Soaking it in

My daughter, Noodle, said her first word today. She actually said it yesterday, but today she made it clear that it was an actual word and not just babble. Yesterday she made it clear that she can stand without assistance, which means we are on the road to walking, which means we are screwed.

As everyone told me, this babyhood thing is going way too fast. At the same time, it seems as if she was always here, and yet, she just arrived. I want her to stay little forever, even if she makes me so tired I want to slit my own throat. I’m terrified of her growing up, the same way I am with my son. I live in fear of people teasing them and hurting them, and I want to freeze them in time.

I know, I know. You’ve heard it a million times. I am trying to soak all the babyhood in, because I am pretty sure she will be my only baby (never say never, but Husband would kill me, not to mention that I might die of exhaustion). I adopted my son Tibs when he was three, so I never saw his baby days. I look at his sister and wonder what he was like as a baby, and it breaks my heart that I will never know.

So today, in an effort to get Noodle to sleep and get the dog some exercise, we went for a walk. And I tried to take everything in. If you know me at all, you know that I am not the ‘stop and smell the flowers’ type. I am more of the ‘yeah, yeah, I smelled that flower, now let’s get going’ type. But our neighborhood is in bloom, and everything looked lovely. I stopped at a lilac bush with a bud right at nose level and breathed it in. I stopped to watch a man sowing the field at the farm around the corner. And I stopped numerous times to gaze jealously at people’s dogwood trees and to rue the fact that our lawn is too small for one.

And Noodle fell asleep and the dog got his walk. And I got a minute to think about how I need to slow it down and take it all in. Tibs is six already and he’s 47 feet tall and all legs and arms. Noodle is almost a year old, and she’s talking, for God’s sake. Soon, I am going to be those middle-aged mothers with kids in college who talks about how it all goes by so fast. The most I can do is try to pay attention as we go.

I used to be a writer

I used to be a writer. Don’t get excited. I was no Hemingway or Shakespeare or even Stephen King. But I wrote for a living (albeit a meager one), and I liked it. I even wrote for fun, about interesting places and experiences, and I liked that too.

And then I adopted a little boy, and the time and energy I had to write diminished. And then the economy went south, and my employers diminished as well. And then I had a baby, and I stopped writing altogether. No more stories for magazines, no more blogs, not even any more emails.

It’s been more than a year since I published anything, and now when people ask me (out of interest or to make conversation) if I have been writing, I cringe when I have to say no. Partly because I feel I should be a Productive Member of Society instead of a Stay-at-Home Mom, but mostly because writing was something I loved, and I miss it.

I have all kinds of excuses: my baby is always on the move, and my son is a dervish of energy. I have no money for day care, and I have no time to write because I have to make sure my daughter isn’t climbing the stairs or licking power strips. When she is sleeping, my son is usually home, and he wants me to play baseball with him or watch him play baseball or ride his bike or run around. There are doctor’s appointments and vet’s appointments and things to buy at the supermarket and books to return to the library, and sometimes, naps with the baby because I am so tired I think I am going to just drop dead.

I still don’t have any time to freelance. In that case, it turns out that since I am too poor for day care, I am too poor to write professionally. Who knew? But I am going to try to start a little blog about my little life so that I can do a little writing so that my brain and my heart don’t wither and die. It won’t be exciting, and the posts may not be frequent. But here it is.