Sunday Morning

It's Sunday morning.  The street outside my house is lined with snowmobiles.  Sleds.  That is the proper, "in the know" name for them here in our winter dominated Town.  In fact, if you use "Skidoo" as a genereric term, someone here is sure to remind you, in a somewhat patronizing tone, that "Skidoo is a BRAND name."  Well, if I use the term "Kleenex" or "Xerox" as generics, pretty sure you know what I mean then, too.  But I've decided to pick my battles.

After a snowy November, a mixed December, and an ass-breaking cold January, February has come in like a lamb and remained pretty lamb-y.  It's been unseasonably warm and sunny and consequently the traditional hardest month to get through in our winter Town has been a time of cheerful walks with kids in half the gear I'd usually have to fight them into.

But this morning it's snowing again.  The sky isn't too dark, so it might pass and return to our sunny holiday.  But right now it's coming down softly.

The sledders are here for some sort of annual trip to our Town.  I haven't had to deal with them much before this year as we've always lived off the main street.  Now we live right on it, across from the main hotel in town.  Last night the restaurant at the hotel was open, and it has not been for most of the Fall and Winter, so we took the family there for dinner.  Locals were thrilled to have a rare alternative to the one eating establishment that stays open all year, while the visiting sledders were perplexed by our quaint ways: "Can I get a glass of wine?" "Sorry, you need to leave the restaurant, cross the lobby, go into the pub, order it at the bar, pay for it, then carry it back to your table yourself."  It makes perfect sense to all of us.  We're just happy to have a Pub open in the winter.  We are happy to fetch our own booze if it means we have a place to get some of it.

Speaking of the Pub: the whole town was abuzz yesterday as we woke to the news that, in the small hours of the night, some thug a-holes had driven from the nearest bigger town (which is really, still a small town) to our tiny Town to look for trouble.  This doesn't happen often, but it happens.  So, these two idiots went to the Pub and started taunting one of our local boys, trying to get him mad enough to fight.  They chose the admirable technique of talking shite about a friend of said Local Boy's.  The friend they were disparaging happens to be dead.  Local Boy is a sweetheart, but he is also tough as damn nails.  I've known him since he was a kid and he is one of those small town combo kids who is charmingly polite and respectful to the older local ladies and yet can turn around and mop up a barroom full of jerks with his fist and then go right back to being polite.  I love guys like that. So Local Boy deflected the taunts, but when one of the a-holes (after being thrown out of the Pub) sucker punched the owner of the hotel/bartender when he went out to remind them that they hadn't payed for their drinks, Local Boy and his friends took care of business, fist-wise. It happened right outside our front door and we all slept through it.  But, yesterday morning it was all over Facebook and quickly became the talk of the town.  We were all giddy with the news that our Local Boys showed two a-holes who came here looking for trouble that you don't mess with our Town.  David and damn Goliath, right outside my house.  Everyone was talking about it in the hotel last night, and everyone will keep talking about it until something else happens.

Oh...right now, as I type, the sledders are firing up their machines and heading off into the mountains. It sounds like a chainsaw revving contest. The sun is breaking through the clouds now, and the snow is slowing to a soft sprinkle.  And the kids are bugging me to go outside.

So this is a February Sunday morning in our Town.

Stumbling our way through

J. and I are not big planners.

We kind of negotiate our way through life leading with our hearts and our gut instincts guided by the general notion that if something seems right, and feels right, it might be right, so let's do that thing.

But having kids is a great, new, enormous frontier of not having a clue.  The idea of suddenly being responsible for other people is a crazy big concept.  And although we wanted it badly, and worked hard to achieve it, our pregnancy was not peaceful - at all.  My fault.  Entirely.  A few weeks in I kind of lost my mind.  We had spent so many years in a desperate state of trying to conceive, and I had gotten used to that.  The feeling was familiar, and the fight it presented to me was actually, now that I think back, a perfect scenario to facilitate me at my best: "we can't get pregnant, you say? - watch me!" I have a contrary personality, and when I am told "no you can't" I feel a massive wave of "screw you and stand back" churn up inside me.  So I fought hard to get there, to be pregnant, and then once I got there I lost my mind.  Terror of the reality of parenthood crept in like Winston Churchill's "Black Dog" and I panicked. Here I was, over 40, financially insecure, living in a one bedroom rented attic apartment, driving a hand-me-down from mom and dad car, and I was pregnant with twins! After six years of struggle, heartache and intense fertility treatments my honest thought upon successfully achieving a very planned pregnancy was: I don't think I really thought this through.

