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The last two weeks I've felt like every step I took I was dragging the corpse of a donkey behind me. But that didn't stop me from Doing What I'm Supposed To Be Doing With All My Free Time. I did yoga, I walked on the treadmill, I took Coco out for some much-needed training walks on the leash. I read books, I took baths, I sent off my enrollment form for the translation gig. I hounded my recommenders to send in their letters, I cooked, I cleaned, I ran errands (with and without Coco), and at three p.m. sharp I picked up Paula from school.
But no matter what I did, I couldn't shake the profound fatigue, the achy muscles and bones, the extreme heaviness I felt. Finally last Friday I gave in and spent the morning in bed. By Sunday I was feeling even worse - where is the logic?
Yesterday morning Paula woke me up exactly 12 hours before I was due to pick her up from school. I tried soothing her, giving her a third bottle of milk (that's not counting the one she drank to go to sleep), letting her rub my tummy, playing dead, taking her to the bathroom. Nothing I tried got her back to sleep.
Around 4:30 I decided to take more of an instructive approach. I briskly informed my daughter that out of respect for her parents she was not allowed to crawl all over the bed, talking, signing, and hugging my neck with a death grip in the middle of the night. If she did not wish to sleep, the decent thing would be to go play in her room. I enclosed her in said room and went back to my bed.
I had a hard time sleeping over the crying, but damn it I made a very solid effort. Joel brought Paula back into the room at some point, which she took to mean that it was once again okay to crawl all over the bed, talking, signing, and hugging my neck with a death grip. I returned her to her room, explaining that she could sleep, play or do whatever she wanted, but Mommy is going to sleep now. Mind you our regular wake-up time of 6:00 was fast approaching. Still, I buried myself in the covers and squeezed my eyes shut.
Finally, the alarm went off at 5:45. I got up, retrieved the still-crying child, and started getting her ready for school. The next 90 minutes were like some kind of epic battle between the forces of good and the forces of screaming. Let's just say Paula was feeling a little disagreeable, and Joel and I were functioning great on 2-4 hours of sleep.
After Joel and Paula left for school and work, I started feeling that awful, queasy heaviness again.* My shoulders and back had been hurting over the weekend, and in a moment of PMS and self-pity, I started crying into my pajama sleeve, wishing it were "easier." That's about the time I felt a pain in my chest.
The best thing for a solitary morning with PMS, self-pity and chest pain is a hot bath, right? So I ran the tub full of hot water with suds from my grapefruit shampoo. I had a lovely time in the bath, but I was still feeling cruddy when I got out. I decided it was time to call a doctor - after all, I'd been feeling like crap for two weeks, and now I had chest pain. Look it up on Google: chest pain, fatigue, nausea, shoulder and back pain can mean a heart problem. Or they can just mean you feel like me on a sub-par day.
My doctor said to be seen today. I sighed. It was nothing, and I knew it. I knew if I went to my GP he'd listen to my heart and say, "You don't have any risk factors for heart problems, but if you're really worried about it we can order some tests. But you'd have to change the IPA on your insurance and come back next month to get your referral."
I called my friend Jacqueline for advice. Her sister has heart problems, so of course she said I had to go check it out.
So I went to Emergency: the slightly faster way to find out you're fine. Long and short, I spend a number of hours getting poked, x-rayed and hmm-ed over, before being told that, surprise surprise: there's nothing wrong with my heart.
But as I reclined on the hard hospital mattress and held Joel's hand, I realized the doctors, tests and x-rays were wrong. There is something wrong with my heart. It's just not a medical problem.
I miss Paula. She goes off to school every day and I'm supposed to be jumping into this new, exciting phase of life where I get to develop myself professionally, artistically, financially, intellectually and aerobically. We're both turning over new leaves! It's thrilling.
Truth is, I really miss her. I miss how her arms feel around my neck, how her legs wrap around my waist when I carry her on my back. I miss her calling everything silly, and getting so excited about dogs. I miss her hands on my face. I miss that smile that immediately improves my mood by a factor of 10. I miss her playing with Play-Dough while I watch TV. I miss being the one who witnesses every new word, every new sign, every new consonant.
But I know it's time to leave behind that intensity of closeness with her. Not that I'll stop loving her or being her mom, but the time for us to be an inseparable dyad is over. It's time for the role of Mommy to shrink somewhat in proportion to the other parts of my life.
So today my search begins for new models, new archetypes, new ways of imagining who and what I am in this phase of my life. From early adulthood I had imagined what kind of mother I might be, but now it's time to bring into focus the larger person that the mother fits into.
* No, Mom, I'm not pregnant. I checked.
