Search for the Overhead Camera

Holiday paperwhites and a painting by the brilliant William Meddick.

If we were being filmed by an overhead camera and if that overhead camera were to pan out and back far enough so we were just a mere speck on the landscape, we would see we are all on a path, that it is sometimes winds through low ground, sometimes on hilltops, sometime murky waters, forests, rocky patches, parched fields, tall grass, and sometimes it is green, green and wide with an magestic view, like the earth upon which Julie Andrews twirled at the beginning of The Sound of Music.

Of course, I didn’t invent this way of looking at life, at our walk through it, on our own individual paths, etc., but I do like the image of looking down from great heights to my small form making its progress, of being able to see ahead to easier ground because when I am feeling dark, my mind is about as sophisticated as a cat on a car trip. It's like this: my life has always been and will always be this vomitous jiggly journey, trapped inside this car, while I look out through the slippery windows, out there at things that go by too quickly for me to recognize.

No. I don’t feel that exactly, but I remember how my cat used to act in the car and in my view, he couldn’t remember the life he had before the car trip or the life he was going to have once we reached our destination. He couldn’t imagine the Maine for which we were bound and all its pine tipped splendor, the way the sun punctured the early morning darkness and shimmered on the steel gray mud flats, couldn’t conjure up the grass hoppers waiting to be capture, eaten and regurgitated, the stiff weeds beckoning to be brushed against and chewed.

His life was a bumpy car ride. The end.

I am not a cat but when I am in the tall tall grass, I forget.

I’ve been reading Marrit Ingman's book, Inconsolable, and I love her honesty. I love that she tried to strike up conversations with mothers, their infants slung around their bodies; I love that she wondered how they were doing, really doing; I love that she longed to connect with other mothers about how hard and isolating and stressful motherhood can be. I didn’t have PPD but I’m wondering now if I’ve had some sort of chronic stress disorder since Fluffy’s birth or is it a disorder? Or simply a consequence of motherhood? Andi Buchanan talks about it in her book, Mother Shock, about the passage into mother hood being like one to a foreign land with the same sort of exhaustion, disorientation, unfamiliarity with the customs and pace of life that happens when you settle in a new country.

Maybe that’s what it is? All I know is there was an instant change when I became a mother that was miraculous! lovely! fragile! life turned inside out in the best possible way, upheaval! disorder! sleeplessness! I wandered around in my maternity pants and nothing on top, my gigantic boobies on display for every delivery people who arrived daily with gifts, packages, cards, flowers. It was deep winter in the northeast and I was floating in a bubble of zero modesty that began during delivery and ended about 3 weeks post partum. There’s even a little footage of me doing an African dance with foot stomping and harvest hands reaching down to earth and up to the gods in my pj bottoms and a dirty cooking apron, pendulous breasts flopping about. I look like a lunatic butcher.

The instant change was fine. As the months and years have passed, the gradual change is something I’m trying to shake off.  Now, do I have to even say how much I love being Fluffy’s mom? Does anyone need to reassurance? Or can we all assume all those intense and specific and wondrous feelings are deeply rooted and beloved and move on to the hard ones which are for me: isolation and stress of how to solve the taking care of myself puzzle. This is the gradual change in me, the effects of isolation and stress.

(This just in: My he-man husband cut himself on a loaf of bread. This is a man who walks around all day saying OW whenever anything breezes by him. I used to leap up and dash to his side with the first aid kit--I love a first aid kit and would most definitely have been a doctor had I more than one shot at life. Now I barely look over. But I’m saying, he cut himself on bread, not the knife, the BREAD, while it was still in its bag. Okay. Back to my stress...)

I’m lonely for the company of grown ups, those who can handle loaves of bread without injury. I do enjoy the company of my husband a great deal, but I need outside inspiration, if you know what I mean, not the sexual kind, just a little novelty, someone who lives in a different house. But I’m out of condition, socially. I forget to modulate my voice. I laugh inappropriately. I stand too close, like my childhood friend Joan Matthew who used to careen into me like a truck with no brakes every time we went anywhere, like from my room to the kitchen.

As for the stress, well, I need a mother who could watch me like a hawk: NO NO! Kyra! No more candy! Kyra! Go to bed! Okay, honey, time for a nice hot bubble bath. Aw, come here, sweet pea, let’s do some ocean breathing. Hey! Let’s get our coats on; time to go outside! Kyra! Put that down! NO! No salami! And No More Computer!

I know, I know. I have to be my own mother. And some days I do a bang up job. But there’s something about the shrinking of my life since becoming a mother that makes the mothering of oneself, as well as one’s child, harder than it seems fair.

I suppose the camera could be locked in close up so I can see the little things more crisply and soon it will zoom back out again and everything will be clearer than ever.

I suppose.

Comments

[MommyGuilt]

Kyra - you need OUT TIME, GROWN-UP time, whatever you want to call it. Some time to be Kyra, not Fluffy's Mom, not Husband's Wife, just plain old fantastic Kyra. Find something, not writing, that you love to do. Do it. Exercise if it gets you out with other grown ups, take a class - even if it's just for the hell of it...it'll get you with grown ups (even if it's just the instructor or professor). But do it. Do it for you so that you feel good when you're back being Husband's Wife and Fluffy's Mom.

[suburban misfit]

And even when you *do* get out and get to talk to adults, most of the time they won't understand why you're so desperate for conversation, or they won't understand the words you use to describe your child, or, worse, they *think* they understand the words but they don't. They don't. They'll say, "Oh, yes, Bobby was quite the active boy," describing a child who has never, ever, smacked a friend in the face with a book because, "I just couldn't stop myself. I knew it was wrong but I couldn't stop."

At those moments, the aloneness is opressive.

[Melinda]

Again you put into words a lot how I feel....

[Susan]

I am feeling much the same way these days--I get dressed in the morning, in nice pants and a pretty sweater, so that I can drive the boys to school and call the pediatrician and the speech therapist and Henry's teacher and talk about what went well or not well today, and go to the grocery and not talk to anyone but the clerk, and then go home and change out of the nice clothes so that I can play in the yard with the boys all afternoon, alone, without anyone over the age of five to talk to.

And I find that my computer life--searching for answers to Henry's issues, 'talking' to my on-line friends--is sometimes more real than my REAL life, which makes me nervous and sad at the same time that it makes me greatful that I have these lifelines.

And then it is time to do it all again, and optimistically I put nice clothes on, in case TODAY is the day I get to see real people, real adult people, who will sympathise and understand.

[Felicity]

Huhm, the hardest thing I learned (do I need to add this caveat, that yes I know my kids are different from your kid? That I'm not pretending to know exactly what you're experiencing?) as a new mom and I frequently forget and go thru months without this knowledge til things get really ugly and I learn it again is, I can't parent these kids without taking adequate care of myself. Adequate is up to me to determine. If it means an hour alone in the morning, then that's ok.
You can't give from an emtpy well Kyra and don't feel guilty if you need to enforce new boundaries that allow you to care for YOU.

[kim]

I know, man. I am just not the same in the ways I wish I was the same. Like, I love the way motherhood changed me, now I just need some alone time to benefit from it.

Bread? Wow, that's harsh, dude. Shalom anyway.

[Wade Rankin]

A loaf of bread?!?

[Autismland]

This post conveys the movement of that long odyssey that is motherhood--not a bad moment to invoke Penelope, the mother who waited the 20 years for her man (husband, SO--Odysseus) to get himself back home after various dalliances--

Motherhood is dancing at the center of the circle, arms extended to hold on to the little one who skirts the edge.