6Jun

The Cure for Crustiness

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 4 Comments

I have mixed feelings about parenting magazines. On one hand, they can be very informative (How to potty train!), but on the other hand, most of the information is hardly revolutionary (1. Put child on potty, 2. Give sticker as reward, 3. Pat yourself on the back for a job well done). They can provide a sense of community, but on the other hand, glossy photographs do not count as friends. I suppose for me, it all comes down to how the magazine makes me feel about parenting. Wondertime, for instance, makes me want to go nibble on my girls’ earlobes and noses and perfect little elbows just because I’m so delighted to know them.

I wandered onto a popular magazine’s website the other day, though, that made me feel as if I’d walked straight into a spider web. Days later, I still can’t brush off the articles: Why I wish I’d had a girl instead of a boy. How my husband should know better than to expect sex as long as we have kids at home. How I ruined my daughter’s life: A memoir. I couldn’t put my finger on the exact problem until I read their mission statement, which was (and I paraphrase): “Too many magazines imply that parents should like their kids, when the truth is, WE DON’T! So let’s get together and bitch about it.”

I sort of understand. Parenting is a tough job; the workday is 24 hours long, and a lot of poop is involved. It requires enormous sacrifice, patience, wisdom, and creativity. And karaoke skills. And strong stomachs. I find it incredibly dishonest when people claim that parenting is easy. It’s so, so not.

But it’s good. Swinging-at-the-park good. Spontaneously-giggling good. Dr.-Seuss good. Earth-shattering-love good. No words could fully depict the goodness of children: life’s gift to adults who might otherwise grow old and crusty. The magazine’s opinion—that parenting is awful, end of story—is poison. Because the fact is, all the sleepless nights and temper tantrums and sticky floors and rearranged sex lives pale in comparison to the joy of hugging your children each morning, showing them the world, and discovering that those tiny people love you every bit as much as you love them.

3Jun

The World According to Crap

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 4 Comments

The problem, as always, is perspective.

I fall, embarrassingly easily, into deep ruts. I go to sleep one night after a perfectly lovely day and wake up the next morning wrapped in pitch-black heaviness. Then comes the vast expanse of hopelessness, days thunking on like a parade of concrete tumbleweeds. I lose track of time almost immediately, and the hole in my mind chants its own dismal credo:
This is your life,
forever.
No one understands what you’re going through.
No one can help.
You are alone,
forever.
You will be washing dishes and mopping kitchen floors
and changing dirty diapers and crying in the shower
and forgetting how to create
and everything else about yourself—
you guessed it,
forever.

Even during the darkest bits, I know none of that is true. Yet I still think in those terms, doing anything I can to rationalize my senseless change in mood, grasping for something to blame. It’s just this house, I think. It’s too much, I can’t keep it clean, if only I had a housekeeper… Or, Two kids are too many, I can’t give them the attention they need, and if I hear one more whine, my head is going to roll out the door and find a new family to live with, if only we could afford full-time daycare… I think, If only I weren’t stuck in this daily routine, and If only I were in shape, and If only everyone else could be as miserable as I feel today… Perspective coated thoroughly in crap.

Of course, I never can articulate these thoughts when I’m in the midst of the muddle. I just operate under the whole weight of my feelings like a toddler, unable to form complete sentences, all fury and petulance. (Confession: I even threw a pillow at my poor husband, just because he was peacefully sleeping and I wasn’t. And I was still mad at him the next day for continuing to sleep peacefully with the pillow on his face. Because how could he sleep through my internal drama? HOW COULD HE?)

I’m familiar enough with this cycle after twenty-something years of falling to know I’m on the upswing again. Not bursting out of bed in the morning, mind you, but catching glimpses of sanity in my future. Very soon now, the rain will dry up, the pollen will settle, the stars will align slot-machine style—cherries all across—and my perspective will bob back into the light. I’ll remember how much I appreciate this little Italian apartment and the opportunity to imprint myself on it, always bettering. I’ll think of the time not too far from now when both girls will be in school, and I’ll remember how spectacularly fortunate I am to be home with them right now, always in the middle of their experiencing. I’ll realize how very gentle this daily routine is with me—how I can float on the soft structure when I lose my way—and how I need the challenges in my life, fitness, language, creative ventures. I’ll swell with gratefulness for the people who anchor me to reality, those who remind me to smile, and especially those who wake up with pillow-missiles on their faces and still hug me tight. And maybe simply writing this now will help me hold onto a glimmer of valid perspective next time I wake up alone in the dark.

