Outside

 

As the weather seems determined to tumble into summer before May even comes to a close, we are grateful for the following:

• The long hours of daylight meaning more outside family time even on weekdays.
• So much access to the river banks right in our own city.
• Old craggy twisty trees for climbing.
• Shoes that are easy to kick off.
• Bikes and bike paths and a good patient teacher to help expand skills and independence for a more cautious rider.
• A curious caterpiller named Hungry that found a nine-year-old's hands a good place to explore and was given a new home in Mom's prairie garden.
• The relative ease of carrying a ten pound baby in a sling on the outside rather than inside my body.
• River kayakers that spark the imagination with ideas for future summers.
• Watching them love being out in nature as much as we do.



A Pause at the End

Seventeen years ago, I sat on the steps of the rental house I shared with three college roommates, bewildered at what was going to happen next. I had graduated, gone on a road trip with friends, and was preparing to move to the Twin Cities in a few days, but I had also maxed out my vision of the future. Sometimes, when driven to accomplish something, the way I had focused on getting a college degree for as long as I could remember, there's nothing left in the psychic reserves to plan for what comes after. Sure, I had some vague ideas of things I wanted to do, but nothing was as concrete, anchoring, and enjoyable as what I had just done. The future had arrived and I had the disconcerting experience of feeling time stretch out beyond an endpoint that had been fixed in my mind. It must be what things are like for true believers in the apocalypse that find the world did not end on their leader's predicted date. It took me a year to recover fully and five to identify the next big endeavor of my life that I could throw my energy and singular focus behind.

Sometime around the beginning of the last decade, around the time I got married for the first time, my biological clock kicked into full force and I knew that it was time to focus on having children. Like going to college, this was something I wanted to do from the time I was a little girl, and everything seemed aligned to carry it out. The path to building my family ended up being a bit more meandering than the path to educational attainment. I didn't expect pregnancy to be as hard as it has been for me and I certainly didn't expect to get divorced and restart my family building with a different partner. Now ten years after getting pregnant for the first time, I have given birth to my last child, and I find myself once again scratching my head as to what is next.

As disconcerting as it feels right now, I also know this is the right decision. I always knew that I wanted to have more than two children and after three pregnancies and a fourth bonus child that I thankfully didn't have to carry, I have satisfied that desire. I have realized at 38, going through pregnancy and now the sleepless nights of the newborn stage, that I have come to the end of my energy for doing this particular work again. I look forward to completely focusing on the monumental task of finishing raising my current children. I also feel great happiness about the pure potential of using my creative energies in other areas of my life.

And yet. And yet I find my eyes brimming with tears sometimes when I hold Isaac and my mind wanders to the finality of it all. It feels like it's just a short trip from my choosing to be done with childbearing to no longer being of childbearing age. I am feeling my mortality. This is compounded, I think, by the realization that I will never have a daughter and that my intimate experience of girlhood and young womanhood ends with me. And so, the losses I felt as a girl and young woman, although they were always mine, feel so completely mine now. For example, I will never know in any close proximity, what the father-daughter relationship is like for a young girl, and losing my relationship with my own father at a young age hurts all over again. There is no way through these feelings but grief. To paraphrase Gerard ManleyHopkins - it is Charlotte that I mourn for.

And yet. And yet grief feels like such an inappropriate and self-indulgent emotion when holding a beautiful, healthy, sweet-dispositioned newborn in my arms and knowing that Isaac was the exact right baby for me to have. Grief feels wrong when I have been given the gift of raising four children.

And yet. And yet my experience with grief has shown me that as inevitable as it is, its greatest power is in being a marker of the things most important to us. We each have only one life and there are limits on the things we can experience in our allotted time. Some things we give up with no emotional impact, and some things wreck us in their sheer significance. Those are the things we are most meant to do.

So now, faced with the end of one of the things I was most meant to do with my life, I will not attempt to delay the completion with hopes of avoiding grief. I will grieve it - for the beauty of how it was and for the imperfections I perceive in what it was not. I will stare a while into this void, and I will move on in search of the next great thing that will break my heart as fully.

One Week Old

 

Happy to be at home with my bunnies all cozy in our warren.

We Like Ike

Welcome to our new family member and beloved little friend who was, literally, born yesterday.

Isaac Edward McCabe

April 26, 2012 @ 2:35 a.m.

