and the old years blow back like a wind that i catch in my hair

Yesterday I went for a run. Not a long run, not a fast run, but still. I ran. I ran because I have grown tired of walking, and because June was at home with Chris, and because I just wanted to see if I still could. If I still knew how. I had planned on running to the end of the road but then I got to the end and felt like I could keep going, so I turned around and ran back. When I started to get tired I thought about how great it would be to tell Chris that I had run, that I had run the whole way. The idea of telling her kept me going. It kept me going the same way it kept me going all those years ago when I ran twelve miles for the first time and then burst into my apartment where I knew Chris would be waiting for me. If memory serves we didn’t sleep much that night either, although it wasn’t a baby that was keeping us awake.

It is good to be back in this body again and I am glad that it has not forgotten how to run. But most of all, I am glad that I am still running home to her.

*The title of this post is from Lucille Clifton’s poem”i am running into a new year.”

Swinging

Yesterday Gracie and I went to the playground in the center of our little town. I often refer to it as The Nuclear Winter Playground because there is never anyone else playing when we are. Hilltowners aren’t so enthusiastic about climbing structures and wood chips and swings. They like their outside rough, and private.

But yesterday there was another car in the parking lot when we pulled up. And under the band shell a friend of Gracie’s was doing a dance show for her grandparents. We walked over to say hello.

“Does this mean there’s a baby?” I asked.

“Lucia,” the smiling grandmother said, “Tell them, tell your friends, is there a new baby?”

Lucia said nothing.

“Is there a baby, is there a baby, Lucia?” Over and over and over they asked.

“Go to hospital!” Lucia said, over and over. “Go to hospital and see baby!”

I just wanted to scoop that little sweetie up and tell her all the great palace lies about life as a big sister.  I wanted to tell her that everything was going to be OK, and her mama was going to come back to her very soon, and that she was still everything to her mother, that the baby wasn’t going to replace her. But I couldn’t pick her up because I was holding Gracie.

“Gracie, do a show with Lucia!” the grandmother insisted.

Gracie ignored her. I put her down and she made a beeline for the swings.

“She wants to swing,” I said. “We have a special date with the swings.”

Together we headed over to the swings, where there was so much more air and sun. I pushed Gracie as high as she wanted to go, which, lately, is much higher than I want her to go. I thought of a day this winter when we made our way to these very swings by trudging through two feet of icy snow so that I could push her for a few minutes while June slept in the car with my mom. I thought of how hard it was for me to lift Grace then, and how I lift her all the time now and she feels light again, the way she felt before I got pregnant, before I started carrying a baby all the time.

We watched in silence as Lucia and her grandparents walked to their car and headed up the long gravel driveway to the main road.

“Lucia seemed a little sad that her mama was still in the hospital with the baby. Were you sad when I was in the hospital with June?”

Grace nodded.

“I’m so glad to be at home with you again,” I said.

“From now on,” Gracie said, “don’t have anymore babies.”

Solstice

The night we brought Gracie home from the hospital she slept on our bed and Chris and I lay on either side of her. My mom plugged a night light into the wall nearest the bed so that we could watch her while she slept. I can still see her new face, full and round as the moon.

Last night as I lay on that same bed nursing June to sleep in the glow of the night light, Grace opened the door and held out a jam jar full of daisies. “For you,” she whispered, “for the Solstice.” And there was that face again, although it is more sun than moon now.

I have been at this for less than four years, but I am beginning to understand that Grace will always be that swaddled baby sleeping in the middle of the bed even though she stopped being that baby the very next morning when she squirmed free of her blanket and opened her eyes to a moment when she was just the tiniest bit older, just the smallest bit further away from me.

Dona Nobis Pacem

June took the pacifier.

And while there were a few stressful moments yesterday when the only pacifier we own fell behind the washing machine (don’t ask), Chris brought home two more and it is all love and peace and going down awake for (brief) naps around here again.

But the best part of all?

I moved June’s carseat over next to Gracie’s so that Gracie can re-insert the binky when June pulls it out.  Halle-frickin’ lujah.

We are a happy, happy people.

Finding My Dad

The woods I live in now are nothing like the woods I grew up in. I have traded soft pines and rock for old-growth hardwoods and moss. In winter the snow is sometimes heavy and wet, sometimes icy, and hardly ever the powdery ski-perfect snow of my childhood.

Still, when I ski in these woods I am a girl again, and my father is everywhere.

I didn’t always want to go skiing with my dad. Skiing was cold, and it was hard. So hard. But what if I hadn’t gone? What if he hadn’t insisted we keep on even as the snow fell, tying his handkerchief, still warm from his pocket, into a mask across my cold face? What if he had said, Alright then, you can just stay home? What if he hadn’t woken me when it was still dark and helped me into my long underwear and into the car and feed me donuts on the way up the mountain?

