The Year(s) We Became Four
We became a family of four slowly. The new baby was mine first, all mine, which is how I wanted it. I’d had to share my first baby so quickly with the world that I indulged in possessiveness for awhile, knowing deep down it was all just a delusion. But it was nice to at least have the choice to pretend this time.
Those were the days when a day felt like a week and a week felt like a month and month felt like a year and that year felt like it was just yesterday. We were just there but here we are, and as my mother would often say, “The days are long, but the years fly by.”
Sometimes I can imagine we’re still there. We are. We always were. The time before and after children doesn’t exist in a linear way. Were they ever not here? Yes. No. Were we ever just us? No. Yes.
A similar phenomenon occurs in quarantine — in self-isolation. In entire years that go missing. Were we ever not in a pandemic? No. Yes. Has it been a week? A month? A year? Yes. No.
And what day is it? Whether I’m in the NICU or midweek in August or pregnant in winter or on the 100th day of the pandemic or Day 10 of maternity leave — my answer is I don’t know. It could be any day. Any month. Time’s lines have been shredded and taped back together into baby books that brighten this maddening time — 2016-2020.
I can only tell you what time it is.
It’s midnight to 2 a.m.
…and I’m crocheting a rainbow blanket for our firstborn on the first Wednesday of November 2016. Total silence. It’s midnight to 2 a.m. in 2017 and someone has a rising fever. It’s midnight to 2 a.m. in 2018 and I’m writing poetry in bed. It’s midnight to 2 a.m. in 2019 and the littlest one wails out a siren cry that makes me leap from my dreamy ship onto the rocks of another sleepless night. It’s midnight to 2 a.m. and I’m working on another project by the light of a screen. It’s midnight to 2 a.m. and I listen to my children breathe.
Those are my office hours. While work is and it isn’t. While we’re home and we’re not. While we’re planning and we’re pretending that everything that is happening around us — both parenthood and a pandemic — is basically just the worst [insert day] of [insert month].
I might have done a lot more panicking during these years, but in my first family of three — the one where I was the little one — it’s midnight to 2 a.m. and I am never alone.
Because many nights from midnight to 2 a.m. my mother is awake with new moms like me in 2017 and veteran moms like me in 2019, too. With or without a pandemic, she is holding babies — before and after I ever gave her my babies to hold. It’s midnight to 2 a.m. and the veil grows thin and for a few minutes I can’t feel the edges of the world — but I am never alone. Because most nights from midnight to 2 a.m. my father is awake, working out and pondering. With or without a pandemic, he is cleaning. Before and after.
Everything changes, and yet everything stays the same.
Now that we’re all here — all four of us in the family of our making — I can imagine us in both worlds at the same time.
I can imagine many of these days, void of the years they supposedly exist in, happening simultaneously like some vividly never-ending paragraph from a Gabriel García Márquez novel. 2020 could’ve been renamed One Hundred Years of Solitude.
What are days like when babies come and Presidents go and pandemics come and protests go on and on because we must go on? Every day, moving from one metaphorical fire to the next actual West coast fire to the next — sometimes putting it out and other times letting it burn to stay alive — all ideas and no plans, making it up in the moment that we show up.
I can see the days and years overlapping like trick photography, images superimposed on top of one another.
I can imagine a Monday in January.
I can see myself trying to get a moment to sneak into the bathroom without the toddler so that I can take a pregnancy test. It’s Martin Luther King Day 2019. Someone’s on the way.
It’s another Monday in January a year later, and we’re in the hospital again. RSV. I can see her in the metal crib in the morning light of the hospital room with the whirring machines.
It’s another Monday — conjunctivitis. Strep is waiting in the wings. It’s 5 a.m. and I’m in the shower and the postpartum hairloss is reaching unattractive levels. There’s a snow day or two one year but not the other.
It’s Monday and I’m either diverting someone else’s crisis or I am the crisis. I am okay. The days are marathons in which nothing is accomplished in the cold rain or within off-white concrete walls or under crisp blank skies. That noiselessness is snow forming somewhere nearby. Work, school, illnesses, school projects, meetings, 5 a.m. again. Dark mornings. Dark evenings.
