summertime. mosquito buzz, faraway hum of a lawnmower, melting ice cream, screen door slam, a sprinkler inching back and forth, bird twitter, corn dog on a stick. where have the lazy days of summer gone? why do i feel already the need to put in order, to prepare? i am picking up furniture for the new apartment, making order of electric company phone numbers and health food store locations. i am waiting. yet again, i am waiting. i am trying to figure out how to think, or what there is to think about. i am too focused on small ideas, the mundane, and not taking time to consider much of anything. i am feeling good. i am feeling not at the moment so engrossed with my intellect however, and starting to wonder when the last time it was that i spent time learning and thinking and coming up with new ideas. and yet here i am planning to get pregnant in but a few more days and then i have a feeling there will be no more thinking. pregnancy does something to your brain. makes everything fuzz and everything exhausting. i suppose that now that i have child(ren) that i must live vicariously through them, experience the world through his eyes that light up at almost anything at all. realize that while playing with the hose this summer that he is playing with the hose for the first time so that spraying the dog or grandpa or the sidewalk is infinitely engrossing. he has not become so jaded as to be bored, sitting on the steps waiting for his son to finish. he does not want to spend all his time in front of the computer or in front of the television. he wants to run in the grass, try to touch the bees and try to stomp on them despite having once already been stung. he wants to feed the birds and scatter the birdseed all over the patio, smash ants, try to look at the sun, hit the dog in the head with a wiffle ball bat. he wants to chase chickens, scratch in the dirt with a stick and let the nectar of peaches drip all over. he is immune to the irritations of stickiness or dirtiness. why can we not retain that? will everything from here on out be old hat for me? is there nothing left to become intensely excited about? ah, yes... pregnancy. birth. parenthood. the last frontier? i certainly hope not.

i am trying to release myself from the burden of expectation. i am trying to let things go how they will without the burden of having too exactly planned, but with the wisdom of preparation. i cannot seem to see where it is that i am wise and where it is that i am foolish. my actions cannot be read like a book, showing and articulating where it is that things went wrong and why, or alternately offering an explanation of the existence of things as they are or the revelation of things as they are. too often there are questions. questions about my motives and questions about my emotions. why is there jealousy and hurt? why is there peace and understanding? which is which when? how can i learn to identify correctly and adequately where i am at, how i am dealing, what it is that i am feeling and why? how can i learn to identify correctly and adequately the things that i do as correct or misplaced? i suppose what i am asking is what is right? and how am i doing in relation? i cannot see it while i am in it. the benefit of hindsight is so amazing, really. i can see how the outcome of preparations to conceive is to birth in one moment, but in the next how the preparations are all for to mother. you forget once you are in it, how you dreamed of the word "mommy" and how you imagined tangibly holding onto the scent of a sleeping babe. i forget that i cannot truly savor things appropriately. i cannot be thanked appropriately or respect myself appropriately or even do it right all the time. i can only always try. and the most aggravating thing, perhaps is that there is no good way to evaluate how i am doing. either at mothering or at being. so even as i am trying to learn how to unburden myself from the responsibilities of expectation, i am unaware if i am being at all successful or if it is even possible. am i at peace? at this moment, do i know peace? or am i merely at this moment a little tired, a little dreamy and wistful? i cannot know. but i am not at this moment bothered by that because perhaps i am just a little tired. or maybe a lot peaceful. the inner struggles are at times utterly ludicrous.

duplex. friday we went up to visit jon's family and then over to cleveland to go house hunting. we found an apartment yesterday and move august first. it's the first floor of a duplex in the coventry area of cleveland, right near jon's new school. it's got hardwood floors and washer dryer hookup in the basement, two bedrooms, a large front porch, a bit of a front yard, a small patch of grass for a backyard, large living and dining rooms, large closets, a garage, leaded glass windows, a nonoperative gas fireplace, glass enclosed bookshelves on either side of the fireplace and glass cabinets in the dining room. it's old, but clean and we're pretty excited about it.
 
