Tag Archives: Motherhood

On My Mind

Guys, I’m back!

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Leute, ich bin wieder da, read my Whatsapp message to a group of climbing friends.

Not too long thereafter, I dusted the chalk from hands sporting four open blisters (rookie mistake: continuing to climb when the baby-soft skin first begins to rub away), went through my stretch routine, and packed up to go home.

I didn’t, but I could have skipped down the street. I could have grinned at every passing individual. My heart felt carefree. My body felt used, tired, worked. I took a deep breath and savoured it.

The last time I was in the climbing hall was on my birthday. I was at the beginning of my eighth month of pregnancy and had spent the previous months waiting for the moment when it would be time to stop. I’d felt a little too much pressure on my lower belly, a little too much tension on stretched muscles that I wasn’t supposed to engage. Objectively, the top rope route had been easy and boulders before it even easier, but I owed it to my baby and to myself to answer honestly when my belayer asked if climbing felt okay. “Actually no,” I replied then. “I think I’m done.”

And now, with my baby six months old, I was ready to come back. In some ways, ripping open my hands in exuberance was a reminder of what it means to return to a sport after so much time away: Go slowly.

While pregnant, my joints softened and pelvic floor stretched; my pretty darn good abs disappeared; my belly stretched out and knitted back together. My hands are no longer calloused. My body is not what it was.

Go slowly.

Early on in my pregnancy, I stopped climbing three days a week. And then I stopped climbing twice a week. I was content when I stopped climbing altogether, and surprised at the fury that took hold when I couldn’t start again once the baby was born. Everything that had been was no longer, and I didn’t recognize myself in the life that had begun. It took time until I stopped looking for who I had been and lamenting what I used to do. And then I found who I had become.

As a new mother, I am living in the very real luxury of a time that will not come again. I am home with my daughter, and this means that I can focus on her without having to worry about balancing work just yet. When I have the time, I can attend to myself.

Now that she is getting older, now that my body is fitter than it was, I’m back at the climbing hall, this time with a new appreciation for the time spent independently, in physical exertion, and as part of a community that knows a very different version of me. I’m a tiny girl’s mama, and a climber, too.

Parenting

Cherish

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The time goes so fast, they said. Take pictures, take videos, so you’ll remember, they said.

I’ll remember, I thought, but I find comfort in instructions, and I followed them.

It appears that I’ve forgotten.

I asked my partner last week when our baby stopped making the inchoate newborn noises that kept me awake at night. Months had past since we’d heard them, but I’d forgotten since when. I hadn’t known we were coming to the end of that time.

I recently flicked back through the earliest videos I’d recorded, marvelling at the slowness of the movements that have become deliberate and finer, the nasal squeaks that have blossomed into a wordless voice full of expression.

In just under five months, the skinny, scrunched bundle we brought home from the hospital has transformed into a baby – one who babbles and laughs and tries unsuccessfully to roll over; one with likes and dislikes, her very own temperament, and characteristics that signal a nascent personality.

And I’ve forgotten, just as everyone assured me I would.

I’ve forgotten just how tiny and new she was, and I am stunned at the videos and photos that remind me. I’ve forgotten just how tired I was, though the feeding times scratched into a notebook every two hours provide the proof. I’ve forgotten the feeling of just getting up and ready for the day, but I imagine it to be quite freeing, indeed.

This is a fleeting time and it needs to be cherished. Nearly five months already gone, and in them I have done little besides loved.

I wrote once that love is a verb, and I understand that yet differently now. I spend my days and nights awash in it.

It is this feeling that has me writing while growing increasingly uncomfortable on the couch while the baby sleeps in my lap. I could be doing so many other things with this time . . . but I’m not. Cherish.

And I cherish the drunken glow that washes over me when I breathe in her baby smell, or when she lays her head on my shoulder when tired, or in the moments of clear, wordless communication.

Tears prick my eyes when I think of the deepest truth I have ever held and will not attempt try to explain: My daughter and I are one being.

I cherish this feeling, too.

I want to remember. They say I’ll forget, and they’ve been right, but I hope to remember, and when not with the brain, then with the body (which is a manifestation of the brain, but that’s a blog post for a different time).

It’ll be all too soon before she doesn’t want to be held anymore, all too soon before she slams the door shut.

And when she’s raging, I hope to find the feeling of tears pricking my eyes, tickling the back of my throat, because my daughter is sleeping in my lap and the world is simple. Because we are one, despite how I know she’ll pull away, despite how I know my role is to giver her wings and watch her soar.

I’ll catch her when she’s ready to land, this daughter who gave me the gift of being her mama. And I cherish that, too.

Jena, Germany – February 2024
Parenting

Parenting is a Jazz Routine

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I grew up involved in theatre and its associates – drama classes, plays and musicals, dance and dance recitals, chorus and choral concerts. I attended improv shows, student and professional performances of all kinds, and sought out live music in cafés and on street corners. I grew up in a town with an annual, famous, phenomenal jazz festival, which I still miss attending.

I was a young teenager when my guitar teacher and I started playing around with jazz, which did not captivate me then like it would when I was a bit older. Far too uncertain and afraid of making mistakes to just give it a try, I looked for the right notes, something that would undoubtedly work, and missed the opportunity to enter the unknown and see where it would take me. Nowadays, I go through phases of playing the guitar and am immensely grateful to have brought it with me all over the world. Rather a lot of guitar improv has taken place since I asked my teacher if we could do something else.

Considering this, I had to laugh at myself when, in response to a friend’s query about how my little family and I are doing, I answered “We have something like a jazz rhythm going on – not a routine but rather patterns, and some more predictable than others.”

I don’t think I’ve ever compared life to jazz before, but I’m certainly not the first one to do it. And upon reflection, I find that’s not a bad way to think about parenting in the stage where we are right now. There’s a general flow to the day, lots of twists, turns, bumps, and happenings, and a general flow to the evenings and nights. Anything and everything can happen in between and it does. Plans are in quotation marks because little goes according to plan, but appointments are kept and meet-ups occur. As soon as we think we’ve figured something out, our sweet baby grows and changes and we start all over again.

And just like a good rhythm, jazz or otherwise, there’s an undercurrent, a steadiness holding it all together, that one can always find and fall back on. In the case of being a parent, it’s the purest form of love.

Rochester, New York – June 2019