pause, play

We're 80% of our way to surviving my first week back to work. Turns out, if you do nothing for 8 weeks, you fall behind. But I'm not one to get stressed about work. Like, AT ALL. Sometimes I fake it just because I'm supposed to be stressed, right? To show that I'm busy and motivated? But inside, I'm not. Don't tell.


This was all Calum's idea.

I'm feeling pretty much the same way with parenting these days. It's nice, the whole feeling-calm thing. I know things will get easier with this routine in time. We'll work out the schedules. We'll put one foot in front of the other and find our cadence. I also know things will get harder. We'll get sick. Snow days and random school closures will throw wrenches in our very carefully, very precisely laid plans.

We'll deal.

I'm officially done with stressing. I could credit experience, but I think I've simply run out of energy for stress. Either that or all my nerve endings have died. Toss up.

And as if to counter everything I just said, I cried once (or twice) on the way home from work this week. But not stressful, fretful crying. More exhausted, resigned sort of crying. This schedule is tough. It's non-stop and unmerciful.The momentum must be maintained. Socks, shoes, coats, out the door. Never stop, never pause, or we'll all miss the next step and the dominoes will topple.

Yet there's nothing special about this week, and that's where the resignation comes. I've never much liked the whole discussion of work/home "balance," as if an ideal exists, as if we can achieve it if we could only steady ourselves better. There are only choices and there are consequences. This is our life. These are the choices we've made; these are the consequences.

On maternity leave, I was acutely aware of simply being with Abram. I soaked him up like the sun through the windows in February. I breathed him in, I smelled him and watched him sleep and rocked him until my shoulders ached.

I absorbed the comforts of home, of open days with only meals, errands, naps, chores to fill the time. People would call and ask, "Are you stir crazy yet?" And I was not, not in the least. I had no desire to get out. No drive to fill the time. If I could have slowed down even more, I would have. It was a pause that made me hunger for less. For less distractions, less commitments, less demands and fantasy ideals. Just time. That is all.

I dropped Abram off at the babysitter's for the first time on Monday morning. I didn't cry. Not then. But he looks SO like Emmett. I keep calling him by his brother's name automatically, like my brain can't stop going to baby Emmett. After leaving Abram (and Willa) at the babysitter's, the next stop was dropping Emmett at preschool. From the window, he waves and waves. He stands there until I've pulled around the corner, after I can no longer see him. And I have a flash of Abram. In a mere flash, I see my baby boy, waving happily, grown tall, wearing his football jersey tucked in to his pants and socks in his signature way.

Folks say it ad naseum, "They grow so fast!" We all hear it and sometimes-- many times-- it's aggravating. When you're stuck mid-morning in a slow motion day of tantrums and dirty bums, it's not exactly helpful.

If nothing else, returning to this life-- this impossibly fast, impossibly demanding routine of working with four children-- brings me closer to that realization.

They do. It does. So fast, indeed.