Happy 5th Birthing Day: Reflections & Moving Forward

First day on a school bus ever! (summer camp)

“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.”

– Carl Sandburg

When you wake up and question where the last 5 years have gone. July 11, 2020. It is the height of the Pandemic. My labor is taking a long time to kick into gear. We are not allowed to leave our hospital room, let alone the hospital. A windowless room with no guests allowed. I remember a glowing landscape and a meditation type melody playing on the TV in the room. I was in and out of a foggy haze over those next 36-72 hours, in what ultimately culminated in a complex and complicated birth.

If I’m being honest though, that was the easy part. One’s birth is supposed to be wrenching and hard. The mother is allowed to reel with fear and pain. For me though, postpartum turned out to be the bigger challenge. Over those next 12 months or so, I was scared to admit what I felt and what I didn’t feel. How was I supposed to get support from other women and moms over a screen? There were no in person “mommy and me” gatherings or classes that I could find in those days. I relied on some virtual support groups and online lactation coaching. But I pretty much felt I was on my own to process the traumatic birth and the ensuing circus.

We had a newborn. She was perfect in every way, but it would take time to find my path forward. The wee hours of the morning were sometimes the most peaceful part of the day. If I listened carefully, I could hear a buzz from the crickets outside and I had my baby in my arms, cooing and nursing. I used one (sort of) free hand to read Pachinko and sunk deeply into the present moment.

Fast forward five years and there are days now I don’t want to jinx how lucky I feel. To have this little human that our daughter has grown into. She is a blessing and a beacon of light. She laughs the biggest and boldest laugh I’ve ever heard; her giggle is contagious. I want to bottle up her desire and endless energy to sing, act, dance and make trouble all at once. Yes, I want to bottle it all up like its a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade, in hopes that it will run through my veins and come pouring out like a sweet salve on my skin.

At the same time, the last 5 years have been a bit of a blur. There are times I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it… afraid that I wasn’t cut out for this journey, this role, this excruciatingly challenging task of mothering a child into the world, as well as mothering myself, for what has often felt like the first time. No script, no one book to follow, and certainly no self-help guru could solve this new life puzzle for me. How, for example, do I soothe her tantrums and soothe the inner child within me that is scared too, scared I can’t tolerate her big feelings without exploding into a ball of nerves.

As I now look towards the next five years, I find myself reflecting on this reoccurring theme in my writing of “time and space,” and specifically “time scarcity.”

I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t an issue before my daughter was born. I can remember waking up on a Saturday in my early thirties, with the entire day ahead of me. On one hand it felt like waves coming in and out of the ocean, the day is full of possibilities. And yet through my time scarcity lens, all I could often see were a series of competing choices, all of which I wanted to try on before time ran out. And yet I remember feeling so fretful that I would either pick the “wrong choice” or that I wouldn’t have time to do all of them.

Underneath all of this angst are two competing life fears that I still grapple with most days: a fear of making a mistake and a fear of missing out. I believe deep down I have this genuine love for and curiosity for life…but it rides alongside, perhaps an existential deep knowing that we are only on this earth for so long and we must make the most of it. I see this play out in my life now, both as a forty something human and as a working mom. With even less time (ostensibly) at my disposal, I find myself asking quiet questions most mornings about how I can exercise after work and have silly 1-1 time before bed with my daughter. Do I have space to finally take a French class this year, join a book club AND take my daughter on an after school play date? I’m playing out the same scenario I did in my early 30’s, except now I’m adding in another human’s needs to the matrix. I sometimes have to remind myself to literally stop cleaning the kitchen and vacuuming so that I can pause and look at my daughter sitting in her small, black, wooden arts and crafts chair, quietly drawing a picture of Elsa and Olaf while singing a made up song to herself.

You blink an eye and you miss it.

Alas, as I look towards these next 5 years, I know we will see new challenges and hurdles arise. With the Jewish High Holidays upon us, I often see this time of year as an opportunity to reflect on what I want for myself and my family in the coming year. How can I be more intentional about the way I’m living each day, giving and receiving, breathing and believing in myself, as a mom, as a daughter, as a friend, and as a citizen on this earth? As I referenced in a recent blog, I want to lean into my mid-life years with a little more freedom, ease, and forgiveness for myself. And yet, I also want to be realistic that the way I’ve been leaning into “mid-life” up till now is and has caught up with me. I can’t “do it all.” And I certainly can’t do it “perfectly,” or as well as the “the mom across the street” is doing it.

Let it be known that in these next five years, I want to emphasize quality over quantity. I want to choose less and live into those choices more fully. I want to judge myself and my family, not against any other family’s framework or lifestyle, but against my own gut instincts about what feels right.