anna peeking in
 
  
taking a picture of myself in the entranceway on the closet door mirror  

 
living room       

 
living room windows (leaded glass) onto front porch and yard  

 
alex in dining room (note glass enclosed cabinets, swinging door to kitchen) 
 
 
dining room opposite angle

 
kitchen cabinets 
(the refrigerator was in the middle of the room due to painting)     
 

bathroom

 

linen closet built-in

bedroom number two

bedroom number two closet (right side built-in)

tower of pancakes. this morning i made pancakes. silver dollar sized. and this especially for jon:

considering my son's nose in the mirror, i see finally just how crooked it is, how the whole left side slants down, covering the nostril, leading down to the scar and the tightened, knotted lip, raised where it should not be, the two halves connecting incorrectly and i am overwhelmed by sadness and anger and the injustice of my life, the way my body failed me so... i am dying to try to have another baby just to prove that i can do it, that i can make a whole person and feed that person as i was intended to and nurture and cradle that person how i wanted to with alex, but was prohibited from. i am so jealous of all the perfect babies out in the world and the perfect mommies who can do so easily what i could not do at all. i remember when he was born, how i tried to nurse and couldn't and how he screamed at my chest. i remember how the two sides of his upper lip could move independently in ways that were not intended by upper lips to move. and now, i am reminded of this every time i brush his teeth and the inside of his upper lip is so tight from the forced connections of tissue that it is hard to reach his upper teeth, let alone see them. and at the moments that i do get a look at his teeth, there is a tooth that slants sideways and back because it is in the hole where nothing should be and just to the left of it, there are no teeth at all because there is no gum at all. every night at bedtime and every morning after breakfast as i say, "brush teeth" and he repeats and points towards the toothpaste and the toothbrush, "teeth, teeth," i am reminded that there are surgeries yet to come and orthodontics reminiscent of medieval devices employed by barber surgeons yet to come and rhinoplasties and implants and god knows what else all yet to come. all this tells my heart is that it takes but moments to set in motion pain and suffering enough for a lifetime...

before

after

considering my son's foot this morning upon waking, i took in the toenail and the toes, the peachiness and the plumpness. for now there are no freckles on his feet, no moles, no scars, no hair upon the toes, but one day, there might be. one day, when he is older and no longer my baby cradled in my arms. and i will no longer consider his feet and spend time considering if there are freckles or hairs, long or short springing from the knuckles of the toes. i will no longer wonder over each inch of his skin, looking for new freckles sprung up. at the moment, at last count, my son had six freckles: one on the back of his right ear, one on his right elbow, one on his left wrist, one on his left cheek, one on his anus, and one on the top of his right hand below the knuckle of the middle finger. will there come a day when all i consider is him, who he is, his personality, and no longer the wonder of skin and muscle that i created out of the magical, unseen division of gamete cells? it is such a soft, tender thing to know my son so well, to hold him close and smell his hair, kiss his head. i do this everyday. it is the joy of warm summer days filling me up, of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies still warm from the oven. it is a first kiss and the knowledge of true love. and every single day i get to feel this by simply holding him and rocking him to sleep. i am nervous of when the day will come when he will be too big for my arms and will no longer be so peaceful, but roughed and tumbled up by the miseries of life. my son, his human form, as the physical expression of my heart beating outside of my body is astonishing to me every single day.

