight in my accomplishment?  My mom.  she just thinks it's the coolest thing in the world that I managed to pull it off.

But hey, I think we learn and grow the most from putting ourselves in uncomfortable situations.  The ones where we are so stretched that we can't manage those traditional markers of virtue.  If life is hard enough that you aren't quite managing to keep your house in order and your children well-behaved in public, then you must be learning some of the best and brightest life lessons, and pursuing some of the most difficult-to-attain virtues.  I bet you could use a cheerleader.  I will cheer and validate you from my messy corner. And that's how I'm feeling about motherhood today.

More frenetics at Bantam Hill

We (Mr Renn and I) are trying so hard to mold our still-new-to-us home into a place with some grace built in.  Entropy is rising up to battle us at most every turn, but now that I'm not forced to spend every iota of energy on a thesis, and I'm at least halfway through the most intense phase of infant-dom, I'm beginning to feel like maybe entropy doesn't always have to win.

Last week was not my favorite thing.  Circumstances combined to make too many things happen at once.  For a week my basement was being drywalled, and we had to find temporary homes for lots of things, for that same week, it was Spring Break and my kids were home all day every day and there was no spare money or adult supervision to leave the house we had only half-access to.  Plus, for kicks, the Duke's baby blessing was the following Sunday, so the house needed to be cleaner than usual, and lots of food prepared, despite the extra messes of drywall dust and too many bored bodies in too little space.  I worked hard last week, and by the time the blessing arrived and my house was full of company, I was too tired to be the kind of hostess I'd like to be.  But, I was relieved to have made it to that point.  I hadn't totally beaten back my to-do list, (The fingerprints on the sliding glass door are still there, for one.) but everything was good-enough, and done and that busy-crazy week was behind me.

So now, we can turn around and focus our energy on the next thing.  Luckily our next things are gaining momentum and scale.  This month we hope to get trees planted around our house.  There were 3 total trees when we bought the house, and we cut the only substantial one down the first week we lived here.  The bit of Pennsylvanian still living inside of me has felt terribly bereft, and so kickstarting our mini-arboretum is an energy-filled prospect.  Plus my basement is being taped, mudded, and sanded this week, so I need to pick out paint for it.  Paint always feels like a gratuitous decision.  If you're ready for paint you've really accomplished something. We're done working on invisible skeletons and we're ready for the really visual elements that reward your eyes with instant gratification when they're installed.  Momentum! Momentum!

4 weeks in

A sweet, well-intending lady in my ward tried to comfort me recently by giving me verbal permission to get absolutely nothing done right now.  In one sense it worked, because I am getting alarmingly little done right now, and it does sort of have to be okay.  This is the stage where my babies sleep soundly in my arms but their eyes pop open the moment I move to lie them down.  I have found no way around this but to outlast the stage.  There are no other bodies both present and old enough and responsible enough to do much baby holding (Sir O only has about a 5 minute attention span for such a thing), so I am it.  I splurged on the 4Moms mamaRoo before our baby burrito duke was born, and it's definitely earned its keep, but even so I find precious little time each day when both of my own hands are at my disposal.  People get fed meals, laundry gets done, and I make futile attempts at decluttering and straightening in microbursts.  It feels kind of mean, actually.  I finally have the  energy to want to tackle all the decluttering and organizing that's been shoved to the back burner since we moved here a year and half ago.  I'm finally neither impaired by grad school nor pregnancy, and I can both see what needs to be done and come up with the emotional energy and focused thinking to figure out how I want to do it.  I just can't act, because my hands are occupied.  This has led to some grumpy moments.

Luckily, I have done this enough times to know that it will feel like it went by quickly once it's over, even if it doesn't feel like it's passing quickly while I'm in it.  Two months from now we'll have settled into a routine, and I should be able to plan and calculate what I will accomplish during semi-predictable nap times.  Three months from now the tide of baby vomit should start to recede. Five months from now I should be able to lay this little man down in his own bed when he's supposed to sleep and trust him to figure it out on his own.  Everything changes so much and so fast in the first year, I know I just have to give myself tiny serenity talks when I'm feeling oppressed by it, and choose to be okay with the way things are now, because they are changing and soon enough they will be different again.

