February, 7 months after the end of June

 So guys i went to a slam poetry show with one of my besties last night initially because it sounded like a cool new thing to try (even though poetry often gives me the icks) but her husband didnt want to go, she had two tickets, and I'm always thirsting for an adventure. 

So we went, and I am shocked to tell you all that I was completely blown away. Multiple times I had tears falling down my face feeling his words so deeply (some very very funny, and some very very moving) and they brought out feelings in me that I'd even forgotten about, or hadn't organized how to feel about, and he put them not only into words, but into beautiful words.

My friend is an artist who surrounds herself with artistic experiences like these and artistic people who inspire her and it's true that being around art really does inspire you to make art! Maybe it's why she's so talented. She never lets it go stale.

Guys my February *royally* sucked. I mean like doesn't February always suck for everyone? But seriously February was super bad. And looking back I'm realizing now that February is kinda always super bad for me. Like BAD. It wasn't completely situational (although 2 week-long stomach flus in our house in our house certainly didn't help) but just emotionally i was an all-over-the-place wreck.

I look at an app everyday that sends me through all of my social media posts all the way back to when i first got my facebook as a too-young freshman in college (so like 17 years ago?) so i can see what I was up to on this day, every year, for the past 17 years.

Every February since Oliver was born I look at it and Oliver is perhaps the cutest he ever is as a baby. 7 Months of chuckling, bubbling, butter-ball-iness. But for some reason I don't get happy when I see the pictures I'm filled with overwhelming despair and I couldn't put my finger on it until finally this year I realized that *FEBRUARY* is when ollie turned 7 months. I always say that I came out of my scarily dark PPD when oliver turned 7 months and all of a sudden it's like i had a baby that i loved and i was almost myself again, and oh how sweet he was, and the pictures just started flooding. They don't really exist a ton before 7 months.

I have a friend who told me your body responds to "trauma anniversaries". Realizing the robbery of a newborn and infant phase of your only son qualifies as trauma to me. And February is the anniversary.

It's wild, but the calendar clicked to March this week and all of a sudden I felt a lot better but made the realization *yesterday* about my "Body Keeping the Score" of the toll my PPD charged my on my time with Oliver.

The culmination of February aligning with a night full of cathartic poetry got me thinking in terms of words that could emotionally cleanse my own soul of all the things i was feeling about this and my friend told me to just go for it. And against all of my normal tendencies i decided sure why not.

So here is the poem that i wrote. (The first poem i have written since i had to write a poem in high school lol) do not laugh at me, i am painfully self conscious.

Seven months

I grew you for 9 (10) months

Held you for 6

But met you at 7 months

You, long awaited little stranger, arrived in June

I met you in February

I saw you

Watched you

Fed you

Changed you

But saw nothing

Felt nothing

Remember nothing

Until I met you at 7 months

I saw you arrive

Watched you come home

And then missed it all

It’s all gone

My mind went dark

It went to places so dark my mind doesn’t remember

Doesn’t want to remember, thereby cannot remember

So it’s gone

Other mothers meet their new little lives and are never strangers

They see it all, feel it all, relish it all, cherish it all, keep it all

I keep nothing

There was nothing to keep

Until I met you at seven months

In February I saw you.

I looked at you and I SAW you

And you were beautiful

And you weren’t a stranger

You were a wonder

A fixture

A monument

I held you and I held you close

I breathed in your intoxicating smell

I rubbed my face in your soft bouncy skin

Smushed my lips on your water balloon cheeks

How have you been here this whole time?

Why do I only get to meet you now?

I search mind and memory for any record of this miracle of a creature

And there is nothing. 

I see nothing

Remember nothing

There is only darkness

Other mothers get those moments

The newborn smells

The nighttime snorts

The muscle memory of the constant swaddles

The tiniest hands, holding their finger in a death grip for dear life.

The dead weight of a smush-worm against their shoulders

The mindless sway of a mom so tired from rocking her newborn she has forgotten she isn’t even holding a baby.

I have nothing.

I’ll always have nothing.

To me, your life began at 7 months.

I will never know you as a newborn.

I will never know the sound of your tiniest cry before you found your voice.