But there’s this happy little boy chasing me down the driveway with a red and blue toy lawnmower. I can see him over the green trash bin. His giddy shrieks are the only sounds on the quiet street. He’s almost two. He’s almost three. He’s almost something every January. So am I. We turn ourselves over into our older selves close together. One hopeful winter birthday and one chilly spring one.
It’s Monday in January and I’m writing in a gratefulness journal. I have a lot to write and yet the water heater is making a high-pitched whine that I keep mistaking for the dog wanting to go out and the medical bills pile up accordion-style until I stuff them half-paid, half-organized into folders, envelopes, something. I’ll look at them later.
I can imagine a Tuesday in March…
…relentless with rain. Everything dripping, puddling, muddy, ants tracking in, bags overfull of cough drop wrappers, coronavirus spreading. I’m never quite dressed properly. I’m wearing boots then flip-flops, a scarf with short sleeves. Tiny jackets hang in every corner like bats. I don’t look at the calendar anymore, just counting down the days to spring break.
On a Tuesday in March, I have my first baby. I’m looking at him, now, enormous compared to that day. Now, I’m looking at her, the second baby, itching to crawl and grow teeth. Merlin the Monkey is the sole voice of reason in the evenings, and I wonder how normal it is to find myself learning how to talk to my child through a puppet persona I, myself, created. The baby is eying her brother’s baby lion and the rivalry begins. Merlin mediates by request.
It’s a Tuesday and our sweet senior dog is the best part of going to work. I’m writing long, funny letters to whomever crosses my mind.
It’s Tuesday and we forget to put out the trash and recycling in time and as usual the yard is trash and the laundry is left in the washer. My gratefulness journal is spotty, but I’m holding on by a thread, a thread that means spring is almost here.
Suddenly, spring break comes three weeks early in the form of a pandemic. Just another Tuesday. St. Patrick’s Day is Tuesday, and the toddler comes home with an ear infection. I take him home from daycare; we both don’t know he won’t go back. He’s unaware and happy that the red mustang that lives caddy-corner to us, also known as Lightning McQueen, is almost always parked in the driveway now. We’re all in quarantine and suddenly everyone knows their governor really well. We fall asleep nightly to I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew.
I can imagine a Wednesday in October.
I’m voting early with my baby strapped to my chest with a mask strapped to my face. Or I’m cycling quickly through the days of sleeping and feeding and eating and milk making and medicating. I have the whole day alone with my new baby. We’re a whole universe destined to disappear in one blink. But for a moment, a Wednesday, a millennium, we’re everything to one another. October is over almost as soon as it starts. I love just us girls, and I still miss my husband and my son, too.
It’s a Wednesday in October 2020, we miss everyone and still mostly each other. Stress hits all-time highs; moods hit all-time lows. Grad school deadlines are completed to the sound of primal screaming.
It’s Wednesday and I’m looking at a calendar filled with Wednesdays scheduled with professional development seminars, preparing myself to drag a car seat along hoping I can nurse and look engaged at the same time. I can. I do. I’m drawing on the lessons from my first round of mothering; I find strength remembering my body withers and blooms like the seasons. I can’t pretend it’s spring yet. I’m healthy. I’m young. I’m back in my old jeans. But I need more time. It’s isn’t spring; I am an autumn falling swiftly into winter. I get sick too easily. I get emotional too easily. I get thin too easily. I need more time to cave in….
It’s a Wednesday in October, and I have my last glass of wine for the next year. It’s only okay wine, unfortunately. We are celebrating a job interview that went well (though that job didn’t happen), and two days later I have that moment a woman has staring at a calendar at some point where I have to count…and recount…and count again. Could I be…? Wednesday is my first due date.
It’s Wednesday morning and we’re on our way to daycare. I’m filling out paperwork for another daycare. I’ve filled out paperwork for four daycares in two years. Now we’re on our way to forest preschool.
I spend October Wednesdays in 2019 piecing together my grandmother’s personal history and watching too much TV. I’m eating ice cream on the couch with a warm bundle sighing in my arms with my full folds buried beneath one tie-dye blanket and one scratchy throw. I’m thinking about how the car is making a noise, but I don’t have to drive for awhile, and our fence is no longer fencing anything in or out, but we don’t have anything worth fencing anyway.