So yes, if you stop by unannounced, you will get the alarmingly messy version of our home.  (And feel free to jump in and improve the situation, by all means),  but I'm doing my best to not beat myself up for what I'm not getting done.  I'm still doing a rockstar job of growing this baby.  He's enormous (compared to my other babies at the same age), and he's snacky.  I see rubber-band-rolls in his near future.  I have reason to believe he's getting enough attention and affection from the whole lot of us (but mostly me) to develop healthy attachments and to feel perfectly secure (I dissolve into a hormonal heap of sniffle-tears when I think about babies who lack those very things).  I try to remind myself it's a good thing that he cries and fusses whenever he realizes he's been laid down and left alone (usually 5 minutes after I laid him there, having spend 30-40 minutes trying to get him soundly enough asleep to attempt such a feat) because it means he trusts that crying will get his needs met.  At least thinking such a thing helps keep me from getting too frustrated.

So, my to-do lists are very short just now, and even so they are never quite completed.  I'm working really hard at being okay with that, for now.  This also involves working really hard at not losing my cool when my other kids make messes that I know I won't have time to address, and then lose their ability to either see the mess or to stay on task when I ask them to clean up after their (dang) selves.  Sir O has especially entered a phase where it is apparently traumatic to be asked to do chores and contribute to maintaining a family home.  Life is hard, buddy.  Welcome to it.

Anyhow, I'm now in that place I prepared for.  People asked me what I was going to do after grad school ended (presumably digging for insight into how I was going to use my degree?) and my answer was always that I was going to have a baby, and then do damage control on all my family relationships, and then see how much energy I had for anything else (thinking, maybe 4-6 months postpartum I'd have my act together enough for such thinking.) The baby's been had, he's lovely.  The damage control is being beastly, but I feel like I'm making headway.

My body is being rather pokey with postpartum recovery, I'm anxious for about a dozen parts of me to tighten up and function properly.  I'm hoping, but not certain, I'll get the green light for exercising my tail off at my six week postpartum doctor visit.  I haven't done one lick of working out since last May, and I miss it.

So my prayers, of late, contain a lot of "let the baby sleep" and "let me sleep," because those seem to be the keys to all my hopes and dreams right now.  It'll come with time, but how much time?

Introductions.

Yeah, you try coming up with a pseudonym for a fourth boy.  It's almost as much drama as coming up with the nym(name) only the stakes are lower.



We've considered:

S. Esquire
Baron
le Dauphin (or even le petit Dauphin, but that's just getting too long)
Earl of Bantam Hill
And I've always wanted to call one of my boys Little Lord Fauntleroy, but can't really shorten that to "Lord" for the obviously blasphemous connotation.


In the end, and in part because his coming was so closely timed with Bowie's going, he's going to be some variation on "The Duke" - but he's going to have to do a bit more living before the best adjectives to attach to that title make themselves apparent. (I have a feeling neither "thin" nor "white" will be his for the taking, so this name will be a work in progress.)

Simply Simon

So, yes.  I came out on the other side of this.



And I am still very much finding my feet 10 days later.  February is a restless month anyway, and having such a large-scale (wonderfully wanted) disruption land in it is enough to make anyone feel lost.

So, pretty much don't ask me to be anywhere anytime soon, especially if you're hoping for a non-pajama-ed version of me.  Dressing the immediate postpartum body is the pits. You're all soft and sore and needing quick access to all your parts.  Mirrors are not my friend.  But hey, who needs them, I have a new friend.




This little guy came barreling into the world at full-speed, and was more than a pound bigger than any of my other babies. (Nearly a 9-pounder) Compounding my slow recovery, we're pretty sure he bruised my rib on his way out.  Which, ouch.

(Also, bruised rib + postpartum sutures and bladder trauma + sinus infection = trifecta of nose-blowing terror)

I hope at some point I'm able to reflect on this birth with more spiritual eyes.  It happened so fast and I've been scrambling so much to keep up with life (with 5 kids!) since then that I haven't managed the kind of reflection that I hope will still come.

So here's the version with the chronology, if not the teleology.

My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer back in January, and was originally scheduled for surgery only 2 days after my due date.  Panic sort of ensued.  First of all, my mom with her years of nursing experience is the very best postpartum caretaker in the world.  She can't always give me as much of her time as she'd like, but the time I get is of supreme quality.  Everything you can think of gets taken care of for me.  Kids are happy, messes are contained, I get checked on regularly and reminded to eat and drink and stay on top of medication.  I can totally just focus on being reflective and bonding with my new baby for a bit.  I highly recommend it.

However, it was not in the cards this go round.  My mom's surgery did get pushed back a bit, so there was reason to hope she'd get to at least spend some time with baby before a long 6-week recovery period where she can't hold anything heavier than a spoon. (She needed to save all her leave from work for post-surgery) But then my due-date came and went, and days started passing us by and she started sweating bullets.

