Skinless

Two weeks ago, when you hit the six-month mark, I wished you a happy birthday on Facebook. I thought about celebrating with a post about the mammoth accomplishment that has been nursing you. Over the couple of years I've been on Facebook, I've seen posts about all sorts of celebratory things: weight loss, wedding anniversaries, ultrasounds, healthy babies. Every single one of those things is bound to be a struggle for someone reading them - someone's got a friend who is 50 pounds overweight, someone who has recently been divorced, someone who can't carry a baby to term or has a child with health problems. I wouldn't be angry or feel judged by someone who lost weight, but being a mother's not like that.

Being a mother, at least being a new mother (I can only hope this fades somewhat), is like having no skin. Skin is an intermediary for nerves, a big down comforter that strips the experiences of the world down to a manageable level. Skin softens the sensory overload of the world to a tolerable point. But now I find myself walking around with no skin, and even the gentlest, most well-intentioned "touches" from contact with other people burn like fire. Even the most commonplace interactions can suddenly leave me feeling flayed open, internally wide-eyed at the rapid delivery of distress and panic and inadequacy, like having a house dropped on me out of a clear blue conversational sky.

Speaking to me now, at least in an ideal way, would probably be akin to speaking to a wild animal or a mental patient. It's best to make no sudden movements, to speak softly and slowly and roll the weight of every word around before dispensing it. Sometimes, all of a sudden, language seems awash with vast gulfs of meaning, and instead of standing on a secure shoreline with gentle waves, I find myself miles from anything solid, casting about, sucked into the trough between "Is she..." and "Isn't she...." "Is she..." implies hope and future and growth and potential, while "Isn't she..." seems filled with recrimination and criticism and uncertainty. "Is she..." means she will, but "Isn't she..." means she should be by now.

Initially, I was sure this was the fault of other people (and I still make regular vows to myself about the kinds of things I'll say to new mothers), but I think some people are just more firmly anchored, so moored to their secure sense of being right and doing right that there aren't places between the words for them to fall. I realize now it's a testament to my carefully constructed facade, to my years of studying how best to approximate normal, that someone can look at me and see a confident sailor, at the helm of a steady little craft skimming across smooth water instead of a small vessel floundering in dark, rough seas, struggling to find keel, to keep from taking on water.

At one time, I would have been sure this was my curse, comfortable with the sharp irony that my talent was my undoing, but now, I just wonder if maybe, just maybe, they might be right and I might be wrong. Could my understanding of myself possibly be so skewed? There's irony in that as well, I suppose. Perhaps, like the Velveteen Rabbit, after years of being pretend, I've finally been made Real, and somehow I'm the only one who doesn't know it yet.

Six Months!

Woohoo! You've been here six months! Six whole months and it seems like years and years, but in a good way. I look at all we've learned over the past six months, and I don't know who to be more impressed with. Okay, I'm more impressed with you, but only because you didn't have access to the internet. :)

I've learned so much about you. I've been reading Bill Bryson's memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and he talks about how intimately you know the world as a child, and it struck a chord with me, because I remember knowing my childhood world that way. I knew how many stairs there were down to the basement, what the gas furnace sounded like when it clicked on, how many times Mom would answer the phone on Saturday morning before getting out of bed, the number of tiles on my bedroom ceiling and where the brown water stains were, how long I could run the garden hose before getting caught, where the warped spots were on the ping-pong table in my grandparents' basement, what name to call your uncle to start a fight. I knew the smells of everything: my grandpa's workshirts, the cabinet under the sink, the loft in the garage, my grandmother's lotion, my mother's perfume, the hot plastic smell of our Buick in summer, the burners on the gas stove. (This, by the way, is why you'll someday be annoyed with the "I don't remembers" you get from all adults in your life; you'll not be able to fathom how such a fundamental understanding of our world slipped away from us. I can't either.)

But now, suddenly, I know something so microscopically again: you.

Paper Moon

Parenting is a controlled illusion and an illusion of control.  We struggle so much with teenagers because we feel as though we're losing control, but in reality, I realize already, we've never had control.  Never, not for one moment of a child's existence.  We snap inwardly at parents with unruly children, muttering, "Control your child!" or "He's completely out of control!"  Yet actual control is not what we ended up wresting for, but rather a sort of cotton candy control, all puffed and spun and empty.

I'm not sure why we're so surprised, so baffled and wounded, when our elaborately constructed, self-proclaimed authority comes crashing down around our ears.  Perhaps it's because we have spent years and years carrying this sense of control around like a talisman against all the uncertainty of the world, comforted by the steady weight of it, only to discover when called upon to use it that it's merely like Dumbo's magic feather.  We mistake control for influence because influence is not enough.  In reality, I've never had control of you, even when you were in the womb.  You've been thwarting my meager attempts at authority, the authority of my body and my mind, since you were two tiny cells.  I couldn't dictate when you wriggled, when you pressed outward against my ribs as though you were attempting to blow out a wall and enlarge your inadequate accommodations, when you hiccuped.

Although pregnancy is the large black underscore for loss of control, it's really when the illusion takes root.  All things become about shaping the production process, selling the idea of indirect control by molding fixations on the raw materials delivered.  Lunch meats with nitrates should be avoided, eat lots of fish to assist with brain development but only certain types and not too often lest the excessive levels of mercury you're bound to ingest lodge in a developing brain, avoid varnishes and stains and aerosols...the lists and concerns go on and on and on.  The physical weight of your body was nothing compared to the weighty sense of responsibility I felt at every moment, with every decision.  We sell ourselves on the idea of our control over you so that we can then sell you on it as well.  Converts, it is well known, make the best evangelists....