Having Number Two: A Clear Yes or No

Up until recently, I’d pretty much convinced myself that I was going to be okay with just one kid. I cringed when I imagined how hard it’d be to take care of a newborn and a toddler at the same time. I cringed when I imagined how I’d go back to having hardly any time to myself, even less so than the first time around, and how I’d have to put all my teaching and writing projects back on hold. My husband was pretty much in the same boat.

With one, we could gain back our freedom to travel sooner—whether on weekend trips with just the two of us, or family trips that involved more distant locales (even China, I fantacized, for several months… we could rent out our house, take up in some quaint town (or tolerable city), immerse the whole family in Chinese).

Then there was also the question of money and space. With just one child, we would not be pressed to add on to our one bedroom cabin as quickly; we would not be forced to take out a loan before we felt like it was a smart financial decision. Hell, if other factors outweighed a desire for more space, we could even put off remodeling indefinitely. It’s been working out just fine the last couple months with our bed in the living room. Plenty of families all over the world wouldn’t blink an eye at raising a family in 850 square feet.

It wasn’t that I’d made up my mind or anything; I knew that there was a distinct possibility that I could feel totally differently in a year. But when I’d see moms with a baby and toddler and feel a wash of relief that I wasn’t them as opposed to envy, I thought that was a pretty good indicator that I was happy with what we have. Cedar is an awesome kid. But he wasn’t an easy baby with all his food sensitivities and sleeping challenges. He’s bright, active, and will keep delighting and challenging us for years to come. He’ll have plenty of playmates; I don’t think he’ll be lonely. And meanwhile, Matthew and I continue to reclaim vestiges of our former adult life back.

One of the major elements that we’ve recently started to reclaim is sleep. Cedar is finally sleeping through the night, pretty much every night, in his own bed. That doesn’t mean he always gets enough sleep, seeing that he wakes up around 5 a.m. But we no longer have to spend half our night listening for his waking whines, then rushing in to put him back down before he fully wakes. He no longer depends on nursing to fall asleep, and he knows he won’t get any milk from me now until 5 a.m. (which I’d like to try and change to even later; that’s the next goal).

In addition to all this, he just recently started going to sleep without anyone staying in the room with him until he drifts off. This feels huge! We do our usual stories, I leave, then him and Matthew say night-night to various animals, objects, and people, and then they turn on the noise machine, say a final night-night, and Matthew walks out and closes the door. Brilliant. This whole shift happened quite effortlessly one night after Matthew had enough of Cedar squirming about, climbing on top of him, and keeping himself up by distraction. Matthew decided to say goodnight and leave that night—and Cedar let him without a cry of protest. So that was it. Matthew then did the same thing the next few nights, staying in the room for an even shorter amount of time, and Cedar hasn’t protested at all. The most he’s done is get up and crack the door open, listening, then shut it and go back to lie down. I wish I could see what he looks like as he lies there going to sleep on his own and know how long it takes him, mostly to bask in the pleasure of my little guy getting to be so independent and taking so many changes in stride. But I don’t need to see him to know how good it feels to have an entire evening now where me and my husband can both relax, off duty for hours, by ourselves.

So needless to say we’re pretty happy about all this, and it’s probably no coincidence that now that we’ve FINALLY gotten over this poor sleeping hump, I’m lo and behold a bit more open to the idea of having another. It’s totally ironic, yes, that the minute I start sleeping better I’d begin considering being thrown back into total sleep deprivation and chaos. And on top of this, I’m thinking about weaning soon—almost looking forward to it as much as I’m dreading it—and I don’t exactly want to go straight from weaning to nursing again. I’m banking on having at least a good few months, if not more like a year, to remember what it feels like to not be producing milk as a primary occupation.

Here’s the thing. If I wasn’t 37 and a half years old, I wouldn’t be in a hurry. I’d say, let’s wait until Cedar is at least four or five, out of the toddler stage, before we even go there. Let’s give ourselves a few years off from this early intensive stage of parenting. Let’s get our finances together and remodel first, and let’s not kid ourselves about how long that process might take in itself. Let me also get my teaching life that much more established, not to mention self-publish that dusty manuscript of memoirs that I’ve been saying I’m going to publish for so long. Let me achieve some major goals that make me feel good and satisfied as a writer, before I dive back into the intense beauty and torture that is mothering a newborn. In other words: let’s take our time and think about it.

