On the Occasion of my First Mother's Day: Amnesia and Art Appreciation

Based on a one-house study, seven weeks of parenting marks brief periods of amnesia for both parenting partners:

• Early evening: I am sitting on the leather sofa (the material for which we have repeatedly congratulated each other on choosing, after bouts of milk spit up, less fortunate fluids, coffee spills), musing how nice it will be when Javier comes home in the evening. Possibly we will go to bed early! But whatever hour, it will be so nice to sleep the night next to him. Nice, indeed! Except that this picture currently defies reality with a newborn. I am holding a baby at the time these thoughts occur.
• Night: Javier comes into the bedroom where I am nursing. "Soooo, I was just deciding, 'I think I'll go to bed early,' but I had this strange feeling I was forgetting something. What, what, what could it be?" Javier has baby night shift.
• Afternoon: My esteemed sister has been here for a visit, developing strong Auntie muscles, and adding some flexibility and sanity to our lives by holding the baby for hour stretches. She exclaims, "She's SO sweet! SO. SWEET!" more frequently than we are capable of doing, since she lives far away and we live here. She IS so sweet, but we must alternate our bouts of enthusiasm with other reactions. In any case, due to Aunt presence, I am able to take a multiple hour nap. I think I will maybe jot a few notes down, or read a few more pages of The Winter People* ; my body vetoes that. "Falling asleep" is much closer to "passing out" than it used to be. I had very active, forgettable dreams, into which an aggressive sound eventually intruded. My brain muttered, "That's a baby~" as in: how *odd*. I had climbed pretty close to consciousness by the time I was able to make sense of this.    

*which is creeping me the hell out, btw. Also, I got it from Bookbound!... Finally checked them out, it's a lovely book store, when you're on the Plymouth Drive side of AA.

So, I expect we are typical new parents. Exhaustion battles with wonderment and frustration. We are learning the baby, who we of course think is potentially showing us how exceptional she is at any given moment. The baby's best friend is a mobile, silverware clinking against china should be banned, and all lights hold mesmerizing keys to the universe.

Baby in Communication with Favorite Painting 

(or super-strong, shiny magnets holding it up)

There's so much to tell you since yesterday!

The lights didn't know, so I've got a question for you.

Do you really think so? That's exactly the way I feel!

...Okay, so the post title was kind of a fake out. No real art talk. I'll try to be better about that -- to help the non-kid oriented avoid baby posts, and keep posts on creativity easy to find...

This Place Needs a Dusting

I left my blog's lights on the last time I was here, and forgot to disconnect the water, so I really wasn't sure what to expect upon re-entry. The darkness wasn't shocking, but I lucked out with no leaks or burst pipes. Some cretin lifted the copper elements, spiders took up residence in the corners, and rodent leavings were paired with sporadic gnaw marks throughout. It could have been worse. I accept it as the dues of neglect. I'm not about to go planting a garden out back as a show of premature optimism for future habits, but perhaps this time I'll take measures to curb utter abandonment ... Other than that, I'll due a quick sweep through, hop over the spiders, replace the bulbs, and get back to it.

As with most guilty abandonments, justifications are on the tip of my tongue; they bear more specificity than the all-purpose life-has-a-way-of-taking-over + generalized laziness... But ultimately they fail to serve as anything which *prevented* me from writing, but rather point to a more full, distracting existence. In any case, a handy CluffsNotes* briefing follows to bring the idly curious up to speed:

2014 was a sparkly, shiny year, involving three key game changers:

• Shacking up with Javier, after living by myself for almost a decade. There is no better way to highlight how crotchety you have become than to combine households. He has the audacity to want to change things! In my our house! It was shocking.
• Discovering I'm pretty fertile at this stage of the game, despite A.) societal messages to the contrary and B.) the words of one dramatic doctor (starting a decade ago), which warned my ability to have children veered closer to winning the lottery than to having a car crash. OK, those weren't her words, but trust me, she put the ALARM in alarmist. Actual quote at tail end of her rant last year: "...And don't get me started on the incidence of malformed eggs of women in the 40s, you would not BELIEVE what happens, it's simply the body beginning to shut down ~~." From the moment I suspected I was pregnant, babies were EVERYWHERE; as was food I wasn't supposed to eat. And pregnancy warning labels, good lord. The only thing shamefully lacking a label? F*cking Grey's Anatomy: that damn, silly show featured imperiled pregnancies/tragic deliveries/preemies hanging on for dear life almost weekly. After awhile I cursed the lot of us.
• A fairy tale proposal, to the sound of waves crashing in the dark, sparkly lights in either direction down the shoreline, after many lovely days in the weird and fantastic Floridaland (mishmash of strip malls, ominous Panther crossing signs, and lucky us, warm family and the beach, the beach, the beach).

*A shoddy off-brand CliffsNotes -- less current than SparkNotes, and may not get you an A, but something beats nothing, right? And real teachers can tell when you didn't bother with the original text, anyway.

The pregnancy was rife with blog post fodder; but the need to write hit hardest in the first trimester, an unwise time to publicly share. Too, in many instances, it would have devolved into *literal* navel gazing. I'd say it's next to impossible to do otherwise, when almost every aspect of your body is changing, in ways that are either disconcerting, highly irritating, abruptly weepy/enraging/euphoric, and/or sporadically impressive. Aaaaah, to be experiencing hormone washes more tidal than a teenager's, as a 40-something! 

Could go either way: sleep or meltdown?

...These days, the kind of day one has seems to hinge on whether the baby is pleased (and likely sleeping) or displeased (prolonged,elevated screaming-crying; our go-to descriptors: "pterodactyl," "demonic blender"). It is amazing and astounding and fantastic and trying and exhausting and everything else of which you parents (or friends of parents) are already fully aware. Javier and I are zombie-ish, but less brain-craving undead than a month ago (she's a month and a half old!); she gives us (cruel?) hope by often sleeping 5 hour stretches at night.

Not screaming, good; accusatory, bad.

I am taking tentative steps back toward the Cakeasaurus picture book project -- finally listed some woodblock print pages I completed last year -- and hung up finished sketches behind the dining room table to refocus myself. I am determined to still be creative, but we shall see to what degree and what forms it will take in the coming months (/years).

Obviously much depends on baby girl. Outside of that, I have been thinking that my key will be to approach life with more intentionality. I can no longer drift into sketching, or writing, or those past luxurious mornings of slooooowly rising, daydreaming in a chair for awhile until moved to action; No. Thing A needs to happen. When? 15 minutes of it, Tuesday morning? Go. That is my current thinking. Make it so. Such a huge shift, such an education in living...