On top of which, did I mention that he was a big baby?  My discomfort levels started to skyrocket.  I could feel diastasis recti in the making (ab muscles separating down the middle), my hips were constantly popping out of their sockets in painful ways, and I got frequent jolts of sciatica.  Plus the worst heartburn of my life, and a horrible head cold and I was a hot mess of a miserable manatee.  Wednesday morning, after my 4th night in a row of nearly no sleep and 4 days overdue, we finally decided that we were going to have to give up on my goal to go into labor on my own. I was scared of replicating my younger brother's birth, where my mom broke her tailbone and had a 3rd degree tear.  In retrospect, we're pretty sure it was the right choice, because did I mention that he was a big baby?

I told the nurse I was tentatively planning to forego an epidural, unless the labor dragged on for a long time, (because remember how I hadn't slept in days and was already exhausted?)  But when you know that you'd be paying for that epidural out of pocket, and that you pretty much can't afford it, well let's just say it makes the choice easier.

The pitocin started just before 3 pm, even once it was turned up all the way my contractions weren't any more uncomfortable than the braxton hicks ones I'd been having on my own.  But once the doctor  showed up to break my water (which I'm told was around 5:15?), then I quickly entered that zone that requires incredible focus to survive.  I couldn't even talk, and Mr Renn kept asking me questions I couldn't answer, so I kept throwing him dagger eyes.  At one point I managed to tell him he was saying the wrong things, but that was the extent of our birth-bonding. (Which is to say, it's a good thing I had other people there to do the birth coaching, Renn will not be going into the doula business anytime soon.)

30 entirely excruciating minutes later, I managed to tell my mom that I thought they'd better check me, I was starting to feel pressure, and sure enough, once the nurse checked me she spun into a thinly veiled panic (it was like 10 minutes before a shift change, and I'm sure people were preparing to leave).  I remember hearing her shout "hurry!" into the hallway.  I only pushed 2 or 3 times and his head was out, but unlike every other baby of mine, he didn't proceed to slide out seamlessly.  His shoulders were still stuck, and I had to be begged to push again and get them through.  I have never been so convinced I couldn't do something in my life.  I remember thinking they were going to have to anesthetize me and cut the baby out of my birth canal or something drastic and gory.

Afterward, my mom told me that my last push had completely showered the doctor in amniotic fluid, right as he was probably hoping to be headed home to his own family.  Apparently it was a really funny moment if you weren't the one pushing the baby out.  There were plenty of understated jokes about showering that followed.

I immediately asked my nurse (a new one, remember that shift change?) to get me on some pain meds.  My thought was that if I could get on top of my pain, I wouldn't need as much of the percocet or loratab, and I hate how foggy those make me feel.  The remainder of my hospital stay was a whirlwind of trying to stay on top of pain meds, trying to name our poor baby, and worrying about his bilirubin levels and wondering when they'd let us leave.

He was 24 hours old before he had a name, but as always we managed to name him before leaving the hospital, so at least there is that.

Since we've been home he's managed to maximize his day-for-night switch, and begun getting them switched back again.  He's a champion feeder, and I'm still curling my toes waiting for it to not feel like he has piranha teeth.   I'm also waiting for my cervix to close and my bladder to firm up so I can entertain thoughts of leaving the house someday.

In the meantime, my mom's surgery went well and I'm anxiously waiting for her to graduate from the ICU.  The timing of all of this was really rotten, so neither of us are able to take care of each other.  Thankfully many of the ladies in my neighborhood and ward have gone out of their way to love on our family right now, even though my older kids are all a little bit feral and difficult to love.  Change is hard when you're in the under-10 set.

But every day we start to feel more like a cohesive family unit again.   The kids all love their new baby brother, (though their interest in him waxes and wanes), and I'm managing to dispense my attention and worry in better, more balanced ways each day.

I am very, very tired, and still very, very sore.  I have had a head cold/sinus infection this entire time and certainly never gotten close to adequate rest.  I remember having a much faster recovery last time (which is to say I felt impaired for a much shorter time), and I wonder whether it's more a matter of subsequent recoveries getting harder or just being older making it harder. Either way, I was hoping to be able to do more by now.  But, as I mentioned, I'm still living in pajamas and trying to find ways around blowing my nose.  I'll try to be kind and patient with myself, and hopefully my body will keep making progress.  

I also promise to whine less in future postings. Thanks for putting up with me.

(Hospital Photos by my cousin Samantha, who also brought a big box of decadent cookies, securing her place in my will.)

Exoneration

I keep hoping that I will find an awesome groove that allows me to roll out this thesis without being in a constant state of paralyzing panic, but it hasn't happened yet.  I'm still dealing with the most distracting and counterproductive types of stress.  Ive been clinging like crazy to the promise of scheduling - clearing my mind by knowing that all the "things" have a time allotted to them.  But in my life trying to stay on schedule is like clinging to a rubber raft in a hurricane. The short people aren't very sympathetic to my cause.

