This is brave

And I am so not anywhere near the place she describes. If something happened to Eliza I would melt away.

http://www.mamalode.com/blog/2011/04/18/mama-digs-to-be/

Surrender

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of surrender lately, especially when it comes to having another baby. It's so easy to be in a place of control with the whole baby-making thing. You can take your temperature and figure out when you ovulate and overdose yourself with supplements that might make your womb a more hospitable environment for a tiny person. You can get to a really obsessive, crazy-making place with the whole process. I have spent time in that place, and it's not at all fun.

I have realized that once you get to a place of surrender about having another child, and have given up any attachment to it, the magic seems to happen. Time and time again this has proven true, both for me and for people I know. I have a friend who had tried for over two years to get pregnant. It turned out she had fibroids that were probably causing the problem, and she got to a place of acceptance that she needed the surgery before she could conceive. Two weeks before she was supposed to go under the knife, she found out she was pregnant. No medical intervention necessary. I have another friend who couldn't get pregnant, so she and her husband decided to adopt. They had been in the waiting pool with her adoption agency for almost a year. She started posting on the message board where we got to know each other that she was so done with the adoption process and was starting to look at donor embryos to try to get pregnant. She posted messages about this all week. On Friday afternoon, her adoption agency called. They had been matched. She and her husband are expecting a baby girl next month.

My first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage at six weeks. I was devastated. I think the fear of potentially having to endure that again got me to a place of surrender with the whole trying to conceive process, and I was okay with it taking a while and physically and emotionally healing from that sad place. And as it turned out, I got pregnant on my miscarriage cycle. I let go, and there she was.

So I'm trying to get myself to that place with this baby. I think you authentically have to get yourself to surrendering any attachment to having another baby, rather than saying "Oh, I'm surrendering all this" and then checking your chart for the seventeenth time that day, and I'm not quite at that authentic point yet. I haven't obsessed about getting pregnant this cycle, and I'm not going to be devastated if I'm not pregnant this month, but I think I still have some letting go work to do. It's hard when I am absolutely certain there is another little one who is ready to enter our family. I just have to accept that God knows far better than I do about perfect timing. Baby, I hope you come soon, but I know you'll find the best time to be born!

Escape

I am dreaming of flying to Rome and spending a few days there doing nothing but eating and drinking. Screw the Coliseum, bring me another chianti.

When I have escapist fantasies like this, I know something in me needs attention, care, and nourishment. I have tried to discern what this ache is for a while now and still feel very in the dark. It's been very hard to retreat from the obligations of family life this past week, and even though Ben does his best to give me breaks, I need Rome. How do I disconnect when staying at home is more than just my job, it is my whole life? And if I need something else new and exotic to feed me, well, what the hell is it?

Finally, spring

We had a beautiful weekend here, and it was so nice to get outside and not have to wear a jacket. The grass is green, flowers are blooming, robins are singing on my lawn, and I could go on and on with this spring crap. I get the whole Easter thing now. I mean, I am not theologically on the same page as Christianity, but I understand celebrating death and resurrection, waiting and rebirth. I resonate with this each spring. In fact, I have these animal spirit cards (and you sigh and point me in the direction of the new age bookstore), and yesterday I pulled a card that had a turtle on it that said Mother Earth. And I was like, no, don't get all environmentalist on me, animal cards, but when I bothered to read the interpretation of the card, it said that the turtle lays her eggs in the sand, and then the baby turtles are "born again" as they hatch out of the eggs and come out of the sand. It said that this card means rebirth, that I am primed for a rebirth. I have been saying this word a lot over the past few days, and I wonder so much what is waiting to be born in me.

Searching for the soulful

I feel like every spring something cracks open within me. I am yearning for spiritual conversation and connection this afternoon. I want to be a part of a group of women, a group of mothers, who have those Big Conversations with each other over laughter and wine. Being home all day with Eliza, I don't usually feel lonely, but I definitely recognize how isolated our days are and I am yearning to have a conversation with someone who understands this afternoon. Maybe after the hibernation of winter, I feel like connecting and creating again. I don't know. I feel this longing every year around this time, and then life gets in the way again and I don't do anything about it.

I am brainstorming about how to start a real group like the one I dream about, because I'm fairly certain no one in this area has something like this going on. Maybe that's how to connect my creativity, my search for work, and this overpowering afternoon yearning.

