heads above water and bottles of emotions

The bad news start rolling in, and I quickly run down the list of available friends whose heads are above water, to see whose shoulder I can lean on without drowning them. And I do this month after month until it seems, right now, hardly anyone is left whose head is safely above water.

What is going on in the world right now?

Which is not to say that I am not happy. I rejoice at every bird I see on a telephone line, and every butterfly I catch at the corner of my eyes, and want to point them out , "bird!", "butterfly!", fully expecting a "duh" and wide-eyed smile in return - only it's not always to the little one I find myself making mentions of various animals.

They say your heart grows when your first child is born, and I believe that. But I am also in the midst of too much at once. Too many changes. And I am like a woman lost at sea looking for a little island of respite, knowing though from looking above that a big storm of change is coming. So I bottle the current emotions up, wondering when they'll get to come up.

And I think of holocaust survivors (yes, I certainly don't come short in the melodrama department). While current wisdom claims that stuff has got to 'come out', has got to be out in the open and spoken and analyzed, the holocaust survivors who were able to create a rather normal family life for themselves were in fact the ones who did bottle it all up and keep it all inside and repress it far far down.

What does that mean for the rest of us with mini-size dramas in our lives?

personnally

I must be a cry baby these days. I mean, you tell me a story about Inuit women asked by the WHO not to breastfeed their children because of high PCB levels in their milk (our fault), and my heart ungracefully twists itself in knots of sadness, frustration and empathy.

Or you tell me the countless stories of women who must choose between continuing to be their husbands' punching balls or prostitutes, and never seeing their tiny children again. And then I just get ANGRY. And horrified. I clam up; I cannot imagine a life where I would be forced to leave my little one behind for my own physical survival.

So yup, the personal is political. And in this case, if you have thirty minutes this weekend, read up on Iranian women's ongoing civic and peaceful fight, and consider signing their petition.

calendar

I love calendars. They're the perfect excuse for splurging for 12 gorgeous and gloriously glossy pages of inspiration.

Yet we have no calendar for 2007. I now find this quite telling: we've gotten sucked into a kind of timeless spiral of ear/eye/nose infections and strep for the little one - since January 1st, number of weeks entirely free of illness or antibiotics: 0. And high level of domesticity for me (never before entering the mother club have I had to pay such close attention to laundries and groceries and bed times and dust bunnies (she likes to eat them)).

Clearly we would have lost track of time were it not for lil A. Who astounds* me: she easily learned the names of all 8 adults present here for Easter weekend, she stacks blocks and sorts stuff, she hums and mimes her favorite songs, she instantly got what the potty is for, she's already starting to do pretend play, and she retells short stories (an airplane flew overhead, the cat was here then ran away). I keep thinking about what it means in terms of human development: we develop a sense of imagination before we even know how to speak, how to hold a pencil, how to walk down a full flight of stairs, how to tie a shoelace, how to put a shirt on.

*: I have no shame saying I'm astounded by her, because I continue to live in a state of denial about the fact that she 'belongs' to me. I keep thinking that she's a wonderful (and challenging) gift that somehow fell into my lap. And I don't think it's because she looks nothing at all like me, because I'm told that personality wise she's a spitting image of my baby self.


Btw - I'll try to post pictures soon.