I can imagine a Thursday in November.
The next day is the last day of the work week and the next month is the last day of the work year.
It’s Thursday and we’re packing for three to go to a cousin’s wedding in St. Louis on daylight savings weekend and the next year, it’s Thursday and we’re packing for four to go to a cousin’s wedding in Kansas City on daylight savings weekend. My dad is retiring. We’re in the glory days of imaginative bedtime stories — characters of my mom’s creation, Jim and Jam the dogs and Meg and Peg the cats. In another month, we’ll put ourselves to sleep trying to tell the hundredth sequel of Jim and Jam and the purple monster.
Last year was the winter of the slow cooker; this is the winter of casseroles. It’s Thursday and I’m making a sandwich in the morning for Kretch’s lunch at his new job. It’s Thursday and I’m making dinner for when he gets home from class in his first semester of graduate school; now it’s his third semester and everything is online and we haven’t been inside a grocery store for months. I’m making grocery lists at work. I’m making grocery lists online. The toddler is telling Alexa what to put on the grocery list. It’s Thursday and I’m labeling bottles for breakfast, lunch, and snack at daycare. I’m labeling baby food. I’m labeling clothing. I’m labeling boxes of baby clothes. It’s a Thursday in November and I’m going through our fridge. I’m going through our closets for gloves and hats and scarves. I’m going through the shoe basket looking for a tiny boot.
It’s a Thursday in November and I’m sitting in a plastic chair at an immediate care clinic saying, “Don’t touch that, come sit on mommy’s lap.” No, sir. No, ma’am. Thanksgiving is always made better because of Friends episodes. I’m writing another blog post I’ll forget to publish. The shower drain is clogged again and the kids need their fingernails trimmed. Three ear infections in a five-week period. He’ll need ear tubes in January.
If I can help it, I’m eating sweet potato pie at Thanksgiving. I run on creamer-filled coffee, lemon-lime flavored sparkling water, Coke Zero, gin + Fresca, and mango White Claw. Red wine makes a cataclysmic comeback in 2020. It makes me write a lot of smut.
It’s a Thursday night and we read Little House in the Big Woods in our own little house in the big city and we fall asleep on the banks of Plum Creek and wake up on the shores of Silver Lake. We burrow into The Long Winter in our own long winter.
It’s the end of an era in 2016. It’s only the beginning of the end. It’s the end again. The beginning is here again. We are starting over again in 2020…or not.
It’s a Thursday in November and we decide mid-argument that Christmas decorations will go up three weeks early just because why the hell not?
I can imagine a Friday in April.
We’re at a baseball game with dozens of people watching Daddy the Umpire. We’re picnicking after long days at daycare. We’re looking for yellow buses and red trucks while we drive to another high school for another game. We’re at a baseball game with thousands of people. We’re eating soft pretzels dipped in hot yellow cheese and lining up for giant ice cream cones. We’re in the sun. We’re in the stands, in the crowd. We’re watching the playoffs. We’re watching an eternal American past time.
It’s a Friday in April and we’re not at any baseball games because sports have been cancelled and the world will never be the same. We’re reorganizing finances. I’m standing on a chair in the kitchen to get out decorations for spring because I’m late putting them up. The trash and recycling is overflowing and the air filters need changing. I turn the Flonase upside down to see just how much is left.
It’s a Friday in April and we go out to eat. Our oldest is hauled to all kinds of restaurants. He’s been in four daycares over three years. Our youngest was born six months before the pandemic started and has barely been to a restaurant or daycare. It’s the last Friday in April and I realize no one has been sick since we’ve been home. Six weeks with no illness.
It’s Friday during spring break. It’s Friday during quarantine. I can’t focus past noon. I can’t wait to spend the weekend at home. Now I’m home all the time. We’re all home together for a month. We work, we play. We say, “Hey all you cool cats and kittens!” a lot. It sustains us in its novel distraction.
I can imagine a Saturday in June-July (summer becomes one long month during these years)…
…humid afternoons heavy with waiting storms. Packing up my office for the summer, sweating in those first torturous moments getting into the car.
It’s a Saturday in June-July and I’m at my first therapy dog meeting that started a six-month journey into the best work weeks of my life, ending abruptly with COVID-19.