The scariest part of this realization is that it means I must finally come to accept that there is no “right” choice for our endless daily (and more nuanced) decisions. But if I slow down, even just 1%, and feel into the safety of my body and breath, there is a window of freedom and opportunity to leap into the matrix of it all and simply make a choice.

So as a gift to myself on this 5 year anniversary of the beginning of my birthing and mothering rollercoaster, I am choosing to step off the pressure-filled looped path that I’ve been living. The new path may be a little quieter and perhaps a little boring at times, but if I can catch a murmur of those cricket sounds along the way, then I know I’m here and I’m living. One wild and precious, messy moment at a time. Blessings for the journey dear readers. And a happy, quiet end to summer.

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“I pray for the change in perception that will let me see bigger and sweeter realities.”

~Anne Lamott (Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers)

Mid-Life Musings

Port of Galilee, Point Judith, Rhode Island

“Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unraveling.” ~Brené Brown

I recently read this brilliant post by Brené Brown about what she describes as a “mid-life unraveling” and something struck me. Just as Brené shares that her “mid-life unraveling” hit her during her forty-first year, for me, my forty-third year has been a sort of unraveling. In fact, I think I’m still in it. I’m not sure how long it’s supposed to last or if there is a prescription for how an “unraveling” is experienced, but Brené Brown nails it with this essay. She describes her own battling it out with the Universe. Her resistance and her armor, which she’s built up over decades, is fierce and it has served her well. But at 41, she surrenders and accepts (eventually) that it’s time to let go… to let the layers shed. The layers of insanely strong and professionally manicured armor that she didn’t even realize she was wearing began to burst at the seams and prevent her from living.

I don’t think anyone has ever described this concept of a “mid-life/mid-love” chapter that I now find myself in so beautifully and yet so adjacent to fear at the same time.

In my experience, I learned at a young age, probably around 12 or 13 years old that I couldn’t share my fears. Not all of them anyways. I became astute around this time at playing into other’s vision of “cool,” what I would later look back at and see as a straight, white, cis-gendered femininity and popular girl culture that I needed to blend into in order to survive. I remember masterfully doing a sort of “code-switching,” acting one way when I was with one group of friends and then another way when I ebbed and flowed into other social spaces. For example, I remember starting 8th grade and laughing along with the “popular” kids on the bus, even when their use of the term “gay” was directed at others in a derogatory way. I just wanted to be liked. I wanted to play into the image of cool that I instinctively knew was my best shot at “survival of the fittest” and so that year I began pushing down, really far down, my own doubts, insecurities and vulnerabilities around my own sense of self and identity. My superb skills at “fitting in,” being likable and even becoming known as a sort of “peacemaker/negotiator” among friends have carried me through decades of living and growing and wandering.

I believe on many levels that I am brave and courageous and am worthy of being loved, which Brené professes so beautifully, are all of our birthrights. But until very recently I didn’t know how to shed the armor that has been covering up my ability to see that I don’t need to keep pretending and performing in order to be liked or likable.

The coping mechanisms that so many of us have developed to protect ourselves from getting hurt are keeping us small and stuck in the mud, even when we reach mid-life.

Mid-life is a scary thought. I fight like hell most days to control my surroundings so as to be able to put my feet up at the end of the day and smoke a proverbial cigar and say, “great job,” “bravo,” “you deserve to rest now…” Only to realize as I put my head on my pillow that I never actually put my feet up that day. In fact, I never stopped. Most days I am fighting an uphill battle with the Universe and I don’t think I’m winning. Instead, I am often working myself into a state of burnout, only to get up and keep fighting the same fight the next day.

For those of us who are caregivers (for children or parents, pets or neighbors, for the planet,) how do we wake up each morning and live into our most sacred truths while still making a living and playing this critical care-taker role? How do we allow ourselves to shed our armor and bask in what we really want to be doing without turning our backs on responsibility?

If I could, I would retire now and enroll in a creative writing program. Wake up and write, paint, take photos and live in nature. But alas, I can’t. I must take my dog out, feed my daughter, take her to school, rush to work and make sure bills are paid in order to wake up and do it all over again the next day. All this in a world that feels very, very fragile and chaotic and frankly scary these days.

Brené Brown shares that, “courage and daring are coursing through your veins.* You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It’s time to show up and be seen.”

*I want to know how to do this and make sure I’m not late for my 10am meeting.

I guess for now, I will just keep writing, keep asking questions and try not to be afraid of this unraveling that I find myself wanting to speak more truth to. Perhaps as Brené illustrates so well, this unraveling is a sort of re-awakening/re-birth that will hopefully allow all of us to build a new type of armor (regardless of where we are in life), an armor of courage, bravery and risk-taking that we didn’t ingest enough when we were young…When I was that 12 year old girl hiding behind myself. Instead, I will try to live into these questions and be less afraid of not being liked. I think I’ll still always be a peacemaker at heart, but I will also try to stay open to some natural conflict and internal dissent along the way. After all, humanity is imperfection. Humanity is messy.

