What’s in a Name?

Auden

            I knew my son’s name halfway through the pregnancy. I felt the little butterfly-like fluttering of his movements within me for the first time during our trip to Ireland, and that’s about when Rob and I decided on the name.

It was very uncomfortable traveling halfway across the world at 22 weeks pregnant, but I hadn’t anticipated that when planning the baby-moon months earlier. On the eight hour plane ride, I needed to get up to pee at least six times. Once there, I slept horribly in the hotel room, as that’s when my legs started to cramp during the night and my hips ached from stretched ligaments. I plastered a smile on my face when we walked from museum to museum, but I couldn’t stop from complaining about my aching back and incessant need to find a coffee shop so I could pee yet again.

December

I am a steward of my children.

I had that thought the other day, after listening to a podcast in which a mom shares the story of losing her son. It was a sad thing to listen to, and it had me pushing off tears with the back of one hand while the other balanced the stroller on my walk. It made me realize how much I take for granted, made me rethink my role yet again, made me reevaluate for the thousandth time.

November

I’ve been struggling. I often write after-the-fact, when things have resolved a bit, you know, when I have a somewhat tidy way of presenting something that was messy. But I’m sitting down right now to write, and I’m still smack dab in the middle of it, feeling adrift in my life and, well, a little bit like I’m drowning.

I’m finding the mom thing hard. Really hard. Here’s my caveat that I know I’m blessed to be the mom of two beautiful boys and that I’m lucky and shouldn’t complain yada yada but goodness gracious, most days I feel like I’m slowly dying on the inside.

“This will just have to do for the October blog post cause I’ve run out of time”

Motherhood is messy. That’s my grand conclusion after two and half years of doing this, and I doubt I’m breaking new ground here, but there it is. It’s messy.

Right now, in motherhood, I feel akin to a jumble of yarn that just won’t untangle. As I start to pull on one string, three other strings get stubbornly tighter. When I pull on another, four strings that were supposed to stay put come loose. I try to sort my emotions and thoughts out, but my brain is too scrambled to make sense of things, because in my proverbial yarn world, all my strings are touching other strings which are tangled up in other strings. Messy.

The last few weeks have been harder than usual. It doesn’t help that we’ve traveled or that the boys and I have gotten sick and cranky—but it’s more than that. I have felt a deep restlessness in my spirit, a lack of peace, and a complete disenchantment with stay at home motherhood.

September Reflection

I’m sitting in my new favorite coffee shop, waiting for my lavender latte. It’s unusually crowded today, full of mostly elderly men and women out for their morning joe.

I’m munching on some gluten free pumpkin bread as I wait for my drink. The woman at the counter asked me if whole milk was okay in my latte and I said yes, because I know now just how much more delicious that makes any kind of coffee drink. And if you’re paying five whole bucks for a hot drink, it better be delicious.

There was a time, though, when I wouldn’t have been able to say yes to whole milk (especially if I was also saying yes to the bread too). That kind of question would have raised an entire moral dilemma, a mini crisis that could have diverted the course of my day. And I want to put emphasis on “moral crisis” because that is what it always was for me: a decision between right and wrong, pure and corrupt, good and evil. There absolutely was no middle ground. I scoffed at “moderation” because that did not exist in my black and white thinking.