Heart Radical

Popo and Cedar

2012-01-29T11:30:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve, huoguo (hot pot) tradition

Also celebrating Popo's birthday

My grandmother has been visiting the last couple months, staying with my parents in Seattle. My mom flew down to L.A. to fly her up here, and in a little over a week, my parents will fly her back down.

My grandmother is 92, too old to fly alone. She still looks remarkable for her age, but each time I see her I can tell that she is shrinking. It is true: old people shrink. Young people grow. Her hearing is going too, which makes it hard to talk with her, especially when in Chinese, a language I am still hesitant to use. You cannot be hesitant in a language in which you need to yell to be heard. Often, I just opt for smiles and silence. There is not much to say anyway.

I love watching Popo interact with Cedar. She met him first when he was five months old, then I sent her photos of him every few months until she met him again when he was 18 months. But it hasn't been until these last couple months that she’s really gotten to know him. I bring Cedar over there two afternoons a week for my parents to watch him while I go write or run errands, and recently I'll come by a couple more times too, where I stay and hang out as well.

Playing deejay and dancing are two of Cedar’s favorite activities at my parents, especially since my parents indulge his every request—changing the c.d. or record again and again and again while he shakes his head, “No, no, no,” until they finally alight on one he wants to listen to. Amongst his favorites are fifties classics like ‘The Twist’ and ‘Rock around the Clock’; or songs for kids like Nat King Cole’s ‘Frosty the Snowman’, me and my sister’s old Puff the Magic Dragon record, or the Sesame Street rendition of ‘Sing a Song’ (which my dad found amongst other old kid’s classics at a record store).

Cedar’s other favorite is “Beat It.” “Bi bi!!!” he’ll yell when it comes on, and when the song transitions to ‘Billy Jean’, he’ll shake his head, “No. No. No,” until my dad switches it back to ‘Beat It’. Then, when he puts on a new record, Cedar demands to be picked up so he can “See, see!” (Did I mention that this boy gets whatever he wants over there?)

Recently we were all dancing to “Beat It” in the basement in the midst of Seattle’s snow storm. My parents were practicing their hustle/swing steps, I was indulging Cedar in his favorite form of dancing (being held and swung around), and my grandmother was marching in place. It was one of those fleeting moments that, even as it’s happening, you realize is precious.

Popo loves Cedar. She smiles, bobs her head, and pats her lap rhythmically when he’s around, calling him over. He runs up to her, and together they do a sort of chicken dance—bobbing their heads in and out towards each other (Cedar copying Popo’s movements). She pulls his bulky 30 pounds up into her lap, even though she is less than 90 pounds herself. She makes noises, “Bababa, bababa…” and also talks to him in Chinese. He copies her intonations-- in fact, my mom shakes her head at the grating way she taught him to call my name, loudly and with an emphasis on the second syllable, “Mamaaa!!!” He calls her Taipo (great grandmother) and she calls him “Cedee”, both pronouncing the other’s name imperfectly.

But really, at two and 92, who even needs language? He is the perfect companion for her, a burst of delight and energy, a being she can relate to because he is a (not quite) two-year-old, and two-year-olds are more or less the same in any language. They are curious, silly, stubborn, delightful. Popo can spoon feed Cedar avocados, let him turn on and off the lamp by her bed, let him play with the remote to the T.V. to his heart’s content. I will swallow my usual annoyance when told how to parent my child, and Popo can admonish me all she wants to put on his hat before we go out, to make sure the gate to the stairs is closed, and to not let him play with a rubber band, because she is his great-grandmother, because she has raised five children, and because no matter how much advice has changed in the parenting department over the years and across cultures, most of her words are still valuable and sound.

When it’s time for us to go, I can always tell that Popo is disappointed.

“Stay for dinner at least,” she’ll say.

“We can’t Popo. Cedar needs to go to sleep in half an hour. And he can’t eat most of the food we eat anyway.”

“When will you come back? Tomorrow?”

“Not till Wednesday. The day after tomorrow.”

She nods, looking slightly disappointed, but appeased that at least it won’t be longer.

I need to make sure that Cedar and I spend as much time as possible over there in the coming week, because before long Popo will be flying back to L.A., and I do not know when I will see her next. It is not easy for me to travel with Cedar, especially without my husband who is tied to a busy work schedule, and the idea of trying to keep Cedar occupied while at Popo’s condo for days on end (without resorting to watching copious amounts of T.V.) sounds slightly… awful. So I hope that my parents will invite her to come back to Seattle again soon, perhaps this summer, and that she will still be healthy enough to travel.

Each time I see Popo now, I cannot help but wonder if it might be the last time. Overall, she’s in great health for someone who is 92, but still, her blood pressure runs high and even a cold will send her into a tizzy of fear and stress (not to mention real, escalating symptoms). But more than this, I can sense that Popo is wondering the same thing each time she hugs me goodbye now, or comments on how old she is, or forces me to take a little extra money: she is thinking, this might be the last time.

Every time I see Popo, and especially as she starts to anticipate her departure, she will start to reflect on how she helped to raise my sister and I when we were young. “I’ve held you since you were a baby,” she’ll remind me again, and nowadays she’ll shake her head and add, “I used to care for you when you were Cedar’s age, and now you have a child of your own.”

I can only imagine what this must feel like. She is 92. Cedar is not quite two. Ninety years separate the span of their experiences here on this earth. One of them can reflect on how fast it all goes; the other does not yet know that there is anything to be lived outside of this moment. One is losing her memory and hearing; the other is learning new words every day.

When he is older, Cedar will probably not remember these days of playing with his great-grandmother. But I will. And I will tell him how much she loved him, how much delight he brought her in such a short span of time, and how much joy it gave me to be able to share him with her, to watch them laugh and play together, these two beings connected to me through blood and fate, these two beings whom I was given no choice but to love.

The Awesome-Crazy-Hard Plunge into Becoming a New Mother

2012-01-21T14:13:00.000-08:00

I’m getting excited to facilitate my first PEPS meeting next week. To welcome this group of mothers and babies into my home, to drink in their tender new beginnings.

As a new mom, PEPS was extremely helpful to me. Although I had other moms and drop-in parenting groups I gathered with on occasion, PEPS was one thing I could count on each week, my one structured commitment in what was otherwise a blur of feedings and naps. Coming together with a group of women who knew me through my emerging identity as a mother and who understood on some silent level what I was going through, helped me to better process this intensely transformative time. It helped me give voice to concerns I had and to articulate what was going on for me and my baby.

The format was simple. Each week we met for two hours in one of our homes. We all lived in the same part of town and we all had babies within a few months of age of each other (PEPS creates groups based on your zip code and due date). A volunteer (also a mother and PEPS alum) facilitated. Each week we would begin by sharing our high and low points of the week, and then go on to discuss some pre-determined topic, like sleep, feeding, or shifting identities. Babies would cry, feed, and sleep during meetings, and moms learned to grow more comfortable tending to a fussy baby in a space outside their own homes. Resources were shared and sympathy given, yet PEPS is not a therapy group nor a parenting class. Mostly, it’s a place to form community and feel more supported as a new mom. It can help normalize what otherwise can be an incredibly overwhelming and isolating experience.

Some PEPS groups continue to meet for years after their formal group has ended. Others, like mine, gradually disband, because women go back to work, schedules conflict, and everyone become more busy. Regardless of the group’s future, however, I believe that the value of belonging to a group like this for even just three months can be enormous.

Motherhood has been such a profound, transforming experience for me, and I’ve spent so much time over the last three years reading, writing, and learning about so many facets of the experience, that I like the idea of sharing some of the resources that I’ve garnered. But more than this, I like the idea of helping other moms to process and talk about the joys and challenges they are going through. My role as a facilitator is not to be a ‘teacher’ (especially since I can’t remember a fraction of what I once knew about each particular stage of development), but rather to be a conduit to help the group form their own strong connections.

PEPS philosophy, as well as my own, advocates that there is no one ‘right’ way to parent. In a culture which inundates pregnant women and new mothers with well-meaning but often unwelcome not to mention judgment-ridden advice, sometimes what we most need is just for somebody to listen. And it is often through feeling heard by another that we can actually begin to hear for ourselves the precise nature of what is actually going on inside. Have you ever had someone say to you something like, “That sounds hard,” after you’ve relayed a story, and then, for the first time, you feel tears brimming in your eyes, tears that key you in on just how hard it actually has been? That’s what I’m talking about.

The other day I went through my roster and called each woman to welcome her to the group and see if they had any questions. In the background, I could hear babies crying, breast pumps wheezing, and the muffled voices of the women themselves that suggested they might be holding a sleeping baby or simply existing in that slightly altered time-space of being holed up with an infant for days, weeks on end.

I try to remember those first days and what they were like for me, still coming off of the drugs from the cesarean, lying down or sitting in the recliner, my breasts heavy with milk, my hair uncombed, the heat turned up high. Visitors would come now and then bearing food that was greatly appreciated, taking their turns holding our newborn, but mostly we kept to ourselves, venturing outside for a walk to the neighborhood pond only after the first three weeks were spent solely indoors, save for a few steps out into the yard.

I also remember how nervous I was when I had to drive the baby alone for the first time, and what a relief it was to arrive. When you are caring for a newborn, there are a million little hurdles like this to get over—first night, first bath, first day caring for him alone, first time away from his side. Actually, I think this statement could probably be said for caring for any aged child: parenthood is a continual succession of ‘firsts’, and although it may not feel as daunting and I may not feel as raw as I did during those first months, parenting continues to grow more challenging and complex in other ways. Although some of the early demands (sore nipples, woken all night, fears of suffocating your baby, seismic identity shifts) might have diminished, there are always new stages and concerns to worry about, and new joys and milestones to celebrate, as well.

Let’s just say it: parenting is really fucking hard. (Only the f word seems to do justice to the gravity of this sentence). If anyone claims otherwise, they are employing a selective memory. It’s tiring, all-consuming, non-stop. It is a constant challenge to carve out enough time alone with your partner; to carve out enough time alone with yourself; to negotiate a sense of equity with regards to how you divide childcare, respites from childcare, and chores; to maintain your friendships, especially with those who do not also have kids. For those who go back to work, it can be hard to be away from your baby for so much of the week. And for those who decide not to go back, it can be hard to leave behind huge chunks of your identity that were tied to the work that you once did out in the world of adult interactions.

Parenting, and motherhood in particular, is challenging on so many levels. But it’s also filled with so many transcendent moments that are equally piercing when they come over you. Beyond the exhaustion and tedium that parenting can bring on, each day we are also privileged to witness a new being coming alive, discovering the world for the first time. Discovering its hands, toes, tongue, voice. Discovering lights, sounds, textures, tastes. And this discovery keeps going, never ends. It is amazing to witness and realize all the stages of discovery that go into becoming a person, all the skills and ordinary miracles around us all the time that we adults take for granted in our daily lives. Holding and witnessing a newborn, a being so new, so tied still to some other world, we are reminded of the pure awesomeness of life, of how each and every one of us was born and came into this world.

Together, new mothers and babies are an inseparable unit, existing in this vulnerable, other worldly state. New mothers have just gone through the exhausting and traumatic feat of giving birth, only to then plunge into a blur of days and nights spent caring for their newborn. Their hormones are careening, their bodies healing, their emotions reeling, their former world and life turned inside out, and they don’t get time to rest to recover-- they just have to dive in.

Mother and baby both recognize each other on some level—recognize each other’s presence, experienced now from a different perspective—yet they are understandably also in a state of inexpressible awe about where and who they now are. This is a magical time; this is a crazy time. This is a fragile time, a painful time. This period of brand new motherhood can be so many things; everyone experiences it slightly differently, but no one can deny how intense it is-- and how precious it is—because it is also so fleeting. One stage, one age, one crisis, one delight, one day merges into the next. And although you may still feel like you are in survival mode for many months or even years, where it feels like enough just to manage to eat, to sleep, and shower (if that), somewhere along the way it can be so important and illuminating to carve out the time to step back from “total immersion parenting” and give voice to your experiences. Whether this voice comes forth through talking to a friend, writing in a journal, or joining a support group, it can be so valuable to find the words to express what you are going through, what we all go through albeit in different ways, as mothers. For it is through this process of reckoning-- of mourning our losses, proclaiming our discoveries, and speaking our truths (and yes, even garbled, sleep-deprived, grasping for truths)-- that we can begin to step more gracefully into the demands of motherhood. In naming and honoring all that we have gone through and are going through, we can learn to see our experiences through a clearer lens, with more perspective, and hopefully with more acceptance, self-compassion, and trust.

Clearing Space and Cutting Hair: Letting Go of Stuff in the New Year

2011-12-29T13:42:00.000-08:00

I’ve never been fond of having too much stuff—stuff on the walls, on shelves, stored away, in the brain. Traveling and changing residences a lot in my twenties helped to facilitate my love of periodically paring down, because I could not possibly carry that much on my back, transport that much in my car, or find the space to store everything in whatever new space I was about to call home. But when you start living somewhere for a long time, with no plans to move for years or even decades, you have to grab the reins and take charge of this process a bit more, force it to happen, or readily give in if you feel a sudden urge to create change.

Unlike some, I enjoy the process of periodically going through my papers, my clothes, my boxes full of ‘special things’—and now my son’s clothes, books, and toys too-- and figuring out what no longer needs to be kept. Ideally, this kind of organizing can be done while alone, playing music, and at a leisurely pace, with plenty of time to allow the mind to pause and linger over old memories as you make choices about what you can let go of. Otherwise, if you don’t have the right time or space to do this, you might be tempted to just re-stuff jumbled piles into new boxes, afraid that you will make a hasty decision that you will regret.

In any case, I’ve been on a de-cluttering kick this holiday season. I took one of my 2.5 hour breaks one day and attacked my overflowing pile of papers and files on my bookshelf. I three-hole punched and stuck in a folder many pages of writing from the last couple years, and I threw away old drafts of grant applications, outdated insurance forms, and old writing magazines.

I also decided to finally throw away a folder full of rejection slips that I’ve collected for almost fifteen years. You might wonder why I hung onto these slips at all, and I assure you it’s not because I enjoy reinforcing my failures (at least not on a conscious level). No, I’ve kept these slips precisely because I’ve been so convinced of the opposite—that someday I would have such success that I would be able to look back on this folder, perhaps even show it to some of my students pining for instant publication and fame, and say, this is what it takes. You can’t be hurt by rejection, you’ve got to keep writing and learning and getting better. You’ve got to trust deeply in your intrinsic love of the process, in your intrinsic knowledge that this is what you want and need to do with your life—amongst other things, of course. Even writers can’t be writers all the time.

But you know what? That folder was taking up space that I could otherwise give to something else. I’ve barely submitted a piece in the last few years due to a lack of time, but also because I’ve transported my “publishing energy” to this blog. And I’ve said this before-- although my audience from this blog may be relatively small, I still am interacting way more with people who are reading my words than I was before. I have not given up on traditional publishing modes, but I’ve taken a sabbatical from pining for such goals because, a.) Like I said, I don’t have the time right now, and b.) refreshingly, the blog format allows me to let go of my perfectionist tendencies, and instead to just keep writing, as much as I can, and put stuff out there even before my ideas may be fully formed or paragraphs fully edited. Is it my best, most polished or lyrical writing? No. But is this process just as satisfying, albeit different, as it was to labor over essays for months, even years, putting them through rounds of feedback and revision? Yes.

There’s just as much of an ego-tripping danger in holding on to something to prove your worth as there is to holding on to something to prove your lack of worth. It’s really just the inverse of the same impulse. In my stubborn clinging to my own outdated notions of what it means “make it” as a writer, I devalue other crucial layers of my creative self that are evolving every day. I persist in clinging to notions of "making it" (book contract, career in academia, recognized in literary circles) that I don’t even fully strive for anymore, for the longer certain beliefs have been established within me, the longer they take to dispel. On many levels, I still value more what the outward, linear trajectory of my life story “says about me” versus the inward, cyclical trajectory that I have come to know as the true reflection of the way I learn, grow, and live.

It’s important to say goodbye to things—to people, to homes, to outdated lifestyles, goals, and beliefs—on symbolic outward levels, on levels that we can recognize, in order to help move the stubborn clinging old stuff inside that persists, despite our best intentions. This, to me, is what this season of solstice and darkness and hibernation and reckoning has come to symbolize: saying goodbye and letting go. Shedding old skins, pledging to new ways, marking time with ritual so that our deepest desires and wisdom can sink into our conscious psyche and manifest in our actions that much more.

Although the actual day of winter solstice passed by in our home without even a lit candle or nod of ritual (what can I say? we are tired; the days blend), this season of letting go and inviting change has not escaped me. Not only have I been purging files, but I’ve also been rearranging items on shelves, re-hanging pictures on walls, moving furniture and plants, and getting rid of bags full of old blankets and clothes. My motivation may be practical and aesthetic (our tiny home’s clutter has reached an all-time high, and we are debating how to either create a little zone for Cedar or, more drastically, move our bed into the living room so we can give him the bedroom), but my underlying impulse to clear space and get rid of things has a more primordial drive. As I continue to move furniture and plants, I cannot help but also dust and clean long-neglected corners of the home, corners which I might not see or notice in my every day, but which are there, collecting physical and psychological weight all the same.

I love how small acts like rearranging pictures on the walls and repositioning things on shelves can make a space feel so different. It’s so easy to get stuck in thinking that this one way of arranging things is the best or only way, when in truth there are a multitude of ways in which we can inhabit our space. I have this fantasy of someday taking our family to live abroad for a year and packing up all our stuff in storage—but ironically, a big part of this fantasy involves the process of then coming home again; of how our home will feel new to us, and by extension how we will be freed to recreate our space, and our lives, in a vital way.

The other unexpected change that my husband and I have embarked on this holiday has come in the form of hair. My husband took the biggest leap and cut off his long locks that he has grown out since high school. He’s been considering doing this for some time, but he’s also known that once he does, he may not have long hair again for a long time—or ever. (Who wants to go through the awkward growing out phases at this age?) It helped that his sister, Sarah, is a hair stylist who brought her shears to our Christmas gathering and gave cuts and highlights to just about everyone in the room.

As for me, I got my bangs trimmed and a shorter cut. Then when Sarah asked if I wanted some color, I confessed to my long-harbored desire to do something even more playful. I just am so low-maintenance and frugal that I can’t really justify spending the money nor time involved in re-coloring roots and what not, but now that she was offering, why not, what did I have to lose?

So here I am, feeling trendier than I have in years with my amber-streaked hair that has loads more “dimension” that I never knew was lacking. Change is fun, and even if it’s “just” on the surface, the surface too is a valid part of the equation that helps us stir up our crusty interiors. It’s probably no coincidence that my new haircut is coinciding with a period in my life in which I am gearing up to lead some workshops and be more “out in the world” than I have been since before I got pregnant. And the fact that my husband and I are working to help clear up our living space is no doubt conspiring to make room for new, more conscious ways of being alive together in our home.

Our homes may be the place where we chill out and relax, but they are also the places from which our habits our born. If we live (and work, for some of us) in a space that has not been “updated” in a long time, it follows that it might be that much harder to break into new modes of thinking and seeing. And similarly, if we slouch within messy clothes or stagnant haircuts for too long, this too can affect the way in which we carry ourselves in the world.

So here’s to clearing space, cutting hair, and letting go. Here’s to asking ourselves not just what we want to do or acquire in the New Year, but also what we want to say goodbye to. After all, if we want to invite something new into our lives, first we need to make the room for it.

Toy Envy, Consumerism, and What We Really Need

2011-12-19T13:33:00.000-08:00

Lately, an article from Wired magazine about the 5 best toys of all time has been circling the net again. It’s a good article, but if you don’t want to read it, I’ll tell you what the list consists of: sticks, boxes, string, cardboard tubes, and dirt.

Of course, I'm all for reducing consumerism and fostering imaginative play, but it occurs to me that only someone who already has plenty of money and toys for their kids can make these kinds of assertions. The popularity of this article speaks to the culture of materialism-overload that it comes from. But for anyone who doesn’t have the means to buy special treats for their kids, to suggest that they already have the ideal toys for their at their disposal, strikes me as a bit… privileged.

Kids like variety, they like being exposed to new things, and toddlers in particular have notoriously short attention spans. There are lots of activities that don’t require money that can help keep them entertained, but when it comes down to it, having the money to buy a diverse range of experiences for your kids—whether in the form of toys or enriching activities—is pretty damn helpful.

Like many parents these days, when I was planning for my life with my child I imagined that I would limit the number of bright, plastic noise-making toys that entered our home, and instead collect (expensive) wooden toys that would last much longer (and be less of an eyesore). I would fill baskets with natural objects like shells, pinecones, and stones, in lieu of plastic doo-dads, and we would start painting and making arts and crafts as soon as developmentally possible.

Well, first of all, I was not accounting for a generous aunt who spent months scouring Goodwill to collect for us a big box of plastic noise-making toys-- a Leapfrog “piano”, a bilingual “guitar”, a talking cookie jar shape sorter, a singing “Alphabet Pal”caterpillar, a singing plastic book, a talking dog, and then some. Next, add in the grandparents and others who’ve contributed over time: a musical, flashing ring stacker, a musical dump truck, a singing bear, a singing Easter bunny, a musical remote control airplane, a musical activity center, a singing train, and before you know it, we are one of those families whose house is chock full of plastic, noise-making toys.

The truth is, Cedar loves these toys, and most babies and toddlers do. It's the parents they drive crazy. Some are not that bad—in particular the ones that play music without words. The ones that drive me mad are the ones that sing, talk or giggle in syrupy sweet, incredibly annoying "kid-like" voice. Why do manufacturers think that kids will only respond to such voices? You can sound friendly and sweet without being nauseating.

In any case, since the relatives have bought Cedar plenty of toys, I have not felt the need to buy much-- until recently that is. We've reached a point where Cedar is not very excited about any of his toys (unless of course another kid comes over and starts playing with them). And while I am somewhat proud of the fact that I've only ever bought Cedar a handful of toys (mostly from Value Village) and I think this makes it that much more special for him to experience new toys when at preschool or friends’ homes, I also have recognized that I get toy envy when I go other parents’ homes.

Mostly, I get wooden toy envy. Wooden toys are more expensive and harder to find used, so we don’t have many. I covet those cute little Plan Toy xylophones and shape sorters, those Melissa and Doug puzzles and blocks, those expensive push toys and wooden kitchen sets complete with wooden fruits and vegetables that can be cut apart with a play wooden knife. I also covet those sturdy little easels, those velvety plush beanbag chairs, those tunnels and tents for toddlers to crawl through. And the more I’m exposed to, the more I start wanting more stuff for Cedar.

One built-in limitation is that our home is small (850 square feet), so there isn't room for us to collect too much, without it feeling like utter chaos. There isn't much storage space to store stuff away, so we have to live with it all in sight.

Our other built-in limitation is that we simply cannot afford to buy a lot. Instead, I borrow a lot of board books from the library, trade toys now and then with my neighbor, find random things in the house for Cedar to play with (radios, flashlights, dominos), and scan Value Village now and then for a treat (more of a way to help pass a long day, than anything).

Enter the Christmas season. I wasn't planning to get Cedar much; I figured he'd get plenty from the grandparents and this would be enough of a toy windfall for one month. But somehow, I've gotten suckered into the materialism of the season, and found myself buying more than ever. A few books here, a used few puzzles there, a couple things from Fred Meyer (yes, plastic), a set of wooden stringing beads (relatively expensive), and some stickers and dot paint tubes from the art store. Once I caved and started to spend, suddenly it was as I'd given myself permission to access a long-harbored, unconscious list of coveted things. This toy lust was compounded by a few Amazon searches prompted by my dad who requested a Christmas wish list, not to mention my joining a new mom’s list serve with daily deals and offers.

I’ve felt a tad guilty about my recent splurge, but I've countered this with an entitled sense of “I/we deserver this” to at long last be the one to pick out a few special toys for my son. I've spent about $100, and depending on who you are that may seem like nothing or like a whole lot. For me, it's a lot to spend in a few weeks, with the purpose of giving it to a child all at once, so I am spreading it out. A few of the presents have already come out of hiding in fact-- we've been having some looong afternoons, and I've needed it. Why wait till Christmas, after all, the day when he'll have way more than enough to keep him stimulated? It’s not like he knows what Christmas is yet.

For now though, I'm done. I highly doubt I will buy him another toy for many months. I'd rather put money towards going to a music class together, or to check out more drop-in play spaces. We need to get out of the house every day, preferably for several hours, and not just to the grocery store; but with our rainy weather in the NW, we can't just rely on playing outside at parks—or sticks, boxes, and mud.

It's important to point out how we don't need lots of expensive toys for our children, and how they can be happy with much less. But the truth is, it's hard to get around needing money to keep a child entertained. After all, we all need a break from parenting, especially stay-at-home parents; none of us can be entirely present, patient and engaged if we are on 24-7. So, there are a number of ways we get these breaks. If we have plenty of money, we can pay for babysitters and daycares to get our “recharge/adult time”. We can also pay to bring our kids to enriching classes, which we may or may not participate in ourselves. Or, if these are not viable options, we can buy more toys or, evil of evils, turn on the T.V. (a subject of its own).

Sure, the most creative and resourceful amongst us will create budget-friendly craft projects for our little ones, and although I don’t consider myself outside the realm of those who might do such things, I do have my limits. A 20-month old's attention span is not long. When I'm tired, I don't really feel like getting out messy paints for what might be a five minute project. I can only invent so many new games or find that many new household objects that might be interesting to my son for two minutes of a day. And so, I’ve found myself resorting to letting him watch an Elmo video or Sesame Street clips on youtube more and more. Or-- I find myself realizing the value in having a healthy supply of toys. Enough toys so that you actually have enough to put a bunch away for a while, with the idea that they’ll seem “new” again when you cycle them back out in rotation.