Paula had a great week at school last week. She loves her teachers, Ms. Boysen and aide, Ms. Yeoman. They sent home a newsletter with photos of each student, and Paula showed us everyone's sign names. From the look on her face, I would say she really loves those kids in her class. Too cute.
Tonight is a meet-and-greet for the parents of new students. I'm looking forward to meeting other parents, and hoping I'll find out why neither of the other hard-of-hearing students in the class wears hearing aids. It's none of my business, I'm just nosy. Or in a more positive light, call it writer-y.
Only yesterday morning did Paula seem to express some hesitation to go off to school in the morning. I gave her a hug and waved good-bye as she and Daddy walked down the path to the garage. Paula took a few of her little steps, then paused and looked back at me.
"Do you want another hug?" I asked her. She spread out her arms. I squeezed her to me, then turned her and shooed her off. "Go ahead!"
She walked to the garage door, then turned back to look at me again. "I love you, honey," I said. "I'll see you this afternoon." Then Joel picked her up and took her to the car. It happened more or less the same this morning.
I can't tell if that twinge I feel is sadness at her leaving, or if loving her so much just hurts sometimes.
My parents, my little brother and I used to live in this little town called Livingston, on Guatemala's north coast. It's on a peninsula surrounded by water on three sides, and jungle on the fourth.
I was walking Coco this morning - yes we still have her - and got to thinking about Guatemala. I came home and started searching for information on Livingston. I was hoping to find out if the town had been affected by Hurricane Stan last October. Remember the awful news of mudslides destroying whole villages in Guatemala?
I still haven't found out what happened to Livingston during Stan, but I did find all kinds of stuff to take me back down memory lane. Here, for example, is a hand-drawn map of Livingston - I don't think any other kind exists.
Down the road from that house, you can see on the map is a little place called La Casa Rosada, a hotel that has its own dock. I must mention that this name always makes Joel snigger because in his family "rosada" means not "pink," as in The Pink House Hotel, but "skin rash." Anyway, the proprietor of the Casa Rosada was a silver-haired North American lady who had absorbed few of the courteous and slow-paced local ways. But she was kind enough to pass on her copy of Time Magazine every week, once she had finished with it. We got Newsweek from Carolyn, a local Peace Corps volunteer.
When I wasn't working at the Tucan Dugu, my mom and I sometimes went there for what we called Country Club Therapy. It consisted of two sparkling lemonades (known locally as limonada con soda, made with lime juice, soda water and sugar syrup) and conversation about Things Outside Livingston. These were usually things we had learned from Time and Newsweek. Here's a sample:
As I mentioned, we are going camping this weekend with my brother-in-law Jaime, his wife Graciela, their teenaged kids Maricela and Jaime Jr, and Joel's parents.
I asked Joel a few weeks ago what it was like camping with his family, and he answered that he didn't know, because the last time he did it he was three.
So I have tried to make some cheery predictions: lots of Beatles sing-alongs around the campfire, because Joel and Jaime both play guitar and know either how to play or how to sing every Beatles song ever written. Okay, that's been my only real prediction. Cheery, but hardly comprehensive.
Last night Jaime called to go over a few things about the trip. He's bringing all his cooking stuff, so we don't have to, which is great. They like to buy food at stores closer to the campground instead of shlepping ice and whatever all the way there. Cool. He mentioned in a perky voice that, "There are showers there, so you can bathe if you want to."
"Okay," I replied, wondering how to say what I wanted to say. "Um, I don't usually bathe when I go camping."
Silence.
"I just try to let all that fresh air blow the stink off!" Heh, heh.
He recovered. "That's cool, whatever! Yeah, just in case you wanted to, you know, they're there."
We moved on.
Then this morning as I was packing I began to worry about having to wear a bra while camping. I don't generally wear a bra while camping, either. But I have this weird feeling that my mother-in-law will be wearing a girdle, so probably it would not be cool for me to be swinging freely. I don't think this will be a good time for my usual we're-in-nature-so-let-it-all-hang-out attitude.
I called my mother-in-law to talk about when we will collect her and my father-in-law for the ride up.
"Be sure to take some chanklas with you to wear in the shower, mija," she admonished me. "You never know if the floor is clean or not."
Right. Okay, this time I just said it. "I don't bathe when I go camping. I just wait until I get home and bathe then."
My mother-in-law is an accommodating person. She began to look for the sense in what I was saying. "Oh, well, maybe I won't either if it's cold," she said. "You could get sick that way if you caught a chill. In that case it's better not to bathe. Definitely."
"But you have to take a change of clothes," she continued. "Especially if you're not going to bathe!"
