Tiny Beautiful Things: A Review in Dreams

Holy shit my dreams have been intense and seemingly completely fucked-up lately. I blame the book Tiny Beautiful Things, which I purchased from Kindle after finishing Cheryl Strayed’s last book. This one is a compilation of advice columns that she wrote under the pseudonym Sugar. Some of these Dear Sugar columns can still be read over on The Rumpus. The advice she gives is raw, based on her own life experiences, and her no nonsense tell-it-like-she-sees-it mentality, it was a quick read (though I found myself taking breaks in order to process all the advice and stories I encountered.

The stories I encountered in her book did not leave my psyche upon entering dreamland. In one night I had 4 terrifying dreams, including:

1. A dream where I was sleeping in a dream and my father-in-law came in, spooned me for awhile, and then left when he heard my husband get home. His creeping into my room woke me up, and my dream self pretended to be asleep in order for him to go away sooner. Upon waking I felt very much like a little girl who had been molested (though I have no history of sexual abuse in my past).
2. A dream where my husband was sexually assaulted by a mentally retarded girl wearing a green shirt. He was tied to a chair when she raped him, and there were many people around, like what you would see at a college frat party.
3. A dream where my grandma and I visited a museum where the first room was full of mummies and decorated with bones and skulls in designs (I partially blame this on a travel channel show featuring such a place), and I was afraid to look around and we walked into another room which was similarly decorated with taxidermied animals, duck wings and antlers, until finally we made it to the part of the museum we came for…which was a room full of balloons and bouncy balls. WTF?
4. Perhaps the scariest of all…a dream where I pulled up to a park, was listening to the radio and finishing a snack before I got Potamus out of his carseat to go play. When I did turn the car off and go to get him out of the carseat, I realized that his head had gotten stuck in the straps and he had strangled. If I hadn’t been sitting there calmly eating a snack he might have lived. I called 911 and saw myself dissociate while  I did CPR, but he did not live.

Jesus, 4 intense dreams involving sex and death all in one night was a little too much for me. In the daylight I very much enjoy reading her frank advice to people struggling with all sorts of topics, but it entering into my dream-world is a little too much. Perhaps my next book choice will be something with a little…lighter…material?

What should I read next? Any good suggestions?

How are YOU a badass?

I was reading this article The Day Female Longboarders Taught me how to be a Badass on Huffington Post, and it hit me in the gut. You see, I have badass women friends that I admire and frankly…am pretty effing jealous of. Melissa Sher starts out saying:

I’ve wanted to be a badass for as long as I can remember. But the closest I ever came was in college, when I got my belly button pierced. Sadly, I had to remove the belly ring after only one day because it got infected. Three pregnancies later, my scar has stretched so that it now looks like a small, upside-down question mark, as if asking me, “What were you thinking?”

I giggled at this, thinking about my impulsive moments in college where I got my tongue AND nose pierced on the same day, and how utterly “cool” I felt with that. I mean, it’s not anyone who would just finish a rafting trip with some new friends, strike up a conversation about tongue rings and realize that you BOTH had wanted a tongue piercing, and then hop in the car and head down to the local tattoo shop to get it done…especially not after I had been there that morning getting my sparkly nose-stud.

This idea of being a badass woman is one that I’ve thought about for awhile. I have goals people…GOALS, though most of the time that goal is to get up off the couch (stop blogging Monk-Monk, get out, enjoy life!) and do something really badass, like changing a poopy diaper. These friends that I’m jealous of include:
1) my bestie from college who married a rock-climber and they’ve adopted 2 australian shepards that they’ve found out on the trails (on 2 separate occasions). They travel around on weekends (and he, for work) bouldering and hiking and camping in the back of their truck. She is a badass. She can climb rocks upside down and the muscles on her arms are toned to a ridiculous point. Best part is, in pictures she looks so incredibly happy.
2) my current bestie who recently double-dutched on her wedding day IN HER WEDDING DRESS, because she loves being a part of her jump-rope group so much. She does Hood-to-Coast and her honeymoon wasn’t to the typical tropical places..no, they road-tripped through Banff, Canada.

