The Only Constant is that Nothing is Constant
Round and round we go
Greetings,
I remember when my first child was born.
Okay, remember might be a bit strong here. It's hard to actually remember through all the sleepless nights (mine and hers) and the crying (mine and hers) that stand between this day and that one. What I actually remember is a feeling. The feeling that the hard moments are forever.
The unsuccessful attempts at feeding her. The extra day in the hospital under those horrific purple lights. The endless crying when she just refused to sleep, no matter how tired we all knew she was. Those moments were interminable. Even if it was only 36 hours, when we were living them there was no way to look ahead and see respite on the horizon.
Yet, a day or a week or a month later, I would look back at a picture, taken in delirium, of her tan little diapered body, or watch her contented face as she nursed off to sleep, and think, "Man, that sucked. Glad it's not a thing anymore."
When you're in a moment - especially a bad one - it's easy to believe this is the way you'll spend eternity. I've spent enough nights huddled around a toilet bowl (self-inflicted or otherwise) or stifling my urge to yell "JUST GO THE F TO SLEEP!" after the thirty-fourth trip back into the bedroom to rock in the chair and pat the back and sing the song to know this feeling very well. But the funny thing about the human condition is that we get through these moments just the same way we get through the rest of them. On the other side, life either gives back what we're used to or slides us into a new normal - either way, the agony of that one moment often becomes nothing more than a curiosity of conversation.
"Remember when...?" we'll say to our loved ones, and we'll marvel not at the fact that we got through it but that it ever seemed so insurmountable in the first place.
For me, the same thing happens in the other direction. Finding a new normal - instituting a new habit or routine - is nigh impossible. A lot of it is due to the kids: when they begin overtaking the time I set aside to work on my new thing (a thing they do quite unpredictably), rather than finding a new time, I tend to do one of two things. Either I forget the thing altogether, or I try and multi-task, squeezing the thing in during other unscheduled times throughout the day and thus diluting my commitment to the thing.
I say this as - like he did for a very ugly spell a few months ago - my son has woken up and refused to go back to sleep twice today while I was trying to work - once as I was finishing one in a series of posts about our local political commissions for Facebook, and once as I was writing this very newsletter for you. I ended up fitting in the Facebook post during breakfast, but the newsletter can't just be fit in. It needs to be carefully crafted and considered before I'm ready to send it along to you, dear reader. So do I abandon the political education initiative? Forget about the newsletter, shoving it one day back in my already choked to-do list?
Nope. I give the kid Sesame Street and get back to work. If the same thing happens tomorrow, and the next day, I'll deal with that then. Either he will go back to his normal schedule, or Sesame Street will become a part of our daily routine, but either way I'm not going to let myself get carried away worrying about it - there's too much work to do.
Can you relate? Have you ever been stuck in hard times and felt like you'd never get out?
Let me know by hitting reply!
See you next time,
P.S. I'm fresh out of updates. Line editing for The Other Women is complete. The freeloading hen still isn't budging, but she's being much nicer - which is a good sign. No agent news. No new articles. You'd think I've been distracted from my work or something.
P.P.S. I've been thinking about politics quite a bit lately, as you know. As I was thinking back to the societal conundrum Lucinda and her Family is in, it really called to mind a lot of what's going on in our world today. Just some food for thought.