Making something

After two and a half years of a lot of work and a lot of student loans, I received my master's degree in pastoral counseling. Unfortunately, when it came time to find a job, the economy downturned into a recession, and of course, when times are tough, human services tend to get the ax. It took me almost six months to find a part-time, non-counseling position (it was a religious education position at a church), and then about two seconds after that for me to get pregnant with Eliza. I quit that job when she was three months old, vowing to get back into counseling and work toward counseling licensure when I decided to return to work.

These days I'm not thinking about returning to work, at least not in the immediate future. Money will always be a bit tight as long as I'm staying at home, but we're very fortunate that I am able to be here, where I want to be, with my daughter. But when I think about returning to work, I do not feel like I am being pulled toward counseling. Instead, my fantasies of work generally revolve around being creative, getting my hands dirty, making something. I think this is in part a reaction to all that "head work" of counseling and not being able to see any tangible results of your efforts, but also, I realize upon reflection that I have always enjoyed seeing the finished product. I used to work in textbook publishing, and I cannot begin to describe the thrill of holding one of my college-level finance textbooks in my hands. I helped create this very real object into being. I loved that feeling.

I feel drawn toward such work again these days. I am frustrated that I don't have an artistic or technical skill that I can showcase. I have visions of quiltmaking or sculpting in my spare time, and then selling my works for a little extra cash. Things like that. Perhaps this blog is growing out of that need to create, too. It's not tangible, but I can see that I have a dozen entries written now -- my work is growing and becoming something. That matters to me, even if I am the only person still reading this.

No matter where I go in life, I am grateful for my counseling degree, because I think it gives me a tremendous perspective on the world. Perhaps I will come back to that type of work when I am in a different place in my life. But for now, I don't have the energy to invest in my clients like I used to be able to. My energy stays here, at home, and the limited candlelight I have left must be directed towards people and passions I care about. I love my life, and right now I am looking to add the thrill of creating back into it.

What Mothers Do Especially When It Looks Like Nothing

I am in the middle of What Mothers Do Especially When It Looks Like Nothing by Naomi Stadlen, and it is the most validating piece I have read about motherhood since becoming a mother. Since making the decision to stay at home with Eliza, I have been plagued with the idea that I am not "doing enough," and this book addresses how my house may be a disaster and I never got to the laundry today, but I am most certainly doing enough when I am mothering a baby. It also talks how there are no words to describe the types of work that mothers do with babies -- that multifocused attention, the multitasking of shopping with a toddler (you're not just shopping, you're socializing a toddler to the world by communicating with them about their surroundings and enforcing social norms), the communication with a pre-verbal child. She names plenty of work that mothers do, and certainly is validating to hear why I can still be so tired after a day at home with Eliza.

What I also really appreciate about this book is the naming of the identity shift that mothers go through after having a child. I remember going over to watch the 2010 Rose Bowl at a friends' house. They have a little boy a few months older than Eliza. Not that I care about football, but the whole time I was there I did nothing but care for Eliza, making bottles, feeding her, changing her diaper, making sure she was entertained. If I talked, it was about my child. We drove home that night and I just couldn't believe what my life had become. No longer would I be carefree or travel lightly. I didn't want to go back to who I was pre-baby, but I also realized that there wasn't a way back. That door slammed shut when my child was born.

It has taken me a while to really incorporate this mama piece of myself. For a while I felt like I couldn't connect all the pieces of my personality together, that they were all separate and disjointed and impossible to integrate... perhaps to make room for this mama piece; I don't know. But I remember thinking that it was impossible for Carefree, Silly Meghan to co-exist with Mama Meghan. And I didn't know which of those pieces I was when I was all alone, doing whatever it was I wanted. I wasn't all of them, and I wasn't none of them, either. While I'm still not sure how I'd primarily define myself, my psyche is capable of owning and integrating that mama piece these days. I recognize that I wear many hats and have many personalities, and it feels less like chaos and more like I have a well-equipped toolbox at my disposal. I am so happy to see a book actually naming, or at least describing, this struggle -- my only wish is that I had read it when I was going through this identity shift.

Eliza is napping; the house is quiet. I have been feeling the need for some spiritual centering in my life lately, and I think I'm going to attempt to right myself in the cosmic realm while I have a few blessed quiet moments alone.