There is, I believe, only one true antidote to feeling like you need to spend lots of money on your child-- and that is being surrounded and supported by a strong community. That means: relatives who will babysit for free, trustworthy neighbors with similar-aged kids who will swap childcare, and friends who will meet up often for playdates to make full-time parenting a bit less mundane.
Finding and sustaining this community, however, is harder than it may seem. As a relatively new stay-at-home mom, I’ve taken my child to plenty of play gyms, storytimes, and music classes, participated in PEPS (a great support group for moms in Seattle), enrolled my son in a toddler co-op preschool one morning a week, and reached out to lots of old friends and acquaintances who have kids of similar ages, but despite all this I still find it hard to create the kind of community I seek.

Everyone is busy—working long hours, caring for multiples, keeping up with complicated schedules. Everyone is tired. And it takes effort to foster a connection that goes beyond a familiar face you exchange a few pleasantries with at playgroups. Even if most of us parents end up passing long afternoons at home with our kids during which we wish we had a more creative option, for some reason getting a playdate on the calendar- and following through- can still be a hard feat to accomplish-- especially if your kids have different nap schedules or once we’ve entered the season of perpetual colds. Although I feel fortunate to know a good number of moms in Seattle right now, sadly, much of this community remains online and via good intentions. There have been many with whom I’ve wanted to nurture a friendship, but after too many failed attempts to get together, I’ve let go of my former hopes.

Community is the true secret to enjoying parenthood and childhood—not toys, whether of the natural or manufactured variety. But it takes a lot more than having kids of a similar age to foster a sustaining connection. Sometimes the viability of a connection does come down to scheduling, proximity and convenience; sometimes, for example, driving all the way across town for a playdate can seem like more effort than it’s worth. But ultimately, creating community has to be something that is mutually sought out and desired. All too often, it ends up being easier to go into default mode—which for our culture means staying isolated within our own nuclear families, sticking to what we already know, and buying stuff to fill in the voids.

Goodbye Old Tree

2011-12-06T16:01:00.000-08:00


Last week, five men showed up on our property at 8 a.m. and proceeded to cut down a tree. Not just any tree, but a 100+ foot, seventy-year-old big leaf maple. A tree that towered over me as a child, and a tree that sheltered the front of our house as an adult. A tree that bursts into green in the spring, and glows a vibrant yellow in the fall. A tree that sheds all of its leaves in November, leaves that we are still often raking into the new year. A tree that has grown humongous roots and been circled for decades by flowers: tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, bluebells, and forget-me-nots. A fairy ring, Els used to call it, Els who planted most of those flowers during the forty years that she lived here. I have only lived here for four. But as a young child, I lived next door for ten. When I was young, Frank used to climb up in the tree himself to take out the dead limbs. I remember my parents talking about it, and Els being nervous. He took out two of the main limbs himself when they were dying, which left two massive remaining ones-- still plenty of tree. In recent years, I had noticed that the leaves on one side of the tree looked smaller- a sign of decay. There was also a smaller dead limb in the middle—“smaller”, yet still large enough that it would likely be fatal if it fell on your head. Maple is hard wood. This year, we finally decided that we needed to get serious and do something about the tree. Our neighbors had politely enquired about its safety shortly after one of our big cedars came down one day into their backyard, missing their house by a few feet. Root rot. We hadn’t a clue. We got several bids and no one could tell us anything conclusive without expensive testing, but everyone agreed that the maple was in its “twilight years”, and showing signs of decay. Some suggested erecting a cable that would bind together the two main limbs and prevent “catastrophic failure”, but another said that this would not guarantee that the tree would not fall. Either onto our house, onto the neighbor’s house, into the street and power lines, or- worst case scenario-- onto a person. Even if a cable could buy us a few more years or at most another decade of enjoying the tree, it was still on its way out. So we decided to shell out the big bucks and have it removed as recommended. I thought the tree guys would be here all day; that’s what I’d been told, and even that had seemed fast to me. But when they got to work by 8:15, I could tell it would go even faster. Our family of three stood by the window and watched as the arborist spun around on a rope, wielding the saw. Crash! Down came the first branches. Down, down, down. Before we knew it, he was already working on the main two trunks, sectioning off chunks that fell with loud booms. Meanwhile, four guys with orange hard hats scampered below, wielding their own chainsaws, pulling the smaller branches up the steps to be chipped, and leaving us a pile of rounds for firewood. Cedar was mesmerized. We ate our oatmeal on the daybed, staring out the window. Down, down, down, came the tree. By 10:00, the whine of the chainsaws was starting to get to me so I decided to take Cedar out to get some groceries. Surely they would still be here when we got back. But when we drove home at just past eleven, the yard was silent. You could still smell the gas from the saws in the air and the ground was littered with a confetti of wood shavings. Otherwise, what was left was a giant stump, five feet in diameter, and a huge pile of wood for my husband to chop. It felt… surreal. Less than three hours and the old tree was gone. Cedar and I stepped up onto the trunk, which now was the perfect platform to give some future speech or poetry reading from, or play king of the mountain. The sky above was open, which is nice since our property is otherwise surrounded by tall trees and shielded from sunlight. But I also felt a stirring of sadness. Something that grew steadily and slowly for decades was erased within minutes. Responsible as our choice to cut down the tree was, the speed at which it was removed still felt like an incursion. Now, when you sit at the window seat, the ideal spot to read and stare out the window all day, you can be seen from the street. Part of the beauty of that perch was that you used to be totally hidden from view, looking out on a mossy green oasis of trees. And we could pretty much walk around naked in our house and not worry. Granted, we still mostly can. But in the grand scope of how little has changed on this property over the course of decades, saying goodbye to that maple is no small thing. Thankfully, we have one more big towering maple in back. The two maples were probably planted at the same time, anchoring the house, to the south and the north. Raking their leaves in the fall is always a long, time-consuming process, and yet, I love those trees, and by extension, those leaves. I love looking up into their lush canopies, seeing the squirrels jump from limb to limb, and the baby flickers emerge in the spring. The maple in back is also in its twilight years, but it’s not yet showing any signs of decay. We can enjoy it a while longer. Every fall when I rake the leaves from the maples, I think of Frank and how much time and energy he used to put into caring for this yard. I had come a few times to help Frank rake when he was weak from cancer, and he’d shown me his method of getting every last leaf, creating little piles, lifting them into the wheelbarrow with the help of the rake, and then stacking the compost pile in a tidy square, a few feet high, and only when the leaves were moist so they would properly decay. For the next couple years, I made sure I was as thorough as Frank had been about getting all of the leaves. It felt important. I instructed Matthew about how the compost pile should be shaped. Because that’s the way Frank did it, and he must have had a good reason. Eventually, though, I let this protocol slide. Now, I am no longer as vigilant about getting all the leaves (especially those pesky little ones from the plum and apple trees), and I let Matthew dictate the shape of the compost pile. These days, we don’t have the time to be perfectionists about anything. It feels good enough if we manage to get the bulk of the leaves raked, and just hold the basics of this place together, not let it slide into a state of neglect. These days, I have also not had much time to write about Els, Frank and the cabin. Motherhood has consumed me, and any writing energy I have has gone towards addressing my present. But now, for the first time in months, I feel a melancholy stirring inside, sprouting from that same seed of gratitude that infused me after Frank passed away, and as I moved in and discovered him and Els’s artifacts during the months that followed. This tug of melancholy reminds me of how this legacy is still waiting within me, dormant yet pungent, waiting for me to return to the outline of chapters and words I laid down over two years ago. It reminds me of how the roots of the story of Matthew, Cedar and I, and our present life in this cedar cabin, extend so much deeper and farther than the in-your-face immersion in parenting that we have been swimming and breathing through, day by day. It excites me to think about delving into Els and Frank’s past again, to find passages in Els’s letters about planting seedlings that today tower over us, or passages in Frank’s letters that hint at visions of countries and ports that no longer exist, at least not like they did then. Everything changes. The old generation can barely recognize the new. Trees have their cycles. The one you plant today, you likely will not get to enjoy when it is full-grown and towering. But your children will. Or someone else’s children. Everything has its story. And everything, in the end, will die. Now, the stump looks ugly, bare and obtrusive. But my husband reminded me that this is the worst it will look. Next spring, the fairy ring of blossoms will come up again, and we will get to choose a new tree to plant in their midst.

WRITING MOTHERHOOD SEATTLE WORKSHOPS: Sign-up Today!

2011-11-29T11:37:00.000-08:00

ONE-DAY INTENSIVE: Saturday, February 11th, 9:00 a.m. -2:00 p.m.

EIGHT-WEEK SERIES: Saturday mornings, March 3 - April 21, 10:00 a.m. -12:00 p.m.

Has motherhood been a profound or complex journey for you?

Do you long for time to write and digest your experiences?

Whether you are a beginning or experienced writer, a new or longtime mom, these workshops are designed for you!

In a small group setting, we will gather to explore our diverse, individual experiences as mothers. Each week we will free-write from a series of prompts that explore themes such as: joy and intimacy; isolation and community; shifting identities; cultural myths and taboos; longing, change, and letting go.

Participants will be encouraged to share from their writing in a supportive, non-judgmental environment. Together we will aim to go beyond labeling our writing as “good” or “bad,” and to let go of our internal editors so we can access the place where our writing reveals new insights. Each week, we will also read quotes and essays from mother-writers such as Rachel Cusk, Anne Lamott, Naomi Wolf, and Hope Edelman, which we will discuss and use to jump-start our own writing.*

By the end of our time together, you will have generated pages of new writing, connected with a community of mother-writers, and emerge with a stronger sense of what motherhood means to you.

*** The one-day workshop will not *include readings, and instead will focus on free-writing and sharing aloud. The themes will be similar, but condensed.***

Sign-up early for a discounted rate! Details below.

Limited partial scholarships available.

All workshops held at the Good Shepard Center in Wallingford: 4649 Sunnyside Ave N. Seattle, WA 98103.

One-Day Intensive:

Saturday, February 11, 2012

9:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Max.# of students: 10. Register below.

Eight-Week Series:

Saturdays, March 3 – April 21, 2012

10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Max. # of students: 10. Register below.

Payment Options

Online Registration Information

1) PayPal encourages people to register and establish an account. When you click on the PayPal link during registration the page will prompt you for a PayPal user ID and password. Please note it is NOT necessary to have an account with PayPal to register for a workshop. Below the question "Don't have a PayPal account?" you will see the word "CONTINUE," click on this and you will be able to finish paying for your registration by credit card without setting up an account.

2) If the workshop is already full and this information has not yet been posted on this page, I will notify you and issue a refund to your credit card. If the classes do not fill to the minimum (5 students), I will do the same.

3) You will receive e-mail confirmation of your payment from PayPal AND an email from me. If you do NOT receive this confirmation it may mean your registration has not been received. Please email Anne at: alkellor@gmail.com

4) I will send a group email out to the class a couple weeks prior with room information and any other instructions. Thanks!

Scholarship Information

If you are interested in attending either workshop but cannot afford the tuition, you are welcome to apply for a partial scholarship. Please send me an email (alkellor@gmail.com) letting me know what your financial situation is, why you wish to take the course, and how much of the tuition you can contribute. Requests are due for the one-day intensive by 1/11, and for the 8-week series by 2/3. I will then let you know within two weeks of the scholarship application deadline whether your request can be granted.

About the Instructor

Anne Liu Kellor holds a MFA in creative nonfiction, and is a Hedgebrook and Jack Straw alum. Her essays have appeared in the anthology Waking Up American (Seal Press), The Los Angeles Review, and other publications. Anne has read her work from coast-to-coast and led writing workshops in community centers, senior centers, schools, prisons, colleges, and living rooms. She has written a collection of memoirs, Searching for the Heart Radical, and blogs on motherhood and writing.

Questions? E-mail Anne at: alkellor@gmail.com

Gratitude: A List of Things I Love

2011-11-23T09:34:00.000-08:00

Coffee. I still can’t have it all the time or Cedar’s tummy gets upset, but I have it enough to know how much it can help me through a day.

Cheese. Ditto on the above, can’t have it all the time, but when I do, let me tell you, I enjoy it! The best was the cheese plate at the overpriced wine bar with its miniature slices. But did I care? No! The size of those slices was perfect for me and mirrored my savoring-every-small-bite approach. Speaking of which….

The wine at said wine bar was damn good, too. Thank God I haven’t had to cut out wine from my diet. Enough said.

Okay, on to less oral delights… I love…. the way my husband lets me sleep in on Saturday mornings. The feeling of sinking back into a deep, uninterrupted sleep for three hours, and the ability to sprawl my limbs across the wide expanse of the flannel sheet-covered mattress is downright heavenly. With the aid of the white noise machine and earplugs, all outside noises of small children are blocked out, and although I emerge from this dream-laced stupor feeling groggy and out of sorts, this ability to catch up on my sleep on the weekend has felt physically necessary, what keeps me from getting sick, what keeps me sane in the midst of going on 20-some months of continually interrupted and inadequate sleep.

What else? I love… my son’s silliness. The way he cracks up in hysterics when we blow on his tummy, or the way he copies us and blows on mine. The way he says his new word “no?” like a question. Running my hands through the curls on the back of his head. The way he likes to kick and stomp his feet, and turn in circles when he “dances”. The way he chases our cat through the house, screaming “Mao, mao, mao…”, cat in Chinese. Witnessing him absorb language, new words left and right. His recent obsession with candles—requesting (more like demanding) that I light a "ka da" whenever we are sitting at the table. There are worse things for a toddler to demand. Like…. “Elmo! Elmo! Elmo!” Okay… too much Elmo may get annoying, but those folks at Sesame Street sure are clever—ever seen Feist’s “1, 2, 3, 4…” song or Adam Sandler’s song about Elmo? How about India Arie’s alphabet song or that British guy singing Elmo a “lullaby” with a pounding punk guitar? Uh, huh. I’ve watched these video clips on You Tube many, many times, and more often than not, I’ve got one stuck in my head. One more, you say? Okay, baby. And another? Why not. Half an hour’s worth? Well, alright, just this once...or twice. Then mama can wake up and drink her coffee.

Obviously I could fill this entire list with things about my son. After all, he’s the center of my universe right now. The center of my universe forever? Perhaps. So let me just pick one more thing I love about him, then move on. I love…the way he runs around the house with a plastic stir stick meant for my husband’s beer brewing. I also don’t like the fact that this has become his new favorite toy, pushing it in front of him on the wood floor like a vacuum, but I do love how this current excitement of his speaks to how children can find enjoyment in the oddest of things. He likes this plastic stick too much for me to err with my cautious side and take it away from him (lest he trip and it jabs him, or it trips him). Whatever. It’s not sharp and pokey. There are worse things for him to attach to. So of all things to love, I pick the stick. Really, I just love watching him discover the world, I love his incessant curiosity. I love (and sigh about) how he wants to hold and copy every last thing that we hold or do. Nothing escapes his notice. He makes me see the world of mundane objects anew.

What else? I love… watching him connect with his grandparents. Watching him play hide-and-seek with my mom. Watching my mom run down the hall or army crawl behind the dining room table—my serious, often grumpy, yet wonderful mom, morphing into the silly, delightful child that she also is. I love the fact that Cedar has so many people who love him, so many people with whom he can feel safe with, so many people he knows. I love seeing him lift his arms up to a new friend to be held, I love seeing the delight in their faces as they feel chosen by him, having passed the energetic test: you are safe, you are kind.

I love my family, love my friends, love my community, even if I often miss them because they are far away or busy. Oh, so busy. Everyone’s so busy. But still, even though I haven't yet, I love the knowledge that I can take the train down to Portland with Cedar some day to visit two of my oldest soul sisters (our own little adventure), and I love the morning weekend drives that I've made with my husband to Olympia en route to visit Grandma and family. I love that my sister now lives only a few miles away, and I love the fact that we have a small growing nucleus of families with babies next door, families that we will no doubt BBQ and have playdates and drinks with all the more. I love how I have been trading childcare with my neighbor—once a week I watch her daughter for a few hours, in exchange for the same. This is how it is done! That whole village thing. It really matters. We are all so tired, we don’t have the energy to drive across town once we’re cozy in our homes. But we do have the energy to walk next door! And often the morning goes faster caring for two than for one, when suddenly all the old toys become interesting again.

Okay, I lied. Back to Cedar. I love watching him interact with other babies and kids. Whether it’s his 16-month-old buddy Cecilia next door (who adores “C” as she calls him), or the 19 other kids at toddler co-op preschool who we spot more and more around town at library storytime or at the park. I love how he is forming his own little community, and I love trying to imagine what it feels like for him to realize that the world is populated with little people just like him! I love showing up at school every Friday morning and seeing the new (to us) imaginative toys and activities set up in the room, and watching him roam around at will, every so often calling out, “Mama, mama!” and running into my arms for a hug, before darting off again to explore some new corner. I love knowing that he feels safe to explore the outer limits of his environment, yet also knows to come back and check in and get some loving. I love loving this little boy. He is so full of love. I inhale his whole being into my heart when we embrace, drawing as close as I can to his essence.

I should wrap things up here or this list will get unwieldy! So here goes… I love… my husband. My dear, poor husband, who often feels picked on, neglected, nagged. Yes, dear, I have my gripes, but never forget how much I love you passionately. I love your fish smoking and beer brewing ways. I love how you embody my favorite season, fall—building a warm fire, chopping wood in a flannel shirt, baking apple pies, sitting at your table under the lamp tying flies. Yes, we are different. You don’t like to read, and I like things a lot tidier, but somehow those things are not so important when it comes down to what we enjoy most out of each other and life. Like our ability to just sit on the couch and listen to music and talk (or NOT talk!) for hours. And if I haven’t said this recently, let me tell you again how much I love watching you with Cedar. I love the throaty growl with which he’s decided to intone your name (Baba!), and I love the mischievous light in his eyes and yours as you chase him through the house, running to dive onto the bed, collapsing into tickles and laughter. I love your gentle and patient, yet firm ways. I know we will be good partners in compassionate discipline. I know we see eye to eye on parenting, and this is not something to be taken for granted. What else do I love about you? I love… your deep sensitivity to nature and to life’s evolving flow. I love your ability to stay calm in the midst of chaos and change; I love your ability to stay open to inner growth and always on the lookout for taking on new opportunities that scare the shit out of you, but that you know will be good for you. I love your humility, your down-to-earthness, your country bumpkin redneck hippy meets urban commuter technological music fiend. I love you, honey. I love our life, as much as I like to complain about it. I love our story, our past, and I love dreaming together of our future. I love this life, this breath, the eternally unfolding expanding and contracting mystery embodied in this moment.

This moment. I love the unknown possibilities inherent, ripening, ripened: waiting for us to show up and take hold.

Baby Lust— Or Not

2011-11-20T20:33:00.000-08:00

I used to always think that I would probably have two kids. Two parents and two kids seemed like the “perfect” family unit, balanced and lively yet manageable, without necessarily requiring the purchase of a minivan. I grew up with a sister, and although we fought a lot (we are a year and a half apart, and many of our spats ended in fear-inspiring threats like, “You can’t wear any of my clothes anymore, ever!”), we also had lots of fun together. We understand each other on an intrinsic level because we grew up in the same environment under the care of the same people. Being an only child always seemed so… lonely. Only children might grow up to be more… self-centered, or demanding, or possessive of their things. Well, even if these aren’t true (in fact, siblings might feel more of a need to establish their personal territory), I still always felt that two was better than one.

But now that I’m the parent of a toddler, I see things a little differently. It’s true that I still see families of four (or five- but five’s the limit) eating crepes, drinking coffee, and reading the paper and picture books together on Sunday mornings at the café, and think how great that would be to be able to go on family outings someday where everyone will be entertained. But then, during the week, I see mothers pushing their toddlers in a stroller, while also carrying a baby in an Ergo and walking the family dog, and I feel a kind of empathy for them. Or is it pity, born of thankfulness that, no matter how tired I am, at least I’m not them? I’m sure that they treasure their family and that this may very well be the cozy family unit that they’ve always dreamt of, and yet, no one can deny that these full-time mothers shoulder a heavy load.

Mostly, I have embraced my initiation into motherhood over this last year and a half, and I have been grateful for my ability to stay at home with Cedar while he is so young. And yet. I have also acutely missed my loss of time—namely, to write and pursue my career. Because so much of the work that is involved in being a writer is unpaid, we cannot afford to hire a regular sitter so that I can go sit in a café and write. Instead, I depend on the two afternoons a week of childcare that my mom provides, or my weekend morning respites care of my husband—and inevitably, half of “my” time also gets funneled into the mound of dishes, laundry, emails, or chores that I haven’t been able to get done while I’m with Cedar.

Recently, as my son has grown older, I’ve slowly started to claim back little pockets of time to write, not to mention to begin to consider pursuits like teaching and publishing again. And despite what can feel like painstakingly sloooww progress, chipping away at a long list of goals, it has also been hugely satisfying to begin to inhabit the larger spectrum of my creative and professional identity again, even as I remain a “stay-at-home” mom. Don’t get me wrong, I have only the fullest respect for stay-at-home moms—I know how hard they work (for no pay, for often under-expressed thanks from their partners, and for a sliver of respect from society), and I also know what a joy this occupation can be. But I resent feeling like I am “just” a stay-at-home mom in the eyes of others, I resent the distinct ‘demotion’ that this role occupies in our society, and the way that it’s demands usurp all other aspects of my identity.

And so of course I am excited for each new stage of independence that my son moves into—whether this was his ability to be away from the breast for longer periods, or, his ability to go to preschool for several mornings a week in the not-so-distant-future, during which I can dive into my projects all the more. Even if we’ll have to find the money for these additional school hours, this spending will feel more ‘justified’ since it’s good for Cedar to be exposed to other children and creative environments. This investment will be “for Cedar” and not just me, even if I will reap just as much—if not more-- satisfaction out of this new routine.

So with this new phase of motherhood on the horizon, it’s hard for me to feel eager to get pregnant again and to plunge all over again into that altered, caring-for-a-newborn state of mind-- only this time with a toddler to chase after simultaneously. If I’m so tired and desperate for more time with just one, how on earth will I be able to do anything else but care for my children if I have two? Of course, I realize that eventually when they go to school you gain some of your time back. But I don’t think I can handle waiting the four or five more years that that it would take (if say, I got pregnant today) to come back to the state of equilibrium that I’m only just reclaiming now.

Right now, I’m thinking that having just one might be good enough. He can play with his neighbors, cousins, and friends. He can be assured of always having plenty of attention from mom and dad. And he can more easily be schlepped off to the grandparents or brought with us on airplanes when mom and dad regain their ability to go out more and travel (even if this feels like a distant fantasy). Also, having just one will help my husband and I regain some of our own time together, something we desperately need, as opposed to taking away even more.

Maybe if we were rich, some of these factors wouldn’t be quite so relevant. We could hire a nanny, go on regular date nights, both feel intellectually engaged by our work, and still have energy left over to shower on our kids. But we aren’t rich, and when one half of the family income comes from a writer, we probably never will be. So although a lack of money alone wouldn’t stop me from having another kid if I wanted one at all costs, in our case, it’s definitely a factor worth considering. With just one we aren’t quite as pressed to tackle the expensive remodel that our humble cabin requires if my husband and I ever hope to have our own bedroom again. And with just one, doing something drastic (however unlikely) like moving the family for a year to live in China feels slightly more within reach, whereas everything feels that much more daunting with just one more child’s future to worry about.

There’s something to be said for making life a little easier. I know that some people say that with two they can entertain each other, but mostly what I hear from the buzz on Facebook and the like is that having two young kids is definitely harder. Perhaps it’s a selective memory of the early years (not to mention an intense love) that leads one to proclaim that more is easier. I don’t know.

I do realize, of course, that in another year or two I might take all this back as I’m seized by an irrational desire to have another baby. Even now, as I encounter the newborns of friends, I have small flutters of longing to hold and remember the essence of one of those mystical beings. Those first months are such a blur of hormones, anxiety, and sleepless nights that it’s already hard to recall what it felt like to be privy to care for such a being, but I know that, once again, our selective memories can help us to block out the hardships and to instead pine for the fleeting, yet nonetheless very real moments of joy that come with caring for a baby.

And yet, I fear getting sucked even deeper into the maternal world of diapers, playdates, doctor’s appointments, online shopping, and conversations centered around breastfeeding and sleep. I fear getting sucked in so deep that it will feel insurmountably hard to reemerge into the adult, work world. And this is in part because I am acutely aware of how much work it took me to get to where I am—and I’m not even satisfied yet; I still have greater goals. And the longer you set those goals aside, the harder it is to dig back into them. Not impossible, never impossible. But hard.

Baby lust. I know it might still hit me. I know some of you out there might be thinking to yourself, yeah, I remember feeling that way… just you wait another year or so, and I concede that I’m still hanging on to those bins of baby clothes up in the attic, just in case. Yes, there is a part of me that would be excited again to go through the ripening journey towards birth again, with the ultimate climax that comes from meeting the new mystery that life has sent for you. But I have also not yet forgotten just how hard this first year and a half has been. These last twenty months have shown me how strong I am, how much I can shoulder when called upon, at the same time that they have shown me my limits and where I need to set the boundaries when it comes to my own needs.