my husband now has a master's degree. i don't have a degree at all. a week ago, he graduated. now we can leave montana. i leave on tuesday with alex. we're flying back to ohio and leaving jon to pack up the truck and drive it across country. a friend was supposed to help him, but he broke his leg and so we had to get my little sister's ex-boyfriend to fly out to help. they should have a fun trip, actually. except for all the moving business. i didn't have to move the last time at all either because i had just had a baby. i did have to travel out here in a car, but my mom did all the driving. i sat in the back with alex. he was such a tiny thing back then. back when he had that gigantimongous hole in his face. when i think about it, i miss not being able to nurse him. it was so devastating for me. i still cry when i think about it. especially when i think of other people doing it successfully. i just get all jealous and resenting. fuck them for being able to breastfeed perfectly. i don't know who annoys me more actually, people who choose not to breastfeed, but are perfectly capable or people who have absolutely no difficulty at all. i hope beyond hope that everything goes well with our next baby. i'm getting so excited about trying now. i think i have a pretty good idea of when i'll ovulate in august. i'm sort of banking on the baby being late, so i'm counting forty weeks from conception as opposed to the way that professionals estimate a due date by going from the first day of the last period. which means that a pregnancy is actually thirty-eight weeks and not forty, but in my case, i think it will actually be forty weeks like alex was. i'm pretty sure of aleksander's date of conception, so i feel pretty confident that his due date was correct, but that i carry babies a little longer. i know that with subsequent babies, it has a good chance of being different, but if i did it that way then we won't get two opportunities to conceive, but just the one. if i ovulate when i expect to and manage to conceive immediately, then i will be due around the beginning of may. also, if my anticipated dates of ovulation are correct, then i will get a second opportunity to attempt conception for a due date range that is reasonable to our expectations. i can't wait. i was around all these pregnant women today at the blessingway of a friend. it made me want to be pregnant again so badly. i love pregnancy. i know that i complained the last time, but overall i had a very simple pregnancy and my body handled it beautifully, so i fully expect for that to be the case again. i've got to find a better way to handle morning sickness though. i'll stew on that. a friend recommended these ginger candies, but they're pretty darn spicy. maybe i'll just buy tons of ginger brew, which is less spicy, but made by the same company that does that candies. i'll also definitely buy the wrist bands this time around.
here's a picture of jon after graduating. he's on the right.

not everyday is a struggle. but everyday is exhausting. my bones ache and my skin feels heavy, my muscles sag. i have so much work to do, but it's not necessary to do it this minute, so i am waiting. it's been cold here. i can't wait to leave. we leave on the twenty-fifth. i am ready. i am ready for it to be warm and for alex to have a yard to run around in. today i bought him really really expensive rain gear. i made sure that it was big enough to last him through next spring, when he'll probably actually get some use out of it. the boots have frog faces on the toes and are adorable. the jacket is terry-lined and really warm. he was wearing his boots around this evening while naked. he's naked all the time, really. he's been unpacking the boxes that i've packed. he takes out all the packing materials from the packing material box. so there are now little bits of styrofoam peanuts all over the kitchen, under the washer and dryer, littering the linoleum. i should sweep. it is not immediately necessary, however, so it can wait. i am very tired. alex is asleep now, so i can go to bed. he's been going to sleep very easily lately. it's been nice. every few months he changes his patterns. before this, he had been fighting sleep for a very long time and we were having to find all sorts of activities to get him to sleep. this is much better. it is nice to not have to struggle with him.

we did it again. alex was much crankier the second time around. but the art came out beautiful. we watched crap tv, ate organic frozen dinners and made art. what a life.

alex and i painted together for the first time last night. i've always had this quaint image in my mind of painting with a child, them working on some small corner while i paint on the rest of the canvas. our experience was not quite like that. i spread two drop cloths on top of one another on the floor in the living room, got out my paint box, got some water and my rags and changed my clothes. alex mostly runs around naked, so i didn't have to worry about him getting paint on his clothes. i got a canvas and started spreading paint on it. alex came wandering in from the office where he was watching his father play video games to see what i was doing. then of course he began helping. his work was pretty good, but then i needed to figure out how to get the painting away from him in order to keep him from working ad infinitum and messing it all up. jon recommended that it needed more blue. i should never listen to jon. i saw what he was getting at, but once i gave alex some blue, he began to muck the whole thing up. so then i had to wipe most of the blue off and start over with pink and red and yellow to go back over it. eventually we both had paint in weird places on our bodies (neck, head, him all over his butt), so jon took alex kicking and screaming to the bathtub while i tracked paint onto the carpet (bottom of my foot) and then cleaned everything up.