3) my good friend from school is a Crossfit maniac, when parachuting last summer and is training to be in a Tough Mudder competition (think 12 miles run full of full-blown team obstacle course!). She’s currently on her way to Croatia with her husband to vacation around, which just seems so badas.. not Paris or London, but Croatia (I mean, who has even HEARD of Croatia 😉 ).

A few examples of women in my life that I admire. Like the women in the article, I long to do thrilling adrenaline rushing things. I sometimes feel like I chose such a safe life…marriage to a man, home-owner, middleish class, one dog, one kid, etc. Sometimes I wish I were brave enough to get on a long-board and go 40 mph down a long winding hill.

Then there’s part of me who laughs at my comparisons to my friends. That part of me that remembers moving to India solo and escaping kidnapping by my taxi driver in the middle of the night, the part of me that remembers being Avatar in the Solstice Parade naked bike-ride, or the part of me that remembers calling up a stranger saying, “I was adopted in 1982 and I have reason to believe that you are my father.”

All of those things make me badass.

Changing poopy diapers makes me badass, too…but in a totally different way…right?

Though this drive to be physically badass…through long-boarding or yoga or running in obstacle courses, keeps calling to me…and yet…I still am not quite to getting my goals into practice.

Tell me…in what ways are YOU badass? And how did you get to where you are?

Sibling Rivalry

When strangers ask me how many brothers and sisters I have, I usually have to pause, and think before answering. If it’s just the run-of-the-mill stranger, who I won’t see again and the answer “two” will suffice my conscience, I go with that. If it’s someone I think I might remotely run into again, who might remember my answer of “two,” and then question me about why I am suddenly talking about ‘my little sisters,” or, “my other brother,” I have to answer more truthfully, which is more of a mouthful than a number. There are stories and backstories to my answer, which makes things complicated. On a good day, I have six, though two I almost always claim, since I was raised with them, despite the fact that we share zero DNA, two “halfs” as I refer to them, since that denotes the fact that we do not share the same father, and two “littles,” because thats what they were to me when I met them: 4 and 8…little sisters.

Sibling relationships are complicated.
Adoption makes that even more complicated.

I was in graduate school when I found my sibling’s families. My sister is lucky enough to be born in a state that allows her easy access to her Original Birth Certificate (you know, the one that’s historically true, and lists the vagina she came out of, and not the made up one that she carries identifying her as being my sister by blood). Once she got that certificate in the mail she had a last name and my sleuthing dug up an old Classmates.com account and voila, she was in contact with her mother. And her sister. Or half sister. I’m not sure how she classifies it, now.

My brother wasn’t so lucky as he was born in the same locked-down version of Washington State law that doesn’t allow us access to our own medical and historical documents without having our parent’s consent (though how the fuck we get the consent when we don’t know who these people are is beyond me). We did have first names, though, and the information that they were married, or at least HAD been married at some time. 24 hours of hardcore internet searching, cross-referencing and examining birthdates and address records, led me to his parents. They are married. One older half brother. Two younger full sisters.

The English language doesn’t have words or names for my brother’s sister. No, she’s not my sister-in-law, I told someone one time. She’s my brother’s sister. Or my sister’s sister. Funnier yet is when I talk about my sister’s mother, a lovely woman, who I got to meet one spring day at my parent’s house.

Confused yet? Cause I sure am…

It’s strange enough that I have to always explain that, yes I have 2 moms and 2 dads, no they aren’t step-parents, and no they aren’t gay, either. I have between 2 and 6 siblings, and my siblings have siblings, and I don’t have a name for that, or a name for my sibling’s parents, either.

So I was talking to my sister Poochie this week, and she was telling me her excitement and anxiety about going down to see her family in Oregon. That she was walking Hood to Coast with them, her mother, and grandmother, and aunts and cousin and her sister. And that she was excited because “all the girls” were gonna be in the same van.

