Contrast - Issue No. 6
AND, I THOUGHT I KNEW WHAT TIRED WAS
My sophomore year of college, I pulled my first all-nighter to finish writing a short story for my Fiction Writing Workshop the following day. This class was one I dreaded for two reasons: one, writing fiction was outside of my comfort zone, and two, because my ex-boyfriend was also in the class, though from our lack of interaction, no one would have ever known we had a history. I brought a copy of my piece for each person - and the most zen-disposition that I could muster. Then the piece was torn apart by my classmates, including my ex-boyfriend, as I sat there taking copious notes on my copy in a last ditch effort to not cry in front of everyone. I lost it on my way home, there were free-flowing tears, an awareness that I’m an ugly crier, a fear of not being a good writer, and deep hope nobody was watching me lose it in public. I went home, slept it off, and woke up a much more rational human being who could take it all in stride. This piece is not about the many writing workshops I’ve sat through, taking some feedback better than others, this piece is not about how consequential an ex-boyfriend’s opinions feel when you’re nineteen, this piece is about how viscerally emotional exhaustion can be.
That was my first irrational altercation with sleep-deprivation in adulthood, a feeling that has since become an integral part of my existence. This emotional rollercoaster of trying to handle the world when you haven’t let your body recharge, that’s just another day for a lot of mamas. I’m now going on four years of interrupted, fragmented, light sleep, and here are some things I know to be true:
I’m actually better at handling being tired than I ever thought I would be. This is a superpower for moms that is rarely noted. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I remember after not thinking about it once, that I was up with my son at 3am for an hour.
After never having been a napper or one who falls asleep easily, I’m amazed at how quickly and in what contorted positions my body can now rest: sitting up, on the floor, or with one arm draped over a bassinet to hold a pacifier in my newborn son’s mouth, I’ve proven my versatility.
There is an irrational anger that I feel towards my husband in the night when I wake up and he doesn’t. This, I realize, is not his fault. But, when I’ve gotten up to change my daughter’s sheets at midnight because of an accident, and then again with my son, because he has a cold and has coughed himself awake, I feel an all-consuming resentment. I could ask him to get up, but by the time I explain what’s going on and he has oriented himself enough to be helpful, I’m already handling it myself.
Breastfeeding Mamas have been damned by evolution to never feel well-rested because in their sweetest snooze, their engorged breasts demand action.
I have full-on fantasies about sleeping till 7:45am, and what it must have felt like, once upon time, so many years ago, when I would see the sun gleaming through the crack in the curtains and think, based only on my body and my needs, I’m going to snooze a bit longer, as I’d roll over, sink deeper into my pillow and drift off.
Even if a Mama is holding it together and taking things in stride, even if she maintains her sense of humor and her pleasant disposition, even if she’s found time to brush her hair and her clothes are not yet covered in drool or snot, I can assure you that she is exhausted. Like 19-year-old me after an all-nighter exhausted, except nothing is about her, and she might never sleep deeply again.
What I know to be true is that the tiredness of Mamas sinks deep within them. It’s an indescribable exhaustion that can make them feel like a lesser version of themselves, one that is incapable of idle chit-chat or wit or perhaps even comprehensible sentences. Sometimes it’s so extreme, they might not even recognize themselves. So, at the very least, we should recognize for them the resilience that mothers display every day by just doing all they do amidst the exhaustion.
THE DAY I WAS CALLED A GRANDMOTHER
Last week, my husband had to go to work (something that we’re still actively adjusting to after two years of him working from home, thanks to the pandemic). We watched him drive away from our window and then I chased each kid around the house attempting to get their shoes on, which bridges the gap between a game and a nuisance. The morning was filled with giggling, the sun was shining, my coffee was still mildly warm as I was drinking it. I asked my 18-month-old son if he wanted to walk or stroller and he proclaimed “walk,” so, I decided we’d give it a try. He stood between my daughter and me, his arms extended upwards, each hand in one of ours. And, three across we walked to school, past people smiling at our sheer existence, like a perfect picture. We dropped my daughter off, they embraced, my son squeeked, “Buh-Byeeee” and I thought, “we could definitely have a third, look at me, perfectly in control.” And then, before I could even breathe in the moment of the stars aligning and everything going right, my son attempted to book it into oncoming traffic, his little round tummy leading his feet. I carried him like a barrel under my arm squirming and screaming away every ounce of my newfound confidence I had, until we reached the sidewalk. After I put him down, he ran whilst flailing and face-planted into a pile of woodchips. Then, a mother of one of my daughter’s classmates, stopped her stoller on her way home, and with a generous lack of judgment, threw us a lifeline and convinced my son to hitch a ride back to our driveway. We acknowledged the finite nature of magical moments, that the good doesn’t feel as good without the bad, that parenthood is at its core a humbling act.
I get shaken out of the magical moments, just as quickly as I fall into them. Last week, I took my son to the park and was pushing him on a swing and chatting with the woman next to me. It was a light conversation about the boy whom she nannied, how she was teaching him Spanish, what a lovely morning it was. My son was giggling, his limbs limp as he swung back and forth, the sun glistening against his bright blonde hair. Then, she looked at me and with complete sincerity asked, “Is this your grandson?” At 35-years-old, this one really stung. What I hope is that the mistake was because of a language barrier. What I know is that I will never wear the outfit I was wearing again. For the rest of the day, every time I went to the bathroom, I would lean into the mirror and analyze the tiny creases that have rooted into my eye-corners and the sides of my mouth over the past few years. When I was little, I used to catch twinkling fireflies in a jar, I’d watch them blink into the dusk, and then would feel sheer disappointment when they were all dead in the morning. I’ve always wanted to bottle up the magic, the perfect moments, and keep them glowing indefinitely. But, while the contrast of the perfect moment with the utter chaos and confidence-crushing comments never stops being jarring, it makes the moments when the world seems to twinkle feel that much sweeter.