alex examining his work

my husband has all the digital photos that we have on this slide show that pops up as our screensaver. it just randomly goes through all the digital pics we have - which, there are hundreds since we got the digicam when alex was about two months old. sometimes we just sit and watch the slideshow go by. sometimes amidst all the photos of alex grabbing at the camera or him sleeping or him covered in food, a photo from when he had one of his surgeries will pop up. there's a particular series from his first surgery that i took of him and the room at night with this dim orange light highlighting the midieval-looking metal crib he's in, the humidifier blowing on him, the machines all blinking, hooked up to him under the blankets that he's covered in from head to toe. in his mouth is a nipple with the tip cut off and it's taped to his face so that his mouth stayed open so he could breathe since the swelling and the tylenol with coedine really depressed his ability to breathe and babies don't naturally open their mouths... every time i've seen that lately i've started thinking about how i should have been holding him. i attachment parented from the beginning, but i've recently realized that i wasn't able to bond with him the way i wish i had in those early months. i've started to feel guilty about this idea that i could have been a better mother to him when he needed it most. i'm trying not to put a whole lot of weight into this idea, but it's there. i hate so much the fact that i missed out on nursing alex. i hate so much that i am everyone's prime example of breastfeeing dedication just because i pumped for thirteen months. i hate that alex's teeth are all fucked up. i hate that his scar has not formed as well as it should have. i hate that i have to consider when his next surgery will be when deciding when to have another child. sometimes i hate other mommies that i meet or that i know just because from here it looks so perfect and unfair. i think about all the things i could have done differently, that i could have done or not done to prevent this from happening to him in the first place. which is why it so important for me to carefully plan the next child. which is why i am spending all this time thinking about it, making plans, obsessing over something i'm not even going to be doing for a few more months. i just need it all to go right this time because it's too hard and unfair and i don't want to spend all my time hating. i need to feel my life for all the good in it, to see it. i do and i can, but it'd be very very hard for me to fail at making a whole person and it'd be very very hard for me to fail at nursing again. i know that i'm not a bad person. i know that i haven't done anything to deserve this, and i don't even believe the world works that way anyway, but it doesn't stop the ringing in my head, that little nagging feeling of guilt, of suspicion. i'm just scared and nervous and it's hard. but then, what if everything goes right. well hell, i don't even know...

one day my son will be grown and will leave me. i know that this is the inevitable, and yet cannot imagine it. even as he pulls at my pantsleg and on my arm, wanting to drag me off to another room to get something that he can't have down from a high shelf for him, even as this makes me want to scream and tear my hair out, the repitition of it, the fact that i am quickly becoming "all touched out" - even still, i cannot imagine him leaving me, not needing me to rock him and cuddle him, not needing me to read all his books to him over and over and over again. the repitition of my day, the mundaneness of it, leaves me wanting to get out of the house for once by myself, leaves me longing to see a movie or read a novel. my life at times, leaves me longing for more, something other than what i am. and yet, i'd not give him up for anything. there is nothing that could actually entice me away. despite him tugging on my leg at this very moment, whining and wanting for everything bigger than himself.

the pull of my mind is hard to ignore. i am thinking intensely about the endeavor to attempt conception, to have another child, and yet i am not currently actually trying. but i am thinking nonetheless of what will happen, if it will work and if my body can do it without fucking it all up. will i make a whole person? can i be properly prepared enough to ensure that it takes, to ensure that it stays with me? is there something wrong that i am as yet unaware of? can i have a moment of perfect? am i entitled to that? i have this friend that annoys the hell out of me who is currently pregnant. and i know that because she annoys the hell out of me that everything will be fine with her, everything will be perfect. if only to continue to annoy the hell out of me. this is true with most women i encounter who are pregnant. some days i am so angry at the world that alex was born with the cleft. some days i hate everything. because it seems so unjust. i took such good care of myself as soon as i found out that i was pregnant. and now, i am trying ever so hard to take such perfect care of myself before i even conceive to guarantee that it will go right. but there's the little question in my head, pulling on me, the string connected to the thought nagging and tugging, ringing a tiny little bell in my mind, saying, "but there are no guarantees..." what if i do everything right and still everything goes wrong? what then?