I decided not to mention that usually, on camping trips, I wear the same jeans the whole time. Instead I quipped one of my mother's favorites, "Well, if you're not going to use our soap, at least use our perfume!" She laughed.
See, when I was a kid growing up in Western Colorado and went camping with my family, we often as not backpacked to our campsite. Or if we drove, it was over deeply rutted jeep roads so far into the mountains that we rarely saw any other humans until Sunday when we arrived home reeking of sweat and woodsmoke and checked each other for ticks before bathing.
I love that smell of sweat and woodsmoke. I loved being far from anyone else, in beautiful, wild places where my usually tense and dysfunctional family could relax under the spreading sky and enjoy each other. That's where I learned how to build a fire, where I found out what freeze-dried lasagna tastes like, where I saw marmots and elk, and slept under big black skies filthy with stars.
My dad kept all our camping equipment in a big box, so all he had to do to get ready (this is what I recall, anyway) was get that box and a big plastic barrel of water labeled "Not dinking water" into the car. It really said "dinking." I'm sure there was more to it than that, but it seems so different from when Joel and I go camping. We take along enough equipment to permanently disable an elephant.
First there's our tent, which I believe is supposed to accommodate 10-15 people - but I can tell you it sleeps three mighty comfortably. Then there's the air mattress, the sheets and blankets, pillows, foam pad for Paula to sleep on; there are toys, books, bottles, diapers, milk; our cloth folding chairs with cup holders, our little Weber grill, charcoal, lighter fluid, lighter, kindling, coolers, ice, eggs, fruit, potatoes, onions, corn, canned beans, canned soup, chocolate bars, marshmallows, graham crackers, hot dogs, bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon ... Sorry, I got carried away there. We do love us some bacon when we go camping.
I guess the main thing is that we're a long way from Western Colorado. When you camp in Illinois, you do so within thirty feet of your nearest neighbor. You drive in to the campsite you have reserved, set up your tent, build your fire, set up your propane cook stove, open up the coolers, put up your feet and enjoy. If you get bored after hiking the paved trails, you can go on a hay ride, visit a historic mill where people wear 18th Century period costumes and grind corn all day, or drive ten minutes down the road to a nearby waterpark. As my brother-in-law assured me, there's something for everyone. Everyone who wants to be surrounded by people, with a touch of nature sprinkled in for flavor.
Illinois just can't compare to the grandeur of the Rockies. While I love the oaks and white pines of my new home state, they will never hold a candle to the breathtaking vistas I grew up with. However, I do look forward to the Beatles sing-alongs by the campfire at night. Maybe then I will smell the woodsmoke, look up at the stars and imagine I'm back home in Colorado.
My mom warned me that after a few days of going to school, Paula might want things to go back to the way they had been before. She might wake up and say, "That was cool for a few days, but now I want to stay home with Mama."
I was ready for that to happen.
But in point of fact, she woke up, on this her fifth day at pre-school, and after cuddling up with a bottle of milk and a still-sleeping Joel, turned to me and clapped her hands together, eyebrows raised high with anticipation, "School? School?"
"Yup," I told her, "Today you're going to school!" Then I had to explain to her about the days of the week, show her the seven labeled hooks on the wall of her room, and prepare her for the two (I didn't mention the holiday) days of Weekend. For there will be no school then.
Fortunately this weekend we're going camping with Joel's parents, brother and family, so I'm sure Paula will have more than enough to divert her from the tragedy of not getting to go to school.
On Monday when I picked her up at noon, I asked her, "Are you ready to go home?"
"Uh-uh," she shook her head decisively.
On Tuesday when I picked her up at three, she stuck her head into the gym where the older deaf kids were lining up for the after school program, and said, "Bye-bye, Mama."
On Wednesday she stayed dry all day, and even came home willingly.
Yesterday her class was delayed in coming out to their cubby holes, so I went into the classroom. The oldest of the kids, a four-year-old boy in a blue jacket, was standing tall and dutiful where the teachers had told him to line up by the door. The other boy, a diminutive cutie in a yellow coat, repeatedly stepped into line, then wandered away. One of the twin girls was jumping, playing and talking to herself as the teacher told her again and again to line up. The other twin was crying inconsolably (this seems pretty common for her) about something, and the aide tried in vain to comfort her and get her to stay in line. I think the phrase "herding cats" pretty much sums it up.
And on the other side of the room, mushed down deep into a blue bean bag, my little girl sat engrossed in a book. The teacher got her attention, indicated that I had arrived, and Paula looked up with a huge smile on her face. She came over and gave me a big hug.
So far, so good.
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