So as we kick off the summer and celebrate Pride month, may we all wake up a bit and concoct a medicine that gets infused into the water of our young. A medicine that allows bravery, vulnerability and courage to become seeped into our bones. Perhaps armor will eventually become a thing of the past, both physical and virtual. And perhaps we will realize that love and kindness, freedom and truth are ours for the taking.

Meig’s Point at Hammonasset Beach State Park in Madison, CT

Excerpt from “The Midlife Unraveling“: “I’m not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing—these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt—has to go. Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and lovable, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever. Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through your veins. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It’s time to show up and be seen.”

— Brené Brown (2018)

Brandi Land

“In the cradle of the circle.
All the ones who came before you.
Their strength is yours now.
You’re not alone.”
Allison Russell

Barcelo Maya Beach, Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico

Would you believe me if I told you thousands of people, mostly women, converge on a resort in Mexico for a long weekend every January to compete for the chance to sing karaoke (coined Brandi-oke) with Brandi Carlile and her band?

…The resort is coined Brandi Land, just for the weekend and my wife and I attended this year for the first time. (This is year five of the event.) We really had no idea what to expect and were just happy to escape to a warmer climate and pretend everything was simple for a few days.

What makes this trip truly unique though, is the priceless opportunity to exist for a moment in a time and space where LGBTQ+ folks and families are the norm and not the exception. Everyone is welcome, but given the nature of Brandi’s fan base and the branding of the weekend, it feels as though I am surrounded by a sea of queer women and families. There are two moms to my right, in line for the buffet and two moms to my left, walking back to their rooms… some with toddlers, others with teenagers. There are older lesbians, laughing and hanging out with their friends at the pool. And there are queer 20 somethings, enjoying the safety of walking freely hand in hand. I honestly forgot what that felt like. I know this is not the same reality I live in back home, but it is a reminder, and one that I really needed of late, that I’m not alone.

I attended a workshop during the trip entitled, “Writing in Community with Vulnerability and Strength.” It was facilitated by Lindsay Wheeler, a queer, neurodivergent social worker who guided us in several exercises and writing prompts about the power of vulnerability. One prompt we were asked to respond to was, “Write a short letter to a younger version of yourself in which you tell them about the community you’ve discovered here and what life can look like for them in the future.”

I would like to lean into that vulnerability and share the letter I drafted to my middle school self, circa 1996:

Dear Stephie,

First, hi. I’m sorry I haven’t written in a long, long time. I miss talking to you!

I’m here to tell you that you can let go a little of your worries, dear one. Life is hard and bumpy and messy. But it’s also grey. I know that’s hard to see right now. You’re feeling so many things. Fear, doubt, shame, embarrassment, joy, curiosity, confusion. And I want you to give yourself permission to feel them all. The feelings are big and scary, but I promise they won’t swallow you up.

...and you’re not alone.

I also want to tell you a secret…being gay or what many people now call queer is a gift. You don’t need to have it all figured out, but just know that not being straight is singlehandedly one of the best gifts that you will ever receive.

The prism through which you will be able to see the world will open up in ways you couldn’t imagine. You will see more clearly others who live and float on the margins. You will come to realize that to be queer is not just an identity but it’s also a verb–to queer the lines of art, education, family, etc. It means to rip open the boxes and labels we are told by society we must confine ourselves to. None of this needs to make sense now. But I want you to know you have a superpower, dear one.

Life will not always be easy. And with this superpower comes added responsibility. Most people will not be able to see the world the way you do. You will need to help them. Offer them grace and patience, and help them break down the linear boxes getting in their way. Don’t be afraid to look and feel different. The truth is we all feel this in different ways and for different reasons.

Your queer identity, dear Stephie, is like an invisible bridge into a community of misfits who are all looking to feel seen and heard. You didn’t ask to be this bridge and it is an added weight to carry, but this weight will enrich your world, your children’s world and bring untold meaning to those around you.

And on this one random weekend in the future, at the start of 2024, you and your wife (yes, you will get married!) will stumble upon a rainbow coalition of allies on what feels like a far-away island. They will come from all over the world to listen to music and just be. It will feel a bit like a magical island of unicorns, and it may not feel real, but please know that it is.

…Dear Stephie, don’t be afraid to look for these unicorns wherever you go in life. They are hiding and also in plain sight. Look closely for the grown-up unicorns…the older unicorns who have lived generations before you and can share their wisdom. Tell them what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking. Do NOT push back those scary feelings because they are uncomfortable. Release them into the world.

Most of all, I want you to know that everything is okay.

Love,
Me ❤

—-

I hope we can come back to Brandi Land next year and bring our daughter. I want her to see and feel the magic of this place. I want her to see other children with two moms or two dads as the norm and to start to see and feel how big the world is, even if she doesn’t yet have the language to unpack it.

