The One Where… I Introduce Myself

Growing up, I don’t remember fantasizing about being a mother. I never pretended that PJ Sparkles was my baby. Never pretended to feed her or rock her to sleep. It’s not that she wouldn’t have made a great kid, because she would have, she would have been an overachiever because she was awesome. The idea just never occurred to me. Being a mom was not something I ever gave much thought to. And that remained true even as I got older, before I had kids. I do, however, remember the books. Stories. There were always stories. I loved reading them and being read to. I could never get enough, in fact I have in my possession my favorite book from when I was a kid - The Thorn Witch - the actual copy that my mother read to me.

When my parents sold my childhood home, they had to clean house. It wasn’t until my mom dropped off a queen-size comforter bag containing Hailey-related paraphernalia that I truly appreciated how much shit you accumulate as a parent. Now a fellow mother, I too have a growing pile of “art work”, credited to my oldest children, five and three, that I cannot for the life of me decide what to do with. Typically, when these crafts come home from school they get hung on the fridge. But both the amount of this construction-mounted art and the regularity that it has come home with has made it difficult to keep up. I can’t bring myself to throw any of it out so I’ve been forced to keep an unsightly pile in the corner of my dining room. Evidently my mom was also a sentimental silly like myself. Within the plastic-enclosed time capsule were drawings, yearbooks, pictures, old notes and, last but not least, my childhood favorite, The Thorn Witch. It’s hardcover but both age and abuse have worn the cardboard down, rendering it soft and wrinkled. The pages white knuckle the spine and are shaded in various shades of Crayola. But appearance be damned, the story inside is timeless and one I couldn’t wait to share with my first born, Cole.

One night, when I decided he was old enough, I rotated The Thorn Witch into our bedtime story routine. I was bubbling with anticipation. I made a big deal when introducing the book to him, gave him the whole backstory about how GG (Grandma Gret) had read this book to me when I was his age, how much I loved it, etc. etc. It was all a bit dramatic but I couldn’t help myself. With every page I read aloud I found myself sneaking glances at him, trying to gauge his reaction. It was akin to falling in love with a song and needing so badly for the person you love to listen to it and love it as much as you do. But Cole made me work for it. He was rather stoic throughout the story, holding his cards close to his chest. If he was loving it or, perish the thought, hating it he didn’t let on. When we finally reached the end I laid next to him in his twin-sized bed waiting for a reaction, any reaction. What I got: questions. An endless litany of questions.

• What’s a briar patch?

• Are briars the same as thorns?

• Why is the witch lonely?

• What’s jam?

So on and so forth. For every answer I gave, he followed up with another question. Some of the questions were real brain benders and before I knew it I was down the briar patch with him. When we finally put a pin in the inquisition, I realized I still hadn’t got an answer to the one, arguably more important, question I had when we started: did he like the damn book?! That, in a nutshell, is not dissimilar from my experience as a mother to date. Three kids later and I continue to have more questions than answers.

As I mentioned earlier, I never really thought much about becoming a parent. It’s not that I didn’t want kids, it was more that I didn’t not want kids, if that makes sense. Any family planning was pretty passive. I didn’t have a long term goal, with milestones like when I would want to be married by or a deadline for when I’d want to be pregnant, etc. My domestic agenda was all very loosey-goosey. My now husband, Mark, and I were together for ten years before he proposed, if that’s any indication. I guess that’s more his timeline than mine but I think you get my point. So when we did eventually get married and then, two years later, find out we were going to be having a baby, I had exactly zero expectations for how this whole motherhood thing would shake out. On September 15, 2018, my world was shook. Upon the first diaper change, to be more precise.

I’m embarrassed to admit this but there is a video documenting Cole’s first diaper change. Not for his sake, he did great, but for mine. It took me over seven minutes. Seven minutes! When I think about the amount of things I can now get done in seven minutes it shames me to my core. But that should help to illustrate just how unprepared I was for motherhood. The first night home from the hospital, no one slept. Actually, that’s a lie. Cole slept, mostly. Mark and I were wrecks. We both posted up in the living room where we laid on our respective sofas about two feet from Cole, except when we hovered directly over him. We’d each take turns making sure he was breathing. I was a nutcase about SIDS. My grandmother, Joan, had given birth to seven children and five survived. One was delivered a stillborn and the other who passed, presumably died of SIDS at six months old. At least that’s what they knew then, in the fifties. Nevertheless, this fact haunted me. When Cole slept, I never allowed anything in his crib other than his pacifiers. He wore a onesie or a sleepsack, unless he was at my mother-in-law’s house.