But the reality is, I don’t have a ton of time. After you hit 35, it becomes significantly harder to get pregnant each year that passes—the curve sharpens dramatically. I know people over 40 who are trying to get pregnant now, and who are mourning their belated realization of just how much difference a year makes at this stage. I know that if I were to decide that I did indeed want another one, I should just bite the bullet and do it NOW, or in the next year at least, because wouldn’t that suck to finally decide you wanted one and then to not be able to get pregnant?

Other people my age seem to know this too, because there’s been an explosion of births in my world this spring. I know of seven or eight women in my son’s preschool co-op class alone who just gave birth to their second or are due in the coming months. Then there are my friends on Facebook; the three babies born recently on my block; two of my oldest, dearest friends; and, finally, my sister who gave birth just last Friday.

Seeing people get pregnant and hold their new amazing babies doesn’t have anything to do with my new (old, revitalized) line of thought, does it? Nah…. Of course having lots of pregnant women and babies around me is tugging at my tender heart strings that holds this process up as one of the most amazing gifts in life of all; of course it is. But I also want to make sure that I’m not just caving to some kind of socially accepted norm and unspoken peer pressure—the kind that carves into our psyche from the time we are young that families are supposed to consist of two parents and two or three kids; and that it’s the most natural wonderful thing in the world to want more than one.

I told my husband the other day, the same day we went to meet my sister’s new baby, that I wanted to talk to him about the possibility of having another. He immediately got defensive and antagonistic, forcing me to play devil’s advocate and act as if I indeed knew I wanted another one, when what I really wanted to do was just explore and hash out the idea verbally, see how it sounded saying it aloud, return to the part of me that had always imagined I’d like to have two, a pair of playmates, a pair to grow old with, share holidays with, share affections with, preferably a daughter and a son, the so-called “perfect” family.

I also told my husband the story of some friends of ours, a couple who was trying to decide if they wanted to have another. After much soul-searching they finally decided that no, they did not, they were fine, they were done. And then the minute they decided this and made it real, they realized that they did indeed still want another. It’s that element of regret at play. Wanting what you could have had, but didn’t choose.

The thing is, how many parents ever regret having a child, whether that child is number one or number five? It seems like once you have a child, once they are real and breathing and in your life, there are few who would ever, on a deep soul level, regret having that child. The thought would be unspeakable, for that baby was here and thus meant to be. It might have made your life insufferably hard for many years, but in the end, it was worth it right? You wouldn’t have had it any other way? Or is it simply such an unspeakable taboo that we never hear from the parents who do?

That’s how it seems to work. Once they are here, you can’t imagine them never having been here. But what if you wanted a child, but never had one? Or never had the second one? It seems like the possibility to regret is much greater. I am almost 40, but I still have many years ahead of me to nurture students and to write and publish books. I am almost 40, but I don’t have many years ahead to have more children. This, my dear husband, is why I’m now starting to talk to you about this. This, because it does feel like now or never time. This, because even though we are both still on the fence, we love each other deeply, and if we do want this, we can make it happen. This because it will always be scary to contemplate something so huge as to choose to bring another life into the world and your life. But it will not always be possible to do so.

This is what I don’t want: I don’t want to passively choose to not have another one (by letting time slip away) because of money or space issues. Those are the things that we can figure out, make work. And nor do I want to passively choose to have one (how could you, really?) because of a fear that I would regret it if not. If we have another one, I want it to be because we are so fucking excited by the possibility of being able to experience the miraculous process of coming to know a new being so intimately related to the both of us, and yet so ultimately unknown and mystical, and to know all the joy and riches that such a darling spirit could bring into our lives. That leap of faith.

Yes, there’s always the chance that she/he could have a birth defect, or be a terribly difficult bad seed. (I have yet to see, Dear Kevin, but it’s on our queue). But chances are, they wouldn’t. And even if so, then they’d be meant to be ours to love and grow with anyway. I know of no other “path” than parenthood that rocks your world so tremendously, and that if you choose to accept and let it, will transform you in brilliant ways in the making. Despite all the sleep deprivation, time alone deprivation, and undeniable challenge and hardship.

What I want is to take a poll of all the new moms of two out there and to ask you: tell me the truth, how hard is it? How much sleep do you get, how much time do you get to yourself and with your husband? How much harder is it to balance the whole work-family continuum with two than one? Do you ever get pangs of regret?  I want to hear from the new parents, not the seasoned ones who have made it past the hardest years and are now coasting in the land of “kids are in school during the day” and “couldn’t imagine it any other way”. I want to hear from the newbies because if we do choose to go this route, I want to know what I’m in for. I don’t want to fool myself into thinking I might be that much wiser at hiring help or carving out more time for myself this time around that I’d avoid all the depressing, suffocating pitfalls of new-immersion-motherhood.