Writing Motherhood: 2012 Workshops

2011-11-11T16:27:00.000-08:00

I haven't written much lately, but I have been busy making plans. I feel an energy to step out of my comfort zone again, an energy that is buzzing and rising inside of me, an energy that can sometimes manifest as fear, but mostly as a necessary hunger. A hunger to connect with other adults, a hunger to engage my mind and to feed my spirit, a hunger to see what else I can add into the fold of motherhood, to see how much I can take on, little by little, without becoming overwhelmed.

First off, I am planning to teach a couple workshops-- a one-day intensive on February 11th and an eight-week, Saturday morning series starting on March 3rd. Writing Motherhood. Each week, 5-10 women, incidentally mothers, will gather to write from a series of prompts. I will provide readings culled from memoirs and essays on motherhood, passages and chapters that make me excited, that make me go "Yes!", or make me go hmm...what do I think about this? What do I have to add to this collection of smart voices? What parts of this crazy journey have I been most affected by? What aspects do I most need to spend time with and digest?

I can't wait to share these readings with others and to see how they spark each of us differently. I can't wait to gather a group of women together with the shared intention to explore this vast and complicated, humbling and overwhelming, awesome and mundane terrain called motherhood. I can't wait to learn from other mothers and their writing, however new or far along they are on their mothering and writing paths.

It's been almost two years since I've led a workshop, not counting a short, free one I gave about a year ago. This is not surprising given the fact that my son is 19 months old, and it's been a slow, evolving process of learning how to carve out more time for myself to write, to read, to sleep(!), and to pursue my publishing- and teaching-related goals.

In the early months, it was enough-- or all I could hope for-- just to scribble out a mad journal entry during Cedar's naps. Then slowly, I began to give more to this blog. Then less again, as other things in life easily took over to crowd out my narrow windows of time to write, be it chores, illnesses, or my parents (i.e. my childcare) going on vacation.

Now, I finally feel like I have enough energy and time (though it's never really enough, of course; we're talking about altered expectations here), to even consider giving a little bit of my writing time away to teach. Don't get me wrong, I love teaching, and the communication and community that can come from facilitating a group feeds me in exhilarating ways that writing alone cannot. But if I have to choose between the two, writing will always win. After all, how can I teach writing if I am not actively writing? How would I have the confidence and embodied love to teach, if I were feeling deprived or depressed or unmotivated ? I would feel like a hypocrite. It's not that I need to be in a prolific period to teach; chances are I'm not. But I do need to feel connected to that essential pulse of excitement and love for the process and craft.

I sense a new phase of motherhood coming on. One in which I am still exhausted and pining for more time to myself, but also one in which I am actively claiming back my commitment to my passions. One in which I am surfacing from an almost dreamlike immersion, and remembering that I am so many things, that I've lived so many lives, and that I have so much more still to learn and create.

How about you? Are you ready for something new?

Workshops will be held at the Good Shepard Center in Wallingford.

One-day Intensive: Saturday, February 11, 9 a.m. - 2 p.m.

Eight-week series: Saturdays, 10 a.m.- 12 p.m., March 3 - April 21, 2012

Registration details to come!

Confessions of a Sleep-Deprived Mama: Co-Sleeping with My Toddler Part 2

2011-10-15T20:17:00.000-07:00

I rarely talk to people about sleep anymore. While it used to be the most popular topic amongst us new mothers, somewhere along the way more babies started sleeping through the night and conversations moved on to new developmentally appropriate fixations. Terrible sleep was something that you were supposed to be done with by the time your child was nine months, or twelve, or in my case, certainly by eighteen months. Friends will complain about the occasional bad spell brought on by a cold, but few I know still put up with regular wakings throughout the night, every night. Or perhaps, like me, they just aren’t so eager to talk about it.

Partly, I’m tired of the topic myself. Oh, yeah, sleep. Yeah, read that book, thought about that approach, decided against it, made peace with my lot. And partly, I don’t want to incur people’s judgment. Poor thing. (If you’d only gotten past your guilt/passivity/misguided attachment theories and tried sleep training months ago!).

Mothers are naturally empathetic to other mother’s struggles (because we all have our struggles, right?), but we can also be quick to judge. In theory, sure, to each their own, we all have our own parenting styles and we can respect each other’s choices. But it’s hard to completely stifle that underlying layer of judgment, that layer that says: they can do things their way, but I am thankful I am doing it my way. Perhaps you don’t even recognize the judgment hidden behind this statement, because it’s so finely masked. But if we have formed any kind of opinions about parenting, about why we’re doing what we’re doing because it is the best way, then judgments are almost impossible to avoid. And perhaps I am most weary of other’s judgments because I am also avoiding the part of me that is secretly judging myself.

For the most part, I’ve grown to accept our situation. Basically, most nights, Cedar goes down about 6:30 (in our family bed, a king-sized mattress on the floor), and wakes up about an hour later. I rush in, nurse him for a few minutes, and am usually able to sneak out of there within ten minutes. My husband and I creep around our tiny house, avoiding doing dishes that will clank or turning on music, and obsessively turning down or up the volume when we watch our shows, when a scene gets too loud or else too soft to hear. If we’re lucky, Cedar might do another two hour stretch before waking again. I’ll wait to make sure he’s really waking, then go back in and quickly nurse him back to sleep. And then, when my husband and I go to bed around 10:30, he sometimes wakes from our rustling or from the need to move him over. Then, he’ll usually do a couple three hour stretches at night before he wakes around 6 a.m. and nurses/drifts in and out of sleep until we all rise at 7.

This probably sounds like hell, and to be fair to myself, yes, it can still feel like a form of torture to not have had a single unbroken night’s sleep for 18 months and beyond. And yet, when I want to, I can make it sound not quite so bad by explaining that, most of the time, Cedar’s ‘wakings’ are super brief, so brief that he is not fully waking so his sleep is not disturbed, and I am waking just enough to stick a boob in his mouth for ten minutes or so (or, on rare occasion, just pat his back).

Our sleep situation is way better than it used to be, when Cedar was waking up to every hour or two, often from stabbing gas pains that would cause him to cry and writhe in agony, and sometimes keep us up for hours. And it’s way better than various other periods where he was fighting going to sleep at night, or when he could only go to bed at night when it was me, mama, who put him down. It felt like a major coup when Cedar learned to go to sleep on occasional nights by just lying there next to my husband. Now, he mostly only gives a cursory protest before settling in to rest his head on Papa’s chest. I cannot tell you what a great sense of freedom I gained once I was able to feel relaxed about going out at night, or not having to be the one to go back into the room when Cedar wakes (although, most nights, I usually still am—the quicker we can get back to our show).

I have my theories about why my toddler is still waking. Partly, I do think he is simply a light sleeper. We finally got a white noise machine, but the verdict is still out whether or not this is helping. Mostly, however, I think it’s now just habit. Somewhere way back around four or five months, Cedar started waking a lot, mostly from his gas issues. By the time his gas/food sensitivity saga gradually got better, his habit of frequent waking was firmly ingrained.

Anyone who’s read up on babies and sleep knows that all babies, all humans for that matter, have brief wakings throughout the night. The difference is that some learn to drift back by themselves when they wake, and others continue to rely on their parents. Some would argue that by never having put my child through ‘sleep training’ and letting him cry it out when he wakes, I have deprived my child of important self-soothing skills and made him unnecessarily dependant. And, trust me, when I have gone through phases of “We must change this!”, fervently reading anything from Pantley to Ferber, it has been hard for me to deny the rationale in these arguments. But when it comes down to it, I have not been able to go that route.

For one, we are coming at this from the history of Cedar’s wakings being related to pain—and my ability to help him with his pain, whether by nursing or massaging his tummy. Sometimes, on occasion, food that I eat or feed him still does not agree, and he still wakes from gas, even if the pain is less severe than it used to be. In these instances, I cannot imagine just letting him cry. And since often we don’t know why he’s waking until we go in, I’d rather just err on the side of helping him. Sometimes now it’s teething, and sometimes it’s just waking to our noise, but since the “cry it out” approach seems to be an ‘all or nothing’ deal if you really want it to work, we have decided to stick with the responsive, assisting approach.

This is not to call those who have ‘trained’ their babies to go back to sleep on their own insensitive or cruel. Trust me, I am envious. And if I thought it would be a viable solution with our baby, now toddler, I would have tried harder at it. (As it was, we did a little experimenting with letting Cedar cry, but because of all our variables, not to mention simply an instinctual part of me that overrode my brief moments of resolve, it didn’t seem worth it to me.) In retrospect, the time to try harder would have been when he was younger—before I was worried about him rolling off the bed, and long before he was able to crawl out of bed by himself. But when he was younger, gas was still more of an issue, and let’s face it—some of us parents are just not cut out for that approach, and it’s not because we’re weaker and it’s not because we’re more humane; it’s just not right for us, or for our babies. We feel this somehow, and all these attempts to justify are just that.

Okay, but one last justification. Sleep training and co-sleeping are two approaches to so-called “nighttime parenting” that don’t exactly seem to coincide. Not unless you are willing to continue with “the program” through the night, refusing to nurse or soothe your baby as he wails at your side. Um, no. Part of the reason we’ve chosen to co-sleep is because it makes it easier to soothe our baby at night. And because we don’t believe that this extended closeness with our offspring is going to breed problems with our child’s future independence, but to the contrary, we actually feel it might be good for them—good for their sense of security and belonging within our family unit.

This brings me to the subject of co-sleeping. Why is it that when I tell people we still co-sleep, I feel like I’m uttering some kind of dirty word? Co-sleeping has become more acceptable, at least in the culture of parenting here in Seattle; many parents try it, or revert to it when their babies are young. But the numbers drop by the time your baby is a toddler, and then it seems only the hardcore diehard believers, attachment parenting enthusiasts remain.

But let me make this clear: I am annoyed by parenting dogma and labels, whatever camp it falls into, and I do not consider myself to be an “attachment parent”, however much my practices may fall into this category. I am annoyed by those who assert this is right and this is wrong, and I believe that we all make the choices we do for our kids based on a combination of informed rationale, and a healthy dose of intuition—whatever in the end feels right for us.

Sometimes I suspect that Cedar would wake less now if he were in his own bed, because he does wake sometimes when we toss, turn, or rise to go to the bathroom. Sometimes it feels like torture when, say, I’m nursing him back to sleep at 4 a.m., and it seems to be taking an especially long time, and before I know it I’m fully awake and aware of the fact that I have to pee and my throat is parched, but I know that if I try to get up right after he’s drifted off that he will wake again and cry because I’m leaving his side, so I don’t.

Or, the older Cedar gets, the more he moves around in bed, and the more that nursing can feel like an acrobatic sport, with him lieing on top of me, rolling from side to side, then me lying him down at my side again, then him climbing on top again. Repeat. He likes the closeness of my body, and sometimes, I do too. But it’s hard for me to fall asleep with him mashed up against me—and especially when he’s lying on my organs. And yet. Some nights, especially during that late morning period when he’s in a lighter sleep state, I give up and just let him fall asleep on top of me. Then eventually, when it feels safe, I gently roll him off to my side. Because, more than anything, I just want him to fall back asleep. For me to be sleep deprived is one thing, but for both of us to be is much worse.

Does this sound like hell? Sometimes, yes, it is. And yet. Will you believe me if I say that I experience daily moments, born of this “family bed”, that make co-sleeping feel worth it? That despite it all, there are huge parts of the experience that I still love? I don’t think that with our experiences with co-sleeping that I could convince anyone, not even my closest friends, to try it if they weren’t already pre-disposed to the idea. And yet.

Here’s what I love about it: I love the feeling of snuggling with my baby. Whether at naptime, or in the early morning hours, I love the way that I can hold him close to my body and the way that his sleeping body instinctually responds to this touch—to this knowledge that his mama is nearby—with relief, with a sense of safety. I know mothers whose babies do not like to snuggle, and although this might be an in-born trait, I cannot help but think that it is also a trait that we can grow accustomed to, or not. Cedar is one of those babies that has been held a lot—out of necessity, and out of his mother’s preference, which then became a form of habit. And now he is a toddler who is cuddly as can be. To contradict myself, there are times when I can fall asleep with him nestled in my arms, and I love this. I love the way our bodies still fit together. I love this intimacy, whether we are playing around with him bouncing on me, or whether he is half asleep and guiding my breast back into his mouth with his hand when I try to pull it away prematurely, I love the feeling that our bodies still belong to each other, close to each other, as they should be.

There’s that word should. Sorry, I’ll try to avoid it in the future. But there is this undeniable sense of rightness for me to having my son in our bed with us, a rightness that unfortunately in our modern-day culture of cribs I feel driven to justify and defend. I love how easy it is to just lie down with him at naptime, and let my body decide whether I want to stay and nap myself. There are other perks, too. For instance, if Cedar is sick, I am automatically cued in to what is going on for him at night. If he is cold or too hot, if he has vomited or if his diaper has leaked, my body cues into it before my mind does, and my hand reaches over to check or fix the situation. Also, if we are camping or spending the night somewhere else, I don’t have to worry about bringing a traveling crib. He is used to being in bed with us, or else we’ll make a bed on the floor if the bed is too soft or there is not a side of the bed that can be pushed next to a wall. He is adaptable. Sort of.

Okay, so he needs us to be close to him at night. So what? Don’t you like sleeping next to your partner? Isn’t the presence of a warm body next to you a huge source of comfort, despite the fact that his snores might keep you up or that you can’t stretch out as comfortably as possible? Don’t you think a baby/child might enjoy and benefit from this same sense of sweetness? We can’t rationalize or quantify sweetness. But that doesn’t make it insignificant.

So there it is. That’s the main reason why we still co-sleep: sweetness. Never mind how it’s not dangerous when done right or how it might lead to exceptionally snuggable children. I love it for its sweetness, and for the chance to be that much closer to my child. Never mind that I spend a lot of time complaining about how I wish I had more time to myself. I still can’t express how much I love the feeling of my sweet, breathing, never will be this young again, child next to my side.

Never mind how much I sometimes hate it.

Okay, to be fair to myself, to my husband, and to those who might still be debating whether or not to co-sleep and for how long, I need to disclose more of what I hate about it. Namely, less intimacy with my partner. It’s way less convenient to grab that rare window where we have enough energy at the end of the day to consider sex. And, most nights I am either sandwiched in between the two, and afraid to move Cedar lest he wake again, or, Cedar is in between the two of us and kicking my husband in the head while nursing in a perpendicular formation from my body. I wouldn’t recommend co-sleeping without a king-sized bed, unless you are a single mom, or a midget.

Finally, I must mention that another major reason why it is easy for us to keep co-sleeping, ignoring all the lame aspects and embracing what we enjoy, is because we have a super small house with only one small bedroom. We barely would have had room for a crib if we’d kept our full-sized futon, so instead, we decided to get the king and embrace co-sleeping from the get-go. I also trusted all the material out there about how “mother and baby both sleep better” when co-sleeping, etc., etc., so our initial choice was still more philosophical than practical, but the practical motivation was a driving force too.

My husband and I have discussed moving our bed into the corner of the living room, erecting some college-era, hippy tapestries, and giving Cedar his own bed and room. Eventually, we will probably do this, seeing that the need to make this change will probably trump the day when we have enough financial stability to tackle our dream of a remodel. Some days, I think that we might want to try this sooner than later—perhaps next week even. I LOVE the idea of not waking up every 2-3 hours (wouldn’t you? HA.), and I am impressed by Cedar’s continual ability to adapt. I know we would have to go through a rough transitional period where I’d have to get up and go to him throughout the night, maybe welcome him back into our bed at times, but I suspect that it would eventually work out. And then me and my husband could finally reclaim some of our intimacy, even if it would be at the expense of losing space in our living room (namely, one of us, losing our desk space—and I can already hear the debate).

Other days, however, I think this is not the ideal time. Let’s wait until he’s two, or maybe three—a developmentally appropriate time of increased independence. Or let’s wait till he shows more signs of being ready to wean, for co-sleeping and nursing are pretty tied up together—and if this doesn’t happen (no signs of yet, just increased acrobatics), then when I’m ready. We nurse way less than we used to, but Cedar still can’t have dairy or soy; eggs and beans also give him gas; and meat he can take or leave depending on the day or preparation method. So it is important, if not vital, that I still nurse him right now for him to get enough protein and nutrients. I’m constantly experimenting and hoping, however, that his little body will be able to tolerate more and more.

For now, for better or worse, the family bed is what we’re stuck with, what we’ve chosen, what we both hate and love. Some nights Miles (our 18 pound cat) even joins us, and although this can be annoying and he often gets the boot, there are other moments where hearing his contented purr and feeling his warm lump next to my leg can even add to the sweetness. More bodies, more sweetness.

I will never really know if, and, if so, at what age, we all might have gotten better sleep already by giving Cedar a crib. For all I know (and suspect, or maybe just choose to believe), he would still have woken a lot, and I wouldn’t have been able to just block out his cries, and it would’ve just meant me getting up more, and perhaps just bringing him back to our bed. The choices we make for our children and our families—for some reason, especially regarding sleep—are deeply personal. That is why I don’t want anyone to tell me, or infer, or thus bring up my own guarded suspicions, that perhaps we should have done things differently.

For now, we’ve found our delicate equilibrium. Cedar is well rested most nights, and his naps are getting longer too. My husband doesn’t wake at night like I do (earplugs help, as does the fact that I’m the one with the boobs), so he lets me sleep in on the weekends so I can catch up on what I’ve lost during the week (this feels essential to my health). He also loves napping with Cedar on the weekends, a sweet ritual for the two of them. And we know that things will keep changing every day. Cedar surprises us with a new word, we let him try a new food, we have another bad night, and then we have a good night.

I am still tired. More tired than it seems I “should” be at this stage, more tired than I suspect most of my other mom peers are. And yet. I function. I drink coffee, then tea. I manage to crank out these blog entries, manage to entertain us all day, do my chores, pay the bills, and scribble out my next set of goals. And I am always, always, happy to greet my baby again after being apart from him, for however brief a rest. I am grateful that I still have lots of time to lie next to him, to hold him, to tickle and tease him, to ask for a hug or a kiss and get one in return, to feel his soft cheek against mine, to hold this precious being and remind myself, over and over, that these days are gonna continue to fly, and eventually, I’m not going to remember what was the big deal about a little missed sleep.

Remembering The Sea

2011-10-02T12:03:00.000-07:00

Recently, we went on a five day excursion, first to see friends in Portland and then to the coast. "Is this the longest trip we've taken since having Cedar?" I asked my husband.

We quickly surveyed our previous adventures. There have been three camping trips since Cedar was born, each for three days and two nights. There was three nights we spent on Whidbey for my sister's wedding this August, and two nights on a whirlwind trip to San Diego the year before, for my cousin's wedding. There was another two night trip to Portland, an overnight with my family in Grapeview, and many weekends spent at Grandma's in Olympia, but that's it.

We have not been the most adventurous of new parents, but we've tried our best to have some fun. It feels necessary for me to get physical distance from our house where Cedar and I spend so much time, but it's also tiring to pack up all our clothes, food, diapers and gear, tiring to try and get Cedar to nap in unfamiliar places, tiring to disrupt our hard-earned schedules and get not-so-great sleep on impromptu beds on the floor, and tiring to then unpack, pack, and unpack again when we get home, do multiple loads of laundry along with the dishes left in a hurry in the sink, and then try to get back on our usual schedule so that we can keep our appointments with others the next week without Cedar being an exhausted mess.

But it's still worth it. And I still get that same familiar rush of anticipation and relief that I always have when we finally have everything into the car and we are off! Driving down I-5, Matthew driving, me playing DJ, coffee and tea warm in our mugs, and Cedar happily staring out the window in the backseat. We almost always aim to travel when Cedar is due for his nap, because as long as we keep driving (without having to stop at lights or in traffic), he will keep sleeping for at least 40 minutes, but hopefully 80 or more-- two sleep cycles, his usual nap length. As he begins to babble and show signs of drifting, I'll keep peaking back into the mirror that faces him to see if he's nodded off yet, and when his eyes finally close and his head lolls to one side, I'll give Matthew the 'asleep' sign we've developed (fingertips closed together), and then sigh as another layer of relief washes over me and I settle back into my seat for the ride.

I love road trips. I love that my husband doesn't mind driving the majority of the time, or more like all of the time ever since Cedar was born since I am sometimes needed in the back seat to feed or distract him during the last leg of a trip. I love the feeling of leaving the city and entering the rural; winding through country roads lined with towering maples, passing other people's homes and new territories they call familiar.

For our honeymoon over three years ago, we spent over a month exploring Canada and the Rockies, before coming back to Seattle to settle into our new home and life. "Purpose for your journey?" the border patrol asked as we barely snuck through to Eastern Washington before they closed. "You took your wife camping on your honeymoon??" He asked. We laughed. Yes, it was a mutual choice. We'd just relocated from Olympia to Seattle, neither of us had jobs lined up for the fall, but we had a wad of cash gifted to us by our wedding guests, so we had a rare flexibility to not have a rigid return date, but on the other hand, we knew that we probably shouldn't push our luck-- especially once we had to take our '89 Ford Taurus station wagon into a shop for repairs.

As it was, we were able to decide we were ready to go home before we were "forced" to go home, and upon returning home, Matthew received a job offer for a position that had initially turned him down. The stars were still with us! We dove into retarring the deck before the fall rains kicked in, and then took off for a friend's wedding in Leadville, Colorado, before returning in time for Matthew's first day of work.

I have fantasies of taking off on another trip like that, only I know that it'll probably be a couple years at least before it might actually be pleasurable to attempt a long trip like that with a young one in tow. I have fantasies of us having some kind of camper van so that we don't have to deal with setting up tents every night or getting wet, and of us dipping back into a remnant of our old hippy existence, living close to the elements, sitting around a fire every night, sitting in the sand by the ocean for days on end, letting the sound of the waves sink deeper and deeper into our skins.

Ever since Matthew and I have been together we've had a ritual of camping at the ocean every summer. The first year we went to Shi Shi, hiked far down the beach with our packs until we were far from other campers, close to a stream for water, and close to the area with the arches and most amazing concentration of sea stars and anenomes I've ever seen. By chance we ran into a friend and his ten-year-old daughter on the hike, and they camped a little ways from us, welcome unexpected companions by the fire. The four days or so we spent there were grey, but not rainy. Matthew kept the fire going the whole time, a warm beacon to return to after wandering excursions down the beach. We brought way more food than we needed, Matthew's sandal strap broke in the wet mud of the forest, and we had garbage bags to cover our packs if it rained. We were clearly not schooled in packing light nor equipped to be true backcountry hikers, but give us heavy packs and a few miles of flat terrain to get to a wild coastline far from the foot traffic of day hikers, and we are game.

I love that sense of sinking into the elements, that sense of timelessness that comes over me when I can just sit, wander, do yoga, read poetry, write in my journal. And usually, after a couple days, I don't even feel like reading or writing anymore. I am content to just sit there, listening to the waves-- or not listening anymore-- what I love is when you reach that place where you've been there long enough that you no longer notice the sound of the waves as something separate or other-- it's just there, with you, a part of you, a part of this amazing universe churning through your body.

The first day or so of camping at the ocean, when one is still relatively clean and fresh from indoor living, it is still more instinctual to keep oneself separate from the elements, to try harder to avoid getting sand in the tent, sand in the hair, sand everywhere. But the longer you are there, the more you realize that it's futile to try and keep yourself apart, and eventually you settle more and more into where you are, now lying directly onto the sand where you at first might have put a jacket under your head, eventually relishing in that salty feeling of being dirty, windswept, and unkept.

I cannot say that I reached this place of immersion with the elements this last week at Cape Disappointment (at the very Southwestern tip of Washington, near the mouth of the Columbia ) where we stayed in a yurt for two nights. But that's okay, I didn't expect this; I simply wanted to remember what the ocean felt like. It'd been over two years since I'd stood at her shoreline; we'd missed our annual trip the summer before due to our new immersion in life with a newborn. We'd gone to a few state parks on the Puget Sound, but these are not the same as standing at the edge of the rolling, wild Pacific.

Our first day at Cape Disappointment we arrived in the midst of a storm. Fifty-mile an hour winds blew, and there was no way we would have stayed if we weren't sleeping in a yurt. What a treat it was to splurge on a yurt! It was the perfect way to camp with a toddler. We all stayed dry, a heater kept us warm at night, and a round skylight in the middle let in a warm glow of natural light, even despite the clouds. It was more or less childproofed already for Cedar, and we were a five minute walk from the beach. Then the sky cleared the next morning! A beautiful, sunny day at the ocean in late September? Unheard of! I don't remember the last time I saw sunshine at the coast, even in the summer.

Cedar loved it. Loved the wide open expanse to run around on, loved the sand to rub his hands across and sift through his fingertips, loved the slight edge of the dangerous unknown with the rush of the waves coming in, still huge and tumultuous from last night's storm. Giant collections of sea foam floated along the beach, bubbling in their breathing masses. Flocks of pelicans flew in formation across the sky. At high tide, while Matthew and Cedar napped, I stood at the edge of the path to the beach and watched as the waves pushed in huge logs and rushed in so high, covering the entire expanse of the beach and sometimes coming up even further to the raised patch of land where I stood.

Wild. That's what the ocean is for me in a word. Wild. That's why I want and need to go to the ocean regularly-- to remind me of this force in the universe, this wild force which I am a part of. Nowhere else is this essential in and out, ebb and flow force of the universe, force of my breath, so obvious, so apparent. I breathe in and feel it in my body, how I am connected to this rush. I feel it in an instant, even if it would take many more days for it to sink in on the levels that I long for-- and weeks or months for it to sink in on levels that I can barely imagine right now. And yet, on some level, the ocean already speaks to me from this depth. On some level, I already know what it would be like to live by the sea for months, or years on end. On some level, this inseparable knowing is already a part of me, and that's why I crave it so.