My mother-in-law, Linda, is a big fan of being cozy. When we visit she insists on the kids being bundled up because the “porch is chilly”. So when Cole napped there as an infant, her instinct was to swaddle him in blankets because “babies sleep better when they’re cuddled up”. Well that just freaked me the fuck out. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and I couldn’t deny her power to get him to sleep easier than I could, so I tolerated her instance on a blanket so long as she promised to watch the monitor the entire time, without blinking. Of course with each succeeding child I began to loosen the fuck up and to trust my instincts, but it would be a long road to get there. So either my mother-in-law saw that, or my SIDS paranoia wore off on her, because the great blanket debate became less and less frequent.

My SIDS-obsession aside, I did begin to grow more comfortable with the fact that I was responsible for another human being’s life. But there was still this seedling of self-doubt that had been planted and was starting to grow roots. The things you often see or hear a mother and child bonding over were things that seemed to be easier for everyone but me. Linda, for example, was a pro at getting Cole down for naps. Mark almost always had an easier time getting him back asleep following the 2am feeding. Whereas, I felt like I had to rock and sing “hush little baby” until mama was bringing him some crazy shit. My dad was a master burper. My sister-in-law, Kerry, could invariably get him to smile or coo. I was regularly being told that I knew him best or I knew what was best for him, better than anyone. But that didn’t feel true. At that point in time, if asked who better than me to take care of my son, I would have answered anyone. That’s how I felt - that I was not the best for the job. I was constantly second guessing myself, constantly comparing myself to other parents, asking myself why was this all so challenging for me. I was overwhelmed with uncertainty. It’s not that I was uncertain I loved him, because I did more than anything. It was more that I wasn’t so sure that I wouldn’t accidentally kill him.

Come the end of my maternity leave, work was a welcome escape. It gave me a chance to recharge despite the job itself being draining. I worked as an account manager in advertising which was, in itself, its own unique kind of hell. The hours were unpredictable as I was often at the mercy of the clients’ schedules as well as their budgets. The bigger the budgets the more of my time my clients’ seemed to think they were owed of me. But there were perks. One of my biggest responsibilities was making sure that the client was happy. Schmoozing. Taking them out to fancy restaurants or drinks or both, paid for by the agency. If I was required at a shoot, which the client manager often was, my travel and accommodations were covered, affording me the opportunity to travel to places I might not otherwise have gone. There were also the unique “benefits” of working at an agency, which often revolved around booze: Regular happy hours, beginning early and ending only when the alcohol ran out. Most meetings served beer or wine and when I worked late or through lunch, which was often, we usually did it at the bar.

This was probably why agency culture is often littered with twenty and thirty-somethings. I may not have necessarily been paid top dollar for my time, especially when you factored in all of those late nights and skipped meals, but I was getting compensated in other ways that held weight at that age. And since I was at the office so much, it was only natural for most of my friendships to have developed there. Surrounded by friends and shiny objects, it was easy to be distracted from the fact that I was working for basically nothing. Not only that, but I beginning to re-evaluate my relationship with alcohol.

For the moment, I continued to feel as though work was fulfilling some of my immediate needs that my home life couldn’t, even if they were shallow. Being around human beings who used their words to communicate, for starters, instead of crying or throwing tantrums (usually, not always, depending on the client). Using my brain to accomplish tasks that didn’t involve someone else’s rear end. Even being able to scroll on my phone during downtime, guilt free, was a need I didn’t realize how badly I had. Being able to trust a decision I had made and knowing that even if it backfired it wouldn’t be at the cost of someone’s literal life. In short, at work I didn’t flat out feel like I sucked. I wasn’t reaping any tangible rewards but I wasn’t getting screamed at either. And that was enough. So I clung onto a career and a lifestyle that were, in reality, doing me a disservice. But I wasn’t ready to accept this and what this would mean for my life. Not yet.

On June 22nd, 2020, Ethan was born and boy oh boy was my world rocked for the second time. First of all, his birth coincided with the beginning of a Pandemic. So not only was I making the transition from caring for one, to caring for two but I was also bringing home a baby in the early days of COVID. Shit was scary. People were afraid, people were dying. This disease was taking lives and no one seemed to know how to stop it. The CDC could only advise us to mask up, wipe down and quarantine. Maternity leave was a disaster. It was challenging enough, adjusting to being a mother of two, but now I had to contend with a crazy man-eating disease, shortages, confinement and sleep deprivation? If this wasn’t a recipe for a meltdown I don’t know what is.