I am still trying really hard to make up for damages done in December to my kids and my husband.  The timing of my comprehensive exams was just brutal all around, so I've been doing more reading and playing and making with my kids in an attempt to build up some affirming memories.  I managed to get the boys all re-invested in The Marvelous Land of Oz, and now we are speeding along in Ozma of Oz, having just restored Tick Tock to working order. (Hopefully we escape the Wheelies tonight).

But so far, all of my designated thesising time is at the end of the day, so it gets what's left of me at the end of that day. They call the ends of a loaf of sandwich bread the suegra, or mother-in-law, in Mexico, and that's about the concept of what my thesis is getting from me.  It is, frankly, not enough. Especially on days when I haven't managed to take great care of myself.  When I start my thesis work hungry, too tired, or dehydrated or with a headache, it shows. I'm trying to figure a way to give some of my best hours to it instead, but A) I'm not totally sure when those are and B) I have 3 kids who are at home every morning and even if I try to ignore them a little, they are very distracting; about as distracting as migraines and low blood sugar.  My poor writing.

So, my regrouping plan is to re-prioritize self care, and to crack down on the distractions that I do have some control over.

Things I have been doing well: regular exercise, going to bed before midnight, drinking at least 1/4 gallon of water daily.

Things I have been failing: morning pages, eating well (I've been accidentally skipping meals and then resorting to sugar - horrible combination), setting aside time to prepare (for the next day, or things happening later that day.... it's like I'm constantly failing to be prepared.)

In her keynote at Alt Summit Lisa Congdon recommended breaking productive sessions into 45 minute increments, and allowing for 15 minute breaks in-between.  Longer than that, and she said the ability to focus and be creative wanes, so she always alternates tasks in hour increments. I cannot remember the last time I had an uninterrupted 45 minute streak at home, but I think (and hope) I can still apply the concept, so I'll be wearing a stopwatch for the next little while, and figuring out what increment of time fits best with my life.  Keeping myself on task when I'm home with my kids has always been hard for me. I just keep noticing things that need to be done and floating between them with homemaking ADD, never actually finishing very much. (And also, obviously, not keeping track of time or preparing for upcoming appointments or commitments very well.)

The best thing I can do, I suppose, is to be kind to myself, and strive for incremental improvement.

And keep loving on my kids, because they are insane, but the most delightful things that will ever be in my life. 

How I make time to iron every week

I am of the opinion that establishing a laundry system that works for a growing family is an unparalleled feat.  It has taken a lot of work and trial and error to find a way to keep laundry from becoming the reason I cry in the corner every day.  Like dishes and the kitchen floor, it's the sort of a task that comes at you in a steady, never-relenting stream.  Laundry is never done, so for me, I had to set up a system for laundry that doesn't ever pretend to arrive at "done."  Doing all the laundry in one day is a horrible idea for someone like me.  I have to mess with my own head, and convince myself to tackle it in consistent, bite-size pieces.

This means I do laundry (almost) every day.  It's just less overwhelming for me to work it into my daily routine as a small thing than to tackle it less frequently as a bigger task.  This means our family hamper is tiny - and in a very visible place.  It's the only way to ensure that I will get around to it every day.  A laundry pile within view of the front door is enough of a deterrent, at least for now. I'm able to have the tiny hamper, because Mr Renn built this for me, and we sacrificed storage space in our tiny laundry room to facilitate it.  My laundry-sorting tower is that important to me.

I took a lot of laundry tips from Large Family Logistics, which is sadly out of print.  I make sure everything is right-side out (and zipped up) as I sort, which saves lots of time when I'm folding. And I try to make sure at least one of my kids is with me when I'm sorting and when I'm starting loads (and when I sort the washed cold load, half of which must air-dry). I don't trust any of them to sort or wash on their own, but they will learn better by frequent exposure (and normalization) than by a single lecture and demonstration later on. I'm picky about things like using Woolite Darks on every cold load. (And reading care tags...)

Every clean load gets carried in its basket straight to my bed, where hopefully I fold it right away.  But I try not to let myself go to bed until the laundry on my bed is folded and put away.  When it's only 1 load (occasionally 2), that seems pretty doable.  Also, I love laundry folding boards for neat piles that translate into neater drawers.