Just give me a taste, that's all I wanted this week, just give me a reminder of what she feels like, the ocean, the sea. No, I did not have the same freedom to lie down and close my eyes, drift for hours on end into my own blissful place, separate yet connected to the blissful places that my companions might find, separate yet together in our silent, unfolding communion. Instead, I had only brief moments to stare out and take a few breaths, before checking to make sure that my son was not getting into any trouble, tag teaming care with my husband, engaging in our new ebb and flow, our new layer of partnership developed over the last 18 months. But you know what? This is okay. This is our life right now, a life in which our son-- and sharing this great world with our son-- lies at the orbit. As his mama, as his guide and protector, I see the world and the sea through new eyes, I appreciate the newness of everything in ways that only a child's eye can filter. And then I savor those brief moments where I can stand alone and take a breath that much more. I don't worry about not having hours or days to let it sink in. I take it in now, gulp up what I can, knowing that some day it will not be the same, and trusting that the power of the ocean is still reaching me, still seeping in, no matter what new layers of consciousness I may filter it through.

To journey to the ocean is to seek to have these layers drop away. Even if I only get a chance to stand alone at the shore for ten minutes, this is enough to scrape and rub at a bit of my shell. This is enough to receive a small window of remembering: I am raw, I am tender, I am frothing, I am wild. I am so much more than you or I can see.

How To Write After Giving Birth

2011-09-16T11:00:00.000-07:00

Check out my new piece at Hedgebrook's Farmhouse Table Blog!

http://blog.hedgebrook.org/2011/09/how-to-write-after-giving-birth/

The Journey of a Manuscript, or, Trying to Fit a Circle into a Square

2011-08-31T15:27:00.000-07:00

Something quietly extraordinary is happening. How to put this simply? I have been working on a manuscript that I call Searching for the Heart Radical for well over a decade, and I finally feel close to bringing this process to a close.

It is hard for me to say definitively when I started working on this book, for many of the stories and themes in the manuscript have existed in various incarnations for many, many years. I suppose I have had the feeling that I am actually working on a book ever since I took off on my second trip to China in 1999, even if I wrote the bulk of the pieces at least five years later, while in grad school. Most of the oldest writing has been cut by now, but some ancient passages still remain, cut and pasted into newer forms.

For years I worked on individual pieces, writing when I felt called to explore a particular story or theme. I saw how the pieces could one day all be linked together, but I didn’t worry about the greater whole. I wanted to see what kind of structure they fell into naturally instead of trying to impose structure from the onset.

Gradually, I started to get more serious about writing and publishing. I became a better editor, and held my writing to higher standards. I went to grad school and got my MFA, I learned about the competitiveness of the industry, and started to think about how to market my book.

Somewhere along the way I heard (from several ‘in the know’ sources) that “essays don’t sell." Since depending on the piece (or the person), my writing could be categorized as either memoir or personal essays or some even lyric essays, I decided that it was prudent to call my book a memoir, or rather, a collection of memoirs. These days there were plenty of writers who were publishing creative non-traditional memoirs that were non-linear or written in multiple point of views, like Abigail Thomas’s Safekeeping or Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (both of which happened to be amongst my favorite books). So, memoir it was, I decided, as I drafted my book proposal and began to query agents.

Many agents were excited by my query—it sounded like something they might be able to sell. Quite a few asked to see my sample chapters, and then asked to see the entire manuscript (or what I had so far of it, since with nonfiction, the manuscript does not yet need to be completed when you query). It was encouraging. My writing had been workshopped by many, and revised a thousand times. I knew it was worthy of publication. I felt hopeful that eventually my book would find its home.

But then the trail of rejections. The first agent that saw the whole thing (thus far) liked aspects of my writing, but ultimately, could not see it as a whole. Felt it read too much as separate pieces, lacked a narrative arc. But I was convinced that if she could see the whole thing as I envisioned, if she could see how the yet unwritten pieces would tie it all together, she would see that it did have an arc, very much so. So I decided to finish the book before I bothered to query more. Then, if I still got the same feedback, I would know for sure that it was based on the actual writing and not the outline of the writing to come.

This was back in 2007, I believe. And so I kept writing. And writing. And writing. I delved into long pieces about my spiritual evolution, about my youthful involvement with the Tibetan Independence movement, about my history of intimate relationships. I wrote short “bridge” pieces which helped fill in some blanks or explain jumps in chronology. I knew that in order for a memoir to be marketable it needed to have a clear idea, and I admittedly had trouble articulating in a nutshell what my book was about. Geographically, it took me from America to China and back and forth several times again, and so in this respect, it was easiest to describe the journey in a linear perspective. But I knew that this wasn’t a travelogue. And nor was it a book “about China.” Sure, you could learn lots of interesting details about modern China, but at core, it was a book about an interior journey, a spiritual quest, an identity quest, a cross-cultural love story, a coming of age tale—all of the above. I revised my synopsis many times, and finally alighted on a description that I felt did it justice. And yet, there was always some part of me that knew I wasn’t entirely representing it truthfully.

The manuscript grew and grew. It was almost twice as long as it had been when I finished grad school. It had definitely become much more of a proper “memoir”, and yet, inside I knew that many of the newer pieces (or oldest pieces that I kept trying to breathe new life into) weren’t as strong. But if this were to be a memoir with a narrative arc, I couldn’t see how to cut them; I had to somehow make them work.

At a certain point, a couple years ago, I decided to start sending the manuscript directly to small presses where it was more likely to find a home anyway. Again, I got enough interest to keep me hopeful. And yet, now I was pregnant. And soon, I would have a baby. And I knew that I would no longer have the time to keep researching and sending it out en masse. (Not to mention how expensive it gets to send a 350 page manuscript to New York, and how much time it takes-- months and months-- for them to reply.)

So fast-forward to now, almost eighteen months after giving birth, when I finally have the time and presence of mind again to start thinking about this pesky, beloved, dreaded manuscript. I’ve always known, I can’t just abandon it, be done with it. Some kind of closure needs to happen. And I’ve always trusted that this is not just some pipe dream. So what to do?

I’d never entirely rejected the idea of self-publishing, but I considered it a last resort. I wanted the esteem of being published with a real press. And yet, increasingly, I realize that the most important thing at this point is just to share this work, bring closure to this creative cycle, especially since I’ve long since moved on and started working on other projects. And as I’ve learned about self-publishing models that don’t require huge chunks of cash to order a minimum number of books that may sit and mold in one’s basement for years, but that instead people can order via Amazon and that will print on demand, I’ve started to warm up more to the idea. Finally, just recently, I’ve started to feel those first tingles of acceptance and excitement that say, Yes, let’s do this. Let’s go for it, take a plunge, join the do-it-yourself bandwagon and let go of any lingering stigma I might have about self-publishing.

As I’ve decided to do this (I’m like 90% there), I’ve had some major breakthroughs in how I see the manuscript. In short, I’ve been able to let go of my preoccupations with what is “most marketable,” and realize that I only WANT to publish my very best. This realization has thus allowed me to cut back the manuscript even more— in fact, to cut out almost everything that I worked so hard at adding in over the last several years. And in turn, to also call it for what it is: a collection of essays. A collection that, with the exception of a couple pieces, already existed in its entirety years ago.

Oh, the irony! You would think that I’d be incredibly upset at having WASTED years of my life on writing stuff that I inevitably turned around and cut, and yet, mostly, I’m just relieved. Relieved to alight on this new clarity, relieved to cut stuff that would have made some part of me cringe if published, and relieved to start feeling connected internally to the manuscript again, to start seeing it anew and feeling movement again, like something’s finally happening.

I still think there is a narrative arc, but it is not a traditional arc—instead of taking you from point A to point B, the journey I present is more of a spiral, with the same themes and questions echoing throughout on different levels. Letting go of the need to keep it in strict chronological order helped me cut even more pieces, and in turn, certain allegiances to sub-themes (like my love relationship in China) have lessened whereas core themes feel clearer (like my search to feel at peace existing in an "in-between" place, and to find my voice, whether in English or Chinese).

I think I always knew (or feared) that I was trying to fit a circle into a square. The fact that I persisted in calling them ‘pieces’ and not ‘chapters’ should have been a huge clue that inside, I still didn’t feel it was a chapter book—and yet, I stubbornly persisted in this vein until I exhausted that avenue.

Do I regret the “wasted” years? No. How could I? It’s the way it had to unfold for me, I really believe this. No time, no experience, and no writing, is ever wasted. Sure, it is tempting to groan in retrospect at all the stabs I took at trying to get certain torturous pieces "right", but I guess I had to do it this way, I had to go through all that, my own personal laborious process.

So here I am. A huge amount of work still lies before me before I will be able to get this book into your hands. But the beautiful thing is, I can see it now, step by step, the work that remains. There is no longer the existential question of whether or not the book will one day exist, and in what form. And nor is there the same foggy sense that I am writing myself into some murky rabbit's hole or coyote den or whatever trickster characters might be conjured in this particular lesson I have to learn.

It's too early yet to articulate just exactly what this lesson is, but you can bet that when I figure it out, I will be writing about it.

Dear Heart Radical: A Free Write

2011-08-24T16:50:00.000-07:00

Dear Heart Radical,

You were an idea before you were the title of my manuscript. Book. Collection of Memoirs. Essays. Memoir singular. What to call you?

Does it even matter? Not if I don’t care anymore about “marketability”. I think, truly, you are essays. Searching for the Heart Radical: A Collection of Essays. Or Linked Essays by Anne Liu Kellor.

And what about the old subtitle: “A Journey Between East and West.” Scrap that?

This is all not important. What matters is to love you again. It’s been so long that all I’ve done is loathe you, fear you, dread you, avoid you. I want to love you again. I want to appreciate all the love and sweat and experience poured into your pages. I want to share you, because sharing you is, too, a part of the writing process. Birthing process.

What is the Heart Radical? It is inner fierceness, not necessarily visible to the eye. It is an inner compass that helps the thinking, doubting part of me make choices that are aligned with the deepest, wisest, most transparent part of me. It is instinct that is allowed to function freely when all mechanisms of self-preservation have failed.

And the Heart Radical is also me, finding my voice. It is contradiction and complexity, demanding to exist and not be easily simplified or packaged for digestion’s sake. The Heart Radical is me, striving for authenticity, striving to walk the path I’m meant to walk, striving to do what my heart calls out to do, even when certain choices may not seem practical.

Because I am a writer, the Heart Radical is also about writing, about me staying true to my need to write, but I do not write about this in the manuscript. In the book, the Heart Radical is mostly about wandering. About revisiting my past through stories and travels. About seeking my roots, both geographical and familial. About risking exposure to find love, or at very least, connection with others. About risking vulnerability, for the chance to be seen and known. About learning to be okay being alone, as well as alongside another.

The Heart Radical is also about articulation, subtleties, and layers of truths. It is about learning to feel comfortable in who I am and what I believe, and learning to be okay with all my shortcomings, weaknesses and mistakes.

The Heart Radical is all of these things, and so much more. I love it as a title, as something to search for, because the Heart Radical is never stagnant and unchanging. Each passing day, year, season of my life, the shade and tenor of the Heart Radical is slightly different. Yesterday’s burning need in my heart is different than today’s subtle yearning. Yesterday’s longing for a lineage that could encompass my spiritual beliefs, is today’s longing for time, simply time, to remember what all those pressing questions were about.

Before I had a child, I used to have so much time—to wander, to ponder, to long and cry and feel lonely. Now I have so little time, and I do not feel lonely; I simply want more time for myself to even remember all those private heights and depths, all that scaffolding, elaborate cathedrals erected around my heart.

These pages are filled with stories and images of other people and places—in China, in Tibet, in L.A. But they are mostly filled with ideas and visions of myself. The book, the journey, is primarily an interior one, even if you are most interested in the parts where I take you to a sky burial or through the streets of Chengdu. I am only partially joking when people ask me what the book is about, and I say, “Me.” That sounds kind of arrogant, so I try to avoid that answer, but still I resort to it in moments of uncomfortableness when I don’t feel like exposing myself. It is also a lie if I say that the book is about “my time in China,” which makes it sound like a travelogue, and does not account for the pieces that are rooted in the States. It's about going back and forth, being in between. And if I say, it is about “exploring my cultural identity, spirituality, and relationships,” well that too is vague and non-revealing.

Anyway, that is all for now, I have to go finish my chores before I pick up my child from next door.

This free-write is just a beginning. A way for me to remember, to trick or cajole myself into falling again for my old lover, for these old stories, essays, occasional misplaced prose poem-- whatever they are, this collection of mine.

And why? Because it’s now or never time. I’m feeling this. It’s put it out there, find closure to this cycle, this part of this journey that is tied to this particular cycle of words, and move on. Because sharing the words is a part of the process for me. For even though they were originally written for me, they are ultimately not for me. To me, now, they are worthless in this form. They fester, they evoke a certain loathing. I need to let them go, set them free, release. Holding on to them any longer feels like a form of selfishness, selfishness born of fear. (What if no one likes them? No one buys them? What if I can’t stand to even read them aloud they feel so old? What if they don’t do justice to what my writing and thought process is like now?) Fears. I hold these pages to high standards. Perhaps you will too. Perhaps you will love them (love me!), perhaps you will judge them (judge me!). Do you see how it’s all tied up in my ego and mind?

That’s why to publish them—and self-publish, because I can’t wait any longer-- is the final act in this particular Search for the Heart Radical. That’s why I must. Okay, so I’ve convinced myself. Now, I just need to do it.

On Listening to Laura Veirs, Officiating my Sister's Wedding, and the Eternal Longing to Create

2011-08-18T16:40:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling super depleted right now. Drinking coffee at 3:00 p.m. and hoping this will revitalize me enough to write a blog post, even if I know that late day caffeine is dangerous unless I want to tempt insomnia at night, but oh well-- without it, I'm more or less useless right now when it comes to writing, and this is the first chance I've gotten to write in way too long. Well, technically, I could have written yesterday while I had a babysitter, only by the time I "cleared the mental palette" (by first doing the dishes, vacuuming, and then getting caught up on my email and other online business), I realized I was mentally wiped as it was, even without all those pesky to-dos to get caught up with.

So I've decided that today I'm just going to write one of those rambling, disjointed blog posts that don't have any particular focus (or at least not at the onset), because I simply need to sit down and focus and write SOMETHING, not to mention to break this stretch of blogging silence-- to "clear the blogging palette" one might say, so that next time I can move on and write about other topics that actually feel like topics to me.

Anyway, I'm coming out of a month long stretch that has been more or less focused on my sister's wedding. It was last weekend, and I officiated, and so a lot of my limited free time of late has been devoted to working on the ceremony, as well as shopping for a dress, going to a bachelorette weekend in Portland, making a present for her (still not finished), packing, unpacking, traveling to Whidbey, rehearsing, and practicing for the ceremony. I'm not complaining, because it's been a great, fulfilling month, not to mention an awesome experience to get to marry my sister, but now I'm glad it's all over and I can slowly start to claim back my few weekly breaks for my own writing.

Prior to the wedding takeover, I was finally starting to feel like I was actually gaining back some time to do more than a bi-monthly blog post. I actually got my old manuscript out and started going through it again, willing myself to re-envision it's structure anew, and thinking hard about taking the first steps to self-publish. I felt some "Let's do it!" momentum building... but now I'm back to feeling depleted, and feeling like I need to just put something on this blog as a place to begin. Point of departure. Baseline. Check in.

So excuse me if it sounds like I have nothing to say. In fact, I have a shitload to say, I'm quite sure of this, only I haven't had the time to sit still long enough for the murk to clear and the themes and questions to emerge.

Right now, I'm listening to Laura Veirs, my favorite artist of late, especially when I'm in a dark, churning kind of mood. She is the artist that I have turned to each time I have actually had a chance to be home alone and blast music, drink, and dance-- and she is also an artist I have on in the background right now while I sit quietly and write. Her lyrics are poetic, resonant, and her voice has that necessary edge of longing and heartache and fierceness and gentleness that gives her music a power that speaks to me. She's like the female equivalent of Damien Jurado for me, another Northwest singer-songwriter whom I love.

Matthew and I actually got to see Laura Veirs at the Tractor a few weeks ago, and it was awesome. Not only because we were actually going on a date, at night, at a bar where I got to hear live music, loud, while drinking beer - which never happens- but because it was Laura Veirs, whose music has become a recent soundtrack to my life. One of her songs, Make Something Good off of July Flame, was also literally part of the soundtrack to a slide show that we made for Cedar's first birthday-- for the section that showed my long labor and his birth. I cried when she played that song at the show. And after the show, I felt compelled to go up and tell her what her music meant to me, as well as buy something to support her, and I am not somebody who normally goes up to singers after shows. But as an artist myself, I know it's so valuable and precious when someone really connects with your work, and when they take the time to tell you so, so I wanted to do it. Writing, hell- any art form-- can be such a sacred, solitary, lonely process, that it can feel so redeeming to hear others' praise. It keeps me going. It lifts me up. It reminds me why I do it. For myself, and for the joy in connecting to others.

That's how I felt this weekend after the wedding ceremony. So many people came up to me afterward and told me how they'd cried, or how they looked around and saw lots of guys crying, or how they'd never been to a ceremony that was so articulate, so personal, so heartfelt... and let me tell you, it felt damn good to hear this. Have you officiated before? No. Are you going to do more weddings? Well, maybe... if someone asks me, but it would not be the same to do it for someone I didn't know. And yet, I'm not opposed to the idea. After all, officiating a wedding is kind of right up my alley in that it involves: writing, public speaking, and ritual-- all of which, I am practiced at and enjoy.

I haven't always enjoyed public speaking, in fact, like many people, it used to scare the shit out of me. But now that I've had plenty of practice giving readings, not to mention some actual training with the Jack Straw Writers Program, it mostly just excites me. Sure, my hands still shake and I still get nervous, but I can override that nervousness now when I know I'm prepared. When I've practiced many times, and marked up my page with places to pause, words to enunciate, and reminders to breathe. And when I believe in what I'm reading-- when I trust that it's good, or good enough.

I wasn't really nervous at my sister's wedding, for the above reasons, but also because, contrary to my own personal literary readings where I'm showcasing my work and there's a lot of fragile ego involved, at my sister's wedding it wasn't about me and my writing-- it was about her and her fiance. So it made it that much easier to walk up in front of the 150 guests and smile and welcome the moment and all of them with my full presence and heart. I thought I might get nervous because I've never presented before that many, but the audience didn't feel that different than what I am used to. And on top of that, I had a new dress and haircut (bangs) to carry me. These things can be important.

Anyway, it was a great experience, and I rode the high of everyone's praise for the rest of the day and beyond. My mother, in particular, was especially exuberant in her praise-- and any child will tell you that we are always still eager to hear our parent's praise, no matter how old we are.

It'd also been so long since I'd written something, gone through an intense and rapid editing process (with the input of my sister and her new husband, so three editors in essence, which made the process more challenging, but also that much more satisfying when it finally clicked together and pleased us all), and then I had the chance to perform it-- bim, bam, boom! All in a month's time. So even though this wasn't my own personal writing project, going through this process gave me the same kind of satisfaction that working on something of my own does. And since the main theme of this blog (besides motherhood) seems to be pining for more time to work on my creative projects, I don't have to say more about how much this means to me.

That said, here I am, finally sitting at my desk again, with no pressing errands or deadlines or chores, other than my own pressing need to write. To see closure to certain projects. Or simply to remember again what those projects even were.

So here's to new beginnings. Here's to my beautiful sister and her lovely new husband, here's to a new beginning to this, thus far, cool Seattle summer (in other words, a prayer that the sun will keep shining for another month or two and it will actually get above 80 before the rains come back), and here's to me having some time in the near future to sit down again with my old manuscript.

I don't want to start speaking about fall yet (no, no, not yet!), but fall has always been one of the most fertile and exciting periods for me. It's when school always used to start, when the trees start getting beautiful, the vegetables abundant, and the stirring of a darker, more piercing longing starts to come into focus-- the hunger to dig into my depths, pull stuff out, and get things done.

Why Self-Publish? An Interview with Noriko Nakada

2011-08-01T16:35:00.000-07:00

Author, Noriko Nakada, reading from her memoir, Through Eyes Like Mine

Lately I have had a bit of time to start thinking about my collection of memoirs again, Searching for the Heart Radical: A Journey Between East and West. Namely I have been thinking about whether I should self-publish. I have worked on this manuscript for more years than I care to go into right now. I've sent it to agents, sent it to small presses, edited, rewritten and restructured it a thousand times, and although I've gotten good responses that have kept me hopeful and thus encouraged me to keep going in my quest to publish with a reputable press, I have not yet "won the jackpot."

It is hard, incredibly hard, to score a book deal these days. Especially if you are not famous, you are not particularly well-connected, and if the book you have written does not have bestseller/movie deal written all over it, and is instead, more of a subtle, quiet, or literary book.

There is unfortunately such a stigma surrounding self-publishing and so-called "vanity presses"; it is true that a whole lot of crap gets published that way-- as do plenty of gems. And it is also true that well-known presses also publish both crap and gems. Any way about it, authors these days have to do their own marketing and promotion (unless you are someone like John Grisham). So what it comes down to are various pros and cons about other people's perceptions, whether I still am hoping to teach in a university someday and thus need the prestige of a reputable press, what I'm willing to put forward in terms of my own time and money, and ultimately, the question, why do I most want to publish my book?

Increasingly, as the years drag on and as I move on to new writing projects, I care less about garnering the prestige of a known press, and I simply want to get my book out there. I've worked so incredibly hard on it, I know there are damn good stories and sentences in there, and I ultimately still want to share this baby of mine with the world.

During this recent bout of deliberations, I decided to interview my friend and fellow Antioch MFA alum, Noriko Nakada, about her recent experience self-publishing her childhood memoir, Through Eyes Like Mine (TELM).

I've been following Noriko as she promotes her book on Facebook, and I have admired the way she continues to put herself out there, posting excerpts and reviews, giving readings, and generally not letting people forget about her book after it's initial debut. I can only imagine how hard it must be (despite how easy she makes it look) to try and sell your book, your baby that you've nurtured privately for so long, like some commodity. It's one thing to publish it; another thing entirely to keep encouraging people to buy it. It seems it must take enormous confidence, faith, and persistence. And so, I look to my friends and peers for inspiration and advice.

Through Eyes Like Mine is told through the eyes of Nori, a young half-Japanese and half-Caucasian girl growing up in the small (white) town of Bend, Oregon during the seventies and eighties. The book is narrated in first person, present tense, and Noriko does an incredible job of conjuring the voice of her younger self. Each chapter reads like an evocative vignette, highlighting the way a child absorbs the textured layers of emotion and nuance within her own family's tensions, silences and love. Young Nori's awareness of how her family is culturally different than the others around her is also a big part of this narrative, as are her observations of her mother's religious faith, sibling rivalries, and the adult world at large.

Here's what I asked Noriko:

How long did you work on 'Through Eyes Like Mine'?

I started 'Through Eyes Like Mine' (TELM) during the first year of my MFA program at Antioch University. I finished the first draft as part of my final manuscript, so about two years.

When did you know you were working on a book versus just a series of pieces?

Once I finished writing most of the vignettes, I had close to 50,000 words so I knew I was looking at a longer work. The trick was then cutting sections and writing new ones to help the reader move through the book.

What was your writing and editing process like for this project?

Writing each vignette started with the memory of an incident or a feeling. Then I tried to flush out scenes and determine what I wanted to say with each section. I worked on story order and flushed out themes with some new sections. Then I divided the book into three parts to help provide some needed structure. Once I decided to self-publish, the close editing began. I shared the work with several readers and even though I thought it was close to being done, it wasn't. Each time I read through the pages, I continued to make changes so I made myself read and re-read and re-read until I could read and not make a single edit.

Why did you decide to self-publish?

I actually signed with an agent right after I finished my MFA. She loved TELM and did a great job shopping the work to big houses in New York. Unfortunately editors thought it was too quiet a book so I kind of forgot about it and kept writing and working on other projects. I figured TELM was done and it would have been except I used Amazon's CreateSpace to order a proof copy of a novel I wrote with my students (I teach eighth grade English) and it was so easy I thought, hey why not do this with TELM.

How did you decide which self-publishing press to use?

I looked at quite a few after using CreateSpace to make sure it was the right one for my project and found it was the easiest to use with the lowest out-of-pocket expense.

How does the publishing process work with CreateSpace?

With CreateSpace you create an account and then they walk you through the design. You can create your own imprint to publish from (then it won't read published by CreateSpace) and they assign you an ISBN or if you already have one you can use that. You choose a standard paperback size and then format your book for the look you want (fonts, page numbers, margins, etc.) and then you save a pdf to upload. They have some cover designs you can choose or if you are savvy with Photoshop you can design and upload your own. Once you upload your interior and cover docs you order a proof copy. They send it to you and you decide if you want to make any changes or make it available for purchase. I ordered three or four proof copies before I was happy with it.

What about costs? How did you know how to price your book?

The price that you pay per copy is pretty low and you take home a good percentage if people buy it from Amazon. CreateSpace shows your pricing and profits once you upload your files (it depends on the number of pages). I wanted to keep it affordable and easy to sell myself so it's listed at $10. I also highly recommend making it available as both a paper and e-book. I priced my kindle version at $5.99.

How much were proof copies and your out-of-pocket expenses?