Perhaps she will be able to tell herself now (and not 40 years from now) that she is free to be herself, truly and authentically. While the world does have cynics and bullies, there is also a band of allies and beautiful people who will unconditionally see and welcome her.

—

As we pack our bags to return home, may all of us unicorns at Brandi Land carry a piece of this time and space back with us. May we turn inwards whenever we need to feel the warmth of community (and the palm trees) as we ride out the quiet months of winter.

And may we remember, just as Brandi opened up the whole weekend…

“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue. And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.”

Thanks, Brandi Carlile, for continuing to role model this for all versions of me, young and old, here and in my future.

Lyrics to “You’re Not Alone”

Hey, my little evening star
How bright you are
Anywhere you go
You’re not alone

Rocks and bugs and angel wings
Every little shiny thing
Anywhere you go
You’re not alone

You’re the north star and the compass
Always finding something wondrous
Anywhere you go
You’re not alone

Wish that I could keep you from
Sorrow and harm
None of us is here for long
But you’re not alone

In the cradle of the circle
All the ones that came before you
Their strength is yours now
You’re not alone

Sparrows in the morning
Crows at dusk
Singing with your mam
(Singing with your mammy)
We have love

We have love
We have love
We have love
We have love
You’re not alone

De l’Afrique à l’Acadie
De l’Europe aux Amériques
La musique nous réunis
Une Famille

La musique nous réunis
De la Louisiane à Sans Souci
Tigallum Tigalli on arrive
Une Famille

Hey, my little evening star
How bright you are
We have love
You’re not alone

We have love
We have love
We have love
We have love
You’re not alone

You’re not alone
You’re not alone
You’re not alone
Allison Russell
“You’re Not Alone”
(feat. Brandi Carlile)
(originally by Our Native Daughters)

Letting Go

“Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you- all of the expectations, all of the beliefs- and becoming who you are.
Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

Sometimes the best thing we can do in life is to take our hands off the steering wheel and let someone else drive. There is a Yiddish expression, “Der Mensch Tracht, Un Gott Lacht,” which translates to “man plans and God laughs.” I have received a lesson in this wisdom over the last month. Less than two weeks before starting my new job, I had an absurd, freak accident which left me with a fractured ankle and what felt like an impossible situation to maneuver. Instead of planning my commute to work, I was planning a pathway to surgery and renegotiating a start date to allow for recovery. Life stopped. And the millions of little things that one moment had been in my control and seemed so important were suddenly whisked away.

Since surgery to repair my ankle, I’ve had to relearn how to go up and down the stairs. My daughter is now getting a kick out of me descending and ascending on my butt like she used to do when learning to become mobile. We are both learning to put on socks and step into shorts together. It is not straightforward. I can empathize with how tired she gets when trying to do it by herself and just wanting to give up and ask for help. Well, now we can help each other.

There have been countless lessons in this “pause” that have inconveniently inserted themselves into my life. I don’t even know where to start. For one, resisting reality or grasping for something different makes everything harder. When the Physician Assistant (PA) in the ER came in to tell me about the results of the x-ray, I was in disbelief. I started rattling off all the things I had planned for the summer and asking if I could still do them. I had plans to take my sister to NYC the next day for her 40th birthday…could we still take the train? Could I still participate in the sprint triathlon I signed up for in August? I had finally found the time to get my bike tuned up after years of it collecting dust in our garage. The PA looked at me funny and said, “well if you want to show up on the day of the race and see how you do, go for it.” (Instead my training of late has consisted of doing light ankle stretches and circles). Okay, so what about this concert or this trip or this baseball game or this adventure, etc? I immediately looked at what I was losing. Perhaps this is fair. There is a lot of loss. Not to mention, money and time and the incredible burden this places on my loved ones to pick up the slack.

But what of the gain? What do I gain from a setback?

In the last month my mind and body have slowed down, literally and figuratively. I’m not able to think much beyond what is right in front of me. At any moment I need to know where my crutches are, what I need to grab in order to sit down, whether it’s time to ice or elevate, etc. I’ve been forced to slow down in a way I didn’t think was possible, and life has not imploded. It’s gotten a bit more confusing and there are additional puzzle pieces we need to maneuver but I’m able to keep up at a pace that feels more realistic.

So what happens in a couple weeks when I can start bearing weight again, when I can commute into work or go for a walk to the mailbox? Yes even getting the mail is a formidable challenge now. Will I start piling things back on slowly, until I can’t catch my breath? Truthfully, I probably will at first. But perhaps this time I’ll connect with the ease of keeping things a bit simpler. After all, it’s not what I’m accomplishing or checking off that dictates my worth, but instead it’s in the “letting go” that I stand to gain the most. Blessings for a smooth week ahead and may you embrace the bumps and cracks along the way.