The ironing load is just one of my loads that I fit in every week, so I try to have it land on a day when I can spend half an hour on it in the afternoon.  I wash that load in cold water, with liquid starch in the rinse cycle, then I set myself up with exactly the right number of hangers (no extra trips back and forth!) a good podcast, (for light fare I recommend The Art of Simple, and for something deeper try New Yorker: Fiction)and I get in the zone and go to town on the damp, starchy shirts.  If I'm tempted to procrastinate, the wet state of those clothes helps light a fire under me.  I need to iron them before they get too dry - and also a pile of wet laundry doesn't take long to go sour.  Most of what I iron are the dress shirts Mr Renn wears to work (How to iron a dress shirt), and I get an awesome result without ever having to use my iron's steam feature.  (Which is always invariably the way things get ruined by irons, is it not?) Then it's all hung up, ready to wear (after I admire my work for a moment).

Lightness of Being

Bunny is buoyant.

Despite being a whirling dervish of physical energy, she is also radiantly pleasant. She has the attention span of an attention deficit puppy, but she's polite about it. This girl must say "thank you" more than a hundred times every day.  And she still says "come see me" when she wants to be held (which is pretty much always), and she's got emotional radar.  Whenever anyone else in the house is feeling grumpy or sad, Bunny is instantly underfoot offering hugs and snuggles or to have your cheeks held between her palms.

She also calls her belly button a belly butt.  Which cracks me up every time.

Her inherent interest in the well-being and emotional state of the people around me brings me joy.  It kind of feels like there is a tender plant growing that will one day become the type of a tree I could pass all of my stewardships over to when death comes for me.  There will be someone around to love my people the way only I know they need to be loved.



I actually spent time today trying to guess how old she'd need to be to introduce her to several of my most indulgently favorite things.  Anne Shirley, first and foremost.  I see a lot of them in each other.

So while I'm not sure what I expected having a girl to be like, it's not what I expected.  It keeps surprising me with how awesome it is, and fun, and terrifying.

s'marvelous

I don't know how much longer I can keep up this facade of functionality.  Being constantly overwhelmed by a steady string of deadlines from school/thesis stuff, while managing a family that is consistently losing it's ability to be patient with their only-partially-present mother; it's using up all the me that there is.  It's like I'm splitting myself into two competing halves.

On the one side, there is the part of me that wants to get all of this over with as soon as possible.  Let's get back to a place where I can put more energy into my parenting and homemaking and not be a constant hairball of deadline stress. Sounds good, no?

On the other side, there is the part of me that is actually deeply interested in my thesis, and really genuinely enjoying the research process and having a hard time imagining going to live in a place where being an academic is back in the past tense again.

So I'm wondering, more with curiosity than with angst, because I've none to spare, where I'll find myself once I've got this thesis defended.  How will I find to exercise and retain this mental muscle I've built?

Mostly I think, I'm going to find myself writing more, and turning to the internet for an outlet.  I haven't unleashed much of my research and findings on the internet yet, mostly because it all incorporates feminist theory, and people who choose not to identify as feminists can be very quick to pre-judge anything feminist-flavored.

Luckily for me, I've found some terrific examples of women scholars who do identify as feminists, but who also very carefully take the time to value what women already do and already have done.  Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is lovely, and Neylan McBaine is always thinking in the most critical and kind way I've seen. Plus there are people like Valerie Hudson who only express opinions that they can back up with exhaustive research. (Truly, the scope of her research is mind-blowing and this podcast was worth every second of it's 81 minutes) So there's hope for me to be braver and to find a comfortable way to voice my research, insights, and consequent opinions. I will never be thick-skinned, but I do anticipate getting to a point where I'm confident enough about the quality of my research to not fear criticisms so much.

My personal approach, as I tackle the topic of "mommy blogging" - one that I find everyone already has strong opinions about - is to try to figure out what it is that is happening (phenomenologically) before I even consider placing any kind of a value judgement on it.  I'm not likely to arrive at radical conclusions that way, and I don't intend to find myself making a call for earth-shattering or subversive  behaviors.  I'm hoping to identify small paradigm shifts that women can make so that their blogging habits better meet their needs.  This will likely include small subversions to hegemonic norms, but not likely subversions to entire systems.  I really and truly land on the "moderate" portion of the spectrum no matter how you want to frame me.  Unfortunately, this sets me up to be masticated by liberals and conservatives alike.  It also makes it rather hard to find relevant conferences to present at.  Most conferences covering social media or technology and society aren't terribly interested in the activity of middle-class women, and most conferences dealing with women's studies are coming at it from the very liberal end of the spectrum.  So far nothing is a perfect fit.

So while I squirm under the stresses of deadlines and sabotaged study sessions, I'm also dealing with an uncomfortable identity shift.  I'm not likely to be able to go back to being a housewife and give up being an academic altogether.  But I also know I cannot feasible keep up my current pace of participation and production.  Something a little kinder and more flexible will have to evolve, which is ironically the precise problem with higher education for women and is addressed really well by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich herself.... come to think of it.