I’ve already heard sentiments from moms of two young ones about how it now feels like a “break” when you “just” have the baby to watch, and not both kids. My selective memory is remembering the days of long stroller walks where you could have long continuous conversations with other new moms and get exercise at the same time while watching the baby, and thinking, that wasn’t so bad… But then simultaneously wondering if this kind of activity would be the closest thing to a regular “break” that I’d get in a long time. And, of course, my problem is that I don’t just want your typical mom “breaks” to go work out, go to the spa, or to read on the couch—I want those too, yes, on occasion, but mostly I want time to write and do my work (writing and teaching)-- work that doesn’t pay much if any money.

So my conundrum has always been how to afford a babysitter to do my work that doesn’t pay for a sitter, and still have time left over for yoga or walks or necessary mental health breaks. In short, if I decide to have another, am I deluding myself if I think that I’ll somehow manage to have time for all of these? I can handle a sacrificial period without for maybe six months or so. But after that, I want back to it. I want to write, I want to teach, I want to work. This calling is like another child of mine, one I must take seriously. I don’t want to return to that deep motherhood cocoon quite so wholeheartedly as I did the first time. I want that elusive work-life balance.

My husband (and my selective memory) would do well to keep reminding me about how miserable I’ve been at times during the last couple years, and how it is only just in the last six months or so that I’ve had the energy, resolve, and time to teach again, in addition to everything else. Nobody needs to remind me of the joy of motherhood though. That reminder is breathing and singing and screaming with me every day.

Anyway. I know that after hashing it all out, by myself and with my husband, I know that in the end it won’t be a rational decision. It will either be a clear (but slightly fearful) yes or a clear (but slightly wistful) no resonating from within my heart.  

Dear Heart Radical: A Free Write

Dear Heart Radical,

You were an idea before you were the title of my manuscript. Book. Collection of Memoirs. Essays. Memoir singular. What to call you?

Does it even matter? Not if I don’t care anymore about “marketability”. I think, truly, you are essays. Searching for the Heart Radical: A Collection of Essays. Or Linked Essays by Anne Liu Kellor.

And what about the old subtitle: “A Journey Between East and West.” Scrap that? 

This is all not important. What matters is to love you again. It’s been so long that all I’ve done is loathe you, fear you, dread you, avoid you. I want to love you again. I want to appreciate all the love and sweat and experience poured into your pages. I want to share you, because sharing you is, too, a part of the writing process. Birthing process.

What is the Heart Radical? It is inner fierceness, not necessarily visible to the eye. It is an inner compass that helps the thinking, doubting part of me make choices that are aligned with the deepest, wisest, most transparent part of me. It is instinct that is allowed to function freely when all mechanisms of self-preservation have failed.

And the Heart Radical is also me, finding my voice. It is contradiction and complexity, demanding to exist and not be easily simplified or packaged for digestion’s sake. The Heart Radical is me, striving for authenticity, striving to walk the path I’m meant to walk, striving to do what my heart calls out to do, even when certain choices may not seem practical.

Because I am a writer, the Heart Radical is also about writing, about me staying true to my need to write, but I do not write about this in the manuscript. In the book, the Heart Radical is mostly about wandering. About revisiting my past through stories and travels. About seeking my roots, both geographical and familial. About risking exposure to find love, or at very least, connection with others. About risking vulnerability, for the chance to be seen and known. About learning to be okay being alone, as well as alongside another.

The Heart Radical is also about articulation, subtleties, and layers of truths. It is about learning to feel comfortable in who I am and what I believe, and learning to be okay with all my shortcomings, weaknesses and mistakes.

The Heart Radical is all of these things, and so much more. I love it as a title, as something to search for, because the Heart Radical is never stagnant and unchanging. Each passing day, year, season of my life, the shade and tenor of the Heart Radical is slightly different. Yesterday’s burning need in my heart is different than today’s subtle yearning. Yesterday’s longing for a lineage that could encompass my spiritual beliefs, is today’s longing for time, simply time, to remember what all those pressing questions were about.

Before I had a child, I used to have so much time—to wander, to ponder, to long and cry and feel lonely. Now I have so little time, and I do not feel lonely; I simply want more time for myself to even remember all those private heights and depths, all that scaffolding, elaborate cathedrals erected around my heart.