It’s a Saturday in June-July and we’re at the zoo. We’re at the zoo, again. I’m too pregnant for gymnastics lessons but not too pregnant for swimming lessons! I order my all-star breakfast at Waffle House afterwards.
It’s a Saturday in June-July and we’re not going anywhere or to any restaurant for the foreseeable future so I’m making mini cinnamon rolls for sitting on the couch. I’m finding just enough time for editing-formatting-captioning-proofing-printing grandma’s personal history. We’re sanitizing everything. We’re not going to the zoo; it’s closed because of the virus. We’re finally washing baby lion. If anyone has COVID-19, it’s baby lion. Everyone needs a haircut except the baby because of social-distancing.
It’s Saturday and I apply sunscreen to bodies of various size and mobility for 20 minutes a day. In a zest of deep cleaning, I find a chicken wing from winter under the couch. We’re at the lake. I’m too pregnant and high-risk to travel. We’re not at the lake. I’m at an immediate care center at the lake. The world’s too diseased to travel. We’re at the zoo again and then again with two kids. And again with masks. I set French bread pizza on fire in the microwave. It’s not even the first one to burn that evening….
It’s Saturday in summer and I feel wild breezes cooling off the heat for more storms tonight. I’m watching the lowering sun — miraging gold over the fence — while sitting on the concrete sidewalk on partly rained-away sidewalk chalk. I’m on my parents’ screened-in porch. I’m walking the forest trail. Little girl feet walk along the creek twenty years ago. Little boy feet walk along the creek now. Little girl feet are carried along the creek. She’s already taking little half-steps. We give short wagon rides on the curving sidewalk to the barn. The shock of spiderwebs. The barn is white; the barn is red. Wispy baby hair pokes out over ears, peeking out from under a striped bucket hat. I smell that sticky-soft sunscreen smell on sticky-soft baby skin. Life is precious.
It’s the 28th of July 2019, I crash our van. I’m eight months pregnant. It’s the 28th of July 2020, our daughter takes her first steps. The same week she cut two teeth, one after another.
I can imagine a Sunday in September.
I’m coming home from the hospital with a new baby. We’re celebrating new baby’s 1st birthday. I’m preparing for fall, school anxiety ramps up — and now I’m the preschool teacher of Kretch’s Korner. We’re establishing family game night. We’re making marshmallow popcorn and playing cards. I’m getting groceries every Sunday morning — my alone time at the Church of Aldi — and now I’m sitting in the pickup lane, mask hanging on the rear view mirror.
It’s Sunday and the laundry basically becomes a third child we didn’t plan for; its relentless growth and tantrums make me cry. I’m writing on my phone. I’m reading Agatha Christie. I’m sorting our socks, which defy all logic in their disappearance. Are dryer sheets invisibility cloaks? It’s climbing the list of possible explanations. Nothing has been put back where it was found in living memory and I lock myself out of the house (then jimmy my way back in).
It’s Sunday in September and I’m six weeks into a writing critique group I happened upon. I’m in love with the half-dozen of us that show up week after week after week. We build each other up as we break our writing down. I have people who will tell me “this was the good part,” when I can’t see what I’m doing because little hands are covering my face or sleep-deprivation is clouding my 30-something far-sightedness or I’m just looking away from my own light.
It’s a Sunday in September and we’re on the couch-that-shall-eventually-be-burned eating cinnamon rolls again) also known as “that casserole with the frosting” to our three year old. We’re laughing so hard the one year old is cackling, joining in with her fresh version of human mirth. All five of us (dog included) are tangled together. Six if we count baby lion, which we must. At some point we all fall into our screens for false safety and the one year old climbs into the crow’s nest of the pirate ship (again, the couch-who-shall-not-be-named). She climbs and climbs and eats a banana a day and sounds like her brother when she’s mad.
It’s a Sunday in September and we take her home from the hospital. We love her so much.
And it’s late Sunday night in September and our son is falling asleep while watching me writing late into the night. Before bed we read him a Sesame Street book about jobs called “What Do You Do?” and on the last page is a woman at a typewriter, and it reads: “I am a writer. I wrote this book.” And every time we come to that page, our son says, “That’s my mommy!”
This/these/those is/are/were the year(s) we became four.