Proof copies, again depend on the page count but including shipping, less than $10, maybe even $5 ish. I did order several proof copies to try to get reviews, send to Antioch mentors and other readers. Those proof copies are your only out of pocket if you don't need any of their publishing services. It's a point of sale production so you don't pay anything else up front.

How much do you end up pocketing for each book you sell?

For profit, if I order books myself, they cost $2.81 plus shipping. So all of the copies I sell myself or that my family sells for me, I make about $7.00. If people order from Amazon I make about $3.20 per copy. I definitely went on the low side because profits were and are less important than getting the book out and into people's hands.

What do you think are the benefits to self-publishing today?

It's really affordable if you have some basic computer skills, which is great. But what is incredibly empowering as a self-published writer, is that you can get your book in your hands and into the hands of readers. You also get to control the editing process (which can also be a drawback) and make the book look exactly the way you want. You can also make it available as an e-book really easily and sell it for even less.

What about the drawbacks?

It's a lot of work. It takes hours and hours to write the book but editing it to be copy ready is really a different level of detail. Designing the look of the book takes time and visual arts decisions can be painstaking. I got to know that book so intimately I kind of started to hate it. And then, after all of that work, some people won't buy it just because it is self-published. There is still a stigma and that is a definite drawback. I just try to remember that I want people to be able to read my book and self-publishing has allowed that to happen.

What have you done to promote your book?

Social media networking is where I started. I have a blog so I wrote a post to let people know about my decision to self-publish. Most of my readers are also Facebook friends so I wrote updates of the process every so often whether it was frustration with comma usage or excitement when the cover finally looked the way I wanted it too. Once the book came out, I let people know where they could buy the book. I blogged about it, tweeted about it and Facebooked about it. I asked people to spread the word (or pimp my memoir). This was actually pretty uncomfortable for me. I hadn't asked people to buy anything since I was a Girl Scout, but I figured even if I had gone with a traditional house, I would have had to do the same kind of work. Once the book was released, I set up some readings in my target areas (mostly in Oregon) and I published excerpts of the book on the blog to keep some momentum going. I also teach full-time, so I do most of my promotion during winter and summer break. My family and friends have been great at helping out and books don't sell on their own so everything helps.

Do you have any specific goals with regards to number of sales or the greater audience you want to reach?

I started with a kind of arbitrary goal to sell 10,000 copies. I'd still like to get there but it's going to take a LOT more work. I think the Asian American and growing Hapa communities would love the book so I hope to do more promotion there.

How many copies have you sold so far?

I have sold about 450 copies in eight months.

What advice might you have for writers who are thinking about going a similar route?

Make sure it's what you want. If you are hesitant and still want to go with a traditional press, send queries to agents and test the waters. Also, know if you want to sell a few hundred copies for family and friends or thousands and be prepared to do the promotion. Let go of any stigma you might have about self-publishing and make sure your product is something you can feel really proud of.

What has been the most satisfying part of this journey to seeing your book in print?

It has been amazing to interact with readers about the book. Many are able to think back on their own childhoods and understand how my family's story is both unique and universal. Growing up, there were no books or characters like me. TELM illuminates the experience of growing up in a multicultural family and I now a book like that exists.

The hardest or most surprising part?

The hardest part is motivating to promote. It's hard for me; totally unnatural.

What's next for you?

I'm actually going to self-publish the next section of memoir. It's a middle school memoir called Overdue Apologies. I hope it will be done in November. I'm also working on a YA novel about a Japanese American family from Los Angeles during WWII called Rice Paper Superheroes.

Thank you, Noriko, for being so generous in sharing your experiences with self-publishing! If you want to read an excerpt or review of Noriko's book, or would like to check out CreateSpace, the links are listed below.

excerpts from TELM http://www.norikonakada.com/p/excerpts.html
reviews of TELM http://www.norikonakada.com/p/reviews.html
createspace https://www.createspace.com/

The Idea of A Dog

2011-07-12T13:57:00.000-07:00

Today, I am sad. We made the decision last week that we cannot keep Fergie. I hesitate to even write these words because it still feels like too sensitive a situation, too new a decision to share with the world. But when it comes down to it, this is what I need to write about-- blog or no blog to report to.

Fergie nipped Cedar. I wasn’t home at the time; my friend was watching Cedar, and I guess he turned away for just a few seconds when it happened. I’m quite certain Cedar must have grabbed at Fergie’s face probably, because he’s done this before. Twice now, Cedar got to Fergie before we had a chance to intervene, and Fergie jumped up and barked which alerted me to the fact that there are limits to her tolerance. Ever since those instances, I’ve been extra vigilant in my supervision of the two of them, but inevitably there are going to be instances where I turn my head or step out of the room-- and in a matter of seconds, something unfortunate can happen.

Cedar is fine—he has a faint small bruise on his forehead, along with two tiny scrapes that you wouldn’t even notice if I didn’t point them out. He cried a bit when it happened, but otherwise doesn’t now seem afraid of Fergie or anything. But Fergie is now, clearly, wary of Cedar. She often gets up and goes elsewhere now when Cedar starts heading towards her. She is nervous around him, and that makes me nervous.

Fergie is not an aggressive dog by any means. But she is a sensitive dog, which can more easily bleed into that territory of fearful. I cringe to think what might happen now that this association with Cedar and pain has been established in her, what might happen if Cedar manages to grab at her face again or even just takes her by surprise. Because of this, Matthew and I feel that we have no choice but to give up Fergie. We can’t afford to take the risk of something like this happening again, or possibly worse. Cedar is so young that he still has another year probably before he can learn to not grab at impulse. And as he learns to walk and run around, his “reign of potential terror” will only get worse before it gets better.

I don’t want Fergie to get a bad rap. She is such an awesome dog, so affectionate and intuitive. She is great with Miles, our cat, and has grown up with a young child in the past, although not as young as Cedar. She definitely needs her exercise, but she is also quite calm and mellow. She likes to go after squirrels, as most dogs do, but relatively speaking she is good about not dashing off after distractions, about sticking close to you when off leash, and about coming back when called. She does pull on the leash, but not terribly bad, and these tendencies certainly could be corrected with a committed dose of training. She is not a barker, although she will bark at other dogs passing by when she is tied up outside. And like I said, she is not aggressive. At the dog park, she will mostly run away from other big dogs and try to play with the little ones, who are often afraid of her, at least initially. And, of course, other people are often afraid of her because she is a big, intimidating Doberman with a metal prong collar. Anyone who takes the time to observe her, however, can see that she is a sweetheart.

But like I said, she is sensitive. And throughout the 4^th of July holiday, Fergie was especially nervous. People started setting off fireworks on Friday, and even a week later, I heard an explosion or two. Of course, Fergie hears them all. And on what level of her being we can only speculate. Like many dogs, she gets shaky and wants to burrow into some dark, enclosed space. In our house, that meant the bedroom, where we temporarily moved her bed and let her lie on our bed when she insisted she wanted to be there. Ever since the 4^th, Fergie has still been a bit nervous. Even the sound of a carboy of beer bubbling in the corner sent her headed to the bedroom. And, perhaps, this made her more jumpy around Cedar, too. I can only speculate.

After Fergie nipped Cedar, my friend put her outside and Fergie’s hunched body and flattened ears showed that she knew she’d done wrong. That night and the next day, she seemed depressed to me, staying on her bed and not coming up to greet me and Cedar in the morning in the way she normally does. I think she has picked up on our feelings. How could she not? Animals are not like humans in the way that we overvalue our eyesight and rational powers at the expense of our intuition, hearing, or ability to pick up on energy. So Fergie undoubtedly has picked up on our sadness, and perhaps the sense that it has something to do with her.

Immediately following the nipping incident I felt a little cold towards her and kept my distance as my instinct to protect and nurture my son above all else surged into the foreground. But I never faulted Fergie, and as I’ve had time to process this whole incident, I’ve felt great surges of love and sadness for her. In a short time (two months), she has bonded with us, and us with her. I know it must be hard to be suddenly moved into a new home, and I feel awful to have to make her go through this process, especially so soon, again. I know it was up to us to make sure that Cedar only touched her gently, no matter how tolerant Fergie may have seemed. I know that many dogs would not tolerate a fraction of what she does. I feel bad that we weren’t more vigilant initially in our supervision of their interactions, but I thought that the little bit of pulling or crawling over her legs or back that slipped through the cracks of supervision would be okay. I do not blame myself, however, for I know I am an observant mother. It’s just unrealistic—not to mention extremely tiring—to stay at Cedar’s side every single second. It defies the point of all the care we take in child-proofing, when the one most important thing to supervise with your child is un-childproofable—short of putting Fergie outside.

I feel like this sadness is going to keep sinking in, in layers, and it will be a while, perhaps not until Fergie has been gone for many days, until I will be able to name what those layers are. Yes, I did go through a period during the first month of adopting her where I seriously questioned the decision, but ever since I got over that particularly tiring couple of weeks, I have committed myself to her and thought of her as a part of our family. Yes, there were still days when I resented my responsibility of making sure that she got enough exercise, but mostly I enjoyed our walks with the three of us, our own little unit. Yes, there were moments where I got frustrated at how she pulled on the leash or got in the way of the stroller, and vowed that I would take her to a training course, but mostly, we walked together fine. She waited patiently when I tied her up outside the store or at the park while Cedar swung, and then she’d happily get up and we’d be on our way again, sometimes with her giving Cedar a jovial lick on the face. I have been grateful to be forced to walk so much more, and I think that this added exercise is what has finally helped my ongoing back strain to get better. And in those rare moments when I have a chance to give Fergie some extra affection without Cedar’s needs trumping hers, I’ve felt only love towards this animal, love for her receptive presence, love for her love of us.

Unfortunately, those moments where I’d get to enjoy Fergie and bond with her one on one were all too rare. Cedar was always number one, and she would get whatever I had left over. I admit, it has been tiring caring for a big, sensitive dog, and a mobile, energetic baby/toddler at the same time. Those who cautioned that this might be the case were right. Although I’d committed myself to Fergie and gotten over my thoughts about giving her back, in the back of my mind I still sometimes wondered if it’d been the best decision right now. But never mind that. Matthew loved her, Cedar delighted in her presence, and I grew more attached to her every day. I knew that she would continue to bring our family joy, not to mention that she’d continue to get older and thus need less exercise, and the idea of how bonded we’d all be by the time she got old and grey warmed my heart—the idea of the ever-loyal, ever-happy, family dog.

It was the idea that seduced me in the beginning, and the idea that kept me committed (not to mention a sense of duty). Even within the blur of new parenthood, I was drawn to the knowledge held dormant inside of me ever since I was a child, that it was a joyful experience to bond with a dog. But here it is, one more confession: I know that once I get past this sadness, there will be a small part of me that is also relieved. My life will become simpler, easier again. We will no doubt try again with another dog, maybe a puppy, but not for a couple years at least. I will know better what the responsibility entails and I will make sure then that I am ready, and not acting out of some impulse for change.

I’m not saying that our decision to adopt Fergie was pure impulse. We’d talked about wanting a dog for some time. But we hadn’t talked about it recently, in the midst of raising Cedar. Yet in the end, the idea of getting an adult, yet still youthful, dog in which we knew her history, in which we knew—or thought we knew—how good she was with kids, and in which we knew that she’d been cared for by great people was too tempting. It seemed like the ideal situation. Not a puppy that would require boundless energy, and not a dog from the pound with an unknown past, but a big, gentle, smart, and completely vouched for dog. She sounded perfect. Too good to pass up. A gift from the Universe. A leap of faith.

It is always so disappointing when these leaps don’t turn out the way you hoped for. You want to trust in your decisions, your instincts, your impulses. But you can’t control the outcome, only your reaction to it.

In this case, it’s a no-brainer what we have to do. And I am sad. The good news is that there was another couple (also friends of Fergie’s previous owner) who was interested in adopting her, and they are excited to now give it a try. I really hope that Fergie won’t get shuttled around any more after her next stop. She needs a home where she can get lots affection, lots of exercise and ideally, not have to be tied up when outside (we don’t have a fence, so we kept her on a long lead when we let her out, but she was used to being able to roam freely at her old place). She also needs a home with children who have learned not to grab and pull. And she needs a home where someone needs her as much as she needs them.

Fergie is a dog you can quickly fall in love with-- especially if you don’t have a small child who is competing for every ounce of that love himself. She is the kind of dog who feels deeply present, keenly receptive to every noise, smell, word, or emotion. It is a huge gift to be able to share your life with other animals, not human. But it takes work, and the timing has to be right, and sometimes even when you want it to be right, it isn’t.

Always, In Flux (Or: The Current State of My Fifteen-Month Old’s Napping, Diet, Language Acquisition, Growth and Development)

2011-06-20T21:36:00.000-07:00

Babies are constantly changing. Everyone knows that. It’s one of those basic tenets of baby-rearing that becomes almost cliché. Just like the adage that goes, “Just when you think you’ve got them figured out, they switch it up on you.” True but, to most moms anyway, a cliché.

Babies are constantly changing, but there are definitely periods where the changes seem to come quicker, more suddenly. Skills that have been slowly coming along for months suddenly come together and voila! Suddenly, one day, you realize you are in the presence of a different baby. Not so different than yesterday, but definitely different than two weeks ago. Sometimes it’s the people who only see your baby every so often that are most able to articulate the marked change.

Cedar seems to be in one of those periods now. For one thing, he’s about to make that big leap from two naps to just one. Sigh. For the longest time he has napped around 10:00 and 3:00. We have had a three hour chunk in the middle of the day to eat lunch and then go on a long walk or excursion, meet up with a friend, or run errands. I’ve come to depend on this routine and appreciate its consistency. But as Cedar’s afternoon nap has continued to get pushed later, and consequently so has his bedtime, I’ve wondered lately if I should enforce the transition to one nap and get it over with. But then I’ve reconsidered; why force it? It should become obvious when he is ready.

Now, it’s looking more and more like we have reached the time to switch him over. Last week for three days in a row Cedar resisted going down for his first nap. I’d try, then give up, then try again, then give up, and finally he’d go down sometime between 11 and 12. But then the last couple days he’s been back to two naps, so this is all to say that we are no longer on a predictable schedule.

I know I just need to go with the flow for a while until he settles into a new routine, but it’s unsettling to me to have to play each day by ear and feel unsure about what we’re doing, when is bedtime, whether I can commit to plans with friends, or sign him up for that upcoming swim class. I know, I know, big friggin’ deal, right? These are the kinds of deliberations that probably aren’t very interesting to others, unless you are a parent like me who is slightly obsessed with sleep and who really likes to have a routine. I am by no means someone who likes to over-schedule my day, but I sure do like to know when naps, bedtime and wake up time are. These are hard-earned badges of a tired parent. It unnerves me to have it change every day now in a seesaw pattern. And it can’t be that great for Cedar either. His little body has an internal clock too, and a transition like this no doubt will throw him off for a while--although I suspect he’s more resilient than I am.

It’s probably no coincidence that this switch to a new schedule coincides with a period where Cedar is really exploring the reaches of his body and environment. Cedar didn’t learn to crawl and cruise around on furniture until he was over a year old, and since then it’s still taken him a while to realize that he is free to roam at will through the entire house. He isn’t one of those babies who just took off and was everywhere once they learned to crawl. It’s only now, at fifteen months, where I can truly say he is into everything; every day he discovers a new (un-childproofed) corner full of plants or lamps, a new dubiously supportive chair to pull up on, a new shelf to pull things off of. Only now is he of that age where he will take off with a devious grin as you come after him, playing a game of hard to get. I’ve also been teaching him how to safely get off our bed (mattress) by getting on his belly and sliding his feet off first, and although he still hasn’t mastered the whole maneuver, he sure looks satisfied when he manages a close approximation.

My baby is becoming a toddler. He says, “Hiii…” in a sweet call and response with me, and he understands so much of what we say now—in both English and Chinese. My mom watches him five or six hours a week and speaks to him solely in Chinese. I reinforce what he learns with her by scattering in words and phrases throughout our day when I’m in the mood, and to my delight, this has been enough for him to understand the language! Gei wo, chuan wazi, xiezi, kai deng, kan feiji… Give it to me, put on your socks, shoes, turn on the light, look at the airplane… he knows these, and plenty more. My baby is bilingual! It’s amazing how they soak things up and learn.

He also knows now what ‘no’ means, and he’s old enough to erupt in a tantrum of an arching back and screaming protest when prevented from doing something he wants. I’m seeing more of his stubborn will every day. It’s both exciting and daunting to think about this coming (nearly here, already here?) stage of toddlerhood. Perhaps I will soon long for the “easy days of old” when he was a baby, as much as I’ve longed for the “easier days to come” when I’m no longer nursing and can eat whatever I want again, not to mention leave him for a whole evening or (hard to even imagine now)— a whole week!

Quick diet update: I am still not eating any dairy, soy, garlic, onions, tomatoes, citrus, coffee or chocolate. When you can’t eat garlic, it’s near impossible to eat out (unless I want to just special order a plain piece of meat, after first ascertaining that they don’t cook with soy oil, so why bother when I can make something much tastier at home?). Soy, of course, is everywhere—in most store-bought breads, crackers, chips, spreads, you name it—so that is a big one I need to watch out for. Both soy and garlic still give Cedar terrible gas pains (last time I tested), which leads to a terrible nights of sleep for all of us. I’ve learned from experience many times that it is not worth it for me to eat soy in any quantity. I will eventually test these main off-limit foods again, but there’s plenty of other stuff to test and retest in the meantime.

With his other restrictions, I’ve started to allow a little here and there. Dairy gives Cedar a rash, but it’s not too bad if I just have a little on rare occasion. I will occasionally now allow some organic ketchup on a burger, or some canola mayo (that has lemon in it) on my sandwiches, because being able to eat those two condiments goes a long way in the flavor diversity department. I will also occasionally allow a rare, beautiful cup of coffee, which doesn’t seem to affect Cedar unless I start to have it multiple days in a row. And I will eat a few pieces of certain brands of salami or other items that contain the ambiguous ingredient “spices” which no doubt means a little onion or garlic powder, but which I can get away with in small quantities. I still stay away from cabbage and broccoli, especially raw. Beans, which I’ve tried a bit more of recently, seem okay.

It has gotten way easier, this diet, but we are far from being out of the woods. In the meantime, I’m still constantly trying out new foods directly with Cedar, and since it is a rare day when he doesn’t have some slight rash on his cheeks still, then it can be hard to gauge whether he is having a subtle reaction to something or not. I never want to feed a huge quantity of something to him before I’ve given him just a little the first time, and so inevitably there are many foods I have to give him several times before I can truly say (or guess) that they are okay.

So far (besides the aforementioned things that I’m not eating and so by extension am definitely not giving Cedar until he can first tolerate my eating them), he has also proved sensitive to: bananas, strawberries, possibly potatoes and corn, and also plums, apricots, and peaches. I plan to retest the latter-mentioned fruits because I so hope he can enjoy with us the summer harvest, but I’ll hold off on the other stuff in the time being because my suspicion is great enough, and because there’s plenty of other new stuff I can introduce to him first.

This is such a slow process because I don’t want to test stuff on him if he’s already got a rash, and I also don’t want to test stuff on him if I’ve eaten something questionable myself within the last couple days. For the longest time I was also following the ‘wait three days after trying something new’ rule, but lately I’ve grown impatient and sometimes only wait a day or two if we are trying foods that I’m not that worried about. I’ve tried both egg yolk and whites on him separately, but he didn’t eat much of them, and his ensuing rash the next few days was not obvious enough for me to be able to say definitively if it was from the eggs or not. I haven’t gotten around to trying any nuts or shellfish on Cedar yet, but I have given him tuna and salmon which seem okay, thankfully. Wheat and gluten are fine too (thank god—it wouldn’t be fair for one kid to have so many restrictions!), as are all the meats he’s tried—chicken, turkey, beef, and a tiny bit of pork.

Because of our slow progression in trying new foods, and also because he is somewhat of a picky eater (well, who wouldn’t be when you have only been allowed so few things), Cedar’s diet right now consists mostly of a few key foods: oatmeal, bread, pasta, and puffs; blueberries (his favorite), apples, pears, and peas; a bit of the aforementioned meats (he’s not so hot on plain meat- who can blame him- but LOVED the bbq smoked chicken); carrots he can take or leave, and the same goes for green beans, beets, or squash. I’m constantly trying to strategize what else I can give him, as this diet seems rather boring and often vegetable deficient (usually all he’ll eat are peas and avocados) and protein deficient. It’s hard to make things more enticing when there are still so many foods and spices he hasn’t tried. His main source of protein is still breast milk, and since he can’t have any other kinds of milk, this means it’s important for me to keep nursing for some time—especially until he’s outgrown some of his allergies.

I’ve thought about sharing some of the ways we’ve learned to make food taste good during this period with so many restrictions, although I doubt that many people out there with food sensitivities would match our particular list of what’s okay or not okay. (People always assume that I can’t have gluten when I mention ‘food sensitivities,’ because that’s the allergy that has become more common and thus recognized in our culture. Restaurant people also often don’t realize that soy is in everything, and that vegetable oil = soy oil. And I’m not vegan; I eat eggs and meat, but I can’t do dairy.) I know, it’s a lot to keep track of. But personal gripes aside, I doubt that there are many out there who have to avoid the combo of dairy, garlic, onions, tomatoes and citrus. How do you cook a tasty pasta without these things?! Think lots of olives, capers, mushrooms, peppers, or artichoke hearts; plenty of herbs, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. For other flavor punches, also think bacon, roasted root veggies, and lots of avocados. And think spices like celery salt, paprika, and cumin. Not curry powder though, because that has garlic in it usually, and nothing too spicy either.

Anyway, this blog post is all over the place. I guess it’s just my personal taking stock of where we’re at now during this period of solstice and change. We’re growing up, we’re letting go, we’re stuck in old ways, we’re holding on. We’re trying to remember to appreciate each day, each stage, and each small new success along the way. We’re not walking yet, but we’re getting closer every day, and not that much in a hurry. (I was relieved, however when Cedar finally started crawling because it is such a useful skill for him to have in the interim before walking, even if it is not an essential milestone.)

What else? We’re packing up the 12 months, well into the 18s, already wearing some of the 2T tops, and soon, believe it or not, even 3Ts will be on the radar. (Our collection of hand-me-downs are in constant rotation between the too big or too small boxes in the attic, the “holding drawers” for the next size on the horizon, and then the one big drawer for current mainstays.) One month, one age, one size bleeds into the next, and before I know it, I’m signing my baby up for co-op preschool (starting next fall! Just one morning a week, though).

Some days I think that my life is incredibly tedious and boring. Other days I feel incredibly thankful and blessed. Some days I can’t wait for Cedar to get older and start going to school so I can claim back more time to write and work. Other days I just want to savor these days when he’s still a baby, my constant companion, sidekick, boob man, snugglebug nestled into my chest. I want it to faster, I want it to go slower. Always this push and pull, push and pull. Always, we finally reach out only when someone is about to leave. Always, something to praise, something to disdain. Always, in flux. Always, the norm. Always, surprises. Always, this moment to anchor my fly-away thoughts, to anchor my being in what is.

Boob Salutations, Co-sleeping with my Toddler, and Trust

2011-06-12T15:10:00.000-07:00

“I finally figured out what my breasts are for,” I said to my husband the other night. For feeding my little suckling pig, of course! Sometimes these days the way my son lunges for them and sucks reminds me of a little animal. And no longer will I ever look upon my breasts as some sensual, yet essentially “useless” fleshy, doughy appendage. When my son nurses it is utterly obvious now why they were created—not for my partner’s pleasure, much less for the ogling eyes of men on the street, and not even for my own enjoyment. Breasts, hands down, are for babies.

When Cedar was first born they grew huge, hard, and sometimes clogged with milk. For six months—or more like nine—I wore nursing bras religiously, accepting their less than flattering support for the convenience of being able to whip out the breast at a moment’s request. Eventually, though, I realized that they’d shrunken back down to my pregnancy size and that I could fit back into a couple of my nicer bras. Cedar also wasn’t nursing as much by then, so I could usually just nurse him at home and there’d be no emergency need to feed in public—which exposes more flesh than I’d prefer, especially when not wearing a nursing bra.

It’s been a relief to not have to nurse quite as much in public, simply because it’s a hassle to have to stop what you are doing and find a comfortable, clean place to sit down yet still be discreet. That said, I don’t plan to stop nursing anytime soon. I still love nursing--and as my baby undeniably makes the transition to toddlerhood, I appreciate this ritual that much more.

Nursing has changed since when Cedar was a baby. Long gone are the days when he’d just lie there inert for over an hour sometimes, and gone are the days when he’ll easily fall asleep at the boob. Now, at times, nursing can feel more like an acrobatic sport. We still mostly nurse lying down on the bed, only now Cedar will stick his butt up in the air and nurse in a “downward dog” position. Or, he’ll want both breasts to be out and accessible so he can switch back and forth as he pleases. He’ll let me know this by signing for milk, tugging at my bra, or simply grunting in his all-encompassing language, “Uh.” (Amazingly, I almost always know what “uh” means.) I indulge his requests, as long as he is actually nursing and not say, patting at my other boob, biting, or pinching my other nipple. That’s where I draw the line. Mostly though, his antics amuse me. He can be a goofy kid, and I am more prone to indulge silliness than stifle it.