Can We Go Back?

“We are powerful because we have survived.”
Audre Lorde

It’s the spring of 2003. I’m a second semester senior at the University of Pennsylvania. I have maybe 4 weeks left before graduation and I decide now is the moment I’m ready to walk into my college’s LGBTQ+ Center. I had finally started to acknowledge my queer identity to a few close friends and was ready for a fresh start post-graduation. I was still applying for jobs and internships and wasn’t yet sure where I would land, but decided to make an appointment with the LGBT Center Director to get some advice on transitioning to life outside of Penn as a queer person.

Back then, being out as a college student was still daunting (and for many, it still is). I had essentially spent my entire college experience in the closet. It was easier to skim the surface of my social life as just a part of myself, exploring crushes and relationships with boys, but not going near my feelings for girls. I think part of me truly believed that if I pushed these feelings back far enough that they would go away. I thought I could will a different future for myself, one that placed me squarely into the range of “normal.”

It’s now 20 years later, and I’ve decided to bring my family back to campus for my 20th college reunion later this month.

I’ve lost touch with so many friends. And I have no one knocking down my door to see me again. Part of me wonders if my connections faded because of the “dual identity” I lived during my time there. I was like a fish swimming in heteronormative waters. Every once and a while, I would poke my head out and see that there were other pockets of possibility, but they felt impossible to bridge. I therefore never truly let people in to get to know me. Maybe I’m not alone in this feeling. So many of us are afraid, for different reasons, to let others in during these fraught years. And yet it’s still sad to me looking back that I was not able to open up (to myself and others) about what I was feeling and thinking and questioning as it pertained to sexuality and identity more broadly. I would likely have been met with empathy and support and realized there was a whole community of people with similar questions and life experiences.

It is largely for this reason that I feel compelled to step back onto campus 20 years later and reclaim my college experience as a queer person. I will be bringing my parents, my wife and my daughter and while I’m grateful beyond words to have them by and on my side, this pilgrimage is really a solo one.

To step back onto the Penn Quad and College Green as my full self. To walk proudly down Locust Walk and know that I’m not hiding anymore. It will surely bring up a swell of emotions, painful and joyous, but I’m prepared this time to feel them all. I will point out to my daughter the old gothic buildings where I took my first anthropology classes, the theatre world I stepped into as a college sophomore, and the tiny dorm room I lived in freshman year above the mail center in the upper Quad.

And I will walk her into the Carriage House, home to the LGBT Center, and watch her roam, free.

1 Year Later: Mindset Matters

“Perfection is the mountain that has no peak.”
Emma Norris

If you had told me last year I would be celebrating New Years Eve 2022 embarking on the joys of potty training I would have probably said, “that sounds like a cruel joke.”

Today we introduced our daughter to “big girl underwear.” Getting to choose among patterns including owls, mermaids, tropical fruit and trucks was a really BIG deal. In full transparency, I was dreading this process. It brings up in me all my angst around ceding control, embracing messiness (literally and figuratively) and transitions. Moreover, asking a toddler to give up a security blanket (the diaper), which is often all they have known since birth is a tall order. It’s scary and uncomfortable and not intuitive in the least. And yet, our children have to learn eventually (my older, wiser friends have promised me they won’t go to college in diapers).

As I reflect back on 2022 and what lies ahead in the new year, I continue to see my daughter and parenting as my biggest teachers. It’s been a year and counting since I started this blog. From the get go, I’ve struggled with issues of productivity and perfectionism. Through my research and writing I’ve come to see just how deep-seated these traits are in our modern culture and way of being. I touched upon this theme in one of my first blog entries, noting how tied up our sense of self-worth is with our notion of accomplishing and chasing that illusive something, whether it be a job, relationship or some idea of happiness.

Gradually, I’ve spent this last year slowing down and scaling back what is possible to produce or accomplish. Through this process I’ve recognized how habitual my “need to please” is. Whether it be through seeking validation on a parenting choice or trying to fit my life into a perfect mold of what I think it “should” look like, I continue to put increasing pressure on myself to “get it right.” Contemplating the next right move professionally, personally and spiritually consumes my thoughts most days. Making a decision about what preschool to send our daughter to next year has been like asking me to choose just one sushi roll off an entire menu. Impossible! You can’t make a perfect decision. There is no such thing and even if there was, it won’t live up to the ideal I have conjured up in my head.

At the end of the day, most of this pressure is self-imposed. We want to “do right” by our loved ones and set ourselves and them up for success. And, yet, we have to balance that idea of success with the excruciating truth that life will be hard. We will fall down, a lot. We will have “accidents” (pun intended) and there is no prescribed school or methodology that will shield us from this truth.