These pages are filled with stories and images of other people and places—in China, in Tibet, in L.A. But they are mostly filled with ideas and visions of myself. The book, the journey, is primarily an interior one, even if you are most interested in the parts where I take you to a sky burial or through the streets of Chengdu. I am only partially joking when people ask me what the book is about, and I say, “Me.” That sounds kind of arrogant, so I try to avoid that answer, but still I resort to it in moments of uncomfortableness when I don’t feel like exposing myself. It is also a lie if I say that the book is about “my time in China,” which makes it sound like a travelogue, and does not account for the pieces that are rooted in the States. It's about going back and forth, being in between. And if I say, it is about “exploring my cultural identity, spirituality, and relationships,” well that too is vague and non-revealing.

Anyway, that is all for now, I have to go finish my chores before I pick up my child from next door.

This free-write is just a beginning. A way for me to remember, to trick or cajole myself into falling again for my old lover, for these old stories, essays, occasional misplaced prose poem-- whatever they are, this collection of mine.

And why? Because it’s now or never time. I’m feeling this. It’s put it out there, find closure to this cycle, this part of this journey that is tied to this particular cycle of words, and move on. Because sharing the words is a part of the process for me. For even though they were originally written for me, they are ultimately not for me. To me, now, they are worthless in this form. They fester, they evoke a certain loathing. I need to let them go, set them free, release. Holding on to them any longer feels like a form of selfishness, selfishness born of fear. (What if no one likes them? No one buys them? What if I can’t stand to even read them aloud they feel so old? What if they don’t do justice to what my writing and thought process is like now?) Fears. I hold these pages to high standards. Perhaps you will too. Perhaps you will love them (love me!), perhaps you will judge them (judge me!). Do you see how it’s all tied up in my ego and mind?

That’s why to publish them—and self-publish, because I can’t wait any longer-- is the final act in this particular Search for the Heart Radical. That’s why I must. Okay, so I’ve convinced myself. Now, I just need to do it.

A Woman, Writing, Alone

This is the third time I’ve gotten away to write in a café in the ten weeks since Cedar was born. I plan to do this every weekend now—to take advantage of my three hours or so agreed upon by my husband when I can escape the house and the needs of my baby. To steal away quietly after Cedar’s been nursed and before he has a chance to decide again that he’s hungry or tired and wanting the comfort of his mother’s voice, body, and last but not least, breast. And I realize now how much I need this time; it’s more important to me than I can probably yet understand.

During the first month, recovering from surgery and learning to be a mother was all so new and overwhelming that I barely had time to shower, much less think about writing—though I did manage to scribble a few short entries in my journal, which were usually interrupted mid-sentence. And during the second month, I was just learning how to take care of Cedar alone after Matthew went back to work, so a lack of “me” time seemed a given. But now, I’ve become comfortable and confident enough in my role as a mother, and Cedar and I have settled into enough of a routine for me to begin to miss and crave my old rituals, and to notice how their departure has begun to take its toll.

I miss writing. I need these few hours to decompress, sit, journal and be out in the world appearing in the disguise of my former identity: a woman, alone, writing. Only now, beneath this cover, my breasts are full and heavy with milk, my shoulders and neck sore from nursing, and my body tight from too many days gone by without yoga or exercise. And now, a part of me too always has one ear cocked towards my baby; at the same time that I begin to unwind into this silence of solitude, I also can’t wait to go home and to hear how it went for those few hours we were apart.

These days, my time to do anything besides care for my baby is relegated to short windows and bursts. Cedar’s content for a few minutes in his chair? Quick: make breakfast, get dressed, or make a phone call. Cedar’s finally soundly asleep somewhere besides my arms? Quick: throw in a load of laundry, take a shower, or pay a few bills. Take your pick of a million small tasks that normally could get done in quick succession in a few hours. But now, crossing these things off my list can take weeks. However insignificant in themselves they may seem, I cross them off one by one with satisfaction.

Multi-tasking with an infant is not easy, and I feel better about my day if I’ve managed to do something else besides care for my baby. Most satisfying of course is when I actually manage to write something, spewing out bits and pieces of my new life as a mother. Fragments, that I may or may not find the interest or motivation to return to when I finally arrive at my next opportunity when I can become again: a woman, writing, alone.

I don’t want to complain too much lest it seem like I’m unhappy, because for the most part we are doing really good; in fact, things have been easier than I anticipated. Cedar is a sweet and mellow baby, and I have been proud of my ability to parent alone when Matthew is on the road four days each week for work, proud of the way that I manage to care for my baby and myself, trying to get out of the house and do something each day, be it taking a walk to the pond or going to parenting groups and reaching out to other moms. For the most part, I do what I need to do to stay healthy, happy, and sane.

