Bridging The Last Two Years...
Well, this is a bit awkward.
You know how in TV shows, when there’s a change in the cast, or a lot of time has past between episodes and people are inexplicably older, or a main character is suddenly missing - and the writers don’t make an attempt to work it into the story? It’s weird, right? Something happened, but we’re not talking about it - there was a change, but it’s as if that reality has disappeared into midair.
This is me trying not to do that.
So, it’s been a couple years. A solid two years since I last posted. A lot has happened. My two year old turned three, and then my three year old turned four. FOUR. He’s nearly driving, and the other day I caught him exploring the Pythagorean theorem with Tinker Toys. Like both of his parents, he’s a verbal processor, and thus a constant stream of consciousness is flowing from his tongue. He finds sitting still intolerable, and his state of homeostasis is to have all limbs in motion simultaneously. If he does happen to be sitting still, he is either trying to figure out how some sort of gadget works or has a book open, narrating each page. He has recently discovered non-fiction texts, and recently gave me an intense side-eye when I read a list of our solar system’s planets, noting at the eighth one, “That’s a potty word, Mommy.”
As he sheds the pudgy clumsiness of toddlerhood and plants his feet firmly in the world of preschool years, I feel immense joy as I watch him connect the dots of his environment and make sense of the world around him. As he gets older, I tell my husband, “THIS is my favorite age.” I do feel some misty-eyed nostalgia when I put a clothing size away, and there are definitely times when I want to grab Time by the lapels and yell “EASE UP ON THE GAS A LITTLE, WOULDJA?” I also exhale a sigh of relief as his independence increases, and I can spend less time on basic grooming and more time on Legos, as well as my own personal hygiene. Time is both a savior and a thief.
I wish I could say I have a good reason for my absence, but the reality is that I just got really, really good at ignoring the inner nudges to write, which led to a mild anxiety intertwined with some writer’s block - the perfect recipe for avoidance. Words swirled abstractly in my head, but they darted around like scared cats, and I struggled to tame them into coherent sentences. It probably didn’t help that I’ve also had a cat-like kid constantly underfoot. I like to call him Sir Darts-A-Lot, which also provides some fun additional wordplay options.
I suppose there are some valid reasons to be distracted as well. A lot has happened. I changed jobs. We bought a house, sold a house, and spent over a year remodeling (and counting). We balanced two full-time jobs and parenting, living 2,000 miles from our closest family. We visited specialists as our son received two seemingly-unrelated-and-likely-benign-but-still-unnverving-at-first diagnoses that involved, oddly, his left arm and right pupil. (That’ll likely be its own blog post.) We camped, we skied, we hiked, we biked, and let’s be honest, we also utterly wasted plenty of time starving neurons in front of screens.
The pages to come are essentially my best efforts to corral the literary felines running through my brain, with the hope that my own processing can speak to others as well. Writing helps me digest and cope with life in a really profound way. There is something inexplicably powerful about pulling complex feelings out and laying them out in the light; rolling them around in my fingers like a seashell, examining their shape and texture with curiosity and compassion. Providing a little space from my emotions somehow allows me to soften their power yet also experience them more deeply. Instead of waves crashing down on me while I am curled up on the sand, I’m on top surfing them; still riding each crest and trough, but able to regain some control over how I experience each swell.
There have been a fair amount of waves to surf in the past few years - from the momentous to the mundane - and many will be laid out in the pages to come. Coparenting, healing from trauma, growing as parent, medical issues, mom friendships, tantrums (mine and my son’s), anxiety, adventuring, secondary infertility… those and many more will likely have a place in the pages to come.
There’s a lot I don’t understand as a mom, but one thing I know in my bones is that we were not meant to mother in isolation but to journey alongside one another. While written words certainly can’t replace honest conversations over coffee, there is also something deeply healing about reading your own feelings and experience named by another. As I reflect on my own experience, my prayer is that others will feel seen and understood as I attempt to give voice to the abstract. Thanks for joining me as we Motherbear together.