The Still, Quiet Voice

I sent my older daughter off to school after I’d woken her up only 20 minutes earlier, walking around the kitchen with my hair all crazy, my mind foggy, holding a 26-pound little human to my bare chest who refused to stop nursing.
When I dropped that baby off at daycare nearly an hour later, bucking and screaming when I handed her over to the woman I felt empathy for, I ran away before she could say “No, not like this. Not screaming like this.”
I got home, made myself some food and a second pot of coffee. The dog curled up on the couch, then at my feet, thankful I’d returned home and hadn’t abandoned her like she’d assumed.
A lot of being a writer is not writing. Much of it is reading. I see these as two separate but vital things. The not writing comes in waves of piecing together, and for me it’s self-reflection; looking at parts of my life from all different angles, looking for the most vulnerable, tender spot for the truth. Sometimes it’s an act of chewing, or going through a piece I’ve researched to death and still don’t know how to talk about. Sometimes, when I am most lucky (which hasn’t happened in years until just recently), it’s in someone else’s bed, staring up at someone else’s ceiling, intertwined completely, listening to their contented sleepy noises, my nose buried in their hair.
Things find you. People. Words. Whole entire essays that sit down with you and see you.
“We—mothers who write, solo mothers who write and create—often, if not most of the time or all of the time, write for our lives. Being a mother often makes the act of writing even more urgent, more sanity-saving, more necessary. We can get lost in routine and duty, obviously, but getting lost in the love part—love of our children, love of writing—might prevent that. Part of that is self-love. Part of that is creative output. All of it meant to keep us connected to who we are, as creative beings, when external forces might sever or corrupt such connection.”
DSCN2207Khadijah Queen’s essay on “Mothering Solo” touched on so many aspects of being a sole caregiver without explaining, it came at almost a relief or sigh. Because I’ve felt the need to explain my situation for so many years. I think a lot of my writing in the last few months has been just that.
Since finding out about Coraline, I’ve fought-and sometimes lost-a horrible battle with a part of myself that slut-shames me. I don’t know how else to describe it. I feel people’s questions burning. The whens, whys, wheres, and hows. I have no explanation anymore. We just are. Us three.
Much of my social life is online. It’s where I share most of myself. Even now, in writing this, it will be my one chance to talk about my day. I never expect responses, or even that many readers. Writers are a special sort of breed that need to share their stories by writing them down for others to see. Even when I kept journals as a child, locking them up before hiding them so no one would find them, I hoped someone would. As a kid, I wanted to be like Anne Frank, with my diaries found and published years after my death so I wouldn’t have to experience the horror of people reading my thoughts. I think, even as a kid, I knew that part of it’d be hard.
My last post got picked up and shared by WordPress, and has since been read over a thousand times. Yesterday I watched, a little stunned, as the comments of love and support came in, and continued to this morning. “From the still quiet voice, that shouts in my mind, I am letting you know, that it does get better,” one said. “It won’t ever be perfect, but better. Please feel free to reach out to me should you ever need a friend or listening ear that simply understands.”
DSC01838I started this blog years ago, before mommy blogs were popular, as a way to pick out pieces of my often lonely days with Mia that I wanted to remember. I needed to do that in order to stay sane, but also to be a present parent for her. If I spent even ten minutes remembering, and writing, later that night when she screamed and fought me over eating or going to bed, I could go back to that place where I meditated on the way her hands looked as she carefully picked up a crab with a yellow plastic shovel.
I called it, this website, “Still Life with Mia” then. Most of the entries have been set to private. I want to tell the stories in a different way, in an older writing voice. I want people to read about our life then, but not in the near-desperation of how I wrote about it then.
When I decided to be a “real” writer, I stopped blogging and refused to say the word. Almost a year ago, I started, slowly, taking selected past entries out of hiding and creating new ones. I never imagined I’d have many followers. I wanted to be a freelancer, and in order to get clients, I needed some kind of writing sample. I never thought I’d consider my own website as a true platform, or anything people would seek out. Now that it is, I can’t help but get emotional over the support people so freely offer.
11816093_10153158450028282_1964318977357852109_oBecause it’s still just me, sitting alone, at a computer, staring at a wall of photos and grabbing a mug to take a drink of coffee that is long-since gone. I have to remind myself to get up, to eat, to stop staring, and walk around a bit.
I dropped my baby off at daycare this morning when she was upset and needing her mom so badly, running away from her neediness, so I could sit and listen to the still quiet voice.
What’s it going to say today?
When I used to have regular panic attacks, ones that’d come for no reason, ones that would cripple me into feeling like I was suffocating, ones that curled me up into a ball in a jacuzzi bathtub of a house I’d been cleaning, I found a mantra:
“I love you, I’m here for you.”
The further I got into this journey as a single parent, and found myself further and further estranged from my family, it became my mantra for life. I’d learned I couldn’t depend on anyone else, and fell back into myself as my only source of support.
Maybe that’s where I got my strength from. Reaching out became an action of weakness. Writing blog posts about my hardest moments were showing humility, admitting faults, in an action that is going against the grain of only displaying perfection. It feels necessary to me now.
Where we are raw is where we are alive.