Mother Stewards

My brain folks, it is a busy place to live, and sometimes an exceptionally melancholy one.

Our friend and neighbor Connor died this last week, as has been widely publicized.  I have been worried sick about his family, as well as exceptionally contemplative.  This is just where my mind goes.  How would I feel, what would I think, if I had that mother's burden?  To have sent a delightful, exuberant son of my womb out into the world as a free gift, hoping that his service would be a blessing, and already fighting a sense of loss at his believed-to-be-temporary absence because I believed in the work he was leaving to do?  But then to find that he'd passed away quietly, continents away, in an utterly preventable tragedy of errors?  To know cognizantly what had happened, but to have to wait days and days to deal with the physical reality of the body I birthed coming off of a plane without my son inside of it?  I'm unavoidably spending time in this hypothetical space.  I'm worrying a lot about how to help people grieve in my grief-illiterate culture.

I'm also pondering the control a mother does and does not have.  We mothers figure out pretty quickly that we cannot make horses drink, and that leading them to water often requires running in a lot of elaborate circles round them.  There is an unspoken, overwhelming need felt to be in control, to protect and prevent all types of harm. Conversely, there's a child's will and all the entropy in the whole wide world working to show the mother how little control she has.   Mothers slowly trade in their delusions of control for a hope of influence, and come to accept the limits of their stewardship.  If we are wise, we realize more every day how much of it we have to turn over to God.

So what then, if all of those factors outside of our control manage to concoct a nightmare for us?  What, when a mother has to fight off the "what ifs" and "if onlys" for the rest of her life?  How powerless to save her children can a mother feel before she implodes from the awfulness? How vulnerable is every mother every time her child is out of her sight?

This year Mr Renn's grandparents - who are in their 80s, have been dealt the blow of a child with a terminal cancer diagnosis. This son of theirs is probably around 60, but his mother is still devastated at the thought that her child will not outlive her.  That mother vulnerability is a life sentence, our hearts walking around outside of ourselves in bodies with unknown expiration dates.

It takes tremendous faith, I find, to manage motherhood at all; to not be overwhelmed by the fragility of life and well-being from the the very nascent stages on.  There has to be, for me at least, some negotiation of the cost of mortality. Part of what makes the birth of my children so poignant for me is the understanding that I've marked the start of a bright, fragile, impermanent union of body and soul.  When juggling the utter lack of rationality in my short people, I have to keep that perspective in my line of sight.  This is only temporary.  They are only temporary. I am only temporary.  God is the only thing that lasts, and the only being with enough information to know what needs to happen.   I rarely understand it and I often don't like it.  I've had a lot of experiences this year where I've had to fight the feeling that God is indifferent toward the tenderest and more vulnerable chinks in my heart.  Usually my way out is a sobbing admission: "I don't understand, I can't understand.  Help me to feel it is okay anyway."  "Okay"- being a relative term, but for me implying that God is in His heaven, and all is (ultimately) right with the world, even if I don't like it.  Even if I hate it.

And this, lately, I hate it.

Emily's love language

(Mr Renn capturing unsolicited butt-shots, for which I forgave him)

A lot of the angsty opinion-sharing mess that has been eating up all social media platforms lately has been a drain on my moderate heart.

And moderate is an impossible position to defend with rhetoric, it lacks the pathos of the extremes, and gets scorn from all sides.  I mostly conserve my energy, unless I stumble upon bullying, at which point I unleash all my scholar mom powers to try to say things that soften hearts without offending egos.  Not a super fruitful use of energy, all told.

I tend not to air my opinion of my own volition, because despite being 95% more informed than most of the opinion slingers out there, I am keenly aware that A) I still do not have enough information to form an authoritative opinion and B) I ought not to share my opinion unless I see a clear, loving, and constructive reason and venue for doing so.

But one particularly thoughtless bout of opinion sharing that our friend Facebook kept thinking I wanted at the top of my feed, was an acquaintance insisting that his wife is more perfect than he is, and he thereby needs all the help he can get to be useful.  Essentially an assertion that women are morally superior to men, and a genuine belief behind this assertion that it is a loving thing to say about women.  This may blow your mind, but I know a lot of women who deeply, skin-crawlingly hate this kind of assertion.  You know why?  Because they know it's not true.  And women need more reasons to feel guilty like they need holes in their heads.

The most loving thing you can do for a woman is to allow her to be perfectly human, and to love her anyway.  To extend her forgiveness freely, and to ask her forgiveness earnestly.  To acknowledge and accept to human-ness of humans.  To accept that all stories are biased, all people do selfish things, no human is above vice, and to choose to love them anyway.