Perhaps then our growth comes from learning to relate differently to our pain and worries. How do we respond and react when things get hard and there is no template for how to move forward? How do we hold compassion for ourselves in the process?

Can we begin by accepting that we don’t know all the answers, nor should we? We do not need to decipher every possible outcome and algorithm when making a decision. Instead, what would it feel like to connect with humility to the messy, tangled process of living itself?

In this New Year, may a “good day” or a “good choice” be measured not by what we’ve accomplished, but instead by how we’ve related to ourselves. Did we revel in picking out the best pattern of underwear (or socks) in the morning and then remember to laugh at our bumps and “boo boos” along the way.

To all my friends and readers, happy 2023 and happy stumbling.

Note to Myself: Reflection on Parenting

“What would it be like if I could accept life – accept this moment – exactly as it is?”
Tara Brach

Laurie Berkner at The Bushnell, Hartford, CT 10/15/22

Dear Momma,

This wasn’t about you or your parenting in any way. Your daughter is fine. You are learning alongside her.

You got her tickets to see Laurie Berkner perform live in Hartford, CT. Her favorite artist! You blocked off the day. You carved out precious time for your family. You agreed not to invite anyone else so this could be a true family outing. It was just her, Mommy and Ima. You made every contingency plan necessary, got everyone out the door in enough time. Checklist–snack, diapers, hands, face, teeth, shoes and socks. And managed to get another pair of pants and socks on when the first pair got wet from stepping in your dog’s water bowl.

You bought these tickets months ago and were thrilled to give this experience to her. As a gift, a memory she would never forget.

And yet, when we settle into our seats and you look around, you can tell she seems unsettled. Maybe overwhelmed? Unsure what to make of her surroundings? A baby born during the pandemic, this is possibly one of the largest crowds she’s been around.

Laurie comes dancing down the aisle with her guitar and sings a familiar tune… “When I woke up today…I shouted out Hooray!…” My eyes light up and my ears can’t believe what they are hearing. Is it really her? Live, in the flesh? Strumming her guitar 20 feet away. Unbelievable.

I glance over and see my daughter melting to the ground. Shrinking into a cocoon. Eyes glazed over, lying on the floor, attempting to do a summersault in the aisle and trying to get away. She seems somewhere else. She doesn’t know what to make of it perhaps? Looks out at Laurie a few times and tries to take it all in, but then retreats again. Too much? Tired? Hungry? Cautious? Worried? I may never know.

Maybe she is unable to express how unbelievably strange it is to see this icon live, a blink of an eye away, after only seeing her on a screen or dancing to her music on Pandora. Yes, Laurie Berkner is real. She’s a person too.

I’m so incredibly disappointed in that moment. Yet, in reflecting back, I realize that as much as much as I want my daughter to fall in love with Laurie Berkner in concert, to jump up and down to “Chipmunk at the Gas Pump,” like the other kids, that’s simply not what she is feeling today. She is being her authentic self.

Perhaps to be accepting of my own thoughts, feelings and actions is an admirable goal for myself too. To share our emotions with our children and allow them to share theirs with us. And to be validating and at peace with the “let downs” and inevitable perplexities and complexities of childhood and parenting that will come.

—–

A few weeks later, this experience helps me stay much more grounded on Halloween night when my daughter refuses(!) to put on her Halloween green dinosaur costume to go trick-or-treating. She has been talking about this costume for weeks and practically every day leading up to Halloween. And yet, when push comes to shove, she decides that she doesn’t want to wear her costume and instead prefers to walk around the neighborhood and simply ask for candy.

Yet, what starts off as another huge “wait, you have to like this” (oh, what did I do wrong?) moment ends with a renewed appreciation for my child’s intuition. We must trust them, to know what’s best for them and find ways to trust ourselves in the process too.

Ultimately, my daughter decides that instead of wearing her dinosaur costume for Halloween she is going to cart it around the whole night in her blue car. It will go trick-or-treating with her!

Thank goodness for children’s creative spirts and our ongoing practice as adults to stretch — and be true to ourselves — alongside them.

A Role Model in Brandi

“The midwife told us that we each needed a mantra for every time the world of motherhood felt like it was a template that we didn’t fit into. Mine was ‘I am the mother of Evangeline.'”
Brandi Carlile, Broken Horses

This is the cover art for *In These Silent Days* by the artist Brandi Carlile.

It’s not often I become intoxicated by someone’s voice, just listening to them speak. I recently finished listening to Brandi Carlile’s new Memoir, Broken Horses. From start to finish I was mesmerized and transfixed by her words and songs, woven together to tell the story of her life, thus far.

Brandi and I share the same age (both born in 1981). While our upbringings could not have looked more different, our inner journeys bear striking similarities. Brandi grew up in a rural town outside Seattle, Washington. She moves 14 times in her first 14 years. Brandi’s family was rich with love and poor with means. She drops out of high school in order to pursue a career in music, almost exclusively self-taught. Brandi is gifted beyond imagination and will eventually catch national attention and go on to become the most nominated woman at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards in 2019. Beyond her musical talent though, I think what enraptures me is her raw truth and gift for storytelling.