10 pounds. and 21 inches

Commemoration

The women in my family have a gift for remembering birthdays, anniversaries and other special dates. My sister and I call it "The Birthday Game." Even as my mother degenerates from her early onset dementia, she retains the knack for remembering dates. I half expect to get a call from her today so she can tell me that it is the sixth anniversary of my grandmother's death. She doesn't need to tell me because my brain works that way, too, and I won't forget what happened on April 22, 2006.

Waiting for the baby to be born, I have flipped through the catalog in my mind of what potential birthday connections could be. On Thursday night, two days before my due date when I was having contractions, I thought about giving birth in the early hours of April 20th. My crazy-making brain couldn't let go of the fact that this was Hitler's birthday, even though I consoled myself with the fact that it is also the birthday of my friends Ben and Buster who are two of the kindest and gentlest spirits I know. The contractions ended along with my worries and my hope for early liberation from pregnancy burdens. The waiting game continues.

Four years ago, I went into labor with Charlie on what would have been my grandmother's 92nd birthday. He managed to push his entrance into the world past midnight, choosing to arrive with the summer solstice rather than share his birthday with Gram. Now, I feel a sense of connection as I wait for this baby around the end date of the life of the woman who did the bulk of the work to raise me. It is comforting to feel connected to her as I get ready to take on this womanly work for one last time.

Despite the tumultuous nature of our relationship while she was alive, on this side of her death, I mainly feel the strength of her as my ancestress. Mary Lundgren may have shaken her head at many of the choices that I have made, but I know in the end, she was always proud of me and secretly admired the stubborn way I insisted on pushing against limitations and doing things on my own terms. She was pretty damn stubborn, too, and that's the kind of help you need in your corner when you are poised to bring a new life into the world.

34.5

 



We're in the heartburn- and waddle-inducing huge belly homestretch of this pregnancy now. By the end of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, I will surely be crying "Uncle!" as I wait out the last few uncomfortable weeks in the baby countdown.

On the plus side for this pregnancy: I've felt pretty the whole time and have now had the experience of people telling me I look great during pregnancy. I was definitely not the cute pregnant lady in the last two pregnancies, so this is a novelty. My wedding ring still fits and it's been easier to control my weight this time around. I've also found that the way this baby's DNA mixes with mine has made me a bit more ummmm....assertive throughout the pregnancy. I have to say I like this take-no-guff or prisoners enhancement as much as I enjoyed the way being pregnant with Charlie made me mellower. Our children give us so much right from the start.

On the minus side: I've never really had a point where I've felt good during this pregnancy. Although all tests show mom and baby are completely healthy, it has been a physical chore to carry this babe.

In the last few weeks we've laid in the few extra supplies we need for our new gal or guy, and soon I'll be sending my boys digging in the upstairs closets for the rest of the feathers for my nest. The eagerness to get to know this little one on the outside is ramping up daily.

 

(This is the proof that Josh took these pictures because no one else can make me laugh this hard)

 

Number Nine

 

I gave birth to my first baby nine years ago today. In the intervening years he has developed into a deep-thinker and a deep-feeler. He is my absent-minded professor and my philosopher-prince. Sometimes I get frustrated with him when he has a lost another pair of gloves or doesn't listen because he's lost somewhere in the ether. But when he returns and says things like, "If the aliens were smart, they would attack the earth now before we have the capacity to fight them off," or "If you die and you live alone, what happens to your stuff?" or "I think New Zealand should be its own continent," I fall in love with that amazing imaginative mind all over again.

Sometimes his feelings get him in trouble because the world isn't really set up for people who feel things as deeply as Ellis and he hasn't mastered the defense mechanism of hiding things inside that seems to be a requirement to make others feel comfortable. Sometimes those feelings are hard, like when things are "Unfair!" But mostly those feelings are reflected in an enormous capacity to love, like when he gently talks Charlie through not being scared in the shower or shows him a new game or fixes him breakfast even though Charlie can be really annoying and gets everything his way. I hope one day Charlie and Ellis's other younger siblings realize their luck in having such an excellent big brother.

The key to Ellis is taking time to build a relationship of trust and respect with him. The work will be rewarded with entrance into the magical world he spins and the giving heart he has. I delight in each passing year with him because it means we are getting closer to fulfilling our dream of traveling the world together (First destination: Japan - because he loves Nintendo and I love sushi), and because as that mind and heart grow in capacity I feel like knowing Ellis is a great adventure in and of itself.