I've decided in my self-important way that forgiving other people is 90% of what we are here to learn.    If there is one skill that God needs in order to do His job?  It's forgiving and loving people who do hurtful things.

One of my favorite things about Mr Renn, is that whenever I get that crazy look in my eyes, and turn all ranty on him because I'm hormonal, or tired, or stressed, or hungry, or bored, or feeling hurt, he's always ready to forgive me before I'm ready to ask forgiveness.  He's figured out that Emily screws up a lot, but that if he gives me the space to take one step back for every two steps forward, I can still make steady progress in good directions.  I'm pretty sure he's not telling anyone that his wife is perfect or angelic, but he may be telling them that I work hard, think hard, love unconditionally, and apologize almost as quickly as he forgives me.   Somehow I find that more loving.  Everyone wants to feel known.  Everyone craves that space where they are both truly known and loved.  You can't know an angelic woman; an angelic woman is an object.  But to know and to love a flawed, gifted, dynamic human being, and to offer her forgiveness and to value her enough to ask for it in return, is the most loving thing I can think to offer her.  To offer it to a mother is the seminal way to teach her children of their own infinite worth.

Forgiveness is an act of faith in several directions.  Faith in a person's heart and potential, faith in the importance of relationships, faith that Someone can make unarticulated wrongs right again, faith in your own ability to let go of hurt.  It's pretty marvelous, all told. It may just feel better to give it than to receive it, too.

The horror of almost forgetting to document something as important as our first broken bone.

You guys (all two of you who still read this).  I am having over-sized mom guilt about how everything is going undocumented these days.  At least over here, in a searchable-long-after-the-fact way.  I know there are people who "say" they are posting things to platforms like Facebook so that they can "reference it later," but in my experience, finding anything over three weeks old on Facebook is an exercise in frustration.



And, on that note, I'm finally resolving to begin the painfully expensive process of printing off photobooks of all these thousands of family photos that only exist in pixel form.  Slow and steady, and no scrapbooking.

But sadly, really, what I've failed at most is documenting the emergence of Bunny's personality and all the complications involved in that.  Because she is complicated.  (Duh, she's a girl, I know.) But as of late her primary characteristic is a strong blend of delight (everything is so amusing!) and strong-will-ed-ness.  It is possible, I grant you, that she is learning to act as spoiled as she is.  Sometimes.  The girl's just got so many fanboys who say "how high?" when she says "jump."

So - an obstinate streak.  Currently streaking. What do you do with that in an 18 month old?

Which is relevant because her obstinacy is largely what landed her with a broken leg a month ago.  She had sneaked into the laundry room (with its cement floor) and when Mr Renn was picking her up to remove her, she squirmed and arched in just such an unanticipated way as to cause Mr Renn to lose his hold on her and she fell. Less than 2 feet, but on a cement floor, landing in just the wrong way, and we had the minor-est of fracture types on our hands (or legs).



Four weeks and several thousand dollars later, it's quick becoming a distant memory.  But for a while I dealt with being kicked by a cast (ouch) on a regular basis and hearing the peg-legged sound of Bunny's funny little casted gait.


She adjusted to the cast in a matter of minutes and it didn't seem to slow her down one iota.  She's sort of full-speed ahead every waking moment these days, and hasn't the time to give consideration to inconveniences like broken bones.



Her comprehensible vocabulary is still very limited, but her communication skills are grand.  She signs "more" dolefully, asks for "mamamamama" over and over and over again whenever she wants anything.  Says "Daddy" with joy when Mr Renn comes home, and says "Ousch"while pointing with gusto which means "Outside" about 6,000 times every day.  Man, I wish she didn't have such a magnetic relationship with the middle of the road.  Or that I had a fence.  When she is allowed outside she has to be watched like a hawk, which is rather incompatible with my lengthy to-do lists.  We manage every day for at least a short spell, but the girl wants to live out there. Preferably smack-dab in the middle of our street.



So - first broken bone of my parenting career is under my belt.  For what it was (expensive) it was relatively un-traumatic.  No limbs dangling at contorted angles, no blood, no blood curdling screams.  Just lots of wimpering, refusal to put weight on it, and a long afternoon and evening of hospital hopping. The cast itself was a dry-cast, so we could bathe her normally, and it only restricted her ankle mobility, so she was able to walk almost normally. Quite low-maintenance for what it was.  After they removed the cast the most traumatic part of the whole thing seemed to be the surge of itchiness she suddenly experienced.  Before we could intervene she had clawed herself so badly her leg looked like it'd been mauled by a cat.  But a week later it is almost completely healed.