But I would not be in that van.

And I felt sad.

Left out.

Not intentionally, or like I even want to be a part of her family in that way, but because she and I weren’t doing something together. That I had to share, and sharing is hard, and I wanted to say mean things like “my son is cuter than your other sister’s son,” but I held my tongue.

Her reunion with her family is what I’ve wanted and advocated and fiercely defended to outsiders and our parent’s alike. Same with my brother, though he is much more private about his encounters wiht a fully functioning biological set of family, though I am often startled when pictures pop up unsolicited online.

I am jealous.

It’s not that I want their other lives, but I sometimes long for it to not be so fucking complicated.
Mostly I just kinda wish I was wearing pink sneakers and walking to the ocean with my sister.

Wild: A Review

My hips and thighs and ankles hurt. Not from hiking 1,100 miles, like Cheryl Strayed does in her memoir, Wild, but from lying still, in bed, for hours on one side, cuddled up to a smallish human being who aches for my nipple to soothe him into slumber. I often feel alone, and resonated deeply with Cheryl’s descriptions of the necessity to do her trip alone, while appreciating and loving the people she meets along the way. Very much an example of the hero’s journey, and while I’ve heard reviews that state it’s over the top, I felt she lived up to her “Queen of the PCT” title given her by her fellow travelers.

I was introduced to the author by women in the processing group I lead. One suggested we check out the advice column “Dear Sugar,” and that she had also written these things that were worth mentioning. My co-leader said she had Wild on her nightstand and was making her way through it. Fascinated with a story about the PCT, a trail that I once fantasized about hiking solo, too, I knew that I had to read her adventure, if for nothing else than to see, perhaps, a glimmer into what my life could have been like, if I had done a different solo trip than the one I actually did.

I think my three day solo adventure to Ohanapecosh, my childhood campground in the Mt. Rainier National Forest, actually prepared me for those 6 months in India. I wonder if the 6 months in India prepared me for the solo adventure of motherhood. And when I say solo, I don’t meant that I’m not mostly-happily partnered up, or that I don’t have a great network of supportive people around me to watch Potamus or go to coffee with, but because the journey to becoming and embodying motherhood is inside me, a trek I’ve only been on for a short-though-feels-like-fucking-ever time. I am on a trail, and I pass beautiful things, and hard things, and I feel like stopping and resting my feet and sleeping for 1,000 hours, but the drive to keep moving forward, the nudge from the foot in my side saying “feed me mama,” is still there. Like Cheryl, I have my own Monster…her pack, my baby. Love sometimes. Loathe others. Feels heavy and full and bears down on my hips making them ache from swaying to relieve the pressure, if only for a moment.

I am tired after reading this book. I feel like I have so many more miles to walk, through snow and rain and sunshine, and while it gives me hope, it shows me just how hard it actually is. She doesn’t sugar-coat the difficulty, from losing toes, and gaining callouses, to the intangible diffulties of overcoming fear and the cocky unprepared pride she had starting out her journey.

I would recommend it to so many of you. She will go on my shelf of spiritual and literary dashboard saints. Maybe I’ll wedge her between Donald Miller and Anne Lamott, or closer to Elizabeth Gilbert and Sherman Alexie. I feel inspired. I feel like I can hobble to bed and not feel guilty for memory foam or a down comforter, but know that my journey is hard and that is okay, because my journey is different, but that maybe I’m doing it for the same reasons or entirely different ones, and that is okay, too. Maybe, when I reach my destination, my own Bridge of the Gods, I will be healed, just like Cheryl.

8 months of personality

Seriously, this kid cracks me up.

Pulling up

Just a few more days, I feel, before I will be chasing him all over the house! Mr. Almost-mobile

It’s getting HOT in here

It’s hot in Seattle.
Really hot.
Like, sweaty while blogging in underoos hot.