Before I knew it, maternity leave was over and it was time to go back to work. But there was no “going to work” anymore. There was now “working remotely.” Courtesy of COVID. So there we were, a family of four (five if you included the dog, Truman) all living, playing and working on top of one another in a house that was quickly becoming too small. Mark worked upstairs while I worked out of the guest room, which butted up against the den, where the kids spent most of their time. Up until nap time that room was alive with the sounds of chaos. Cocomelon or Babybum could be heard vibrating through the wall while Cole and Ethan took turns shrieking at a pitch capable of causing a person’s eardrums to rupture. I made an effort to always have my mic muted on Zoom calls, only unmuting when absolutely necessary. I was present on camera most of the time, unless my mother-in-law or our sitter, Heidi, needed the changing table which, as my luck would have it, was set up directly behind me giving the audience front row seats to the peesh show. Looking back, it was comical. At the time, it was overwhelming. All the noise seemed to compete with one another until it all blended into one deafening soundtrack that played on repeat. And without anywhere to go or anything to look forward to, all of the days seemed to run into each other like a time lapse on loop. It felt like Groundhog day on crack.

The lack of escape was one of the hardest pills to swallow. I had no reprieve. And there were no boundaries. Without a commute to contend with, meetings were scheduled before and after working hours. And because we could no longer simply walk over to someone’s desk and ask a question, we were forced to schedule a meeting to discuss the things you didn’t want to go back and forth about over email. This resulted in a manic looking calendar which, even to the eye, seemed to scream OVERBOOKED, NO VACANCY. But this way of working was unprecedented. Everyone was treading water, doing their best to stay afloat, which meant that we were too busy to slow down and recognize the fact that this was unsustainable. Especially for working parents. There was no buffer between work and home. The commute I used to dread was now sorely missed if only for a chance to take a fucking breath and have a minute of solitude. And as for those occasional lulls? They were obliterated. Even if a meeting was canceled I felt guilty for using that time to simply do nothing, especially when I couldn’t ignore the sounds coming from the adjacent room.

The friendships I had made at the office didn’t seem to stand up without the agency walls supporting them. And it was a struggle and a half to make actual friends out in the wild. Without work in common, it was proving a lot more challenging than I thought to establish a connection with other thirty-something females out here on the Island. Even the mommy and me classes, which I had stopped frequenting, were clique-y. I didn’t think my anxiety could get any worse and then I would try to awkwardly insert myself into a two way conversation for the chance to bond over our babies. It was a rough and tumble world in the way of making any gal pals and now that every physical place was shutting down, the opportunities to meet anyone were becoming fewer and fewer. The isolation and loneliness I was feeling was palpable. I was in a rut and I didn’t know how to get out.

I had to assume I couldn’t be the only person feeling this way. So what was everybody else doing to get through this? Where were they going? One look at Instagram and other social platforms and I had my answers. Everyone was going online. So I joined local mom groups on Facebook and followed them on Instagram. Turns out, everyone seemed to be drinking through it. Moms were crediting “mommy juice” for getting them through this remote way of life. People were posting about wine-o-clock. Hell, even restaurants were beginning to include alcohol in their take out menu. The bar down my street wasn’t allowing anyone inside the establishment but was allowing happy hour in their parking lot and to-go cups were provided. Even my agency started hosting virtual happy hours.

I was never a big drinker. I didn’t start drinking at an early age and I didn’t drink all that much when I turned 21. To be honest, I didn’t like the way it made me feel. Tired, full, gassy, and once I broke the seal I always had to pee. Don’t get me wrong, I loved myself a margarita but more because it was delicious. Above anything else, for me, I drank more for socialization, being with people. But somewhere along the way that changed and the way it made me feel changed.

I never knew what a panic attack felt like until I did. It was the day after Cole’s birthday party. If you haven’t experienced one, for yourself I don’t recommend it if it’s avoidable. It’s not fun. When people say it feels like you’re having a heart attack, they aren’t lying. My hands and arms went numb. I couldn’t catch my breath and I was having pain in the center of my chest. Oddly enough I was working on a pharma account at the time that was executing a campaign about heart health. My job gave me the week off. By the following Friday I felt better so I resumed my regularly scheduled program. I had another anxiety attack the following week. I started seeing a therapist for anxiety because I was so scared I was going to keep having these episodes. She recommended I try a SSRI to help manage my symptoms. I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown.

