Tag: queer parents

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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Aruba at sunset

“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)

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.