I will never know what your first smile looked like.

I will never know how you learned to roll over.

I will never know the feeling of your dead weight worm-smush against my shoulder.

I don’t sway.

You were a stranger

And I wasn’t there

My human shell cared for you for 7 months and my soul was absent

Consciousness gone

Self, gone.

The shell remembers nothing.

My Soul returned

When I met you 

At seven months.

My mind’s absence has robbed me

I am gutted and robbed completely

Time the other mothers get

Time I got with your sister

Precious, still, quiet, sacred time 

Has been stolen and has no means of restitution

Your sister has 7 months that you will never have

I watch you sleep at night

Tuck you in extra tight

Hang back a little longer

Thinking each second might

Re-fill that empty jar of time

Have the extra moments I’ve stolen with you totaled to 7 months of moments?

Is there any way to repay you for those moments lost?

Those moments I was able to so freely give your sister

The moments the others get from the other mothers

The moments I couldn’t give you

Will these new moments in this new moment jar ever hit the 7 month mark?

Will that make up the difference?

Will that fill the void?

Will we break even?

Its been 7 years.

7 years and 7 months.

I’ve filled that jar every day for 7 years and 7 months and I will never break even.

You don’t remember being robbed of the time.

But I carry the loss with me always.

I mourn it perpetually.

It’s extra heavy in February, 7 months after June.

I watch you sleep and think

“I owe him more moments”

I weep as I stroke your sleeping, impossibly long eyelashes

I should have been there. I’m sorry I was gone.

I’m sorry I couldn’t give you what the other mothers could have given you.

I’m sorry I couldn’t give you what I gave your sister.

I failed.

I was gone.

I fought so hard to come back

To claw my way out of the darkness

To find this stranger I so desperately wanted to meet.

This stranger I’d begged for and carefully curated.

I grew you for 9 (10) months

Searched for you for 6,

when you found me

and saved me

at 7 months.

the absolute impossible creativity of the bipolar brain

i have spent the past several days in a rather unpleasant mini-mixed episode. any second i've had of unstructured time, i have spent absorbed/crumpled up into an empty, bottomless, thought-pit, that somewhat resembles the inside of an ice cream maker. it is dark, tumultuous, and mind-numbingly loud, where thoughts materialize alarmingly quickly, drop into the ice cream pit at once, and are then smeared away immediately without so much as a millisecond left to process what is happening in there. it's enough to make me mentally nauseated (which trust me, is a thing), and has even gone as far as to make me physically nauseated. i am exhausted from spinning in my thought vacuum without enough time to grab on to any conscious thought to even make any sense of it. 

a calming exercise i've been trying when i have a shred an energy left to do it, has been to try to break down where in my subconscious the seemingly random "speed-thought" came from. for instance, an abstract image of a butterfly unfolding its origami paper wings will go swirling by and it will have several layers of development in my subconscious. it looks like the paper is made from pages of a coloring book that belonged to my brother when we were children. i talked to my brother earlier that day, about a topic unrelated to butterflies or origami but related to childhood and handiwork. the subconscious did its best.

anyway. that way of thinking has begun to help me be more mindful about where my thoughts are going, why they're there, and how to slow them down.

so today, as i was exiting the shower, mindlessly but mentally preparing to de-turban my hair to unlock whatever curly mysteries may lurk beneath, my brain was simultaneously, on an unrelated note, narrating a potential short story, as folks often do in their brains. (i.e "Wouldn't it be great if a movie went like________?") the short story was some silly weird narrative that was writing itself on the backburner of my mind while i was doing the menial post-shower tasks. 

something about star-crossed lovers. at a crossroads. about to find out if they were truly meant to be together. what if they weren't?! what would they do?! but what if they WERE?! what THEN?! were they READY?! 

it was as this narration was rolling in the background in my brain that i was taking my hair out of its towel and realizing that the story wasn't in fact about lovers at all but about my HAIR.

my hair is about to be taken out of its turban. at a crossroads. about to find out if curls truly had formed under there. what if they hadn't? i guess they could be combed back to try again another day, but what if they HAD?! what if curls HAD managed to form?! WHAT THEN?! would I actually need to STYLE THEM?! BEFORE BED?! and HOPE FOR THE BEST?! makes star-crossed lovers sound like child's play. 

