Out of The Nest

I’m back.

I did write while I was away but was so overwhelmed with travel, moving house, and children’s birthday parties that nothing made it to my blog. I don’t want you to feel like we’re strangers now and I offer the peace pipe below as a small slice of my past couple of months. Please know that you were missed:

16 August 2012

My experience so far is that moving house is hard when you’re caring for a very small child. In fact this is my experience at this very moment, or up until five minutes ago when I put my small child to bed. Now I’m eating chocolate and trying to untangle my feelings through writing. The other option was drink an entire bottle of wine. I feel I’ve made the mature choice. If I’m to be truly authentic here, I should tell you that if I’m able to complete this post I’ll have the bottle of wine anyway.

My phone just ding-a-linged. A text from my husband who’s working late tonight. Not only is my phone in the bedroom with the small sleeping child, the text from my husband contains a request to do yet another thing before the end of the day.

Just uncorked the wine.

I need to take a photo of Lennon for his daily blog. I knew I needed to do this even before my husband texted, but today has been so joyless, I decided to not engage in the hopeful act of photography, out of sheer protest. Several camera perfect moments floated in front of me today and while I did feel a little guilty for not capturing them, I reminded myself that we’re in wartime: allen wrench calluses on my hands and piles of card board--I simply can’t be bothered. But now, my husband has taken time out of his twelve-hour workday to remind me to take a photo. It’s time for me to enter the calm eye of the storm, get a hold of my damn self, and snap a bloody picture already. I stumble over a poorly placed box full of heavy books to get to the camera and snap a sloppy photo of my sleeping child.

Back to the wine. Pouring myself another glass, in fact. These two glasses will probably mean that I’ll not sleep well enough tonight. They’ll likely ensure that I’ll have an annoyingly foggy headed day tomorrow, frustrated with my sleepiness, the mountain of boxes, and all that God forsaken fiberboard furniture I have to put together.

…………

But listen to this:

“The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride. To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” –Pema Chodron

…………

So much of the pain I’ve felt this week has come about because of rough spots and imperfections, annihilation of routines, disruption of peace. I almost started crying in IKEA Tuesday over counter tops. I’d like to be someone who views change and challenge with a spirit of adventure. In those moments, I want to think: “what can I learn here?” Currently, fuzzy brained panic is prevailing. There’s also the concern of being too fastidious in my pursuit of laidback-ness, where ‘allowing for messy’ becomes yet another thing with a deadline.

Just finished the chocolate. Sipping the wine.

I can feel myself tense as I hear the noises from the street. Our old apartment was in a Hof and though we had little sunlight, we had near to no noise. Here, I’m very aware that I live in an urban environment. Just had to put Lennon back to sleep. When I come back to my wine, a fly is perched on the edge of my glass.

Chaos. Mess. Drunken, messy chaos: I will try to enjoy you.

No. No try.

I will enjoy {whispered as she jumps from nest}  

Photo source found here.
Information on Pema Chodron found here.

Mess

This week has been trouble. We’re transitioning Lennon from our bed into his crib. The crux of his ‘sleep training’—a controversial practice, to be sure, and a term I use loosely here to describe adjusting his sleep habits—is to have Lennon learn how to soothe himself into a sleepy state without needing to be in bed with Mommy. This alone might result in a lot less sleep for me than usual since babies don’t often appreciate their routines being disrupted, but his crib sits just at the end of the bed in which he’s been evicted, making the situation all the more complicated. About every other hour throughout the night he cries, “I know you’re there. I can smell you.”

What’s more?

Lennon is teething. He has had two teeth break through in the past twelve days. The two ‘biggie’ teeth—named so by other moms I know for their trauma-drama factor—are the upper fronts and they are showing definitive signs of popping; bulging white just beneath the skin. Lennon is in pain and at night.

Also:

Lennon is about to start to crawl and spends every moment that he’s on a parallel surface flipping himself from his back to his chest and kicking his legs. Supposedly, when a baby goes through a motor milestone such as crawling, it’s not uncommon for them to wake up in the middle of the night and practice their new skill. When Lennon wakes with teething pain, generally cross for finding himself in his crib and not the family bed, I often discover him on his belly ready to crawl away.

Not to mention that:

We just returned from a trip to the U.S. last week and I truly believe we’re just now getting over our jet lag.

To say my sleepiness has made me feel defeated would be an understatement. I’m pretty sure no one is at their best when sleep deprived but my symptoms feel very acute. Compounding the chaos, Nicholas is out of town chaperoning a school trip to Prague. When Nicholas is away, it becomes glaringly clear how much I depend on him for emotional support—something I’m not ashamed to admit since our wedding vows talked about doing just that. In all fairness, it was my benevolent idea to transition Lennon to his crib this week so Nicholas wouldn’t be sleep deprived, as he needs to be up early each morning. I stand by this decision, but I’m missing his tender perspective this week.

While Lennon is getting enough sleep—in fits and starts—being bathed, eating healthily, exercising, and playing, his mother is a mess. I’ll be honest with you—I showered for the first time this week just yesterday. Gross. Food wise, I do okay with first two meals of the day, but by five o’clock, when my body screams in protest from lack of sleep, it’s all I can do to open a bottle of non-alcoholic wheat beer and a bar of Ritter Sport chocolate and call it dinner. We have been outside each day this week for lengthy walks, a testament to the fact that while I may have lost some sense of self-pride, I have my wits about me enough to rally so my son can get some daylight and fresh air. I haven’t had many face-to-face conversations with adults this week and when having lunch with a friend yesterday, I noticed that it took me a good half-hour to find any coherence in forming sentences. The academic term at Freie Universität began April 1^st and I’ve slowly started my research, but the idea of working on it this week makes me want to impale myself on my retractable highlighter.

Last night, after a supper of eight or so—maybe more—sandwich cookies, a bar of Choco-Cherry Ritter, and a nonalcoholic wheat beer, with Lennon asleep in his crib, I treated myself to the 1975 documentary, Grey Gardens. I’ve seen the film more than a dozen times and find that watching Mrs. Edith Beale in her East Hampton house makes me feel better about myself. Last night, it served as a cautionary tale—a potential destination should I remain on my present course: filth and liver pate and forgotten dreams and unbathed octogenarians and raccoons in the attic and resentful children.

I really need to learn how to self-soothe.

Luckily for my family and I, I’ve seen enough years to know not to make any rash decisions or judgments about myself when I haven’t had enough sleep. So as much as I wanted to call it quits on the whole lot of life’s ambitions and only do things that would allow me to never leave the house, I decided to sleep on it—even if for just an hour at a time. Before I did, I went to my blue bowl with the fifty curled papers of wisdom and pulled out this little token of the toughest love:

14. Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.

Photo source found here.