Like me, Brandi grows up in the ’90’s. There are no cell phones for us in middle school or high school. We are taunted by our own inner critics more than we are by social media. Bullying is alive and well but it is easier to retreat into our own spaces and hide from the scrolling and obsessive jeering that comes from toxic online commentary. At the same time, we don’t have many public role models when it comes to the queer community. For Brandi, Ellen DeGeneres is monumental. Ellen’s “coming out episode” airs on April 30, 1997 when Brandi and I are 16. Ellen is the first gay person Brandi ever “meets” and she gives her the confidence to come out in high school. She secretly records Ellen’s “coming out episode” on a cassette tape and years later she ironically has Ellen sign it while she is a guest on her show.

I am far from ready to “come out” in 1997 but I do subconsciously archive this moment in my memory bank, which over the next 6 or 7 years will give me the confidence to do the same. It’s funny because even today at 40, listening to Brandi speak so openly about her queer identity and life as an artist, it feels like she is speaking to me at 16 years old. She is giving my 16 year-old self permission to break free from her shell just a littler earlier.

Likewise, it is so powerful to hear Brandi share her story of meeting the woman who would become her wife and their journey starting a family. It normalizes these life-cycle moments in a queer context and again speaks to my younger self, giving her permission to keep moving forward, and with the message that she is not alone. Brandi describes in detail how she and her wife, Catherine Carlile, navigate nuanced decisions around fertility, pregnancy, gender roles, conceptions of motherhood, and parenting in a heteronormative world. Her writing and storytelling is brave, fierce and ground-breaking. One storyline that stands out to me is in Chapter 15, “Firewatcher’s Daughter.” During this segment, Brandi speaks openly about the confusion and “irreconcilable grief” that she experiences as the non child-bearing partner and mother who is relegated to an insubordinate role during childbirth classes. She starts developing a complex in what is a heteronormative structure that boxes “LGBTQ couples into a male-female role paradigm that inevitably makes us feel more alone”. Brandi feels “useless and humiliated” by these classes. She is a mother but feels like she needs someone to reassure her of that.

Brandi gives voice to the truth that same-sex parenting is still relatively new and that society needs to humanize these stories because history is happening all around us. She and Catherine ultimately find a new midwife who specializes in “diverse pregnancy situations” and who works with them through the remainder of their pregnancy. In another poignant scene, the midwife challenges them to each develop a mantra for every time they feel shut out of motherhood as they see it. Brandi chooses the mantra, “I am the mother of Evangeline,” (the name of their first daughter) and this lyric will go on to become the anchor of her song, “The Mother” which depicts the role of a mother through her eyes.

Brandi’s parenting story, while unique, bears a familiar resemblance to my own. While I do carry my daughter, there is a feeling that I still have to prove myself worthy as a parent and a mother. It’s a never-ending coming out process when I share that my daughter has two moms. There isn’t a great template for us (which in some ways is liberating) and we are figuring it out as we go. We struggle with all the same issues that I imagine most couples face when it comes to division of labor, paid work vs unpaid work and the need to feel validated and appreciated for our contributions. What’s refreshing is that Brandi gives voice to a community of burgeoning LGBTQ+ parents who are yearning to see and be seen. We are here and we will continue to “pave our own way,” one spilled milk bottle at a time.

In the meantime, as a nod to Rosh Hashanah and a New Year’s sermon of sorts, I want to thank Brandi Carlile for awakening something in me that needed to be poked. From her courage to speak so openly about her life, to her creative and beautiful storytelling, I am inspired to keep writing and sharing my voice into the new year. So in that spirit, may this be a year for us all of pushing our creative boundaries and sharing our stories with a little more tenacity and grit than before. L’Shanah Tovah.

How Do We Protect Our Relationships?

“One of the greatest gifts we can give to the people that we love is to free them from our expectations of them.”
Meditation Teacher

I sometimes wonder how our relationships survive the act of parenting. By relationships here, I mean the relationship between a child’s parents or caregivers. Perhaps, the answer is that many of them don’t.

We don’t talk often enough about the “crushing responsibilities” that come with being a parent and how they can take a toll on the space and energy required to maintain the health of our romantic partnerships. This is not to presuppose that all co-parenting relationships look the same or have the same trajectory or expectations. With this post, I am speaking for myself and my journey which inherently look different than others. That said, I thought it might be helpful to share some of the personal challenges and vulnerabilities that have come with parenting and trying to maintain a strong foundation at home with a partner.

