Pink and Sparkly

The last post about the balancing act that is marriage post-baby makes me feel a little bad. I don't want you to have the wrong idea, but in leaving you this record of your early years, I don't want to give you the impression that motherhood is all smiles. While I worry that you might someday read this and feel as if I didn't love you or think I was terrible, I'd rather that than have you find yourself alone someday reading a glossy, smiling account of everything and thinking, "What's wrong with me?! Why can't I manage this? Mom never had these problems." Um, yes she did, and then some.

Now in case you're reading this before you're really able to understand, I want to explain something. You'll probably know by now how it goes with some things in life. A great number of life experiences have fabulous outcomes after lots and lots of work. When you're young, sometimes it can be hard to separate the two - to understand that the work and the outcome depend on each other, but are sort of separate experiences. Like when you have to clean your room or study for a test or save your allowance for weeks to buy a new toy - the cleaning, studying and saving aren't the fun parts (although if you can learn to make them at least moderately enjoyable, things go more easily), but the neat room, the good grade or the new toy are terrific. You are the end result, not the process, and I can be frustrated, taxed and tried by the process but still madly in love with you. Two completely, totally, entirely different things!

As I've mentioned, physically pregnancy wasn't rough, but emotionally, I had more than a few rocky spots. But we got you here, and, when I have good days, I can recognize that I walk a little taller inside knowing that I was able to get you here under my own willpower, without having to have the extra assistance of medication or surgery. And I can also recognize that I've pushed through the difficulty of nursing to an almost inhuman degree.

Nursing might be where things first began to slip a bit.
We've had all sorts of problems - yeast, thrush, bad latch - but the end result is that we've gone through bout after bout of painful nursing. And now things are going well again for the moment, but I'm pretty sure that another bout lies just ahead of us somewhere. I pushed myself beyond all reason to keep nursing you. I just couldn't quit. I felt compelled somehow, maybe because without a mother, I just established the highest benchmarks I could imagine for myself and kept pushing toward them. And I kept pushing because while I can quit on myself, I can't ever seem to quit on people that I love, which is something you yourself established an all-new record-setting benchmark for.

Or maybe things got rough because I'm missing your grandma. Now that she's gone, it's easy to imagine her as the potentially perfect grandma/mother. See, once you start imagining, there's really no need to stop. If I'm going to imagine your grandma alive today, I might as well imagine her without the sickness that she suffered from, or without any of the traits that made us disagree. Don't ever fall into that habit if I'm not around. You miss me, miss me lots, but remember me, as best you can, as accurately as you can. (And ask your dad - he'll always tell you the truth.) I'd like you to remember that I was a loving mother, who laughed easily and read to you all the time and never said no to buying books or helping stray animals, as someone who loved her family fiercely and who was resourceful and content, who was blissfully happy with a simple life and simple pleasures. But you can also remember me as someone who didn't always listen as closely as she should have, someone who had, occasionally, too many opinions, who sometimes gave so much of herself that she didn't have a lot left for herself or the people who really meant the most, who worried too much instead of reveling in gratitude. Don't make me one-dimensional, because then you'll never feel you measure up or you'll never feel like you can connect with my memory because it's so much larger than any one person could be. I'm your mother and, I feel fairly confident, our relationship will probably be the most complex relationship you have in all your life, so don't shortchange either of us by making it all pink and sparkly. (Lord, I hope if you lean in a direction, it's that one - that I don't give you cause for dark memories....)

Because I'm not all pink and sparkly. I certainly don't feel it these days. I've been struggling mightily with postpartum depression, listing dangerously in the direction of postpartum psychosis, and that's an ugly, dark, frightening place. Glimmers of movement that aren't real, black surges of anger or fear or panic that break like waves over my head, obliterating light and sound and all things rational, gnawing and rasping beliefs that you'd be better off without me, screams that just roll out of me while the real me huddles in the back of my mind, too numb to make a difference. Currently, the "pink and sparkly" in my life is you - your smile and your hoots and your giggles and your little sleepy starfish hands opening and closing in front of your eyes as you're drifting off to sleep. You make me smile a million times a day and I get up each morning because I know your little wiggly grins are waiting to be discovered somewhere in the hours that stretch out before me.

But there's one other thing I'd like you to remember about me: that I was hopeful, that I held hope in my heart on the darkest days, kept it like a little smooth stone in my pocket that was always there, and that I stepped out in search of the things that hope promised me even when it seemed like there was no point, that I laughed even when it was the roughest gallows humor. Because of that hope, I'm working hard to get better, because I believe that pink and sparkly is somewhere out ahead.