1Jun

The Allergy Haze

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

I’m caught firmly in the Allergy Haze, a spiderwebby mesh of too-tired days with the sneezing and the itching and THE ITCHING and HUSBANDS ARE SUPPOSED TO SUPPORT THEIR WIVES, WHY WON’T YOU LET ME SCRUB MY EYEBALLS WITH STEEL WOOL? I’ve spent the last week living vaguely and dreaming of Rip Van Winkle. I like to think I’ll wake up tomorrow to find I’ve been asleep on a mountain of laundry for the last twenty years; at least by then, allergy season will be over. Right?

I hate wasting away like this. Letters (well, e-mails anyway) languish half-written in the back of my mind until they simply dissolve. Chores pile up, quite literally, and my girls veg in front of the TV while I pass out. I supposed it’s comforting in some ways to know that this is all the result of those damn histamines and not, say, my unbelievable suckness as a person. Yet, my friends? The suckness is overwhelming.

I will be back. Promise. Just as soon as I’m done swabbing my ears with ice picks and sneezing out the final remnants of brain matter.

(Do you suffer from allergies? Feel free to commiserate.)

26May

Girls

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 6 Comments

We notice flowers. Bright bits of lace on the grass, living confetti. We say “ooooo!” and discover magenta, petals dripping jewel-toned paint. We pick haphazard bouquets to stick in a chipped mug and watch during breakfast, because we need pretty.

We dance, every day. Living room dance hall, disco lights through open windows and the stereo up just loud enough. Even I, despite my traumatic experiences with skirts, put one on so we can twirl and twirl. We spin ourselves dizzy, lighter than air and beautiful as gilded carousels at play.

We mother. She with her well-loved plastic baby, I with my well-loved squirming one. We wield bottles as tools of our trade, spit-up cloths and a cheery “hooray!” for rolling over (two for trying to crawl). Even her cars, after VROOOMing across the floor, are put down for naps, blankets tucked up around their fenders with love.

We take over the kitchen. Not hostile, oh no. We’re delighted conquistadors, tasting, stirring, and tasting again, messy dishes left spooning in the sink. We make our own kinds of coffee—mine dark and steaming, hers invisible and spill-proof—and we say “mmm-hahhh” together, eyes closed for emphasis.

We wear pink. And blue and turquoise and orange, and truth be told, I wear mostly brown. But she shows me how to wear pink with charisma, shirts that sing opera and sparkly toenails that send giggles to each other in Morse code. We are pretty.

—

I love little boys, their grit, grime, and rough-and-tumble, their perpetual bounciness and smudginess. I always thought they were what I wanted, a personalized pack of Lost Boys and I their Peter Pan. But now? Not in a million Never-Neverland years, not even for a pocket full of disgusting treasures offered with a grin, would I choose boys over this:

Dance party 1

She and I, girls.

22May

Bibbidee-Bobbidee-Boo

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 6 Comments

On Tuesday night, Dan and I went on a double date with our friends Tom and Lindsey to a magical little agriturismo tucked away in the Umbrian hills. As with most meals here, the combination of gorgeous food and wine led to the kind of eager, overlapping conversation that Italians are famous for. And somewhere between the Sagrantino gnocchi and the profiterole, I found myself telling our love story—the well-worn details of meeting and connecting and promising.