Then where would I go to find him now?

Of course, of course, there are many other places, many other ways that I keep him with me. But nothing is so perpetually fresh, nothing is so clearly him, as the woods in winter. The smell of ski wax and wet wool. The taste of cold water from his canteen and granola bars from his blue LL Bean backpack. The way he planted our skis in the snow with the bottoms facing the sun to keep them from icing over while we ate lunch. All of it, every last sight and smell, is mine every time I put on my skis.

I understand now that parents don’t teach their children how to ski, or sail, or fish, or ride ocean waves just because they love to do those things and they want their children to love them, too. They do those things with their children so that their children can find them when they are gone. And by gone I don’t mean when they are dead, I mean when the children are no longer children and the parents are no longer everything.

Our girls will find Chris at the ocean. I’m not sure where the girls will find me, other than between the covers of a Boden catalog. My guess is that, like my own mother, (and for better or worse) I will be with them just about everywhere.

I find my father in the snowy woods. He is always there with me, more than memory, not quite vision. Conjured by my muscles and my mind, he is still the best skiing partner I have ever known.

Just One Let Down After Another

On Saturday the four of us went to town for the Transgender Pride Parade. We stopped off at the grocery store on the way home to pick up 3 quarts of local strawberries, a bag of organic walnuts, and some g diaper inserts. (We are terrible at grocery shopping as a family. We leave the store having spent about six hundred dollars and arrive home with nothing to eat for dinner.)

I was standing at the bakery counter with Gracie when a woman I don’t know turned to me and said, “I am just sooo excited about all these gluten-free cakes they have!” And I smiled, and said, “Oh, I know!” even though I don’t know at all, having never in my life eaten a gluten-free cake, and then drops of milk started to leak out of my boobs, through my sundress, and onto the floor. Who would have guessed my boobs love gluten-free cake? They also love very loud laughter, Van Morrison songs, good news, bad news, any sort of news, really, air conditioning, and photographs of children, especially cellphone photos of the children of people I run into on the street, photos that I can barely see but that my boobs think are totally adorable. My boobs just can’t believe how much these little darlings have grown!

It seems that all these years of tending to my beauties with custom-fit underwires, breathable jog bras and expensive but well-fitting tankini tops were a bit misguided. All they really wanted was a cake.

Blogging for LGBT Families Day: Conception Day

It was one year ago this Thursday that we conceived June.

One year ago that we drove to the hospital in the pouring rain, one year ago that we got lost trying to find the reproductive technology lab, one year ago that I flipped around on the exam table and rested with my legs in the air and my head turned toward Chris, watching her as she talked and laughed with me and our midwife, watching her and wondering how we would remember this day, this day of getting back on the babymaking horse, back on the long road (which turned out to be nothing more than a driveway this time) of trying to conceive.

I thought of it then as “trying to conceive,” not “ttc,” as I know it now. Then I was a newcomer to the world of blogging and a stranger to the world of fertility blogging. The truth is I am a stranger to it still, although I have found my way to a few blogs written by lesbian couples who are trying to make a baby and I find myself returning to some over and over, returning to see how this cycle is going, how they are holding up as they wait in hope for that BFP (big f*cking positive).

I thank God that I did not know these blogs existed when I was trying to conceive Grace. While the women who blog about their babymaking ventures seem to have created a most amazing and genuinely affectionate community for themselves, I don’t think I could have been part of it. Not only would I have obsessed over alternative methods and conflicting advice and become certain that I had each and every fertility issue being blogged about, I would have gone mad with jealousy ever time someone that wasn’t me got her BFP.

Perhaps these women feel the same way. Perhaps they are obsessive and jealous. Perhaps they are as impressionable as I am, and come away from an hour in front of their screens convinced that they too have PCOS and a tipped uterus and blocked fallopian tubes. But maybe they are able to put all that aside and return again and again for some hope and encouragement and sisterhood. I hope this is the case. I truly do.

What I really hope for on this Blogging LGBT Families Day is that these brave and loving women get their Conception Day. I hope they get their Conception Day and its one year anniversary. And I hope they get so many hectic and sleepless and cereal-stained and and diaper-changing and stroller-pushing days that one day they turn to each other and say “Was yesterday the day? I just can’t remember.“

Thank You

May 22 marked the first anniversary of Hatched By Two Chicks. I meant to write this post on the 22nd, but then again I also meant to brush my teeth on the 22nd and I never got around to that, either.  Still, I want to thank all of you so very very much for this year of showing up, again and again, to see what I have to say. The truth is I would write even if you weren’t reading, but I am so very glad you are.