Cedar nurses the most in the morning when he wakes around 6:30. I am usually still half-asleep, so I’m not sure how long exactly he nurses for, but it feels like a long time—half an hour, sometimes more? On both boobs. Lying down, draped across me, downward dog, moving through all the positions—call it “Boob Salutations.” Then during the day he usually only nurses for five minutes or so at a time, before or after his two naps. Before bedtime, he nurses for another 10-30 minutes depending on whether he’s in the mood to fall asleep that way or not. And although I’ve tried not to nurse him every time he wakes up at night, I’ve recently gone back to just wanting him to fall back asleep as quickly as possible (in order to gain back more of my evening with Matthew or to go back to sleep myself), so that means that I usually nurse for about 5-10 minutes every 2-3 hours throughout the night.

For those who co-sleep, this may not come as a big surprise—a fourteen month old who still wakes and nurses through the night. For others, it probably sounds like hell and you are probably quietly thanking your own wisdom in choosing not to co-sleep. For me, by now, I’ve pretty much accepted this situation. I went through a few periods of “we’ve got to change this night waking problem!” resolve, but Elizabeth Pantley’s ‘”no-cry sleep solution” nipple removal techniques didn’t seem to reduce his waking, and nor did my husband’s intervention (we’ve been having him go to Cedar when he wakes before we’ve gone to bed ourselves, and although this has helped Cedar learn to go to sleep better without me and the boob, it can also take forever and has not helped him wake any less).

I know I would sleep better (duh) if Cedar wasn’t waking so much still, but that said, I am mostly only half-waking when he half-wakes, and unconsciously putting the boob in his mouth for a quick fix before we’re both snoozing quietly again. I know Cedar isn’t hungry. I know that this is now a firmly entrenched habit (or call it ritual if you want it to sound better). I know that it could potentially be broken with “only” a couple weeks (or more) of night weaning torture (especially since we are not planning to stop co-sleeping any day soon), but frankly I’m not ready to put us through that yet.

I am all for doing what’s easiest, as long as it’s still working for us. There were periods when Cedar was waking even more than he is now when I wasn’t so sure it was “working” anymore. But now, it’s been several months with no real complaints from me, aside from the occasional off night. Cedar no longer wakes from gas at night, unless I happen to have been testing eating or feeding him some new food that doesn’t settle well. Mostly now, I think Cedar’s waking now just comes with the territory of co-sleeping.

When Matthew and I were trying to decide whether or not to co-sleep, I read all kinds of literature that proclaimed how mama and baby both sleep better when co-sleeping-- yet I also read things that said they both sleep lighter and wake more. Contradictory? Perhaps. I don’t want to fully debate the merits versus shortcomings of co-sleeping here, but suffice it to say that since we didn’t and don’t plan to switch to a crib, we’ll never really know if Cedar would have slept better that way. Sometimes I think he would, because sometimes me and Matthew’s movements or sounds (when first coming to bed at night, for instance) wake him. Also, even though we have a king-sized bed, sometimes Cedar rolls over virtually on top of me, and then I have to move him and then he stirs, nearly wakes, and so I nurse him quickly so that he won’t wake for real.

And yet, despite all this, I’m still tempted to believe that co-sleeping was the best choice for us all. Not only was it a practical choice since we have a tiny house, but I also can only imagine what it would have been like to have to get up each time he woke during the many hard months when his intestinal issues would cause him to wake crying in pain in the middle of the night, and how long it might have taken for both of us to fall back asleep. And now, even without his gas problems, I can’t really imagine giving up co-sleeping. Ultimately we chose to go this route because we wanted to. And now, I’m as attached to it as Cedar is.

For those who choose to co-sleep, there is undeniably something we love about it, something we grow close to, something that ingrains itself in us over the many months we do it. When you grow used to being so close to the soft breath of your baby upon drifting to sleep, it feels strange and wrong to have him elsewhere. When you grow used to those morning snuggles and nursing sessions and the “wolf pack” feeling of all being in one bed, it seems like it’d be hard to arbitrarily pick an age when the baby is moved into a separate space. Of course, if you didn’t enjoy anything about co-sleeping in the first place, it’d be a no-brainer to boot the baby, for you’d gain back luxurious space to stretch your limbs and freedom to make love or read or whatever else you do for pleasure at night in your bed.

It’s not a black and white issue for me. There are definite pros and cons. I don’t know if we would do it differently if we were to have another one. A part of me says, yes, definitely, we would move that baby into a crib after that initial, intense newborn stage of constant nursing-- by four months perhaps… or maybe six. But then I wonder if I’d really be able to. Perhaps if turns out to be a really hard transition getting Cedar out of our bed and if he goes on to have trouble sleeping alone, I will rethink this strategy. And yet, I’m not really that worried about this transition; beyond the initial getting used to, I think that most kids who co-slept as babies and toddlers end up doing just fine on their own. Mostly, it’s just hard to imagine doing things differently than whatever you and your partner have chosen. We gravitate to what we know. It’s easier to go with the status quo than to tempt the unpredictable results of executing change.

Some might be surprised to learn that even the most stringent sleep-training experts (think Weisblaum and Ferber) now both have sections in their books that allow for co-sleeping as a viable, healthy option. Weisblaum talks about how if a mom chooses to nurse immediately upon demand at night and the baby consequently doesn’t wake all the way, then the baby’s sleep cycles are not disturbed and so there is no “sleep problem.” Along these lines, I feel Cedar is well-rested (except for the occasional off night). And hands down, he’s got a secure attachment to me, to us. Hands down, he’s got a cozy bed.

But what about you, you say? What about my sleep cycles, I say? Well, most days I feel fine. I have plenty of energy, and only drink a couple cups of tea a day—not coffee, but tea! Of course, I’m not required to use my brain that much or sit in meetings or talk to other adults, so it is entirely likely that if I had a different “day job” I might discover that my mental capacity is sub par—but that’s what coffee’s for, right? I go to sleep at 10:30 or 11 most nights and I get up around seven. I get a decent night’s rest, even if you should probably subtract an hour or so for the nightly interruptions of my sleep cycle (even if I am not technically even awake for an hour).

True, I admit I am also excited for the day when Cedar moves to his own bed and when I am not waking (briefly) every two or three hours. But I also know I’ll miss co-sleeping. Just like I’ll miss nursing when Cedar is eventually weaned. I’ll miss that snuggly feeling of fitting inside each other’s bodies. I’ll miss the way he throws his foot on top of my belly and leg, I’ll miss the way he rests a hand on my breast. I’ll miss the perfect way in which we fit together within this act of nourishment.

My body makes the perfect nutrients for you, my little one. Nutrients that have kept you healthy, with only one cold the entire fourteen months of your life, not to mention providing a major source of your daily diet that is free. I don’t have to worry about you not getting enough to eat, because I know you will make up for it when you nurse. And although it has no doubt been challenging to have to restrict my diet because of your sensitivities (I’m still not eating dairy, soy, garlic, onions, citrus, tomatoes, coffee and chocolate—with an occasional exception), I choose this any day over having you wake in pain or get a red itchy rash on your face.

I’ve never considered not nursing you. First of all, there’s no easy solution since you couldn’t even have dairy- or soy-based formulas to supplement. But mostly, breastfeeding just seems like the most natural, bonding act for me. You came into this world with the instinct to root and nurse, and despite all the ways in which you are growing and changing from a little baby into a little boy (oh my!), nursing is this seamless link that we have, this way of connection and love. You’ll have your whole life to be more “independent” and weaned. What’s another year at the breast?

I know plenty of moms who are still nursing and co-sleeping with their toddlers. In our Seattle culture, it is not so strange; even the World Health Organization recommends nursing until at least two. But I know that the older my son gets, the more strange our choices may seem to others—and I admit, I don’t really want to have my son run up to me on the playground for a quick nip. So the older he gets, the more seldom we will nurse, until eventually one of us will decide that it’s time to stop altogether.

Which will come first—weaning from the breast or weaning from co-sleeping? Hard to say. I wouldn’t be surprised if they happen close together. Maybe not at the exact same time, so as to ease the transition. But they are tied together for us. It would be hard to wean while still co-sleeping, though not impossible. And it would similarly be hard to move Cedar to his own bed and simultaneously deny him this great source of comfort he’s known since birth. So we’ll see, keep taking it day by day. Keep making the choices that feel right for us.

At a certain point, I just stopped caring what the books said—whether they were of the mainstream variety or in the attachment parenting vein. I found that all the reading, questioning and plotting based on someone else’s recommendations just made me feel stressed out or guilty about my own choices that diverged from the norm. I found that once I accepted that I was doing things the way I was because they felt right, and not because I could rationalize them into being right, then the arguments for pros and cons dropped away.

I am learning to accept that in parenting there is no “perfect” way to do things. There is only the one winding, messy, and unique path that you and your family carve out for yourself. And this path is based on way too many variables—both the seen and the unseen—to follow any one singular guide but your own.

Words for the Children

2011-06-10T16:25:00.000-07:00

My son, Cedar, loves to read. Or rather, he loves to look at books. And sometimes he likes to listen to them, too. Sometimes not. Sometimes he’d rather just turn the pages really fast. But, in any case, books are his favorite “toy.” We can pass some good chunks of time sprawled out on our king-sized mattress on the floor, reading.

Cedar is fourteen months old, but with many of the books he likes, I don’t think age really matters. In fact, I think that’s what distinguishes a good book from a great one. The great ones, anyone can enjoy. And perhaps it is no coincidence that the ones that I like, my son likes too. I’m sure it affects how often I reach for said book and with what level of enthusiasm I might read it. But that said Cedar most definitely expresses his own preferences, too.

I thought I’d share with you some of our favorites.

Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? by Dr. Seuss: We read this one from the beginning for many, many months. No matter how many times I’ve repeated the silly rhymes, I can still get into it. (Disclaimer: I enjoy making weird noises). Cedar especially loved the “BOOM BOOM BOOM! Mr. Brown is a wonder!” page-- mouth opening, eyes widening, and hands quivering with excitement, something he’s done since he was an infant. That said, I’m also glad we finally moved on—and so was Cedar. I was starting to have to read it with an English accent or sing it with impromptu melodies or read it super fast to entertain myself.
Hug by Jez Alborough: Cedar’s torn this one apart. For a while, he’d just turn back and forth between a few key pages. There are no words in this book except for the cry of “Hug” which is uttered by a little monkey in search of his mother, wandering through the jungle observing all the animals hugging. I like narrating this one in slightly different ways each time, sometimes just reading the word hug, sometimes asking “Where is his mama?” with a sad voice as the monkey travels along, and sometimes pointing out the different names of animals. Cedar is always so excited when they find each other at the end-- and the other animals hug in celebration too. It makes me wonder how much he understands.
Mud by Mary Lyn Ray: This is a lush and beautiful picture book with vivid, abstract paintings of mud and toes and green. It’ simple and poetic, a pleasure to ingest, invoking the thawing of Winter and coming of Spring. Cedar had a love affair with it (with due quivering and gaping), but now it’s on the ‘rest’ cycle of our rotation.
Whoever You Are by Mem Fox: “Little one, whoever you are, wherever you are, there are little ones just like you all over the world…” this book begins, with colorful, intricate (yet not too intricate for a baby to take in) and whimsical paintings of people from all different cultures doing things differently and the same (i.e. crying, laughing, going to school). It’s got a wonderful message about diversity and our shared inner humanity, but not in a preachy or annoying way. (A little man in a blue sombrero also floats around in the sky with a bunch of kids.)
The House in the Night by Susan Marie Swanson is Cedar’s current favorite. Up until a couple months ago, he didn’t take much interest in this book’s wonderfully detailed black and white line etchings, highlighted with splashes of yellow (a sun and moon, a key, a bird, a light). This Caldecott medal winner has a wonderfully poetic rhythm and circular, chant-like story invoking the innerconnectedness between everything. It starts with the picture of a child being handed a key, “Here is the key to the house.” And on the next page, “In the house burns a light…”.

Cedar has plenty of other board books he likes, but I save these special, favorite ones for bedtime. That way we will not easily tire of them, and it makes bedtime that much more sacred. (Yes, it is a sacred hour when my child goes to sleep!) These books have messages for both of us-- whether it’s silliness, wonder, open-heartedness, or magic. They are messages that are meant for anyone of any age. Thank you to our dear friends who gifted them to us!

What books do you and your child love to read together?

Please share your list!

To Remodel or Not to Remodel?

2011-06-01T16:34:00.000-07:00

Right now my husband and I are trying to figure out whether we can afford to take on a major remodel project in the next year or so. We need more space. Our house is 810 square feet, with only one small bedroom, a tiny kitchen, and a three-quarter bath. We consciously chose from the get-go to sleep with our son in our bed, so this helps out with the lack of a space for a crib much less a proper “nursery,” but we don’t want to sleep with him forever (obviously). He’ll need his own room.

We live in a cedar cabin in the midst of Meadowbrook, a residential neighborhood in Northeast Seattle. The cabin has one large ‘great room’ with an A-frame ceiling which houses our dining area on one side, living area in the middle, and desks, shelves, dresser, changing table, and piles of laundry on the other side. Lots of built-in shelving helps us utilize our space, but nevertheless, space is tight. Cedar’s outgrown clothes, along with sleeping bags, Christmas ornaments, bedding, and all kinds of artifacts from Els and Frank are stored up in the attic. We have more storage space in an unfinished basement area too, but only for things that won’t grow moldy from the dampness.

Ideally, we’d like to add on two more bedrooms—one for Cedar and one which I could use as my office or a guest room. We’d like a large bedroom for us, along with a master bath, and we’d love a nice big kitchen with an island and shiny new appliances (our current appliances all date to the seventies). We’d love to put in a couple skylights in the living room which is always so dark due to all the tall cedars and maples surrounding our property. We’d also love a nice deck, and a two-car garage or carport.

What we want isn’t exactly extravagant, but it also isn’t going to be cheap. And we are not exactly rich. But eventually, whether we do it now or five years from now, we are going to need more room—at very least an extra bedroom for Cedar. But since it wouldn’t be architecturally that feasible or practical to just tack on one room, we might as well do more while we’re tearing down walls. So the question is, do we take the plunge, commit to a tight budget and do it now, or do we wait until we feel a little more financially sound?

Over the last couple months we’ve been doing the preliminary research. We went to our credit union and learned about interest rates for a variable rate line of credit versus a fixed rate loan. We got an estimate of what our monthly payments might be for a $100,000 loan versus a $150,000 one. We talked to a couple architects and a contractor about our ideas, and got a better sense of our possibilities. Namely, we surmised that we were not going to be able to come close to doing what we want for $100,000, and even $150,000 on the low end. Better to shoot for the $150,000-$200,000 range, because remodeling always costs more than you think, and because we’d better have some wiggle room or else we will end up very very stressed out or very very screwed—or both.

The only problem is, we are not sure we can afford even the monthly payment for the $150,000 loan. On paper, perhaps, we can make it work. But in reality, we are not very good at sticking to a budget. Do we eat beans and rice when there’s no more money in checking to buy groceries at the end of the month? Of course not! We transfer money over from savings (or we overdraft, and our bank kindly transfers it for us, yet with no fees so we are never ‘punished’ for our carelessness). And we are not talking about a very big savings to begin with. So do we really want to take such a plunge where we will be so tight every month that there is no money to go on trips, to spend on treats, to hire a babysitter, or to stray at all from our budget?

It’s not as if we live lavishly right now by any means. Do we really want to be slaves to a monthly payment for the next 20 or 30 years? We have been blessed by the huge gift of owning a house, but not having a mortgage. I’m not sure we quite realize yet how huge this gift is. I think we might miss the freedom it affords us very quickly once this is no longer our reality. I think we might no longer care so much about the extra bedroom, the bathtub, the counter space, or even a basement free of mold. After all, I reminded my husband, we used to live not long ago in a cabin with a woodstove for heat, a compostible toilet on the porch, and no shower to speak of. When we first moved to our house (also a cabin) in Seattle, it felt like a luxury just to have instant hot water flowing from the faucets and heat to turn on with the flick of a knob.

But of course, we quickly adapted. And of course, the older we get, the more we want, and the less tolerant we are of shitty cars and outdoor toilets. Backpacking for weeks on end in primitive conditions sounds less and less appealing, whereas having things like a nice garden, energy efficient appliances, good sharp knives, and soft down comforters become more important.

I’m pretty sure we will eventually build an addition; it seems unavoidable. And yet… if I had to choose between the freedom to still be able to write and care for Cedar versus working full-time to help us meet our payments, I’m not so sure anymore. Maybe if we wait a couple years we’ll get some of our other debt paid off and maybe Matthew will be making a bit more then and a big loan will feel more feasible and comfortable. But then, maybe by then interest rates will shoot up, Matthew’s job security will be on shaky ground, and Cedar’s school costs will start to kick in.

I know at some point we will just have to decide to do it, take the plunge and commit. I’m just not sure that time is now. I’m starting to wonder if sticking a bed in the corner of our living room for a couple years—or else just continuing to co-sleep with Cedar—might be preferable to being stuck with a huge payment that we are stretched each month to pay.

I’d love to hear from those of you who have embarked on big remodeling projects—what you’ve learned, what you’d do differently, how having the new space has improved your life, or not. What kind of stresses has the process put on your relationships?

Matthew and I have had some tense conversations just trying to get ourselves this far in the process—and we haven’t even decided to do it yet! I can only imagine how the pressure of being displaced from our home for several months, closely tracking expenses and bills, and basically living and breathing the remodel project from start to finish (which will no doubt squeeze out time for writing, for fun, for anything else)—how all of this will tax us.

It will be worth it, I think, if we can stay on a budget we are comfortable with and if we are happy with the end result-- in particular, a vision that doesn't quash the character of the cabin. But we need to really think this through first and know what we’re doing before we start. There's a time for trusting in the Universe and there’s a time for trusting in your own detailed planning. In this case, I vote for the latter.

Happiness is Not A Point of Negotiation

2011-05-27T17:05:00.000-07:00

Your insomnia is a gift from your darkness calling, Wake up! Wake up! Let yourself feel what is churning inside of you. –Anne Liu Kellor, Facebook status update, 5/19/11

You know when you’re going along thinking you’re fine, and then all of a sudden you realize you’re not? I’ve been experiencing this recently. The last blog post I wrote was all about patting myself on the back for finding balance, patience, acceptance and perspective in the midst of never having enough time to do the things I most want to do—and I meant all those things that I wrote as I wrote them. But then the very next day I found myself unable to sleep until 3 a.m., and the night after that I didn’t sleep AT ALL. What is going on? I asked myself. I didn’t feel stressed about anything in particular, I’d been getting plenty of exercise, I went to bed at my usual hour, so why couldn’t I go to sleep?

The last time I’d had a bout of insomnia was back in November during the weeks leading up to my 4Culture reading, during which I needed to find a venue, advertise, tailor excerpts from my project to read (which ended up being more or less like writing three new short essays), and force myself to work on this in any spare moment I could find. It was exciting to have a deadline again, to organize and host what would be my first solo reading, and to cast myself back into the identity of a writer, but it was also stressful. The writing I do for this blog is not stressful, because there are no deadlines except for the (loosely) self-imposed, and because I don’t worry so much about it being “perfect.” I know people read it, but I don’t have to see their reactions first-hand. So suffice it to say that when the reading was over I was relieved to go back to my relatively stress-free life (besides the daily demands of mothering)-- and I started sleeping fine again too.

What I’ve realized from this most recent round of insomnia is: I desperately need more time to write. The few hours a week I manage to get most weeks is not cutting it. I long to actually sit at my desk regularly again, and not have it littered with Cedar’s clothes and unpaid bills. And just writing for this blog is ultimately not enough. I’ve got whole books I’ve abandoned—one finished in search of a publisher, and one that is still in relative infancy—and I don’t know how much longer I can go without working on them.

What I’ve realized is: I’m not happy right now. I’ve tried hard to be accepting of this “break” from my former writing life due to the demands of motherhood, and I’ve been pleased with my ability to adapt to working in short bursts of time, but that doesn’t mean that there has not been some part of me who has been longing, pining—and now, desperately yearning—for more time. Time that allows for sinking into a more meditative space. Time that allows for re-reading old drafts so that I can remember the voice and story that I was working with. Time to stew, time to edit, time to research and submit. Time to actually feel like a writer again. Time to reassure myself that it will not take years of Cedar’s childhood to pass before I re-enter what I’ve long considered to be my life’s passion, practice, and vocation.

It is hard. My husband and I live on one income-- his. After we moved to Seattle and before I got pregnant, I was starting to find venues to teach through here, along with a few new writing mentees to work with one-on-one, as well as some volunteering gigs with writing and youth. I was hardly making any money, but I was making connections and building on the same writing and teaching path that I’ve been carving out slowly now for years. At the same time, I was trying to finish my Heart Radical manuscript. I knew that if I ever hoped to get a teaching position in a college, that I would need to have a book published.

My husband and I had many conversations about the choices I was making. I wanted him to understand how my commitment to writing was both my passion (i.e. I need to keep writing or I will shrivel and die) and related to more practical teaching and publishing goals (see, I’m not just a dreamer, I’ve thought this through). He supported my dreams; after all, he was a creative, artistic person himself. And yet, now that we were married and sharing expenses all the way and talking about having kids and no longer living the hippy lifestyle we once did in the cabin on the acreage in Olympia, he no longer seemed quite as supportive as before.

And why not? We were doing okay financially on one income, due to the fact that I’d inherited a house in Seattle with no mortgage. But mostly I think he was, understandably, envious of my lifestyle. What it came down to was a sense of equity, and his idea of me sitting at home reading and writing and dreaming all day, whereas he had to get up and go to a real job. He liked his job and it was intellectually challenging to him and helping him grow in many ways, but still, it was not akin to his passions, like fly-fishing or making music.

Of course, I saw this all a little differently since he wasn’t exactly planning to build a career based on fly-fishing, and since I have never considered writing to be just a hobby. True, I hadn’t yet made it big with publishing. And despite a successful two-year run of private classes I led in Olympia, I wasn’t exactly a stellar entrepreneur in the teaching department. But I was stubborn, damnit, and determined to keep writing and teaching writing. I would buy all my clothes at Value Village (which I do anyway), drive an ’88 station wagon, never eat out, forego all luxuries. I was good at living simply in the service of “working” less so that I could write more. I’d spent years at this practice.

We had some tense conversations, but ultimately, I convinced him that it was important for me to stay focused within this “career path” and not just go “get any old job” which would neither help us that much financially nor help my resume. With all the traveling and contract jobs I’d held, I’d kind of pigeon-holed myself into a very narrow job market, jobs that pretty much only existed if I invented them myself. Help Wanted: freelance creative writing teacher.

Flash-forward to now. Now, we have a fifteen-month-old, two car loans, a big dog, a fat cat, and a tiny one-bedroom cabin that is badly in need of an addition. We are doing fine on Matthew’s income, but we certainly aren’t saving much money—whether for immediate needs, for Cedar’s future, for our house, or for a retirement (what’s that?). Since the kinds of jobs that I could get as a freelance teacher or, say, working with children are not going to bring in near the salary that my husband now makes, it makes sense that he fulfill the traditional role as bread-winner, and that I stay home with Cedar. The cost of childcare would not make it worth it for me to work-- that is, if you only consider working to be about making money.

Enter my dilemma. I love staying home with Cedar. I know plenty of moms who cannot make this choice and who surely envy all the time I get to hang out with my son. I know that he is growing fast, and that when he eventually goes to school, I will get back some of my own time. I am grateful for my husband’s support, and for his willingness to take on the “professional” role, even when this is still a relatively new role for him to play. I am willing to let go of so much of the time I used to have to write, to pursue teaching gigs, and to edit works of nonfiction. I have been willing to let that all go in service to my son and our family. A part of me has even been relieved at times to let all the “career-striving” stuff go and to just sink into this alternate reality of mother, caregiver, servant, Goddess. I know why the goals and awards are important, but they are not why I write. I will always have just pure writing to come back to. There is no hurry. I can pick up where I left off. Right?

Sort of. All of the above is only partially true, while another part of me has been starving. Frustrated. Angry. Sad. And finally, now, fifteen months after giving birth, I feel the need, undeniable, to claim more of what I need. Time to myself. Time to write. Three hours a week is not enough. (Right now, my mom watches Cedar about four hours a week, but so much of that time gets eaten up by errands and chores. Matthew then watches Cedar on the weekends, but a couple hours away is usually all I get. I could ask mother to watch Cedar a bit more, but she is not willing to commit to more than just an afternoon a week for now, and psychologically it is important to me to KNOW that I can count on a certain day and time each week. It is too tiring to negotiate week by week.)

So what to do? The simplest solution: we need to hire a babysitter. Once a week for a few hours. That’s all. We can afford it, if we decide we can. It’s that important. For no one in this family will be happy if I am not happy. I am the mother, the bill keeper, the house cleaner, the diaper buyer. I am the nurturer, the researcher, the plan maker, the story weaver. I declare my work to be important, even if it does not bring in money. I didn’t spend fifteen years of my life discovering the writing path as my path only to let it drizzle away quietly. I am willing to learn how to get by on WAY less time than before, and yet, this willingness has its limits.

My husband wants me to be happy. He understands, especially after talking to me, that I need more time. He understands (to the degree that he can) how Cedar clings to me, needs me, saps me, and how this all-enveloping experience of motherhood for me is different for me than what fatherhood has been for him. I live and breathe Cedar every day, every night. If I enter the room, he goes to me—like a moth to a flame, as Matthew says. The only way I can take a break in this household is to physically leave, or else Cedar will find me. I go to a café most weekends and write for a couple hours, but then I reach a point where I am hungry and need to come home, and even if I could easily sit down, print out what I’ve written, edit, and keep writing for several more hours, my time unfortunately stops the minute I walk in the door. It is a rare hour where I am home alone, and even then, it is near impossible to not want to first run a load of dishes or eat or sweep the floor or do some other quick task that usually is done as part of a speedy juggling routine with Cedar clinging to my legs.