While the rest of the country has been willing all summer under terrible heat waves, while the PacNW has sailed through unscathed. Not this week, though. This week Seattleites have gotten their come-uppance. We are melting. Mostly melting because only 6 places have air conditioning in the whole county. And one of those places is the mall.

Heat and babies doesn’t necessarily go well together. Potamus has been cranky, waking up approximately 46 times last night and crying like he was being chased by the boogie man. Not cool at all.

But, its days like these that I being thinking about how a mere 6 years ago I was returning from life in India. Returning from a place where air conditioning was a luxury I didn’t have. Granted, I did have a moody reed swamp cooler, and floors built out of stone to keep the heat down, and rickety ceiling fans, so in some ways the technology beat what I’m working with here in Seattle. But not everyone was so lucky.

It’s so easy to forget and acclimate to the goings on around me. 6 years ago 90 degree heat wouldn’t phase me. I’d get my wool socks wet and sleep with a fan blowing on my feet. I’d get my dupatta wet and pull it up on my nearly-nude body like a soaking shroud. How quickly I forget.

Even in high school, in Eastern WA, I had an affinity toward the heat. My car had no AC and I would sometimes drive with the windows rolled up simply because it was college than having 100 degree heat blowing in on me. Band camp and sports practices outside, and putting pants on when it got below 80.

But I also remember back to my young life, in the North Seattle house, where I wore slips to bed and had a big box fan in the doorway to cool it off. Where my mom got our hair wet and put cool washcloths on our heads to soothe the best-headache.

I know there will be a day, probably in November, where I will be missing the warm sunny days. So I am trying to keep cool and not complain. But with a hot, fussy baby, its hard!

It started as self-care…

As part of my decision to buck up my self-care regimin, I have begun to re-read one of my favorite books: Trauma Stewardship. Reading this in not just a backup justincaseidon’tgetthejobthatireallywant anxiety push, but because it’s good and important to take care of myself ESPECIALLY since I have a young one and still want to work with at-risk youth (even if it means I don’t want to do CRISIS work anymore).

I saw the author, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, in a workshop a few years ago, and found the material to be AMAZING, like aloe vera to a nasty sunburn. So I picked it up, and one of the first things that stood out to me was:

There is a Native American teaching that babies come into the world knowing all that they will need for the rest of their lifetimes-but the challenges of living in our strained, cofnusing world make them forget their innate wisdom. They spend their entire lives trying to remember what they once knew.

This quote stopped me in my tracks. While I had read it before, and even read up and believe in past lives and lives between lives (aka, the soul realm), it really hit me in a different way this time…because of Potamus. He is such a kind and sweet and loving soul. Yesterday I yelled at Boof on the phone, not because I was angry, but because his phone wasn’t working right and he couldn’t hear me. Potamus started crying, like a hurt crying, but like a combination hurt/scared cry and he looked at me like, “what is that noise coming out of your mouth?!”

In a flash I flew back in time to all those conversations my mother would have about my using that tone of voice and how I just couldn’t understand what she meant (or I didn’t want to understand).

But in another instance, today, when trying to get my mother-in-law’s attention in the other room, I yelled again and BAM we had the same crying uncontrollably episode as the day before.

Hmm.

So here he is, sweet Potamus, born with everything he needs to know to navigate the world. All the trust and sweetness and love and innocence. And the world is going to try and take that away from him, and it will be hard and beautiful all the same. But I am learning something…my child is affected by moods…very much so. I’m trying to get ahead of this burnout so that I can learn to deal, in whatever situation I’m in, so that I can calmly, peaceably deal with my baby’s needs.

 

Dog Beds

On the slow days, Potamus takes long, lazy naps in our bed. I have managed to transition him from sleeping in my arms for naps, to lying down-nursing-to-sleep in the comfort of our cool cave-like bedroom. It’s like bed-time, but during the day, and I think he very much enjoys being removed from the hub-bub of toys and dogs and tv and all the goings on that happens out in the living room, and slows down for awhile at naptime. Maybe he’s like his mama in this way, that sometimes I’m not even tired so much as the world is a brightly lit over-stimulating place and I need a retreat from it all, to gather my thoughts and recharge for more play.

