Moments, Beginning of Summer

Elan playing with his set of rescue vehicles: "This is a police car. It goes to the... it goes to the... camping. When we go camping, we need the police car. And this one is the ambiance."

A bird is building a nest in the Japanese maple tree in our little yard. It's nice to see someone acting on my nesting impulses.

Elan's first nursery school show. He was so serious and attentive, trying to get all the hand motions right, with a llama finger puppet stuck precariously on his chubby little finger. And then he partied hard. And then he fell asleep during quiet time (a first!).

Napping on Mama's belly, several weeks ago

When I woke him from a nap this week, he looked right at me and said: "Hot sausage and pickles. Vitamin chip sauce!" My child, the picky eater, dreaming about strange food concoctions.

I was feeling the baby bounce around, so I asked Elan if he wanted to feel the baby move. To my surprise, he said yes, ran over and put his little hand gently on my belly. The baby cooperated and gave his hand two swift kicks. Elan's eyes went big with astonishment. He pulled his hand away and giggled. I know, little bubs, pretty crazy that there's a tiny human in there, isn't it?

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Moments is a weekly challenge I'm setting for myself, an opportunity for reflection and to capture all those little moments that make up life. If you'd like to join me in this blog challenge by starting your own Moments series, please do! It's not just for parents. If you do take this blog challenge, please link back here.

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Posting will be light next week while I'm spending time with my extended family. May your weekend be filled with memorable moments.

gorgeous 2 minutes

I highly recommend taking 2 minutes to watch this photo-collage of Buddhist monks creating an intricate sand mandala. It's gorgeous.

(via a post on Chookooloonks, one of my favorite blogs)

Morning Pages: An Update

I'm halfway through my 3-week goal of writing Morning Pages 5 days a week, and I wanted to share my progress. I've done it! I've done my 10 minutes of "brain drain" writing 8 days. It hasn't always been in the morning, and I'm okay with that. Doing morning pages sometime during the day is a habit/practice that reminds me that I'm a writer. It's especially important on the days when that's the only writing I do, and my little guy is clinging to my leg all day.

I'm a fan of achievable goals, and 5 days a week for 3 weeks feels very achievable. There's room for flexibility there, for a day when I just don't get to it or I forget or it gets overshadowed. Achievable goals help keep the perfectionist in me from getting too obsessive over something. Deciding I will do something everyday never works for me; I end up falling off the wagon and then feeling too bad about myself to get back on in a timely manner.

I'm curious to see, at the end of this short experiment, if I feel like it's benefitted me as a writer. I'll let you know.

kindness

self-portrait, 22 weeks

I stayed up way too late last night - MIDNIGHT! I haven't seen midnight in ages, whereas it was once a regular phenomenon that Mikhail and I went to bed at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. There was no good excuse for staying up. I shouldn't have done it, because my belly button and right side of my belly were hurting, and the longer I stayed up, the more they hurt. I was engaging in an activity we call "strollering" - named after the inordinate amount of time I spent during my pregnancy with Elan looking at stroller eye-candy online, reading reviews, fantasizing and fretting over this particular purchase. So now strollering is a verb in our household, for anytime you find yourself falling into an online vortex. The problem with window-shopping online is that the stores never close and your feet never get tired.

And then Elan got up at 5:45 a.m. today. Because he likes to torture us. (He did sleep in till 7:10 on Saturday morning this weekend, a complete anomaly, but my dad accidentally dialed us on his new phone at 6:30 - oops!).

Predictably, it was a screwy morning. One of those pregnant days where I feel like hormones have overcome my brain and taken up residence in the places where logic and memory once lived. I forgot things, showed up at the wrong time for appointments, and the kicker: felt bad about myself for being disorganized and distracted. Cried a lot -- for lots of reasons, and no reasons, all at the same time. Don't take this in an un-feminist way, but it is mornings like this when I'm glad I'm not responsible for important foreign policy decisions involving missiles and warheads and such. Of course, if I were President, maybe my kid would sleep in. They'd have a Secret Service agent all over that.

Anyway, I found myself thinking about kindness. Kindness toward myself, because I'm overwhelmed by all I have ambitiously taken on since starting to feel better. Kindness and compassion and sense of humor to replace what I was feeling: judgement about all my failings, large and small.

And just when I was thinking this word kindness so loudly in my head it was practically on my lips, I went into the bagel store that takes cash only and realized I didn't have enough money, and a complete stranger gave me his 75 cents in change, which was just exactly what I needed. I thanked him and put my sunglasses on so that no one would see the tears filling my eyes.

And then later in the day, I found myself capable of giving kindness to others. Kindness to a friend who's got so much on her plate and needs to be reminded of kindness toward herself. Kindness toward my husband, who declared that I should try to do almost nothing that involved leaning over or lifting today (laundry, picking up toys, vacuuming) and has done it all himself instead -- to try to help my belly feel better (and now it does). Kindness toward my son so that I got over my frustration at his latest fuss-a-thon; I sat with him pulled close to me and breathed long and loud until we were both calmer, and then we played trucks and went to the park.

When you're kind to yourself, kindness to others flows.

Moments, Week 1

A life is lived moment by moment.