all this to say, bipolar brains are a nightmare. if i told you i didn't nauseously cry myself to sleep several times this week, mentally motion-sick from the relentless "thought swarms" getting dumped into my ice cream-maker, i would be lying. but nightmares can be magic. bipolar people are magic. there is a reason the great creative minds of our world are bipolar minds. 

i am not a creative genius. but when you hear an actual creative genius one day say something like "Yeah i actually thought about my idea for Katniss and Peeta while I was getting out of the shower, my hair was telling me a story in real time, it was wild!" it will make sense. and you'll know why because you've just taken a peek inside a bipolar mind :)

2021

 2021

I know everyone is telling us not to gear up for positivity in 2021. That it will still suck, it will be more of the same, things are still going to still be astronomically bad, that nothing will change.

I beg to differ.

It’s true, the world will still be in a state of utmost terribleness and sucky-ness. (With the exception of the expulsion of the unqualified oaf from the White House!) But with 2021 comes MYRIAD changes that will help us through the year.

The changes arent in the world around us, they are in our perspective. In our attitudes, and in our resolve.

If we learned anything 2020 is that we. can. do. hard. things.

We suffered fires, tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes, riots,  protests, civil unrest, murders, and all of this during the biggest global pandemic in over 100 years. (Not to mention a huge slew of unexpected deaths of public figures who we will all miss tremendously!)

We went through it all, wondering how we would ever muddle through it, if we could survive it, if we could even thrive through it. And we learned that we totally could.

How many of you picked up a new skill during quarantine?

Who adopted a covid puppy?

Who pulled kids out of school to start their own homeschool program?

Who strengthened their relationships with their partners and children?

Who learned what’s REALLY important? What to hold on to and what to just let go of in order to keep our sanity?

Who drew closer to their senior loved ones, even when they couldnt be physically close?

Who started spending a lot more time outside?

Who learned new ways to serve others even when we can’t be close to them?

Who decluttered in a major way?

Who enjoyed getting a whoooooole lot of takeout?

Who started ordering groceries and will NEVER go back to the old ways?

Who started really focusing on their spirituality?

Yes, we all wanted to curl up in fetal position and cry through it some days.

Yes, we had mental temper tantrums in our heads every ten (ok three) minutes.

Yes, we screamed into our pillows every day.

Yes, we wish our kids would hide silently in their rooms for the rest of their lives.

Yes, we miss date nights and movie theaters and restaurants and sports and school and ANYTHING social. 

Yes, we miss the breeze on our faces.

Yes, we wonder if things will EVER go back to normal!

And we learned that, even if they don’t, we can totally handle it. We’ve already adapted in so many ways and we KNOW we will continue to do so no matter what!

In 2021, a lot of us will STILL be doing remote school. It still sucks. What’s changed? We KNOW what we’re doing! We’re experienced! We’ve got almost a year under our belts. We know how to make it work for us and what won’t work for us.  2021 will be better.

In 2021, a lot of us will STILL be working from home. It still sucks. What’s changed? We’ve got our workspaces carved out. We have a desk SOMEWHERE in our homes that feels lived in and familiar. We have a routine. We know how remote workflow works. We’re experienced. 2021 will be better.

In 2021, the 3rd (and probably 4th) wave of the pandemic will be raging. What’s changed? Awareness is spreading. Acknowledgement has finally become prevalent. Mandates are in place. The curve has flattened in many states. More information is known and continues to be discovered about the virus each day. A vaccine is in trials. WE WILL HAVE A PRESIDENT WHO CARES! It’s still a huge problem, but we become more prepared for its effects every day. 2021 will be better.

2021’s circumstances will be largely similar to 2020’s. Our surroundings may stay the same, or even get worse. But where in 2020 we were flying blind, in 2021 we have experience. We have resolve. We have knowledge that WE CAN DO IT! How? We’ve already done it. 2021 will probably still suck. But this time we’re ready for it. 2021 will be better.