With (hopefully!) a new job prospect on the horizons and the knowledge that in a month (whether I get a new job or not) the routine around our den is going to change. Boof may be primary caregiver for awhile until he shores up a job, or Potamus may join a local daycare for a few days a week. Regardless, it means that naps must be done differently, even if it’s a hard transition. My mother-in-law’s petite frame is having a hard time holding him while he sleeps, and he never naps quite as long on her lap, as he does in our bed. Boof can usually manage to get a 90 minute nap out of him, but it’s inconsistent and restless at best. And while I hope we find a fabulous day-care provider, since we can’t afford a nanny, I doubt they’re gonna be able to hold him for naps like he’s used to. So the quest begins, to let my sweet babe learn how to nap on his own.

Some days, like today, where I am on-call and flitting about, Potamus naps in the carseat while we drive, but lately these little bursts of napping have left him cranky and over-tired. I long to give my boy routine, as I notice he thrives off it. The days we get two long lazy naps he is SO happy. Even yesterday, with only one morning 2 hour nap, and a few carseat nod-offs, he managed to make it through a coffee date with a friend and dinner with my mother-in-law, all without throwing any tantrums. I’ve tried laying him down on the couch, side-lying nursing him like at home, but he’s not having it. I’ve tried laying him on the floor, but that hasn’t worked, either. A pack-n-play isn’t big enough for me to cram my 6’1 frame into, and the beds downstairs are too far away to feel comfortable with him sleeping. And I don’t really like cribs.

So my mother-in-law and I were out at Costco, and like every trip, we managed to meander all the aisles (instead of heading straight for the blueberries like she wanted) and ended up parked for a minute in front of these dog beds. Dog beds with two slightly raised sides and soft fluffy lining. Dog beds that were made of memory foam and looked like a great dane could curl up comfortably. We looked at each other, and back at the dog bed, I laughed and said, “are we really considering this?” and we stood there scratching our head for awhile longer.

Well, we managed to leave the store wit a dog bed. We set it up in one of the quiet rooms upstairs and I put him down and nursed him for awhile. He seemed calm, and while I knew he was tired, he hadn’t quite decided he was THAT tired yet. More play. We tried it again. Almost asleep and then wild, smiley, distracted boy. She bounced him on the exercise ball, transferred him to my arms, and now, thirty minutes later, he has gone down for his first nap in his grandparent’s house.

In a dog bed.

I guess, if our dog is allowed to sleep in our bed, our baby can sleep in a dog bed?

Self Soothing

I am always surprised at the genetic component to my relationship with Potamus. It’s sometimes hard to believe that he is the first biological relative I’ve known from the beginning, and I sometimes marvel at how much he is like me, or like Boof, in mannerisms and patterns.

For example, it’s something that I noticed about two weeks ago, but didn’t think much of it until tonight. I was driving to dinner with my mother-in-law, and Potamus was SUPER tired. He had a short car-nap on the way to her place and wasn’t necessarily out of sorts, but definitely needed to get some shut-eye. We’re driving along and she said to me, “what is that noise? is he scratching something?” Without thinking, I answered, “no, he’s self-soothing. he’s rubbing his foot against the car-seat fabric. It’s something he does when he’s tired. It’s something I’ve done since I was a kid, too. Usually my left foot.”

Sure enough, I turned around and there he was, heavy-eyed, mindlessly rubbing that foot back and forth against the car-seat.

She looked at me and said, “huh, isn’t that neat. Genetics sure are amazing.”

And they are. While nurture is also amazing, it’s fun for me to experience parts of Potamus that aren’t consciously mirroring things he sees Boof or I do. Somehow he got the left-foot-rubbing-fabring-to-sleep gene from me.