WHEN THE CATERPILLAR STINGS YOUR BUTT
When I was in graduate school, I decided to go down to Florida to interview my great-uncle Clayton for my thesis, which was a collection of essays exploring the complicated nature of memory. My mom had told me this story about my grandfather and his two brothers who were all in World War Two at the same time. They left their home and family in Mudd, West Virginia and their mother had to grapple with all three of her sons being in the war simultaneously. The story goes that she wrote letters to them asking them to try to get together, despite all being stationed in different countries. She wanted them to remember where they came from and what they were fighting for, in hopes that connecting would help them survive. And so, somehow, they all met in Italy, shared a pivotal weekend together and then, subsequently, and perhaps in part due to their meeting, all returned from the war relatively unscathed. So, I met with Clayton (the only brother who was still living), ready to hear his version of this epic tale. I have roughly 15 hours of recorded tape, with fascinating stories on so many facets of his life. But, the story that I came down to Florida to hear, the one that I anticipated being among the most integral, was one we hardly talked about at all.
So, the essay in my thesis ended up being less about what to make of his memories and more about recognizing which memories made him. Now, similarly, I’m experiencing my daughter, falsely categorizing my memories in terms of level of importance. She’s been requesting certain inconsequential stories on repeat. At Easter brunch she asked, “what was the one about the caterpillar and your butt again?” And so I shared, at our holiday meal, for the one millionth time, the story of being six or seven and mounting my bike, who I affectionately named “California Girl,” in order to impress a boy at my next door neighbor’s house. I sat on a caterpillar with spikes and then proceeded to pull down my pants and scream for my mom, in front of the boy. My mom called an entomologist, who said I’d be okay, and then treated the sting with ointment and a bandaid. This story, another about me attempting to run into gigantic waves in Hawaii, and a third about me not getting into the high school musical Freshmen year despite having tap shoes, and best friends who did, are among the most treasured stories currently in my daughter’s rotation. I don’t know why these particular stories have resonated so much. I wish she’d care to hear stories that mattered to me more, but I guess that’s not how it works. Perhaps someday, she’ll want hours of tape (or maybe by then it’ll be computer-brain-reading) about my life too. But in the meantime, I have no say in what stories become treasured.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
Once a week, and usually on a day where the hours between 1pm and 6pm feel like an eternity, my daughter and I venture out to the library while my mom watches my son. This has become one of our most loved parts of the week. This Mommy-daughter outing, with a bubble tea which we split on the backend, brings both of us so much joy. We do our temperature checks at the entrance of the library, Pooh Bear’s temperature hovers around 72, and then my daughter places her books one at a time and so gently in the book return slide before prancing to the children’s section to grab 11 more, which is a totally arbitrary number I have set for no reason other than to ensure we don’t take the whole library home with us each week. This was the first place we ventured with my daughter during the pandemic after months of being quarantined and her forgetting what it meant or how it felt to be in public. I remember her walking in, masked and wide-eyed with more stimulation than she’d felt in months. She began to know the sections that carried her favorite series and she’d always have a list of her most pressing interests to give to the librarians, so they could pick out books accordingly: Dinosaurs, trucks, dinosaurs in trucks, princesses, hardware stores, princesses using hardware, first days of school, first days your pets go to school, pigs who own bakeries - the options feel endless. I could go on all day about the importance of the library in our family’s rhythm, but instead, I’ll put the top eleven books which have really rocked our world in the past month:
1. Peterrific - Kann
2. Fergal & The Bad Temper -Starling
3. I Got Rhythm - Schofield-Morrison
4. Can I be your dog? - Cummings
5. The Electric Slide and Kai - Baptist
6. Will You Help Me Fall Asleep-Kang
7. Birdie's First Day of School - Rim
8. Love, Violet - Wild
9. Buddy Bench - Brozo
10. First Day of School- Van Den Berg
11. Ella The Elegant Elephant Takes The Cake - D’Amico
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
Recently, my daughter has begun trying to understand the idea of exchange. She gives you a plastic ice cream cone, and then you give her money. She only accepts her money in pounds, thanks to Peppa Pig, but the concept is there. When we go to the library, she gives her library card to the person checking us out, and they give her a stack of books. She taps Mama’s card on a plastic square, and then she receives her popsicle. It all feels pretty magical and simple, two adjectives that couldn’t be further from describing money. Explaining payment, giving to get, it’s a complicated concept. And, this brings us to the Tooth Fairy. Similar to quicksand, the number of books on the Tooth Fairy would lead you to believe she will play a far more important role in your life than she actually ends up playing. To her dismay, my daughter is not of the age yet to lose her teeth, but she is desperate to be given the opportunity to find treasures under her pillow, because, who wouldn’t. So, she’s decided, and reasonably so, that perhaps other outputs will give her the same result. Recently she told me that by putting boogers under her pillow, the “Boogie Fairy” would take them in exchange for chocolate. And, soon after that, she explained that the “Nail Fairy” would take the nail clippings from beneath her pillow and in return leave her gold coins. So, now we’re dealing with a disappointed three-year-old, desperate to wrap her mind around economics while flexing her entrepreneurial ambitions.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
Tropical California Avocado Salad
Summer is upon us and with it, I am always looking for lighter meals that incorporate all of the fresh produce of the season. This Tropical California Avocado Salad is the first recipe I ever discovered from What’s Gaby Cooking, and now I have her cookbooks and reference her all of the time. Her recipes are honest (in required effort and energy), easy to follow, versatile, and delicious. If you’re looking for a refreshing salad that embodies the brightness of summer,
look no further.