My wife and I met about 8 years ago through a mutual friend when I was living in New Haven, CT. She was living in a small rural town in CT and it often felt like our get togethers entailed exploring completely different cultures and terrains within the same state. Still new to New England, I was insistent on taking countless day trips to explore quaint towns, villages, cities, beaches, breweries and everything in between. It was light and fun when I stayed out of my head and just enjoyed the adventure of building a relationship with someone new.

This is not to say that building our relationship was simple or easy. We had our fair share of ups and downs. Coming out as queer was a long, arduous process that in many ways started when I was a young teenager. Having felt a bit stunted emotionally, I wasn’t comfortable or ready to start dating seriously until my late 20’s. By the time I met the woman who would become my wife I was 32, a very young 32 and still had a lot of maturing to do. I was no where near ready to settle down and had numerous hurdles to mount in order to feel ready to take that leap of faith.

Fast forward 8 years and our daughter has just passed the 20-month mark. She is a fireball, always in constant motion, exploring all the nooks and crannies of her big, wide world. It’s been an honor to be on this journey with her. At the same time, as the relationship with my daughter blossoms, I’m managing all the anxieties and stresses that come with motherhood. At times, this can become so overwhelming that I am able to see nothing else and am unable to focus on the role I play in my marriage.

In the days, weeks and months since our daughter was born — as we’ve muddled through ongoing sleep issues, a global pandemic, career changes and parenting anxieties — I am realizing that I’ve boxed myself and my wife into the role of logistics coordinators. Who is going to pick her up from daycare? Who is getting her up in the morning, doing bath time, giving meds, cleaning bottles, cooking dinner, driving her to the pediatrician’s office…the list feels endless. Resentment can so easily build up and our communication at times can look like a bidding war on who is doing more to manage our countless responsibilities. What starts as a conversation about the dishes or taking out the trash somehow devolves into an existential discussion about wanting to be seen and acknowledged for all “that we are doing.”

The truth is, everything we are “doing” can’t be assessed according to a rubric. No one is getting a grade. But we dig our heels in nonetheless and are ready to go to the ring to fight for our title as “hardest working parent, most deserving of a break.” The other day I found myself immaturely fishing for a “thank you” as if we were playing a game when I simply cleared the table after dinner.

Perhaps this is a form of #adulting that we are all immersed in, whether we have children or not. I do remember when we brought our now 5-year-old Portie (Portuguese Water Dog) home, we fell into a similar dynamic. I was more concerned with whether our dog got his paws dirty in the house, then if my partner had a good day at work. Had he been walked, fed, who was going to take him to the vet, etc.? Everything became a negotiation of sorts and communication between my wife and I centered almost exclusively around tying up loose ends at home.

I know that a lot of couples go through periods of this throughout the extent of their relationships, and some of it is to be expected.

But is there anything we can do to curb it before we start to feel more like business partners than life partners?

A couple of ideas that come to mind based on what I’ve noticed when I do manage to go against my “have to get things done” mindset…

To begin, when possible, I’m now trying to make a point to share space with our daughter, even if it feels like not a “good use” of our time. When possible, we will both give her a bath or pick her up from daycare or pile into the car for an adventure together. It may not make sense from a logistics standpoint, but it gives us a chance to breathe together as a family and create joint memories. Just this past weekend we decided to make an adventure out of a run to Target. What could have been a rushed errand to take something off our plate, was instead a full blown sensory and learning experience.

Interestingly, as a queer couple we are less subjected to traditional gender norms and heteronormative ideas around the roles we play inside and outside the home and who is doing “more” for the family. Instead of a power play, I am trying to look to our relationship as a team sport where we are both on the same team. If she is doing well, we are both doing well. And vice versa. If we are doing well as a unit, then our daughter is more likely to thrive. Admittedly, this is much easier said than done. There are so many pressures on each of us individually and it can become all too easy to slip into a contest of who is more deserving of the so-called parenting/logistics award. Perhaps it is a cry for control during a period in our lives where this kind of mastery feels more fraught than ever.

Additionally, I’ve realized how important it is to cultivate excitement around joint ventures and activities outside the parenting role. What is it that we can plan together, even if it seems lightyears away? (I already started daydreaming about a hypothetical winter 2023 getaway). I want to hold more tightly to those small moments of connection. Can we stay up past our bedtime to watch an extra episode of bad TV or meet up for a secret rendezvous at Chipotle for lunch? Perhaps these moments are not as sexy as our honeymoon period adventures, but they are just as meaningful.

As always, I am very much in the thick of this unchartered territory and open to the experience and wisdom of others. Above all I want to make more of an effort to give myself and my partner grace when one of us is stressed or overwhelmed. After all, what drew us to each other all those years ago at an ordinary bar in New Haven was our zest for life and adventure. Business and parenting logistics have their role, but perhaps letting go of some of these expectations and embracing “messy” will take us further in the end.