Words, hastily plucked
Hello world!
I emerge from the depths of a long writing desert back into what is hopefully a newly rejuvenated writing routine. (Fingers crossed, slowly, because I have developed some delightful carpal tunnel becoming a new parent.)
In the past few months, I’ve settled into my new role as a first time mother, and what can I say other than I’m overwhelmed with joy, happiness, weariness, and all that? I keep hovering over the keyboard in between baby naps, considering how I was going to lay down my next magnum opus with my philosophies and perspectives gained in snippets of lucid dreams, but then often find myself pulled away by the duties of my mostly mundane reality.
Parenthood is nothing like I anticipated. I actually steeled myself for the worst, and if you know me, it’s because you know I like to plan. Plan for the worst, hope for the best, that old chestnut. I had read up on every possible pregnancy/parenting resource there was, hoovering up information at a frequency of which many others constantly pooh-poohed my efforts on (sheesh, the number of times I was told, “you can’t possibly learn enough or prepare for what’s to come!”).
Well, guess what! I was prepared, dammit. Labor and delivery went great. Baby’s first few months had pushed us to adapt to a million new things, and we did it all. We absolutely love doing everything there is in serving this new wonderful little human’s life to allow him to survive and then thrive. And truly, it’s not been a particularly big challenge, because he’s the most wonderfully sweet and most adorable baby in this universe. Some of it is genetics, some of it is luck, and I like to attribute at least some portion of this ease to our hard work prior - that is, my hard work in eating and sleeping well, and reducing stress wherever possible.
Anyhoo, I leave you with something I found I wrote in an email to a friend many years ago that I stumbled across because I was trying to remember the context and history of why I had someone else as a mutual Facebook friend. There was a little drama and heartbreak in that email thread with my friend, so what I had written below was responding to that:
Oh man, what a saga - I think while there is this terrible loss and heartbreak, don't you feel like you've been wrapped up in this incredibly epic romantic tragedy worthy of poetry? I think the gravity and heft of a situation likes that lends an air of incredulousness and thus some sort of improbability to it. I hope that you feel, in the end, that you've come out of it with something beautiful and valuable gained as an experience, rather than something lost. I think that experience with another human being, albeit brief and doomed, qualifies to meet some astronomically high standard of beauty and truth - for what could never be, but could have been, that sort of wistful longing is the most lovely and mesmerizing type of painting of a memory, wrought from the ashes of what had burned brightly before.
As for me, same old ho hum. My life poetry is more of the fridge magnet type these days - nonsensical and lacking certain words. I'm not sure how to complete that thought yet and I think, actually, that succinctly sums it up. I'm a bright and optimistic person, maybe more so than ever, but a bit weary of it. I feel like I'm constantly mentally cheering myself onward, but really annoyed at having to do so. I'm not entirely sure how to approach romantic love anymore, and to be honest my heart has been so full lately of so many friends and family it's no longer become a matter I actively pursue. I mean, the more you search for something, the more it eludes your grasp, right?
It’s so funny to read things I wrote so many years ago because I had obviously suffered heartbreak myself not that long ago at that time.
Now older, wiser and much more tired, I chuckled reading this and then glanced over to my husband and little guy, heart bursting in ways that I could never have thought possible.