izzyblog

I've always been in love with the idea of being in love.  I have measured my life by my loves and have imagined a kinship with others -- artists, writers -- whom I think have also wandered shamelessly and often, open-mouthed, into the wake of love.  My loves have taken many forms -- have been cruel, kind, tempestuous, vicious, even distant and diffident.  I believe I have made the greatest and most unforgettable mistakes in my life in the pursuit of love.  Yet even  those most painful moments have been some of my most vivid memories.  Like the summer I lived in Cooke City, Montana.  Although I got myself there, it was the pursuit of a love that made the summer so dreamy.  The love sharpened up the edges a bit because I had a partner to push me past my own edge of comfortable adventure.  I wouldn't have camped on the side of the mountain, taken the backcountry geyser hike, sneaked into an abandoned mineshaft, walked without a flashlight up the mountain in the dark... any of it had I been alone.  The affair ended miserably, but the experiences it brought were phenomenal and even carved out the direction my next steps would take, planting deeper in me the seed for adventure.

Life changes though, and now I have a new love.  The tenderest moments with my baby are some of my favorite.  Hurrying to the crib in the dark, where Finn is on his belly, propped on his elbows, wailing with his eyes closed in the moonlight.  His head is velvety soft, and I stroke it gently, hoping to calm him, but the cry only intensifies as he searches to be picked up.  In my arms, he latches quickly on my breast, and I study him in the low light, notice how much he has grown in these 5 months.  He spreads easily across my lap now, and he feeds so quickly.  His cheeks are so soft, and I would stroke or kiss them, but it makes him stir.  He is unfathomably soft in my arms, pure in his shameless greed for milk and nurturing.  I cannot help but stare at him, despite the fact that the dimness reveals very little to me.  Yet there it is -- the outline of the cheek, and then I breathe in the weight of him relaxing into my arms.  The moment is intoxicating.  It happens every night.  And while I could complain, and sometimes do, that Finn keeps me from sleeping properly, he also offers me these tenderest minutes that easily compare to any night walk through the woods. 

The relationship between the two, though -- why are they simultaneously on my mind tonight?  What chord do they form, when played together?  Me, becoming more of myself in the woods, finding a new form inside me that explores, sees wildly new things, expands.  Me, nursing a child in my arms, pulled toward a unyielding passion for the tenderest being. 

Sometimes there's God, so quickly.

As Finn quietly enters Round 1 of tonight's Great Battle for Sleep, I think about how much our nights with him have changed in these 5 short months.  We've been through several sleep routines in his short lifetime, each feeling so heavily weighted with significance that I want to give it the name "routine," even if it only lasted a few weeks.  Each of those sleep habits with him has felt so significant, because they've determined my own ability or inability to sleep, so perhaps that's why I ascribe so much importance to them.  We're currently in a new evolution of the sleep-in-crib with-a-lead-in-bedtime-routine routine, this one getting him down for sleep between 7:30 and 8 pm.  So far, I'm winning, but Finn could easily arouse after his first 45 minute cycle and call lustily for the boob to come back to quiet him.

This is our best routine yet, for me at least, because I'm able to get a decent amount of sleep these days.  We have a little routine that includes bath time, massage and song time, then boob time and down to sleep.  Finn seems to respond well to all of this.  I am of course indoctrinating him in yoga  during the song time.  Our nightly lullaby sessions consistently lead off with the chant "lokah somastah sukinoh bhavantu."  Loosely translated:  "May all beings everywhere be happy and free."  Our translation, included in our sing-a-long: "May all babies everywhere be happy and free."

Our previous routines, thank God, have come to an end, as endless and endlessly sleep-depriving as they seemed at the time.  One of these routines, which we adopted early on after discovering that new babies don't just sleep in their cribs at night like all the ads and movies would suggest, involved one of us, usually me, sleeping on the couch with Finn.  Nervously, I would wedge myself up into the corner of our sofa, a big couch pillow supporting me at a 45 degree angle and boppy pillow around my waist.  Finn would lie in my arms, which were supported by the boppy so that they couldn't slip when sleep finally relaxed them.  We lived like this for perhaps a month of his life.  How miserable!  But how fond this memory is -- in retrospect!

I also remember swing sleep.  Finn won't sleep in his swing anymore, but as an itty bitty baby he'd fall asleep in the swing, and some nights I'd keep him in it for 2 or 3 hours at a time so that I could doze on the couch.  We also tried sleeping together on the futon in the back room some nights, so as not to wake Jesse.

What strikes me as interesting in touring through these memories is not only the fact that our lives have shifted dramatically and decisively in the 5 months we've had Finn.  But also, the mini-routines we've created, which seemed so solid at the time, have shifted dramatically and decisively as well.  These little routines, which gave definition to our days and nights, which marked our evolving understanding of how-to-be-parents, at the time manifested in seeming solidity, punctuating our days and nights with meaning and importance.  They allowed us a semblance of control over this new life, a way of forming the chaos of life-with-baby into something understandable.  They still do.  My lullabies, my massage routines, my games -- all are little routines that shape out our time together into something I can describe, can repeat.  And the repetition feels good, assuming familiarity quickly.  Yet the routine changes quickly too, and again settles quickly into a new solidity.  I don't quite know what to make of this strange marriage of change and solidity.  How they work together so seamlessly baffles me, but there it is.

They grow up so fast...

Since I'm new to parenthood (5 months today), I wonder what it means, exactly, when people sigh and tell you that children "grow up so fast."  Of course, there's the literal meaning of the phrase.  Time does seem to beat a quick pace after a certain period of life.  Once we hit 25, we stop feeling much older.  The years gain momentum, and we have little sense of having changed a great deal, character-wise, after that point.  Perhaps, then, the line about children simply fits into this model.  Just as time passes quickly in other areas of our lives, so does it continue into the childbearing years.

But there's more to the expression than its literal meaning.  It includes a sense of nostalgia too, a melancholy remembrance of something than has been lost.  But what, exactly?  Is it a loss of innocence as one's children move deeper into self-discovery?  The end of the beaming-eyed baby smiles reserved only for her mom & dad?  The broadening of the child's world to include more than the nuclear family?  The introduction of outside influences?  The emergence of a non-parent based sense of self?  Simply, the introduction of separation and personal development?

I'm not sure.  I can imagine that the end of Finn's open-hearted little gummy smiles will be heartbreaking in a way, because my little beloved will change and development into someone I cannot yet anticipate knowing. 

Some stages of child development look rather ugly from this vantage point.  I see my sister-in-law, for example, experiencing the beginnings of the period in which her oldest son feels embarrassed by her.  They're both on Facebook, and she wrote, "Hi, buddy" on his wall this week.  He had a fit about it.  His reaction was probably calculated for his audience -- namely, me.  In other words, I doubt it bothered him as much as he let on, but he seemed to have a need to prove that it bothered him.  It's sad, his posturing, largely because it indicates to me his own lack of comfort with himself and his emotions.  His teen years won't be very easy -- especially for his parents -- if he's always working to prove himself by talking himself up to be tougher than he really is.  Trouble trouble.  To say that he has grown up too fast is, for me, a way of expressing sadness at these new developments in him that I do consider unfortunate and unnecessary.  They're developments of a form of self-hood, but an unsteady articulation of it that makes me worry for him.  He has plenty enough going for him without this added baggage of trying to be "cool." 

But is that what the expression is about?  The development of undesired traits in little people?