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Here Now

I’m writing this knowing my bank account is overdrawn, because I’m still waiting on four, unexpectedly late paychecks. I’m writing this from my couch, where my 19-month-old is sleepily nursing in my lap. I’m writing this two hours before I was supposed to meet friends for lunch, but had to cancel because of lack of funds. I’m writing this in between the tugs on my heart strings and knots in my stomach and angst of being alone.
Yesterday I went to bring my friend who’d just had a baby dinner. While I sat at her table, doing the familiar action that was holding a small baby while trying to eat, carefully picking food I’d dropped off of her incredibly new little frame, I started to seethe in jealousy and self-loathing.
My friend had a housecleaner. She had a mother-in-law staying with her. She had a husband at work who made enough to support the three of them and their house, two dogs, and two cats. She had a pile of boxes of things people had sent her, and a lot of things she’d planned to return because they ended up not needing them.
IMG_6450I looked over at my girls, playing so sweetly together, and thought of when Coraline was just born. I was completely on my own in an empty house just two days after I’d given birth. My cousin had stayed with us for a few days, and left us with a freezer full of pasta dishes, and some friends had brought us some food. Other than that, I was alone with a newborn who screamed if I put her down, and a rambunctious 7-year-old who, though I didn’t know it at the time, had hair completely full of lice.
Though Cora’s dad wasn’t there then, he’s here now. For the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen him almost every day. He got a full-time job and has committed to helping me pay for daycare costs while working with me on a schedule that gives him ample time with his daughter.
Mia’s had a hard time with this, of course, since she just returned from being with her dad for a week. Last night, after the visit to my friend’s house, Cora’s dad came to hang out with her for a couple of hours. I turned to Mia and asked her if she wanted to go to the store for cupcakes.
We live next to this ritzy hippie store, full of organic produce, but they also have baked goods that we can purchase with food stamps. On the way there, Mia skipped along next to me, holding my hand.
“Have I told you how much I love you lately?” she said.
I laughed and said not really.
“I love you so much, Mom,” she said. “You’re the best mom anybody could ever have.”
We ate our cupcakes, and I sat across the table from her while she talked about school, and mentioned one of her friends who was really really grumpy that day.
“Am I ever really really grumpy?” I said, knowing I was often.
“Yeah,” she said. “Like if I’m not listening and I know I’m not listening.”
“I feel like I’m kind of hard to live with sometimes,” I said.
“You’re a great mom,” she said. “You get grumpy, but you just had a baby by yourself. I know it’s hard.”
Lately it’s come to my attention that I’ve exhausted myself for a long time, and I’m beginning to feel the mental and physical toll. My hair’s about half as thick, and going gray. I don’t sleep for more than three or four hours. There are always about five things I need to be doing, not including taking a shower or going pee.
I’m looking for a therapist, though I’m not sure what it’ll do to help.
DSCN2248Despite all of this, I’ve already been published several times this year, and am putting the finishing touches on a book proposal that I hope to send out in the next week. My article through the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago made it to print in the newspaper. An essay featured in the Style section.
These last few months have been life-changing with Cora’s grandparents and father becoming a part of our little family. It comes with its own realizations of my own issues revolving around trusting others. In that sense, sometimes it’s easier to be alone.
All of my desires to find a suitable partner have faded. It might be from a mix of no longer having the ability to put energy into it, to wanting to focus on my family’s recent expansion and how that’s affecting everyone. I published a piece about it in the Washington Post the other day, ending with saying I’d try some sort of casual thing, but even that was too much.
I think it’ll be a long while before I can jump into anything like that.
But Coraline’s finally starting daycare two days a week. I don’t think I even need to say what a huge relief that is. It seems like things are always just on the brink of sailing smooth. Or sometimes they do for a while then dip back down to weekends like this where I have absolutely no money.
Darkest light’s before the dawn, you know.

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