lost in transition. my husband finished his thesis and we're now able to get ready to move. i can't wait to get the hell out of here. i'm in this completely transitional mindframe and it's wrecking my ability to accomplish anything. i have conflicts here that i'm not interested in resolving, work that i'm not interested in doing, and weeks before i'm leaving, so there's no need to pack yet really. my hands are tied by my thoughts. i'm compelled to do nothing. i'm floating around, maintaining yet moving nowhere. there's no forward to move towards. i'm left sitting still, hands limp at my sides.

today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of my birth. so i'm a little older, not a bit wiser for it. getting older is starting to become just a nuisance. at least i get to go out on a date with my husband. he finished his thesis yesterday, so i suppose we're both in celebration mode. though of course at the moment, we're both just tired. i think i'm more excited about getting to see a movie in a theater than my actual birthday. seems fitting really, the years are just making it harder to remember the count.

everyone i know is pregnant. or trying to get pregnant. or just became not pregnant. none of my friends back home who are all my age, of course, but every other mommy on the block, it seems. there are three pregnant women that i know in my building, at least one that i don't know, two women from playgroup, and then there are four women i know who are trying to conceive/not trying but not stopping it/trying to trick their husbands into letting them get pregnant. also, my sister just had a baby two weeks ago and another woman in my building just had a baby at the end of december. i now also know all these women online who are trying to get pregnant. i am surrounded by the quest for fertility. it invades the spaces in my brain. all i can come up with for myself is that it was the smoking that caused alex's cleft, temperatures that are beyond erratic, an iud waiting to be dislodged, and the idea that i need a bottle of folic acid to start overdosing on pronto. babies babies babies... i don't understand it, but there seems to be this silent fertility competition among women that perhaps most of us don't even ourselves acknowledge. it's what makes us all ooh and ahh over new babies. it's what makes us all want a baby after watching some stranger from halfway around the world's perfect birth in all it's idealized flash glory. we're driven by instinct, i suppose, to want more and more to spread our genes despite all of the best-laid intellectualized intentions drawn deep from the wells of our alternate desires to leave something behind us when we die, to remain active in this life and independent and to produce an income - everything that "sequencing" promises - having it all, just not all at once. for me, i personally don't have a clue about what i want beyond babies, beyond that biological imperative to spread one's genes, to go forth and multiply. how lame am i? look everyone, with this brain and these talents, i am busy wasting away in domesticity, toiling daily with toddler underfoot at nothing more than picking up the same mess five hundred times and the most that i produce in a day is perhaps a healthy snack. how lovely for me.

so i'm going to try to conceive. again. well, this time i'm going to try. last time, it just happened. we've decided to try for a june baby round about august-september-october sometime, depending of course on when i ovulate. so i've started charting my cycles and so far it's not going so good. i started taking my temperature before i actually had or read a book that told me how to chart. now i've got the book, but my temperatures are all over the place, contrary to what they're supposed to be doing. so i'm changing thermometers, seeing if the old one's batteries were perhaps dying or something of the sort. this time, i've got to really plan this. i've always had that in my head, from the moment alex was born with the cleft, i knew that the next time around i'd have to be really careful and take extra good care of myself. so no boozing it up this summer (not like i have the time for that anyway with a toddler underfoot), cutting out caffeine again, eating healthier, etc. after four surgeries and the agony of missing out on breastfeeding, i'm just not prepared for anything else going wrong. i know that my chances of it happening are slim, but i've seen worse happen to other people and i feel not a little bit vulnerable. at the moment, i'm not really feeling into the whole idea of trying to conceive at all, but i'm not feeling much into anything. i can't figure out what's wrong with me. lately my head is just so full of soup it's ridiculous. i'm getting upset at the slightest thing, and feeling absolutely no motivation to do much of anything. it's amazing that i'm here typing. it's amazing that i've done any of the things that i did today: went to the insurance place, did the laundry, did some dishes, worked on my attachment parenting brochure... and yet, still, i feel like i've accomplished nothing. i'm just not happy right now. i don't know why i can't just be happy. it seems so easy when i see kodak commercials or crap like this. i don't know why i can't live in a fucking kodak commercial.