Postcards

Four

Gracie and I decide that we would like to go somewhere alone, without June. Grace wants to ride her tricycle around the paved paths at the local fairgrounds and I agree to this plan, even though it is raining and cold. I load the trike while she climbs into her carseat and we pull out of the driveway. No one is crying, no one is shusshhing or singing all five verses of “Good King Wenceslus” in an attempt to induce sleep. We arrive at the fairgrounds where it is raining harder than it was at our house, and where a few dozen tractors are parked on the grass, their owners conspicuously absent. Grace rides slowly, the hood of her coat pulled up over her helmet. She stops every few feet to pick a flower or a bit of sheep’s wool she sees tangled in the grass. We don’t talk much. She asks me which tractor I like the best, I ask her if she’s ready to go to the Creamery and have a snack. When she is, I put the trike back in the car and she unbuckles her helmet and reaches up to put it in the trunk next to her bike. She looks at me. “Mama, this is the best day I’ve ever had.”

Five

I call my midwife because I am having all sorts of aches and pains in my pelvis. I feel certain my uterus is prolapsing, even though I’m not quite sure what that means. She wants to see me. It is the weekend, so I make an appointment for Monday. For the next two days Chris is on June Duty so I hardly wear her at all, in contrast to the multiple hours of the day she usually spends attached to me in a sling or a bjorn or a beco or an obi or some other babywearing contraption that I have spent too much time researching and too much money purchasing. My uterine prolapse miraculously heals. I dream of buying a dressmaker form and strapping June to it.

Six

The only thing harder than trying to feel good about your body 11 weeks after giving birth for the second time is trying to feel good about your body 11 weeks after giving birth for the second time when you are married to a non-gestating, non-lactating athlete who looks hotter than she did the day you met her.

Mothers, Day and Night

During June’s first month of life she woke every night to nurse and when she was finished she would not go back to sleep. This was the part of life with a newborn that I had forgotten which, let me tell you , is lucky for June because had I remembered it she might not be here today. I had forgotten that a newborn is an equal opportunity fusser– just as pissed to be alive at midnight as she is at 9 a.m.

Sometime between the hours of 10 and 4, when it was clear that June was not going to accept my nipple as the sleep aid I was insisting it could be, I would surrender to her cries and take her into the bathroom (the fan makes the kind of white noise only a being with an unfinished nervous system could love) and bounce her on the exercise ball until she fell asleep.

I hated getting up. It was so cold and so dark and I was so tired. I hated sitting in that bathroom where I couldn’t help but spend my mental energy committing all the details of the decor to memory– the color-block design in the South African tiles hanging above the toilet, the turn of the metal handles on the bathroom cabinet that I meant to replace before I had the baby and now won’t have time to change until the baby is in kindergarten, the label on the window screen warning me that it will not prevent my child from falling out the window.

Every night, usually just as I was snapping up June’s little sleeper after changing her diaper, my mother would appear in the doorway, a wool sweater buttoned over her polka-dotted flannel pajamas. “How are we doing?” she asked, every single night.

And every single night I would offer some variation of the same report: she just pooped, or she needs to poop; she just ate, or needs to eat, or needs to eat but is too fussy to eat; she just burped, or she needs to burp, or she won’t stop burping, can a baby burp itself to death?

Then, after getting some reassurance from my mother that the baby could not poop, burp, or cry herself to death, I would assume my position on the ball, if bouncing was what she needed, or on the closed toilet seat, if nursing was what she needed. And my mother would assume her position on the other, ready to switch with me at any given moment.

My mother rarely did anything during those nights together in the bathroom. A few times I was too tired to even hold the baby, and so she would take her and swaddle her, and bounce her to sleep while I slept on the couch. And she always brought me a glass of water, and held it for me between sips. But other than that she just kept me company while I nursed and bounced and shushed.

I imagine that my mother wanted to take June more often than she did, or that she wanted to say, maybe she’s hungry, maybe you should nurse her. I imagine that she wanted to redo the baby’s unraveling swaddle, or pull a hat over her tiny head. It’s hard to listen to a crying baby and not get the chance to try something new, something that might bring an end to all the crying. But she never did ask to do any of those things. She just sat in the semi-darkness with me, holding my glass of water while June and I tried to figure each other out. And eventually, when the hard work of calming my fragile baby was done and I was ready to go back to bed, my mother walked through the kitchen and down the hallway behind me, turning out the lights as she went so that I would not have to make my way in the dark.