So, I spent the pregnancy in a sort of icy panicked haze of semi-denial while J. tried to experience  a small amount of joy without freaking me out too much.  Sometimes he spoon fed me bits of reality, like when he quietly went out and bought the car seats we would need to bring the babies home from the hospital.  Other times he tried to snap me out of it with tough love and firmly reminded me that I was "ruining this" for both of us.  Eventually I gathered myself up and admitted to my doctor that I was having trouble finding any joy in the experience.  She encouraged me to get help and found me the number for insurance approved counselors.  I went to talk to a nice old Irish lady who reminded me of a combination of Bea Arthur and that lady named Sue who used to give frank sex advice to kids and became sort of a celebrity (I can't recall her last name, but hopefully you know who I mean).  The counselor was great, and quickly said, matter of fact: "You are having an identity crisis."  The diagnosis sounded so 70s.  But she was right.  She helped me understand that of all the things I knew I was: artist, fighter, writer, actor, wife - "mom" was not one of them. She kind of helped me snap out of it, and get on with it.

The problem was, by the time I saw Bea/Sue the pregnancy was well in and we still hadn't done much planning.  J. knew I went into a semi-coma of stress if we even looked at cribs online or walked near the baby section of a department store, so by the time I was too pregnant to think about it we realized we'd done none of the expectant parent cliche manouevres like decide the sleeping arrangements, pick out names, buy stuff for the kids, etc, etc.  Near the end of my pregnancy things started to get dangerous for me - gestational diabetes, hyper tension, etc., so now I was essentially bed ridden and told not to move too much or stress too much.  So there would be no eleventh hour scramble of nursery set up or parenthood classes for us.  We moved straight from denial about the pregnancy to the reality of making sure it didn't kill me.

We had, without necessarily meaning to, set ourselves up for one option of parenting strategy: as with most aspects of our life to this point, we would be winging it.  Luckily we had some experience there.

So, on the appointed evening we left our apartment and headed to the hospital for our next morning C-section.  I recall, as we were leaving, looking back over our little home and thinking: "the next time I walk back in here, I will be a mom."  The apartment looked just like it had for the past two years.  Nothing in that space would give any clues to the fact that this was about to be home to newborn twins  - no cribs, no bassinets, no toys, no cute outfits waiting to be filled by real life babies, no swing or bouncy chair. It was just our home, same as always.

When I think of that time now, three years into parenthood, I understand a bit more of what was actually happening to me when I was pregnant.  I have always been a person who could only deal with things when I could deal with them.  As a child I resisted doing things because someone told me I had to.  Although I was always one of the highest achievers in the class academically, I dawdled when it came to learning to tell time, tie my shoes, ride a bike. I always did these things when I felt ready.  I didn't get my driver's licence until I was 28 because I didn't really need it until then.  And now, I needed to find my own way into parenthood.  I needed to have the babies there and present so I could actually see what was going on, what needed to be done, bought, set up.  I was doing it my own way.

J. and I are very good parents, but we are not completely conventional parents and we freely admit it.  Parenthood is fraught with immense pressure to "do it this way." But we are a couple of people who often do it a different way because the usual way doesn't fit, or feel right.  Gut instinct and improvisation seem to have emerged as our parenting style, from how we sleep to how we play, laugh and learn.  So, this is how we came to be a co-sleeping, dancing, laughing, happy, bluffing our way through with love and guts family.

My J.

Last night I woke up at about 1am.  Okay, to be fair, I didn't "wake" up so much as I was awoken by O. suddenly barrel rolling over me to nestle in between me and J.

I'm one of those people who has no trouble falling asleep, but I have a helluva time falling BACK to sleep if something wakes me up.  And because I am pre-menstrual right now my brain likes to find things to obsess about.  So, I found myself wide awake at 1am obsessing hard about the usual: house, money, contract deadlines, etc. etc.  I slid out of the bed, went to the loo, and felt a full blown panic attack gathering in my head and in my guts.

J. needs his rest as he is in a very involved, stressful job.  So I resist waking him up at night.  But I did not want to be alone.

I crept back into the bedroom and stood at the end of the bed.  J. woke and groggily asked: "are you okay?"

"No." I said, and burst into tears.

So, this is a short post, but it is a thank you post to my husband who, knowing full well he needed to be out of the house before 8:30am, got up in the middle of the night and cuddled with me on the couch while we watched "Sherlock" (so good) on Netflix until I calmed down.  He let me tell him the whole plot of the mini-series I've just watched, and he kissed my head and told me everything is okay.  He reminded me of how everything goes a bit crazy for me in the middle of the night, and especially if I am in my PMS phase. He distracted me by telling me about the original AC Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories and how "Sherlock" has adapted these into its modern day setting.

J. is currently in a professional position wherein he is constantly being "needed" by people.  His phone never stops ringing, his email alerts sound like morse code, he can't go out without someone stopping him to talk business.  This is a guy who could use a few minutes of not being needed.  And yet, when I go nuts at 1am he gets up with me and talks me down.  Because I need him.

So, thanks, J.  You are a first rate husband, father and friend.  And, sorry to have to tell you this, but we all need you.  A lot.