alex today

i have problems. i took a personality disorder test. here are my results:
Disorder | Rating
Paranoid: Low
Schizoid: Low
Schizotypal: Low
Antisocial: Low
Borderline: Moderate
Histrionic: High
Narcissistic: High
Avoidant: Low
Dependent: High
Obsessive-Compulsive: High

his heart beats silently,
but his breathing is always labored.
air screams through a tightened wall of scar
where once there was nothing at all.
his lips press tightly together,
pursed into a frown by the vacuum of breath
rising and falling.
his hair mats from sweat collecting on his pillow.

and what dreams do not wake you?
what makes you smile while sleeping?
is it the bath fish come alive, wriggling against your skin?
or mama chasing you in fields of bedding,
catching you and tickling?

how did you even come to be you?
what mistake did i make that left your flesh incomplete,
your face hollow where a smile should be?
was it my body?
the things i did,
this gross collection of DNA,
half-rotted from some past indiscretion?
my cells eating each other at the exact wrong moment,
leaving you incomplete and detached,
so that now, months later,
your inhalation and subsequent exhalation
are driven hard by will,
forced coming in and going out
against damaged tissue,
hardened by unfamiliar hands
and yet unable to soften with kisses,
to relax with words whispered gently in a lullaby hum…

why can i not repair what i’ve inflicted
and heal my heart enough
to have faith in this body’s ability to
make a whole person,
perfect and ripe,
fruit born from a shell tough enough
to weather every wound,
to absorb every stone thrown
in a tornado of creation?

will one day come when we have both healed over,
yet left with scars
that remind us at times
of how difficult it is to breathe?

i think that my struggle has more to do with understanding my choice to be a mother. being a mother is a greater task than i could ask for. it takes everything of me, all the parts of me to do it as well as i like. i can do things outside of being a mom, and i do, but at the moment all roads lead back to that. the things that i am doing outside of being a mom include leading an attachment parenting group and organizing an attachment parenting group booth at a mother's day event. i also see a therapist to talk about being a mom, since my adult interaction is limited. i don't mind being a mom. i love it, it's fabulous. and i am still me even though i'm a mom. i guess i've found a career, you could say. but the struggle is that sometimes doubt creeps in. guilt creeps in. curiosity creeps in. and i begin to wonder if maybe there is some other version of my life. sometimes i feel the pressures of 70s-era feminism saying that opportunities were presented to me that i snotily declined. sometimes i feel the pressures of artisthood breathing down my neck saying that i should be progressing, growing, producing at all. at other times i realize that all of this is the stuff of life and if i were doing anything else i would be missing the real thing which is where i'm at - the purpose of the species, the intentions of my biology, to which i know that i am truly, truly dedicated. i know that despite the rhetoric, the goal of feminism was to allow for the choice, which as a culture we are only now remotely appreciating. i know that despite feminist gains that support for mothers at home or mothers at work or single mothers is decidely lacking and that the discrepancy between the pay rates of men and women is 75 cents on the dollar. i know that in order to be an artist fully, i must allow for life to feed the art. i also know how frida khalo struggled with the inertia to create, how fitzgerald felt that his earlier work was immature, and how salinger still hides in the woods. what history now tells me is that given all the time in the world (van gogh) or a hefty cocaine habit (basquiat), or the world's wealthiest sponsor (michelangelo), or some combination of the three, one can produce ad infinitum, provided one's back, or one's heart, or one's brain doesn't give out, which of course it eventually does. i am not yet 25. my world is not likely to end tomorrow. i must simply learn to accept everything in good time. i must also devise better methods for staving off all those gremlins of fear and doubt and guilt. and as an artist, for which the time will come, i must learn how to do as jack black has mastered and keep ego and critics away from my brain as my fingers type or paint or what have you. and you're right, indeed - fuck 'em.