October 20, 2020 I made the decision to quit drinking. Alcohol wasn’t doing me any favors. It was no longer providing me with anything I was looking for - relaxation, peace, an escape if you will. If anything, it had started causing me anxiety. I wasn’t sleeping and I was a witch because I was tired and on edge all of the time. It was not a good look and it felt fucking terrible. It was like my body was telling me to find another way to cope with all of the changes in my life. I’m not here to preach. If you want to drink, do you. For me, alcohol just wasn’t contributing anything beneficial to my life and, as I got older, I seemed to have developed an aversion to it. It was the change I needed and it got the ball rolling on another change I was afraid to make.

It’s hard to put into words how significantly my life began to change with one decision. To start, I didn’t feel like a giant bag of sand all of the time. I slept like a goddamn champ. My anxiety all but disappeared. I no longer needed medicine. My stress levels went down, my patience increased. My interests returned. Drawing, reading, writing. I loved going for walks with my double wide, two kiddos in tow, listening to Super Simple Songs at full volume. I didn’t feel like ripping peoples’ faces off for asking me questions or trying to get my attention. I didn’t feel as overwhelmed, even though my workload was the same, the demands on my time the same. I could finally begin to feel a sense of calm that I had so desperately been seeking. That’s not to say that my life didn’t look like a dumpster fire every now and again. Shit was still crazy. I guess the difference was that I wasn’t adding to it, unnecessarily. This general acceptance couldn’t have come at a better time because my life was about to be rocked again.

On October 20, 2021 Theo was born. One year from the day I quit drinking. We weren’t that clever to have planned it that way. We never planned for a third at all. We were just beginning to adjust to having two. But shit happens, life happens. Literally. But let me tell you, three is a game changer. We were now in the big leagues and officially in over our heads. We were outnumbered. And the house had begun to feel too tight, long before Theo came into the picture. We had reached max capacity. We had to make a choice: stay and sell a child or move. Despite my initial apprehension we actually loved each and every one of these fuckers, so our decision was fortunately an easy one.

The next several months were a blur but I’ll do my best to give you the highlights:

• We gradually moved into our new house. We lived with a lot of cardboard for a long time but, eventually, we unpacked every moving box.

• Theo was hospitalized on the day he turned two months and spent his first Christmas in the PICU with RSV. I consumed an ungodly amount of vending machine food but the pull out bed in his room was actually very comfortable.

• Ethan had several ear infections and as a result was a raging lunatic but who can blame him.

• Cole started school.

• Cole started another, less terrible school.

• Cole came down with a psychotic stomach bug and sprayed the house with various bodily fluids. That was fun.

• Truman jumped in the canal behind our house and our neighbor rescued him.

• Truman jumped into the canal again and the neighbors gave us sass.

• We put up a fence.

• Cole got sick again but it wasn’t COVID.

• Mark and I got sick and it was COVID.

• All the kids got COVID.

• I changed my specialty at work.

• Correction: I thought I had left account management for project management but, funny joke, our wires somehow got crossed and I was doing both jobs.

• I raised a flag.

• The big wigs at the agency said they were working on it, that they were finding someone to take the lead on the account. A couple more months passed.

• I was told I was killing it as an AM/PM. As you might suspect, that’s not an actual thing.

• I quit.

June 10, 2022 was my last day of work because fuck. that. noise. In all sincerity, I appreciate how lucky I am to be in a position to have had that decision to make. Mark works hard and is compensated, as he should be, for that hard work. I also worked hard and was not being compensated, as I should have been, for that hard work. My time is valuable and if anybody is going to under-appreciate me and abuse me it’s going to be my children so I choose to spend my valuable time with them. I might not have all of the answers. What’s more likely is that I’ll still be left with more questions. But I know now that I’m the best for the job. I want to be present for the good, the bad, the funny, the ugly. I don’t want to escape from any of it. Don’t quote me on that. More or less, for better or for worse, I want to enjoy my kids while they’re still kids. And maybe become what I’ve always wanted to be when I grow up.

That brings me to today. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve always loved stories. So why not write about my own? That’s why I’m here. I’m going to share my stories with you and I hope you’ll read them. I hope you’ll relate to them. Laugh with them. Share them. If one person reads this and finds comfort in the fact that they’re not alone, I can die happy. But hopefully I won’t die anytime soon because I have a lot of storytelling to do.