It struck me later, as we walked through herb gardens back to the car, that this was the first time I had recounted our romantic history without feeling defensive. See, Dan and I got engaged only two months into dating, and I often felt like I had to justify our relationship to others, lay it out in neat mathematical terms so they would approve. It wasn’t easy. We went to a small Christian university where students were concerned with finding the Right Person to marry. Ironically, the divorce rate among our former classmates is higher than average, but I suppose it makes sense—a lot of Mr. and Mrs. Perfects showed themselves to be less-than-perfect after the wedding, and oops! Destiny must have loaded the wrong program. Ctrl + Alt + Delete, UndoMarriage, Restart.

I wish someone—maybe Dr. Phil?—would have sat the lot of us confused college students down and said, “Listen. Life is not a fairytale. There is not one custom-made person floating around somewhere in the world with your future happiness in his hands. Prince Charming? Is gay. So stop worrying about perfection and marry someone who helps you bloom into a better, brighter self. Choose someone you can laugh with and cry with and charge into the future with, and then be prepared to work hard for your relationship ‘til death do you part.”

I never knew what people meant when they told me, “You’ll know which one is The One.” No divine decree conked me on the head when I met Dan, and I often doubted our relationship simply because no fairy godmother was singing “bibbidee-bobbidee-boo” at us. However, I adored him. We could walk comfortably through each other’s minds, and our personalities clicked from the start. More than all, we wanted the same things in life, and our future together shone with delighted promise. I hated having to explain our relationship to cynical friends. They were looking for complicated magic—a mile-long wish list being checked off by one person—whereas what we had was simple: We loved each other, and we were willing to put our lives’ efforts into caring for that love.

I don’t often blog about marriage because I feel like there are fine lines between the honest and the pretentious (“We have it all figured out”), the sugar-coated (“Our marriage is a 24-7 makeoutfest!”), and the complaining (“My husband is a horrible person who would rather see me writhe in agony than put his dirty socks in the laundry basket”*). And while parenting is often a one-sided struggle, marriage is a very intimate haven requiring respect and discretion. Not open for public viewing

At the same time, I’m always encouraged to hear about other couples learning how to love each other through life’s inevitable storms and whirlpools and doldrums. Also, I can’t help wondering if there’s some other woman out there wondering if she’s chosen the right husband, terrified that any argument could lead to divorce. So this is what (nearly) five years of marriage have taught me:

Making time to talk about little things is hard.

Making time to talk about big things is harder.

Making time (and finding courage) to talk about the huge and ugly things, the ones you really don’t want to bring up, the ones that make you scared or weepy or furious, is incredibly hard,

BUT

Those conversations are the ones that propel a relationship forward, and if you can get yourself to say the unsayable, to work slowly and painfully through problems together, and maybe even to hug in the middle of a fight, you’ll delve deeper into the kind of love that far transcends checklists and fairy godmothers.

—

* For the record, my husband always puts his socks in the laundry, no writhing required. I like him, yes I do.

21May

Empty Hat Tricks

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 4 Comments

I must have pulled all the words out of my hat last week amidst the weeping and gnashing of teeth that was me rewriting for a deadline. I am a habitual un-finisher, and very few things in my life have been as hard as sitting down to make my rough draft a little less rough. There was Red Bull involved, and dark pre-early-morning hours, and possibly some cursing, and most definitely some* giving up. Thank goodness for a husband who sat up late with me, helping me glue all my shards of self-confidence and perseverance back together. He had to beat me repeatedly over the head with encouragement, but it worked. I mailed the story in, and even though I’m convinced it is the crappiest piece of crap ever crapped since the dawn of crapfulness, I’m glad I did it. Kind of deliriously excited, actually, with a heaping dose of shock.

The problem is that one week later, I still have yet to regroup**. I’ve indulged in naps and Lego Star Wars and a highly sticky Living Room Waffle Picnic Extravaganza. We even got to spend yesterday with some fabulous friends from the States, exploring downtown in the rain and talking over incredible food until late in the night. Nothing but wide open time between now and summer vacation, but I still feel oddly cramped.

So, consider this an official notice to my writing mojo: Coffee break is over; back to work! ::cracks whip::

—

*By which I mean lots, or even more accurately, LOTS x 107,000,000,00. Lots.

**Or blog. ::hangs head in shame::

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