I’m not sure if an additional three hours a week will be enough to motivate me to pull out those old manuscript drafts, but at very least, it will allow me to keep up more with this blog, and to delve into some of the more complex and emotionally charged subjects that I often don’t have the energy for (especially not if I want to actually post what I write, for some of the more tangled and messy stuff I spew out in these quick writing sessions do not make it into cyberspace). But this is a start.

Like all good mothers do, I’ve sacrificed a lot this year for my son, for my family. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how gracefully I’ve adapted, how natural the transition has been. Motherhood has been hugely fulfilling for me.

But I am also learning: I have my limits. And I am remembering: I am a writer, and if I am not writing then I am not happy. And I need to be happy. This is not a point of negotiation. This is infinitely more important than any future-oriented goals. This is where I draw the line.

Finding Balance Along the Way

2011-05-15T13:29:00.000-07:00

Today, it rains. I sit at Cafe Javasti in Wedgwood, my favorite weekend writing spot, and drink Oolong tea (still not drinking coffee, sigh). I almost didn't get away this morning-- two poor nights of sleep in a row have compelled me to ask my husband to let me sleep in, thus cutting into my writing time. But, alas, here I am, if only for an hour or so. I need my weekly moment away from Cedar and the home to sip my tea, breathe, and decompress. Digest.

Today, like many mornings where I sit down to write for this blog, I ask myself what I have to say. More specifically, I ask myself what I have to say that won't take ten hours to unravel and then some-- if there's anything short and focused I can spew out in one sitting that is nevertheless still remotely interesting to anyone besides myself. It's important to me to not wait too long between posts, because when this happens it makes me feel depressed. As I've said here before, this blog is my lifeline to my writing life. Without it, right now, I do not feel much like a writer. Short abbreviated notes scribbled in my journal don't do much to satisfy the writer in me. If this blog is my lifeline, then those disconnected journaling sessions are like little floats that keep me bobbing along the way. Whatever. Enough with metaphors. Onward.

Being a parent to a one-year-old, and not having much money to hire babysitters, there is a lot in my life these days that doesn't get done or satisfied. Of course, we are not alone in this situation. It is part of the reality of being a parent to a young child. It is a part of the sacrifice we willingly make in exchange for the joy of creating a family together. Shone in the right light, it is a rollicking, thrilling adventure-- this thing called our life. Each day, we wake up tired and go to bed exhausted, and somehow tasty dinners still manage to get cooked, family walks have become our main form of entertainment, bills get paid, groceries purchased, dishes washed, and glasses of wine drunk at the end of the night with a sigh of sweet relief. (Have you seen the new picture book, Go the Fok To Sleep? It is hilarious, and if you are a parent, you should go to the bookstore soon if only to read it once.)

Somehow, the essential tasks manage to get done. And what gets left out? Sadly, a lot of friends don't get called or seen, or if they do, it is far too seldom. Late-night collage or dance sessions with my sisters don't happen anymore, and music doesn't get to be played loud at night. Date nights happen only rarely in our household, and even then, I still can't eat most of what is served in restaurants, so we've only gone out to eat a handful of times in the last year. Concerts and shows at clubs are a distant reality too. I envy the parents of good sleepers who are able to easily go out for a night, or-- still unimaginable to me-- even go away for an overnight stay. Someday, yes, this will happen. But we are on the slow train when it comes to weaning Cedar from his dependency on his mama (and I'm not even talking about weaning literally; that isn't going to happen for another year or more).

Case in point: it was only a month or so ago that we started involving Matthew more actively in the going to bed routine. Before, he'd help with baths, pajamas, and stories, sure, but the crucial nursing and singing of lullabies and falling asleep portion was solely my responsibility. Now, I am gratefully happy to report that my husband and I share this job. If Cedar does not seem to be falling asleep at the breast (which is more often now than not ), then I'll say goodnight and call Papa in to the room, then leave. Cedar will cry in protest for a minute-- or ten, or thirty, depending on his mood-- but eventually (usually after crawling around the bed, patting Papa on his body, and otherwise playing around) he will quiet down and grow tired enough that he will just lie there and fall asleep. Then, an hour or so later, when Cedar usually wakes up again, Matthew is the one who goes in and lies next to him again until he falls back asleep.

I can't tell you what a huge relief this has been. To not be the one who has to listen closely for Cedar's stirring cries while we attempt to watch an episode of Mad Men, to listen and determine whether he is truly waking or not, then hurry in before he wakes even more and put him back to sleep--and to do this, again and again and again, all night long. I still do it in the middle of the night when we're all in bed, but if Matthew and I haven't gone to bed yet, it's now Matthew's responsibility. We are hoping that if Cedar knows he's not going to always get Mama when he wakes (and especially not Mama's boob), then he might learn to let himself go back to sleep easier when he stirs. So far, this doesn't seem to be happening, but the good news is that he is now way more accepting of the comforting of Papa's presence, and in turn, I feel much more free to go out for the night without worrying that I am going to come home to a screaming baby who has been up for an hour, demanding my return.

So this has been a big change, allowing me to feel a much overdue sense of expansion when it comes to things I can do in my life. I am much freer to go out and meet a friend at a bar, or even go out to a show if I should so desire. But the truth is, I usually still opt to stay home, because I am tired and I want to go to bed by 10:30 so that I can wake up and feel refreshed by 7:00. And when you only have two hours to chill out at the end of the day (after the baby is asleep and the kitchen cleaned-- for if we don't clean it at night then guess who has to do it anyway in the morning), it often sounds more restorative to me to just sit and talk to my husband on the couch with a glass of wine, and some music playing quietly. To surf Facebook (yes, it's true, sad as this sometimes seems), to read, to take a hot shower (with the heat turned on or else Cedar will hear the water and wake up-- did I mention that he is a light sleeper?), and then to drape my body over the exercise ball and stretch those tight back and neck muscles that get strained each day from carrying around my twenty-five pound baby.

Someday, things will change. Someday, Cedar will sleep better and my husband and I will get hungry enough for more time together that we will make the effort and fork over the money for a babysitter. But for now, I am resigned to this period and I know it will go quickly. In the meantime, I have adapted to these new parameters of what kind of "fun" a weekend can hold, and to how long it takes to get things done.

For example, this weekend. Yesterday, the three of us plus my mom went to see a Chinese drumming and dance performance at the Seattle Center which I'd gotten free tickets to. We timed it perfectly between Cedar's naps, fed him avocado and rice puffs along the way, and he enjoyed the show from my lap, bouncing and clapping and mesmerized by the lights. We were home by three, with time left in the day for a nap, a long walk with Fergie, a new batch of beer brewed by Matthew, and a dinner of fried rice with chicken, peas, and carrots for all.

And today, Matthew's brother and sister-in-law are visiting from Olympia. We're borrowing my sister's truck so that we can haul a bunch of branches to the dump from the cedar tree that fell in our yard several months ago, I'm going to take Cedar and Fergie for a walk, and later on, we'll all barbeque. I won't mention all the things that aren't getting done, all the things on our list that have been there forever (like budgeting, doing research and contacting people for our future remodel, mopping the floors, various childproofing tasks, overdue phone calls, and of course, any and all of my more involved writing projects which are pretty much just on hold for now-- though I don't know how much longer I can placidly accept this as the status quo).

Okay, so I will and did just mention some of the things. But my point is that I have been learning to accept our current limitations-- which almost all have to do with a lack of time. And in turn, I appreciate all the more the small successes that occur when we manage to achieve a relatively health balance between working for money, indoor chores, outdoor chores, family time with Cedar (and now Fergie too), time with friends, down time, solitary time, and finally-- so importantly, and sadly what often gets squeezed out the first-- time for Matthew and I to reconnect as a couple, to try and remember a glimpse of our pre-child reality, the energy that brought us together in the first place.

Balance. Priorities. Acceptance. Patience. Perspective. All of these qualities are necessary and called upon when learning how to become parents, how to create a new family, and how to merge into a new fluid, working organism. And, of course, we can't forget to throw in a lot of silliness, a few tears, and an occasional roar of wildness rearing it's head in a rebellious demand for change along the way.

Tell Me Again, Why Did We Want a Dog?

2011-05-10T19:05:00.000-07:00

I confess, I have had a few moments this week where I’ve questioned our decision to get a dog. I haven’t wanted to vent about this online because I am aware that my friend, Fergie’s old owner, will likely read what I write, and I don’t want her to think I am actually having second thoughts. Questioning does not mean regret. I just think we’re all going through a necessary adjustment period where things are a bit more tiring and stressful than they will be down the road. We are getting to know each other and figuring out a new routine.

Routine. Anyone who is involved with the full-time raising of a baby will tell you that we are constantly yearning for and clinging to some fragile sense of routine. At least I am. And why? Because babies are constantly changing on us, and we are constantly trying to figure them out—what works, what is the ideal sleep schedule, how and when to cram in chores, phone calls, emails, feedings, etc. The often-spoken truth is that once you light upon a routine that feels fluid and works for you, your baby inevitably is ready to switch it up on you.

Cedar is thirteen months old. For the past many months his napping schedule has not really changed (although it is showing signs of the need to change soon). But for now, the rhythm of his naps and my corresponding planning of our days unfold with a consistency that I am reluctant to give up.

Mornings are the most mellow time of day. We wake around seven, nurse in bed for a while, then rise to change diapers, make tea and toast, check email, and entertain Cedar with books and toys. By 8:30, Cedar’s ready for his second morning meal-- oatmeal and fruit, blueberries the current favorite. Then, we change diapers again, get ourselves dressed, and putter around the house doing dishes, folding laundry, listening to music, and looking at books and toys. By 10:00 he’s sleepy again, so I heat up my tea, get my books and journals ready, and proceed to bounce him to sleep, then hold him while I sit in the big recliner and read, write, make lists, and enjoy my 80 minutes of rest.

Yes, I still hold Cedar while he naps because this is the only way that I can count on getting a solid block of time to myself—not to mention restorative time for Cedar. Otherwise he’ll only nap for 35 minutes at most, and that is not enough time to do much of anything but pop around like a crazy woman trying to get random things done. It’s much better to be rooted in one place by his weight, and “forced” to do “non-productive” things, like reading and writing.

Anyway, I digress. So now, it is not just Cedar and I doing our thing together all day long, but me, Cedar, and Fergie—our big, sweet, five-year-old Doberman. Now, picture the same aforementioned routine, but with Fergie nudging her long nose onto my lap as I hold Cedar for his naps, or Fergie’s long limbs stepping gingerly around Cedar as he crawls around her toes. Imagine me with a diaper bag slung around my shoulder, with Cedar in one arm, Fergie’s leash in the other, trying to get the big-ass stroller out of the car and unfolded into place. And imagine both Cedar and Fergie pulling and leaning against my body, seeking my attention, when all I want to do is sip my tea, eat my toast with almond butter, and take a few minutes to myself first thing in the morning before I devote the rest of the day to their needs.

Okay, I know, not a huge deal, but I’m just saying that I’ve had my moments where I’ve asked myself whether I really have the energy to be the mama all day to not one, but two. Granted, dogs are much easier to care for than babies; I can go on a walk with Fergie, and have a freeing sense of solitude that is very different than when I am walking with Cedar. But now having to walk the two of them together, it is definitely more tiring.

Exercise. That’s the key component to caring for a dog, especially a big dog. Going into this whole endeavor, I knew this-- I knew that adopting Fergie would force me to go on more walks, and I knew that there would be times where this would feel like a major drag, while other times where I would be grateful for it.

Matthew and I have committed to taking Fergie out about three times a day—he walks her around the block in the morning, I take her on a longer walk during the day, and then one of us, usually Matthew, but on occasion the whole family will go out for a short walk in the evening. By some people’s standards, Fergie is getting gold star treatment. But I’ve also read books (like by Cesar Millan, “The Dog Whisperer”) which suggest that what we’re giving her is more like the minimum for what an energetic dog needs. Fergie does have a lot of energy, but she is also pretty mellow, so I think we will find the right balance.

Cesar also writes about how you should adopt a dog that has a similar energy level or lower to your family. Well, if this is the case, I think we got a dog whose energy is probably a little higher than what Matthew and I have been used to. But I also don’t think we’re in over our heads. We both want (and need) to exercise more, and this is already happening. Also, we’ve already gone on several family walks during times which I’m pretty sure in the past we would have begged exhaustion. As the four of us set out with our energetic new companion, I like this feeling of the new pack we’ve created. I’m remembering the feeling of walking with a dog. A dog is energy, a dog is enthusiasm, a dog is a vital spark of life.

And yes, a dog is also work. A dog is needy. A dog is another being getting in my way, needing to be fed, wanting my attention at the same time that my baby is demanding my care—and, let’s face it, between the two of them, the dog will always be number two. That’s just the way it is. I have love to give Fergie, I have time, and I have energy—but these have very real limits. These are the limitations that have caused me to question, in moments, whether adopting Fergie right now was the wisest thing to do, and these moments have occurred when I’ve felt tired and stretched and when I’ve realized that as the mother of a baby, I can never offer Fergie the same kind of devotion that, say, a childless person might be able to. I try to imagine what it would have been like to adopt Fergie before we had Cedar, or to adopt her when I was single, and I am sure that my devotion to her would be ten-fold of what I can give her now.

Pre-Fergie, Cedar and I would go on a long (hour or more) walk every other day or so. But there were also days where we were busy or it was miserable out, and we didn’t. Now, the walk must happen no matter what. Now, we must structure our day around the walk, instead of letting the walk fall into free empty pockets. Maybe I’ll grow more flexible about this in time, but right now, it feels important to me to commit to giving Fergie enough exercise. And so, my routine-seeking and -planning mind plots away. Maybe I can give up some of a.m. routine time and go on a walk in the morning. Or else the walk will just be the main thing we do during our 12-3 chunk of time (between naps), unless I am willing to hurry hurry hurry us along, feed us on the go and feel very tired by the time I make it back for Cedar’s second nap. (You might think three hours is plenty of time to walk and go somewhere else, but everything takes twice as long when you have a baby). Otherwise, I’ll feel slightly guilty all day if I make Fergie wait until 5 o’clock for her main walk, even if I let her outside throughout the day.

I am not a hurrying kind of person. I love the leisurely pace of my days with Cedar. Not having to hurry also helps to balance out some of the tiredness of having to constantly, ceaselessly be “on” with him. I like being able to set him in his high chair at lunch time and let him eat his peas and rice puffs--one by one by one-- while I eat, sweep, do dishes, and bustle around tidying at his side. I like having plans or social outings with other adults and babies most days, but I also like having plenty of down time. I am not the type of person who can easily go from one play date to another—one is plenty for me. And although I’ll go crazy if we spend too many days alone, I will also go crazy if we go too many days without a day to just be mellow and alone. And by alone, I mean Cedar and I, bopping around, going to the library, the grocery store, the pond, listening to music, doing our thing. (Lest this sound too idyllic, trust me, it’s also very tiring.)

Now, enter Fergie. There have been days already where I’d really rather not arrange my day around her walk—when we already have plenty going on to keep us busy. Yet there have also been days when I’ve been grateful for her canine company. That extra bit of energy jingling by my side as we pack our bags full of snacks and treats and journey off to the park. An adventure. That extra bit of entertainment and love filling our home. That giant breathing ribcage to lean my head against at the end of the day and say goodnight.

Fergie is a really sweet dog, and her presence is seeping into my skin day by day. But it wasn’t love at first sight; as a breed, I’d never been drawn to Dobermans—they don’t inspire that furry, goofy, cuddly response that say, Labs or Retrievers do. Yet I’d also heard that Dobies can be great family dogs—gentle, smart, loyal, mellow (if they get their exercise), and not huge shedders. Of course, this same loyalty can translate into over-protectiveness, and I don’t need to tell you about some of the more negative stereotypes that Dobermans carry. I see people tense as we pass them, and although I am confident that Fergie would never bark or lunge at a person unprovoked, I try to resist the impulse to draw in her leash or move away from the people we pass so as not to make them nervous. Dobermans seem to be one of those breeds that people either love or hate. Many dog lovers know enough to know that Dobies can be sweeties, but most everyone else kind of shudders or reacts with surprise when they hear what kind of dog we’ve adopted.

When I walk with Fergie and Cedar, they kind of balance each other out: big, “vicious” dog + cute, innocent baby= neutral response to the smallish, Asianish woman wielding the leash and stroller, smiling her hellos. I admit, I kind of like the attention Fergie attracts, or at least I’m curious about it, curious about what kind of looks people give us as we pass. And although I abhor the idea of someone getting a dog to compliment or enhance their image, I admit, I do feel just a tad more bad-ass with Fergie (in her metal pinch collar) by my side. Maybe it’s a refreshing anti-thesis to having my identity so tied to carrying a baby for this last year. Maybe I have just been craving some kind of change. Now, my steps are carried forward with a newly jubilant and purposeful stride with a dog—a bad-ass dog (but really a sweetie) by my side.

Fergie is incredibly gentle, having grown up around a small child and other animals. She is not at all aggressive towards humans, cats or even bunnies. But I still like to keep a close eye on Cedar and Fergie, as she towers over him and he crawls underfoot—all in a small carpeted space crowded with toys where they both hang out most of the time. (And did I mention we live in a 810 square foot house?). Actually, I’m more concerned about Cedar hurting Fergie than vice versa, as he is fond of grabbing her fur or at her face (not a good habit). Fergie’s already demonstrated a non-plussed tolerance of all this, but I don’t want her to get hurt or to take any chances that she might someday get annoyed enough to react differently. I don’t really feel this will happen, but I know it is a good thing to be cautious for now when she is still so new to our family.

“Tell me again, why did we want a dog?” I asked Matthew one night last week after a particularly exhausting day. I was only half joking. “It was your idea,” he said with a glint in his eye. When I shot him a look he added, “Because we want to be a big happy family?” Better, but in that moment, I wanted something more, something to assure me that we hadn’t just irresponsibly followed some whim. There was a small sinking part of me that feared that the naysayers may have been right. In particular, one Facebook post from a friend: “Everyone I know who has a baby and gotten a dog regrets it. Harsh but true.” Ouch. Would I too become one of those people, drawn by the allure of “a big happy family,” a T.V. image of a couple, child, and dog bounding for the woods together (that doesn’t show the difficulty packing, the long drive, the wet dog smelling up the tent)? It occurred to me that none of the people who’d encouraged us to “Go for it!” and “Get the dog!” had a baby. Was this really not the ideal time?

But then I had a little epiphany the other day while I was walking Fergie. It hit me that the things we most value in our lives, the things that are the most rich and give us the most pleasure, are the things that take the most effort, energy and devotion. This might not be an original or profound thought, but it came to me with a steadying clarity and assurance.

Ultimately I feel so fortunate to have adopted a dog whom has been raised by a friend, a dog whose history I know, and who has been nothing but a source of love and great companionship for her past owners. I can’t really imagine a better situation. If this opportunity hadn’t come about, I don’t know when I had the energy to raise a puppy, and I don’t know if we would’ve felt comfortable adopting an adult dog with an unknown past until Cedar was much older.

Of course it is more tiring and stressful right now. But something tells me that it won’t take long before I can’t imagine Fergie not being here. Something tells me that she was meant to be with us, and I know she will reveal who she is to us more and more so every day.

On Dog Energy and Taking A Plunge

2011-04-30T14:09:00.000-07:00

In a couple of hours, our family of three will become four. In a couple of hours we will pick up our new dog, Fergie, a five-year-old Doberman, who by all accounts is sweet and gentle, and not at all aggressive. Good with kids and good with cats, she has mellow energy though will need her exercise for sure. She was raised by a distant friend of mine who is sad to give her up, but who doesn’t have the time to care for her properly due to a new job and grad school. So she posted a note on Facebook two weeks ago, and something inside me payed attention. Matthew and I have wanted a dog. We haven’t talked about it much since we had a baby; there was no huge rush to introduce another being into our lives who would need our attention and care. And yet, we still wanted one, someday, maybe in a year or two.

Enter the Facebook post. Matthew was putting Cedar down one night when I saw it. “What do you think?” I showed it to him later. “Should I write her? At least find out more?” He smiled a conspiratorial grin. “Sure.” And before we knew it, we came to meet her in Olympia last weekend on Easter Day, and here we are now to pick her up and drive her home on May Day.

In recent years, Matthew has been a bit more eager to take the plunge and get a dog than I have been, but mostly this is because I know that I am the one who will be the primary caregiver for the dog since I am home all the time. We had talked about getting a puppy, because we wanted to make sure our dog was good with kids-- but puppies require a lot of energy. I didn’t think I’d have the energy for a puppy while I was pregnant or raising a newborn, and now, with a one-year-old, I still don’t feel like I do. Yet with rescue dogs, there’s always the wild card factor; you can never be sure of their habits and past. But an older dog who we know is gentle and well-behaved, who doesn’t bark or get on furniture, who has been raised since she was a puppy by a friend who I trust and respect, this sounded too enticing to pass up.

We didn’t see this coming. If I wanted to, I could come up with lots of convincing arguments for why the timing isn’t ideal. But I can also come up with lots of reasons why the timing right now might be perfect. Right now, I am home all day. I go on walks every day. It is springtime, and I would love to go on even more walks than I do. Right now, it’s true that I am tired from lack of proper sleep every day and that I have little time or mental energy to write or pursue many of the intellectual activities that I want to do. But what I do have is a lot of time to be physically and emotionally present. To go to the park, to sit in the yard and play, to sing songs, prepare meals, and run a few errands along the way. I can easily imagine how me and Cedar’s daily rhythm will be enriched by the presence of a gentle, loving dog. She will be a companion and source of added joy and delight for both of us.

But there is no “rational” reason for us to get a dog. We are not looking for a guard dog, a therapy dog, a distraction from loneliness, or a symbol of our status. Why do most people get dogs, after all? Because we know from past experience that we love them-- we love the energy they bring to our lives, we love the warmth of snuggling with them, we love their unconditional love and excitement for living—simply put, we enjoy the energy of dogs, and we want them to be a part of our family.

That does not mean that I am looking at this coming change in our lives without a hefty dose of realism. I know there will be days when it is pouring rain and I really don’t feel like getting me and Cedar bundled up in raingear for a quick walk around the block, not once much less three times a day, and yet, I will because I have to (well, maybe not three times on days like that). I also know that most of the time, my body and psyche will feel better after we do.

I know that there will be times when we want to get away on a trip where we can’t bring Fergie along, and when there will be no smiling relatives or friends available to pet sit (my mother has already made that very clear; let’s just say my parents are amongst the few who absolutely do not think it’s a good idea that we get a dog right now). In these instances, we will have to fork over some big chunks of money for dog care, or simply not go on our trip. But, that said, unlike most periods in my adult life, we are not planning any big trips right now, or in the foreseeable near future. A lack of money and a lack of desire to travel too far with a young child is keeping our wanderlust in check for now, and instead our sights are set on short, local camping trips where a dog would be a welcome addition (even if we’ll have to get more creative with our packing—we are quite accomplished car campers, bringing along no shortage of wood, wine, tarps, fishing gear, baby gear, and books on each trip).

In some ways, this blog post is an attempt to explain to my parents the rationale (and lack of rationale) that is going into this decision. It’s one of those things, much like the decision to have a child, in which there may never be a “perfect,” complication-free time to do it. Yes, dogs (and children) are big responsibilities. And yet, I may very well have more time and energy right now than I do in a year or two to take on this initial challenge of getting Fergie adjusted to her new home and family and integrated into our new routine. For all I know, in a year or two, Cedar may take even more energy to raise (I’m sure he will and he won’t, in differing ways), and I also hope to have more chunks of time to write and teach by then. Hopefully, in a couple years I will be launching into a phase of my life that integrates my identities as writer, mother and teacher more evenly, and this shifting will be my focus, my main “project” if you will.

But right now, I am pretty much just here to raise Cedar. My energy is devoted to him, with whatever chores and bills I can get done on the side. I write a little when I can, and I read (voraciously) during his naps, but I feel like I am capable and, now, with this deliberation about whether to adopt a dog, I am realizing that I am even eager to take on more. True, I would love even more to take on more writing or teaching (in that order) if I could, but since I can’t right now (we can’t afford childcare and I have also mostly accepted this period as being devoted to Cedar since he won’t ever be this young again), then why not get a dog now? She will be my new “project” if you will—and I hope that doesn’t come across the wrong way.

Of course, Matthew will share in the responsibility. We’ve talked about him taking her out for her first short walk first thing in the morning and last short walk at night, whereas me and Cedar will take her out for her long walk or run during the day. And we look forward to weekends where all four of us can journey to the dog park or the woods and make these kinds of outings the norm, whereas right now long family walks often get squeezed out in favor of house projects or individual errands or goals while the other parent watches Cedar. Soon, a good chunk of exercise each day will be the priority and not just one goal of many-- and this can only be good for us.

I know this sounds like a whole lot of rationalizing for what, when it came down to it, was a spur of the moment, gut-level decision. We didn’t have a long period of deliberation over what breed to get, or multiple trips to the pound. Instead, we saw an opportunity present itself, and decided (with a decent dose of nervousness and butterflies for sure), to say yes.