This week I'm introducing a new weekly series called Moments. It's a place for me to capture all the little moments that make up a week - quirky, joyful, heart-rending, funny, enlightening, frustrating, touching... You have a lot of those when you're raising children, and but they don't necessarily make their way into a blog post. Welcome to my first Moments post, an opportunity for weekly reflection when life spins fast.

Elan fell down the stairs and sported a Harry-Pottery-style mark on his forehead for a few days.

In the car: "Next year I'm going to be four. And I'm going to turn into a girl. Next year, I won't be a boy." (We are guessing this is because most of the four-year-olds at his nursery school happen to be girls.)

We got him to try corn, which probably wouldn't feel like a victory in the vegetable department to some parents, but did for us.

On finding his wallet, a coin purse: "Okay, we've got money. That means we can borrow something from a store."

Have you ever tried to sing a bedtime song over a different song playing on the CD player? I did, and the comment I got, with an affectionate hand in my hair was: "Mama, you're funny."

An afternoon that felt like summer: I took Elan to Lake Anza, up in the hills outside Berkeley, where we met up with friends. My friend and I sat with the sun on our backs and our pregnant bellies (we are due the same week, as is another good friend!), while Elan and his buddy played for two hours in the shallow sloping water. They were ecstatic. We got soft-serve ice cream cones and the boys would take a few licks, then run back into the water, then run out again for another few licks... Elan slept well that night.

My husband bought me flowers to mark the one-year anniversary of my miscarriage.

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If you'd like to join me in this blog challenge by starting your own weekly Moments series, please do! It's not just for parents. (If you do take this blog challenge, please link back here.) Thanks for reading & may your weekend be filled with memorable moments.

one year

This past week has marked the one-year anniversary of my miscarriage. The anniversary is split between two dates: June 11, when we found out via ultrasound that the pregnancy hadn't progressed, and June 17, when I had the D&C, a surgical procedure that officially ended the pregnancy. In between, I was caught in a never-never land of pregnant/not-pregnant.

I think about myself one year ago, June 17, 2009. I remember how Mikhail and I employed a loopy kind of black humor in the waiting room of the UCSF surgical center to get through the half-hour it took to process our paperwork. How grateful I was for the pill they gave me, but how I wished it were stronger, to make me less aware. How kind the nurses and doctor were.

I think about the woman I was one year ago with such compassion. She's just been through something so awful - an entire first trimester of morning sickness, hopes and dreams, only to have it all come crashing down unexpectedly. And yet, she thinks this is the end of something. She has no idea of all that is to come - the blood clot that will make her tender and concerned, the partial molar pregnancy diagnosis that will dash her hopes for a quick other pregnancy, the six months of worrying and waiting for blood test results, through it all the sense that she should still be pregnant. That she's somehow traveled onto the wrong road, and if she can just find her way back onto that other road, she'll end up where she wanted to be. She has only an inkling of the strength of her grief, how it will surprise her with its force, how it will return over and over again, the waves washing over her and leaving her wrung-out afterwards, the calm times in between them slowly lengthening out.

June 17, 2010. Today is a beautiful day. Sunny, calm, peaceful. I am pregnant with a baby who dances in my belly, kicks growing stronger by the day. This is where I hoped I would be, come one year. I am happy. And sad. I think about all I have survived in the last year, and I celebrate my own strength. I am proud. And sad. I remember the baby-who-would-have-been, a spirit who is still real to me, though not to the rest of the world. I am peaceful. And sad. Yet another wave washes over me, then retreats.

I light a candle and leave it burning in the fireplace all day and night. As I pass by, I see its flicker, and I am glad it is there.

a goal

Yesterday I spent a lot of time thinking and writing about what kinds of habits or practices I could put in place that will support my vision of myself as a writer. Immediately I thought of Morning Pages, a classic tool for artists of all stripes from Julia Cameron of The Artist's Way. I last did Morning Pages regularly many years ago, when I was living in San Francisco and trying to decide if I wanted to go to a M.F.A. program for creative writing. As soon as I thought of the idea, I rejected it as not possible. My mornings are not my own, I thought. They're run by the 3-year-old dictator in the house.

But then I thought some more: what if I could spend a little time every morning establishing my identity as a writer? I already have a lot of morning practices that reinforce my identity as a mother. In fact, I've been feeling just a tad bit resentful lately about my son's early morning tendencies to wake up too early and then fuss a lot, as if someone forced him to get up by 6:30 every day when he really just wanted to sleep in till 8. I can't convince him to be in a better mood; all I can really do is control my response to his mood. So I decided - what the heck!? I'm going to give it a try.

Julia Cameron has a specific method for her version of Morning Pages. My version will be a little different. I will write, free-hand and stream of consciousness-style, in my journal, for 10 minutes straight, 5 days a week for the next 3 weeks (until the end of the e-course I'm taking). The idea is to not think about what you're writing - just do it. I think of it as brain-drain writing: a place for daily cares, to-dos, lists, fears, thoughts, memories - anything that comes up in those ten minutes gets drained onto the page.

Ten minutes of showing up at the page, of reminding myself that I am a writer, an individual with her own creative life, as well as a mother. Today was my first day. I did my morning pages in the car after dropping Elan off at preschool. I wrote 3 pages. My hand got tired. It felt good.