But, of course, I still have my down days. Days when Cedar resists napping, and I am exhausted, and end up watching too much trash t.v. or never getting out of the house. Or days when I already feel bored by this new life, wondering if some variation of this feeding, napping, stimulating, and soothing routine is what I primarily will do now for years on end, and depressed by how distant I feel from my former identity and working routine as a writer.

Gone is the daily journaling, much less the hours on end to work on long-term projects; gone is the huge rush of motivation I had during the three weeks I spent at Hedgebrook before giving birth to Cedar, where I was able to produce pages upon pages of my new book each day; gone is my most recent surge of hope and determination to publish my memoir, a project that’s been with me too long, especially now that the latest round of rejections have trickled in and I have neither the time nor drive to research a new round of small presses or agents. And while I’m on this rant, gone too now is my motivation to spearhead new creative nonfiction workshops in more venues across Seattle, to update my website and “market myself”, or to reach out to new people to work with one-on-one.

Yes,I am aware that I am still in an early stage of this grand adventure called parenthood, a stage that, like all others, will evolve and pass, and I trust that I will return to the projects that are most important to me. But still I must confess that I’ve been feeling slightly depressed, or rather, ambivalent, right now about the future of my life as a writer. For, right now, and probably forever, nothing could feel more important to me than raising my child. And in a certain light, it really is that simple. Goals that have been important to me for so long, like publishing my book, have faded in their intensity.

Yet then I ask: how much of this new ambivalence is an authentic reaction to the immensity of how my life has changed, and how much is a defensive reaction born of my current state of weariness—and fear. Fear that says, if I’ll never get to return to my writing life in the way that I used to then I might as well lower my expectations, rather than pine for all the time and energy I no longer have. And fear that says, if it was so challenging to keep writing and trying to publish before life with baby, how am I ever going to keep up with it now? These days I feel lucky if I manage to work on one small writing-related task each week, like for instance, this blog. How will I ever write another book?

I want to be clear: I love being a mother. I love it with an intensity of emotion I’ve never known before, and I suspect that this love is only going to get stronger. But there is also a part of me that fears that I will slowly become, first and foremost, a stay-at-home mother -- who writes a bit on the side. Mother, being the dominant identity. And writing, more like a hobby. I’ll look back on my former drive to publish books as youthful optimism, and I’ll settle for lighter goals, like, well, this blog.

For years now, it has taken so much conviction for me to keep writing and calling myself a writer, especially in the earlier days when I was more afraid of other's judgment and had none of the small successes under my belt to “prove” that I was serious. Even when I had lots of time, it still was never easy to commit to this path, this path that does not lead to promises of financial stability much less public acclaim. So now, with only a fraction of the time I had before, yet still with so many goals unfulfilled-- without a book contract, with so few publications, and with so many insecurities each time I step up to teach a new class—perhaps it is only natural for all my dormant, writing-related fears to return.

I think what I am most afraid of is forgetting why writing matters so much to me. Forgetting that writing is much more to me than a career or a chain of rewards (i.e. grants, publications, praise), but that this is my practice, my spiritual practice, a path that I have now cultivated for years. This is not to say that those grants, publications and praises aren’t important, because they are. And it took me a long time to figure all this out—to arrive at the place where I could bridge the private, spiritual practice side of my writing, with the public, publishing and wanting to share my work side. For a long time now, I have no longer been satisfied just writing for myself, yet any accomplishments and praise I gain from others are hollow without the innate knowledge that my writing is feeding the deepest part of me—without that internal, wordless understanding of why, for almost fifteen years now, I’ve sat down to write each day.

Until now. Now, I face a challenge that so many women have faced before me: the question of how to balance motherhood—this huge, enormous role-- with everything else I once held sacred. I know I am not unique, nor am I particularly strong and resilient. I am just one woman, in a chain of many, who has been handed what feels like the most important job in the world—to nurture and care for a child, to feed and help gently shape a new compassionate seed of life—and then left to figure out how to merge her old sense of purpose with her new one.

Throughout my pregnancy, I knew I was preparing for something huge, but there was no way to really understand what this was exactly until I arrived here-- brimming over with protective instincts and a love that is all-consuming. Living a completely new life, yet still connected by a infinitude of threads to my old one. Exhausted at the end of each day, and beneath this weariness, hungry, for just a few moments to remember in my body what it feels like to be a woman, writing, alone.