About Me?

I decided to start blogging again about a month ago.  I created my little blog, read back through some of my old blog posts from previous blogs, and opened up a new window to start typing away.  And I sat and stared at the blank page for a bit before deciding that I was going to update my "About Me" page.  That should be easy enough for me.  So I opened it up and I started typing...and I realized that everything I wrote focused on mothering or wifery or homemaking.  And all three of those things make up what I do and make up the three most important people in my life...but they are not me.

So I stopped.  I walked away, or was distracted away, and vowed to return after mulling it over for a bit.

A month later, I've returned.  And I'm still not sure I can write the description, but I'm going to try.  

I am a mother first.  In all the roles I play in my life, I am a mother first and always.  When my daughter was pulled from my womb, I was changed.  My life focused into a single point and all that is me become something different.  Prior to birth, Bailey represented a dream.  She was the person I imagined holding when I was 7, the embodiment of every dream I had ever had about what my life would be when I was a grown woman.  She was not real, yet.  My perspective was clouded by a lack of realism and my understanding of parenting was formed by the "Parent's" magazine I read religiously each month and by my own distorted vision of how a person parents.  We lovingly created her nursery, purchased her clothes and loudly proclaimed our refusal to force her into a gender identity.

And then she was born.  Instead of my natural delivery, Bailey was pulled, via c-section, from my body after 2 1/2 days of attempting labor.  Labor never really started for me.  Our 10.9 pound child came from my body bright red, screaming bloody murder and wired with intensity and drama.  She has never, ever stopped using her voice loudly...and 6 years later, I hope she never does.  She changed me.  She leveled every expectation I had, destroyed and then helped me rebuild the mother I have become.  She quickly dispensed of the idea I carried that mothering was something to be defined and something within my control.  When my body betrayed me and threw me into a dramatic and nearly life-ending post partum depression, it was Bailey who stayed present through it all.  Her constant presence, more than anything, forced me to let go.  I learned, within three months, that all I had thought I knew about myself as a mother, about the job of mother, about the love I would feel, the fear that would haunt me and the sacrifices I would make was all crap.  She was, and the job was, more than I knew and so much different than I expected.

I struggled.  Deeply, horrifically, fearfully struggled.  I am not ashamed anymore to admit that I didn't like it.  I was afraid that I would harbor resentment toward her, because all the changes were not good.  My quality of life decreased, and the part of me that closely and jealously guarded my space and my autonomy was pissed as hell.  I didn't blame her, I didn't blame me or my wife or the decisions we had made.  And without a way to process or blow off those intense and entirely unexpected feelings, I turned them inward where they became so toxic that I become suicidal.  Medication helped, but it was mostly time that brought that under control.  Time is a parent's best friend.

When Bailey was only 9 months old and when I was not far enough away from the trauma of her birth, I convinced my wife it was time for another child.  We wanted them close.  We wanted our children to grow up together and it was the last remaining vision I had that the reality of parenting had yet to shatter.  I dreamed that another child would fix what has broken in so many areas of my life.  I tried, and failed, to get pregnant twice.  After the second attempt, I made the first really good decision of my life as a parent and I told my wife I did not want to carry another child.  She stepped up and it was her body and her experience that would carry our son.  We were pregnant three months later.  

Again, from almost the start, the illusions proved to be fake and it felt like my life exploded into insanity.  My wife was sick from almost the beginning; so sick she was medicated for 17 weeks to keep food in her belly.  She was weak from the physical toll, exhausted from managing her own emotions and her reality, and completely and utterly distracted by the enormity of a decision to undertook without knowing how completely it would change her.  I was shocked into another version of parenting truth...one in which I did 99% of the work while my wife grew a child.  Bailey, no less of a force for intensity and drama, was walking, talking and creating chaos every where.  We both worked, we both lost our minds.  

And then he was born.  We were complete.  Our son came into the world much like he lives it.  He was quiet at birth and struggled for his first breaths.  He sought my wife, as all newborns do, and was happiest at her breast.  Through Connor, I knew love like I had never known it in the first months of Bailey's life.  

I have no illusions anymore.  My children have torn to shreds what I thought I knew, and what was rebuild in the gaping hole of my expectations was a truth so solid and important...that nothing else mattered, ever, as long as I chose to love them.  Everything else was detail and subject to change.  Eventually, I left my job and took on the role of stay at home mother.  I have been doing that for 3 years and 8 months.  Bailey is 6 and starting 1st grade.  Connor is 4 1/2 and starting preschool.  I have time that I haven't had for years.  Again, I am changed.

I am a parent first.  

More later...