On Turning One, Developmental Milestones, Being Proactive and Letting Go

2011-03-28T15:53:00.000-07:00

Cedar turned one on Friday, and is on the cusp of so much change. He’s been a bit of a “late bloomer” on a lot of fronts—the most obvious one being the fact that he still has not figured out how to crawl. I didn’t worry about it much for many months since I knew that crawling was not an essential milestone and some babies skip it all together and go straight to walking. But as more time went by and I watched my friends’ babies who were the same age scramble across floors and furniture, I began to worry-- just a little. It wasn’t just that he wasn’t crawling, but he wasn’t moving around much—rolling, lunging, or dragging his body in ways that other non-crawlers nevertheless learn to get around. He abhorred tummy time, and within seconds would usually just sink his face into the carpet, complaining. Mostly, he seemed fairly content to just sit there and stretch his body as far as he could for the toys that were within reach--developing an impressive ability to do the splits. You could see him looking at something and calculating whether it was worth going for, and in many cases he’d decide, nope, too far.

Online one day, I ran across a link to a free developmental screening offered by the local nonprofit Parent Trust. Why not? I thought. Even though people like my mom told me not to worry, Cedar would crawl when he was ready, I knew I would feel better if I was being more proactive. I wanted an expert to tell me not to worry, or to suggest exercises I should do with him. I’d tried for months placing tantalizing objects like the remote control or other things he wanted but wasn’t allowed to have just out of his reach, then putting him on his tummy and encouraging him to come get it. This occasionally motivated him sufficiently to inch forward a tiny bit, but almost always ended in cries of frustration.

I’m really glad I went to the screening. We sat on the floor in a room full of toys with a woman for an hour and I answered questions about what Cedar could and couldn’t do, while we observed him play. The screening confirmed what I suspected—Cedar was right on target with everything, with the exception of gross motor skills. It wasn’t so much the actual not crawling that was significant, but more that he figure out how to move his body around and get places and things by himself. Cedar had rolled over more or less “on time,” but he rarely did it. Cedar had also not figured out to sit up from a lying down position. He could hold his weight just fine when I helped him stand on his legs, and he was getting more and more balanced while standing against a couch, but he was still pretty far from being able to scoot himself around by himself while holding on to furniture. He was probably most active when he was pulling himself up onto my body, but he still often favored his tiptoes instead of standing flat-footed.

The woman didn’t raise any alarm bells with me, but she did encourage me to start giving him more tummy time—perhaps more often, but for shorter periods. We needed to see how much of his not crawling had to do with the fact that he didn’t have enough practice and motivation, or, if he still didn’t progress in the next month (he was eleven months when I brought him in), then I might want to look into whether he had weak muscle tone. Also, she encouraged me to give him plenty of opportunities to practice standing, for instance by putting toys on the couch for him to reach for and play with while standing up.

I’d done this before, but now I was definitely more motivated because I had concrete suggestions, perspective, and accountability to someone whom I trusted and liked. It just was that much more on my radar to make sure Cedar got more than just one token attempt at tummy time a day.

It’s been amazing to watch how much he has now learned and explored in just a few short weeks. I don’t know how much of this had to do with my efforts, and how much coincided with the timing and the fact that he was just ready, but it didn’t take long for him to get more tolerant of hanging out on his tummy (reading to him in that position worked well since he loves books), even if he still was far from crawling. And then one day he figured out how to push himself up back onto his knees and then awkwardly get his legs out from under him back into his favored triangle-leg sitting position. This was huge! Once he practiced this a few more times and mastered it, then being put on his tummy was no longer a big deal since he could easily push himself back up. Granted, this means he is still not increasing his tummy time, but what he has been doing is lunging for things, falling onto his tummy, then sitting back up. Or else he’ll use one leg to scoot himself around on his bottom. I can still get away with plopping him down with some books on the floor and going into the other room for a minute (max), but on the contrary, I am getting more cautious about leaving him in the middle of our king-sized bed for even a few seconds (especially if our cat, Miles, is lying there, for Miles is one “forbidden to grab object” that Cedar will not hesitate to lunge towards). While it’s been kind of nice to have been able to delay worrying about childproofing (especially our bed, which we all sleep on and which we’ll have to change to just a mattress on the floor really soon), this is not something that I have wanted to brag about.

Although Cedar still lags behind many of his peers who mastered crawling long ago and are well on their way to walking, I know that there is a big range in which babies hit their milestones and now that he’s made so much progress in just a few weeks, I feel reaffirmed not to worry. I also know better than to blame myself or worry that I created his lack of motivation to move because I “carry him too much” or bring toys to his side. Surely giving him more tummy time helped, but I also think that the main factor in how kids develop has to do with their innate personalities and bodies. Cedar has never liked to be laid down for long (perhaps partly due to his frequent early discomfort from gas?), and so I’ve held him all the more. Cedar has also always been a watchful baby, content to sit back and take things in as opposed to a baby who impulsively lunges and grabs for things. He loves books and is content to sit there flipping through one after another on his own. He alternates between being quiet and serious, and being loud and talkative. I continue to be astounded by how fast he recognizes new songs and words.

Even though Cedar will probably be a late walker too, I am nevertheless beginning to see the toddler in him emerging. This is both exciting and a bit scary (can you say, hello temper tantrums and stubborn will?). Although he has yet to utter his first words beyond mama and dada (and perhaps a few others I can’t be sure of), I can tell he understands so much more than I realize. I ask, “Do you want to read a story?” and his eyes flash up to the bookshelf by the bed. “How about ‘Mud’?” I’ll say, and he’ll smile and pant and wave his arms excitedly. In response to other questions he’ll answer simply by uttering the all-purpose affirmative syllable, “Na.” I feel like I can now have a call and response conversation with him, and I witness more and more of his distinct little person every day. What happened to my baby? He’s still there. But so now is the vision of a growing, opinionated child.

Case in point: just yesterday I registered him for a toddler co-op preschool starting in the fall. It will only be once a week for a couple hours and I will be there with him (unless it’s one of the alternating where I’ll spend an hour in the ‘parent education’ group), yet still, it is a bit mind boggling to already be signing him up for something called school! It’s exciting to think of all the books, animals, songs, games, train tracks, jungle gyms, circle times, dancing, painting, cooking, and sensory projects to introduce him to in the years to come (hello nascent preschool teacher inside!—yes, I’ve worked part-time in preschools since high school, and I probably still would if they didn’t pay so little). At the same time, I also keep reminding myself to imprint the image of him now, as a baby, in my mind. Imprint, imprint, imprint. For it won’t be long before I’ll look back on pictures of today and say, “Look how little he was!” instead of bemoaning how BIG he’s gotten, and how much carrying him around is killing my back.

Other recent changes for Cedar include finally waving bye bye, finally cutting his first tooth at eleven months, and just in the last week or so—rolling around or outright sitting up as I nurse him to sleep in bed (or when he wakes up later on). Part of this has to do with the fact that we finally stopped swaddling him at eleven months (I asked the popular Seattle nurse and educator Anne Kepler what she thought about us still swaddling, and she said if it was still working for us no reason to stop swaddling before he’s a year or so). The transition went just fine, although I fear the day when he outright protests going to sleep AND we can’t just confine him in a crib and walk away since we don’t use a crib. (Cross that bridge when we get there). For now, I am grateful that he goes to sleep mostly without protest and sleeps pretty well at night (without flailing all over the place) by my side.

I’m supposed to schedule another appointment with the developmental screening lady soon to check in, but I don’t feel a pressing need to now that Cedar’s made so much progress. I think I still will however, because I enjoyed having a knowledgeable and concerned woman to talk to at length about my son’s growth, especially when my visits with Cedar’s doctor at Group Health are so hurried and short. The screening also helped put on the radar for me other developmental skills to look out for in the coming months and gave me ideas for activities to do with Cedar to help encourage them. Any Washington state resident can schedule one if your child is between the ages of one month and five and a half years.

I do not aspire to be the kind of mother who is obsessed with developmental milestones or to be constantly comparing my child to the children of others, but I admit, it’s hard not to enter the comparison game, especially when I know so many parents of children who were born within a month of Cedar since we were all in the same PEPS group. I suspect we all do it, whether we are aware of it or not. It doesn’t just happen when our children can’t do something that others can. It also happens in the natural bubbles of pride that swell when our child does do something new that seems fairly advanced. But it’s so important to keep all of this developmental milestone and comparison business in perspective. Watch, take notice, celebrate, and talk to others about your concerns. Try not to worry or jump to conclusions, but also be proactive and look into it. I know this can sound contradictory, but for me, I worry more if I try to corral off my worries into a little corner of my mind that I don’t want to look too hard at. I feel better if I investigate my small seeds of concern, and take conscious actions. That way I can know that I’ve done what I can do, which makes the more important and difficult act of letting go that much easier.

Baby Notes: A Food Sensitivity, Muscle Testing, Banana Eating, Elimination Diet Saga Update

2011-03-18T20:31:00.000-07:00

Every day for the last seven months I’ve written down in a little notebook everything I eat and drink, everything I feed Cedar, every time Cedar goes to sleep and wakes up, whether he’s had any gas or a rash that day, and whether I’ve put hydrocortisone on his face.

I have three makeshift columns: the left side is sleep; the middle is what I feed Cedar plus any gas or rash symptoms for the day; and the right column is what I put in my body—which usually starts with tea (x2) and ends with wine. My handwriting is messy and much of the notes are coded in a way that only I would understand (AB is almond butter; if something is circled it means I’m suspicious of it; if something is circled and starred it means it is something new I’m introducing; if something is highlighted it means I went back and tried to trace correlations over time; and, if there has been a reaction then I scribble all over the page, drawing arrows and question marks, making my best guess for the source.

As the months have progressed and as Cedar’s gas and rash problems have mostly gone away, I’ve gotten more relaxed about not recording every last thing— for example I might write down “chicken pasta” without listing the other ingredients—let’s say olives, mushrooms, balsamic, and zucchini—because I’m not worried about the dish and I trust I’ll be able to remember what was in it if I should need to go back and double check what I ate the last few days. I also might even skip a few days now, if, say, Cedar is mostly with his grandma for the weekend and thus I don’t know when he slept and woke as precisely; it’s good for me to let go a bit—and tracking sleep is more out of habit now than really necessary. (I will however go back and write down what I ate, roughly, especially if there was anything new or something old that I’ve still nevertheless had my suspicions about).

You might think I’m being a bit obsessive, but keeping this record has helped me figure out a lot of what would otherwise still be mysteries. To explain this, I’ll need to back up a bit, and also refer you to my old elimination diet saga post if you want all the background details. But in a nutshell, after many months of self-sacrifice, I figured out that Cedar was sensitive to: dairy, soy, garlic, tomatoes, plus various gassy vegetables and beans that I’ve continued to stay away from to this day. By now, with Cedar being almost one year old, I’m willing to test or retest virtually anything, but this process is still very time consuming. There isn’t a day that goes by where I am not either gauging the reaction of something new I’ve eaten or something new that I’ve fed Cedar, and waiting the requisite three days in between each new food. Plus, so often, results have been inconclusive and so I’ve had to go back and test things multiple times.

Cedar’s gas symptoms mostly went away once I figured out the main culprits. But they never went away completely, and nor did his rash, and then once I started introducing solids it became even harder to be sure what his lingering reactions were now from. Finally I got it together to visit a new naturopath, and she let me know an appropriate dosage of fish oil to give Cedar each day (1/2 a teaspoon), in addition to the 1 tablespoon I was already taking myself. This was for his eczema, and seemed to help a lot. I also started taking probiotics, and gave Cedar a pinch most days too for his tummy, which may or may not be helping, but it doesn’t hurt. The ND also suggested I check out the ingredients in my prenatals, and to my shock and frustration I discovered that there was soy lecithin in the coating! Soy was something that Cedar had some of his strongest reactions to, and here it was in the very pill I was taking every single day for his benefit. Oh, the irony.

Around the same time that I visited the ND, I also decided to contact a woman in Olympia who does muscle testing for allergies who had been recommended to me by several friends. “Applied kineseology” is a method of holding a series of little vials filled with different foods and potential allergenic substances against your body (or in my case, the body of my baby while I am holding him), then holding out your arm and having the practitioner press down on your arm to test for various levels of “muscle weakness”. Theoretically, when your arm stays strong and solid, there is no allergy detected. But with some substances, your arm goes weak and will offer no resistance to the person pushing, try as you may. I know this sounds a bit strange, and I’m sure you could get a better explanation of it somewhere online (along with sources that call it hokey which I’m glad I didn’t read before I went in or it may have prevented me from going). All I knew was that several of my friends had tried it for their children and wholeheartedly recommended this woman -- and these were intelligent, informed, open-minded women. It cost $60 for one hour-long session to test scores of substances and it was non-invasive. I figured it was worth a try.

I ended up taking Cedar to this woman twice. The phenomena of feeling my arm go weak in some instances and not others (without knowing what was being tested at the time) made me a believer. That, and the fact that the sessions confirmed what I already knew: that Cedar was sensitive to dairy, soy, tomatoes, and garlic. But more importantly, I also discovered a few surprises: sensitivities to onions, citrus, coffee and chocolate, too. Now, mind you, I had tested each of those things via the elimination diet; in fact coffee was the very first thing I reintroduced (which tells you how much I like it)-- and I had detected no reaction. But when I’d first tested coffee, I only had half a cup (then a little more a couple days later, until gradually over time I was drinking over a cup a day again). And when I tested onions several months later into the diet, I only had a little bit (knowing that Cedar was super sensitive to garlic, I was worried about its cousin). I had been a little suspicious when I’d tested citrus, and thereby concluded that a few squeezes here and there were okay, but whole oranges or glasses of juice were not. Now, I realized that it was entirely possible that these were all foods which, if I had a little here and there, there would be no obvious reaction. But if I ate or drank some combination of them every day, the cumulative effect would take its toll.

Sure enough, once I eliminated these last four things, Cedar’s lingering gas disappeared, as did his rash for the most part. I was bummed to give up onions and citrus since these added a lot of flavor to my no garlic, dairy, or soy diet. And though I knew I’d miss my coffee and chocolate, it was not that hard to give them up knowing that I was finally so close to solving the food allergy puzzle that I’d invested so much energy into for months now. There was nothing more satisfying than to finally get to the end of this intensely consuming investigation!

Of course, I wasn’t going to just blindly trust whatever the muscle lady confirmed, but once my own experimentation corresponded with our session’s results, I had no problem in believing in her methods. Sure, it still sounds a little hokey to me when I imagine explaining the method to those whom I know are going to raise their eyebrows with suspicion (e.g. my parents). But all I know was, it helped us, and this wasn’t any ‘placebo effect’ since we’re talking about Cedar’s responses and not mine-- and Cedar doesn’t know what I’m eating or not eating.

Our bodies are mysterious, sensitive, and complicated organisms. We manifest and register illnesses in such a magnitude of ways. Within the natural medicine world, this muscle testing practice is widely accepted and it is also used by many chiropractors. My mother-in-law, who is a counselor and hypnotherapist, also uses a form of muscle testing known as EMDR as a part of her practice, specifically for patients who’ve experienced trauma. You ask them a question and they respond by raising different fingers for yes or no. Our bodies know so many things that our minds suppress.

There is also a process of “clearing” an allergy which involves holding the offending substance (in the vial) next to your skin while having certain pressure points massaged at the same time, thus reconditioning the body to accept the substance. Although we did try this for Cedar for a couple things (why not?), I have less faith in this process (and time or money to invest in it), since it supposedly can take a few sessions to fully clear it. It does sound a little “too easy” to me, and perhaps I’m a little too traumatized to want to rush into giving Cedar soy or garlic again. But I am open to the possibility that it works in ways that are beyond my own abilities to easily explain. I’m also convinced that the world of naturopathic medicine has a lot more to offer to the growing rate of those who suffer from food allergies than Western medicine has been able to come up with. Where the pediatric dermatologist told me, “We mostly never know what causes the eczema,” the naturopath said, “Something is causing it and we need to figure out what it is.”

That said, I’m content for now with just staying away from dairy, soy, garlic, onions, citrus, tomatoes, coffee and chocolate, knowing that I won’t be breastfeeding forever and that Cedar will likely outgrow most of his sensitivities in time. I am however planning to try little bits of cheese (I heard that some dairy-sensitive people can often tolerate mozzarella), along with other foods that Cedar may be able to handle the older he gets. I want to try some organic soy sauce we found versus the regular GMO kind, as well as try cooked tomatoes versus fresh, and try dairy that’s baked into foods versus raw—all of which I’ve heard from a conglomerate of random sources that a some food sensitive people can better tolerate. We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m still oh so eager to introduce Cedar to more foods (it’s so fun- so satisfying to see his facial reactions each time, not to mention to keep building a varied, flavorful diet for him), so it’s always a trade off—who gets to try something new this week?

Sometimes it seems like this is all taking so long, so I get impatient and thus more sloppy, not waiting the full three days in between trying new foods, or else eating something and giving Cedar something (both of which I’m not positive are okay) around the same time. I have tried goat cheese three times already, and every time I haven’t been sure about the results. (Was that slight rash from the dairy or from the cold air? Or was it from the coffee, onions, or citrus I was still eating back then?) Speaking of citrus, I only recently realized that lemon was in the Canola mayonnaise that I’ve been eating (with relish, I might add, once I deemed that eggs were okay). Which means that the food reaction I noted to banana during that time I was having a plethora of chicken salad sandwiches was not necessarily the banana. Sigh. Even after months of this process, I still make mistakes. If nothing else, this diet is a practice in careful regimenting and patience.

Yesterday, I gave Cedar banana again, letting him have a third of one. He loves tasting banana, and often reaches for it when I am eating it, so I was really hoping banana would be okay. It’s one of those easy foods that everyone always has around, no need to heat up or puree. Well, a few hours later—and all night long—Cedar squirmed and cried out in pain. All night long he sucked on my boob for comfort. Poor guy. Poor mama. We are both very tired today, and I’m not sure his tummy pangs have fully gone away. Now I know for sure: bananas are not okay. They may be fine for me to eat, but this is no way to gauge whether Cedar’s delicate system can handle it.

And so the food, gas and rash saga continues. Overall, however, the diet is much less work now, but still our life is not without it’s occasional wakeful nights of discomfort or regret for not being careful enough. And Cedar’s rash is way better too; I only put a dab of hydrocortisone on it about once a week versus almost every day, and otherwise keep his skin well hydrated with all-natural oils and creams.

For now, I experience a small triumph every time I eat something or give Cedar something new, and there is no reaction. Yay- chicken is okay for Cedar! Yay- shrimp, beans, collards, and ginger are okay for me! The main thing I’ve been craving is CHEESE, in all its luscious forms, and by extension of this, also PIZZA. First, I’ll need to test that tomato paste though, and then we’ll have to make it at home of course since I can’t have garlic or soy oil which could be in many crusts.

Yes, it’s a constant challenge and game to see what I can get away with. And, it’s a constant return to feelings of remorse and weariness when I discover what I can’t. But never once throughout this process has it occurred to me to give up breastfeeding. I love breastfeeding, the bond it creates between me and my baby. And, I know that Cedar is getting so many essential nutrients and antibodies through my breastmilk that I could never fully replicate with even the best combination of formula and solid foods. So I celebrate the fact that amidst these trials, my milk supply has stayed healthy and strong, and so has Cedar’s immune system. It’s kind of amazing that neither he nor I have barely had one cold during this entire first year of his life. I can’t say for sure that it’s from the breastmilk (or fish oil, prenatals, probiotics and healthy-ass diet), but it doesn’t hurt anyone for me to take some credit here. No one else has been tracking our progress as closely as I have, so I might as well bask in this moment of satisfaction.

Walking Olympia

2011-03-07T15:59:00.000-08:00

I’m sitting at Traditions Fair Trade café in Olympia. I love this place, the multi-generational crowd it draws, a mixture of young students from Evergreen and aging hippies, peace activists, white-haired ladies and men. It brings back memories of the few years that I lived here and came often to drink a pot of tea and write, back when I was single and solitary and would walk for hours through this town by myself. When I lived on the Eastside I’d often walk down Legion, pass the old Armory, the school and ball field, the churches, while crunching on fallen leaves beneath the giant oaks. I’d visit the Japanese peace park, or go down by the marina and sit on the dock, or browse through Orca books and grab a bagel at Otto’s. But Traditions was the only place where I ever felt like a true regular, Traditions with Dick, the kindly and fierce, grandfatherly yet youthful owner, and Jodi, the smiling woman with short hair and glasses who’d always hand back your bills of change with two hands. Did I mention I love this place? It is not a place to hide behind hipster fashions and stay separate from others. It is a place to feel comfortable in your own skin.

I was such a shy girl then. Afraid of being seen. Desperate to be seen. Afraid of being misinterpreted. And thus choosing to hide instead of risk disappointment. I was also such an intense girl. Steeped in tai chi and long solitary walks at Priest Point or in the Evergreen woods, or on long winding bike rides through town. Today, as I walked down the hill towards downtown from my mother-in-laws house, I felt a body-memory of that time in my life, that part of me that still lives inside even though she’s long been dormant. For a flash, I remembered in my senses what that felt like to be so alone, like I was then, waking and walking and searching for signs from the Universe on my own.

I was so sensitive back then, so attuned to my qi and the qi of others. It was hard for me to interact with strangers, especially men, or those with whom I was particularly enamored. Like Matthew, my future husband. He carried a quality of unattainablity to me then. Not only was he ‘taken’ and in a long-standing committed relationship, but he also seemed so rooted in who he was, so calm and confident in his skin, with eyes that would no doubt pierce through all my weak insecurities if I ever had a chance to let them. We worked at the same restaurant; he was the baker, I was a prep cook/busser/waitress/delivery driver. I didn’t know him well, but I always had a feeling about him, and once I even had a dream. Eventually, I allowed myself to wonder aloud in my journal one day: I wonder if we’ll be together one day…

Matthew, however, was oblivious to my crush and to my potential charms. He confessed later that he thought my energy a bit strange. I didn’t know then that he was born and raised here in town, that he loved goats and lived in a log cabin with an outhouse, that he was a butoh dancer and a bass player-- and that one day he’d be my husband. Our story of eventually coming together is too long to recount here, but if you’d told me then that some day we’d have a son together and live in Seattle, suffice it to say that I would have flipped out. Probably in gratitude and happiness. It would have been such a sweet relief to know that all the hard solitary work I was doing inside, all the exploration of my spiritual path and my writing path and how these intersected and were joined but not identical, would someday be redeemed with a sweet whispering affirmation from the gods, that yes indeed, some day in the not so distant future (what’s seven years?) I would be with a man whom I loved and felt fully seen by. Of course, we’d first have to go through a period in which I flirted dangerously with fear and doubt and almost fucked up our chance for good. We went through a period of drama, broke up a couple times, and quite possibly might not have found our way together again, in this life anyway—except that we were meant to after all. It wasn’t easy, as the best of relationships, the ones we learn and grow the most with, rarely are.

But anyway, where was I? Dick, the owner of Traditions, just walked by and said hello. It is sweetly comforting to still be remembered here, in this town, Olympia, where I spent six years of my life—three pre-Matthew and pre-China, and three post-China, with-Matthew. I’m grateful that Matthew’s family still lives here and so we have a reason to visit, even if our trips are hurried and I’m still tied to Cedar’s schedules. Yesterday we had a brief “date afternoon”—a walk at Priest Point, then a hot tub at Matthew’s moms. And today, Matthew skis with his brother while I write at Traditions and silently soak in a taste of the conversations and community around me. Maybe if I sit here long enough I will see someone else I recognize, even if the people I truly know in this town now are few. I never made many friends while I lived here. Even when I went to Evergreen, my friends were mostly the woods and the shoreline and the wind.

Now, as I write of this time in my life, it feels like a lifetime ago. It was another life I lived; I was a different person then. And now that I am the mother of Cedar, this feeling is only magnified. Yet I can still taste on a day like today what it once felt like to have all day, every day, to myself, to wander, to write, to read, to study, and to plan and worry about my future. To wonder what profession or career on earth might possibly contain the vast sense of what I wanted to do with my life—a feeling much too large and mythical for any clear rational answer. I can still taste this part of me, feel her inside of me, even if I am more grounded now, and less afraid.

Back then I thought it had to be all or nothing. Either dedicate my life to peace and the Tibetan freedom movement and Buddhism and writing, or be lost and sell out and turn my back on all I know is true. Back then, I was so lonely and confused. Back then, I was so pure in my intentions, so fresh, so translucent and blue.

I don’t have time to be a peace activist right now. At least not in the outward, traditional, or most obvious-- organizing, demonstrating, and petitioning sense. My peace activism, at least the place where I feel the most authentic and thus the most impacting in my actions, has always come from this meditative relationship I’ve cultivated with solitude, silence, and the page. The process of steadily growing and gaining confidence and authenticity in my voice has allowed me to become more authentic as a person, as a community member, as a human being engaged with others, learning from their activism, and sharing moments of my own. I knew this then too, but I didn’t trust it. I still thought I needed to be out there with the marchers and bullhorns. I doubted my own resistance to roles that weren’t cut for my skin.

Today, I am grateful for that girl, that twenty-something bud of a woman I once was, that girl who I’m still learning from, that girl whose igniting fire of spiritual inquiry, questioning, and aching persistent longing still teaches me right now. I don’t want to be as cloistered and solitary now as she was-- and I don’t imagine I’ll get a chance to be that solitary even if I wanted to be, at least not until I’m old and grey. But this much I know: she is still alive in me. She is the part of me that closes my eyes and inhales with a sense of gratitude and exhilaration as the wind blows across my face and the limbs sway overhead. And she is the part of me that still yearns to look each stranger in the eye as we pass on the street, and that remembers to nod with recognition and respect when I do.

Hello, friend. Hello, fellow wanderer. I see you. I know how much we all long to be seen.