And frankly, we have our hands full preventing her next broken bone.  This age is so incredibly fun, and yet so much work!

wings of lightning

(he's been perfecting his cartwheel)

We have come to the shockingly obvious conclusion that Sir O is an introvert.
Which is, of course, an oversimplification.  Because introversion and extroversion are not clean binaries.  But the Captain can be called an extrovert pretty safely, and Sir O is definitely on the other end of a spectrum or two.
As a rule, this kid thrives on quiet alone time.  And sleep, and routine.
He requires repetitive prior notice to handle change well.
And even when I try to anticipate all the parts of bumping up against real life that might make him moody, sometimes I still get blindsided.


He's been begging to get his own room, in hopes of getting more sleep on school nights, and if and when we can, we will probably comply.  School mornings are a little bit brutal around here.  I generally tiptoe into the boys' room, pull Sir O's clothes for the day out into the hallway, and then start trying to gently wake him up.  I'll rub his back until he's stirring, and then I either start to dress him in his bed, or if I want his brothers to stay asleep, I'll carry him out in the hall and lay him on the floor to dress him.

Yes, he's almost 8, and his mother dresses him on school days.  Because he's either floppy and fighting to not be awake, or he wakes up grumpy and fights me tooth and claw.  It's the only way to get him out the door on time.  I'm realizing I won't be strong enough to carry and wrangle him much longer.  He's been growth-spurting like crazy and he seems so much a man-child that I get regular pits in my stomach over it.  His hands are nearly as big as mine, and our socks are the same size. He's only 1 foot and 1 inch shorter than me, and he is growing and I am not.

This morning was a floppy morning.  There was not a great deal of resistance as I carried his long and lithe body out into the hallway.  His legs are getting to be forever long, and his top central incisors are finally coming in - (they fell out in October, didn't they?) and he seems to be right in between two awkward stages, in a short lived burst of pleasant proportions.  This enormous body, sprouting length like a butterfly stretching out of its chrysalis, bearing only faint traces of the supple babyness that used to be so familiar.  I don't have to bend my mind very far to feel for that moment in the future when this boy will outgrow me.  His arms will stretch farther than mine, I'll have to look up to demand evasive eye-contact.  They physical reality of having your body's creation outgrow you is uncanny.

Immediately upon consigning himself to not-going-back-to-bed, Sir O always bounds into his sister's room.  Usually she's awake, or stirring, and Sir O has claimed a stewardship over being Bunny's first-thing every morning.  He's fiercely invested in her, and becomes half of a parent sometimes.  Every single school day there's indignation over being forced to eat breakfast instead of play with her.  It's maddening and perfect all at the same time.

By the time the neighbor kids come to pick him up and walk to school with him, we've usually managed everything but brushing teeth, so they wait, in an unfortunately normative comfort, while he brushes and I finish preening him.  Then he and his hurricane head out the door, and I think about him and his day too little before he's back again in the afternoon.  There are just so many squeaky wheels.

When Sir O gets home from having spent 7 hours surrounded by so many bodies, he is again unpredictable and often moody.  I've learned better than to take him personally, and usually if I can provide an after school snack, I manage to win at a game of dodgeball with Sir O's outbursts.  School lunch is too short and too social to allow him to get much eating done, so his growing body is always ravished.

Then, when I can manage it, I try to give him some time to be alone.  When I do it right, he'll jump into an elaborate color-by-numbers or a library book, or ride his bike.  When I'm sloppy he sneaks into my craft room and makes expensive messes. After some quiet time he's a totally different person, and we're better able to negotiate him.



Staring down Spring Break, and Summer Vacation after that, I'm looking forward to letting him sleep in a bit and skipping our morning wrestling matches, and I'm glad he'll have enough sleep and quiet self-directed time to be a much less Mr. Hyde version of himself, but I also worry about the destruction and messes.  And everything's compounded when I have homework sitting on the front burner of my brain. Grad school mom brings both pros and cons for the family as a whole - being constantly distracted by unfinished homework is a solid con.

And this is what it looks like, to me, as two imperfect people navigate life in the same space, one feeling responsible for the other.  Motherhood is so perpetually foreign. It's one of the most universal experiences on earth, but nobody has yet managed to avoid drowning in it. There's no way to teach via language the experiences that require a body and all its separate minds in all its connected senses.  Motherhood is the wheel that is reinvented every single time.  Unanticipatable aches in unknown parts of one's own soul, and bumping up against unfamiliar borders of one's own capacities.  No one could ever think about it very hard and feel confident they had done anything "right."