The Mess of Motherhood & Life; When This Us, doesn't feel like This Is Us.

He asked me to marry him under white lights lining a gazebo on a very cold winter night. Ukelele in hand, he sang me a proposal song he’d written as bypassers stopped and cheered. I hadn’t slept through a night since our daughter was born three years earlier and I was pregnant, and profusely sick again. After swearing off marriage for 34 years and saying yes; this was a polarizing emotional experience of blending an old identity with the new.

Three weeks later, my oldest son almost didn’t make it through one of those sleepless nights alive. He acutely formed a very serious and rare heart condition called Myopericarditis (basically something attacked his heart from the outside in, rather than having a heart attack from the inside out). 

I’m sure there are people who’ve lived this and cannot even admit to themselves the pain of laying with their head on their hooked-up-to-IV’s, passed out, and just told he might not make it to the morning child’s shoulder, praying to God (while pregnant with a second son) that if he was going to take my son, please, please, please, don’t let it be this one. Not him. Not the one I knew. Not the one I’d carried until I couldn’t carry anymore. I wanted to see him grow old. He, not him, he, could not end, or I was sure, I would. 

Everyone at the hospital kept saying “Stay calm, we don’t want you to go into a stress induced labor” but I’m way too controlled to have ever left his side, even to birth. Though I was technically nine months pregnant at the time, I knew who came first right now, and it wasn’t my second son. 

As excruciating as it seems to me today; if I had to make an exchange at the time; I’d want my first to be the one I was bringing home from the hospital alive. Terrible I know, but survival mind is the devils playground and I imagined if I had to sacrifice any of my son’s to Love, it’d have to be the one I hadn’t yet seen or spent 15 years protecting outside of the womb.

Three weeks later, my eldest was gratefully home, recovering, and not only lived, didn’t require a heart transplant which was on the table. Again, one of my sleepless nights, rather than my three year old daughter who’d always had sleep issues needing my sleep time to attend to her needs; my youngest son called out from the womb insinuating his arrival. Twenty four hours of labor later, he was born. 

Immediately I loved him, and immediately I regretted every sacrificial thought I’d had praying to God three weeks before. 

Also, pretty immediately the nurses panicked as he turned blue, his heart rate dropped to abnormally slow, and they discovered he had an Rh incompatibility because of a vaccine I’d gotten that we didn’t need, which caused the very thing it was intended to prevent. 

For the first week of his life, just like the week he and I spent with his older brother in a hospital city sky rise, watching him be poked and prodded and tested in questionable uncertainty, he had daily hospital visits for testing, and just like his older brother; by the grace of God, three weeks later, we were all recovering and appeared to be on the mend.

The whammy of heightened emotional experience after heightened emotional experience, especially when it’s coming from all directions that are all different plates that one feels like a juggler that in a split second is most definitely going to drop, isn’t something the nervous system is prepared for. 

The transition into being a family of six, was hardest on my youngest daughter who didn’t start sleeping through the night until about a month ago, at almost five years old. 

The sleeplessness of these years, my stress, usually carried itself in her face. 

She’d wake me up from a night terror, or for whatever reasons she’d insist on having a need at night while I was also woken with puking from pregnancy or from a crying newborn; and I’d absolutely lose my head and try to keep my face for her sake. 

These past ten months have felt like someone literally ripped any unstable foundation that was holding us up, out from under our house and like I was doing my best to grab everyone while we were still flying from impact before gravity forced us all to take the hit on the ground. 

Literally every other week (and to be fair, all week, every week for months in some cases) someones been incredibly sick, or the dryer broke, or the timing belt snapped, or the roof leaked; and I know enough to know that this is a system with a leaky emotional valve wanting to be buckled in. I also know enough to know, as the mothership, the container, I am the valve; and I’m the leak.

My dreams have primarily been about looking for new houses in which most of the floorboards are missing and we could slip through to the lower floor at any second; so I’m the only one of my family I let walk through the house. Everyone else, I make wait at the door for me to secure the grounds and figure out the jigsaw-puzzle-like floorboard system so I can show them the pattern before entering.

I’m bleeding again, for the second time after giving birth which feels symbolic because...at least there’s a physical release moving the energetics I’ve been holding throughout these past ten months through my system and out into the earth. (Note to everyone: never judge a postpartum woman by her face; because she may have a heart, and even if her make up’s all done and did, she likely doesn’t have her own head, and most definitely, her guts are tied up in feeding someone else’s.)

I watched a scene in This Is Us where Rebecca tells her son that when he was an infant, she’d happily come into his nursery when she heard him cry in the mornings, put in her headphones and listen to Joni Mitchell as they sat and rocked while the sun came up through the curtains until his siblings awoke. 

She said she knew that any morning may be the last morning he let her rock her like that, so she remembered every detail of those mornings spent with him. 

On a morning I was only woken twice last night (for literally the first time in almost five years), this morning, I woke before the baby who was laying in my wing (we co-sleep). 

I felt his cool skin enveloping his warm body, and laid him down just right as to not wake him where I could see him; watch him sleep, see the pucker of his lips that infants do as if they’re nursing when they’re not. And I wanted it to always be like this. 

But this isn’t how it’s been for us. Most mornings throughout this year; I’ve been exhausted, and pissed off at my four year old; reaching for coffee or a friend, only one of which feels attainable; and falling into the abyss of the floorboards I’ve been dreaming about missing from underneath me. 

This is motherhood. 

Some days it affords us the rest to wake, wakefully rather than sleeplessly, to feel the pulse that we’ve somehow missed in all of our attempts just to upkeep it. 

Some days we know that this literally could be the last of anything about this one particular day or phase that we love so much we’d do anything to sink our teeth into it, but we’re so busy chewing just to swallow, we don’t have time to taste it. 

Some days, like today, our life seems held up by a foundation that usually looks like a soft bed, and we let that be enough to be grateful for. 

Some days, this being us, really actually does feel like a scene from This Is Us, but some days, our story feels more like the bed falling through each story of the house, and we’re just trying to catch up with gravity while we’re flying in the air hoping we land again, in a soft space; and with all of our babies on the same cloud of a bed. 

I want to be like Rebecca, and remember every detail of what it feels like to be supported enough, rested enough, to “be” with the people I love rather than constantly feel like I’m “doing” for the people I love. 

But life, and motherhood, are a persistent polarization of what it means to be a human with an inner terrain colliding with an outer territory. 

It’s a messy kaleidoscope constantly shapeshifting only to settle for a moment in order to capture the image, and then its all shaken up again, and somewhere in the lines that separate all the colors coming together; there we are, and this...this, is, us. 

And this, this, is unforgettably, everything. 

Even the best writers, writing the whole story; are only writing the lines from which they stand on to see the colors coming together so everything; like the leaky valve of motherhood, and life; though is “sometimes” manageable; is indefinitely, uncontainable. And so it is.

This is us, and this, is the essential everything, beyond words, and across all lines. Lest we forget, this gift, is enough.