Everything to do and nothing to be done
Reflections on last-mile parenting
Nothing about being pregnant felt real to me at first. It’ll feel real when I see an ultrasound, I told myself. But it didn’t. It’ll feel real when I feel the baby move, I decided. But nope. It’ll feel real when the baby’s born, I insisted. Wrong again. But maybe that was because I didn’t get to bring my baby home with me right away.
My water broke 10 weeks early with that first pregnancy. So I spent 23 days in the hospital, leaking amniotic fluid and willing my baby’s lungs to develop. I had always thought a baby was supposed to be born within 24 hours of your water breaking — maybe you did, too — but apparently that’s not the case when your water breaks at 30 weeks. When your water breaks that early, the risks of prematurity are greater than the risk of infection. So you try to keep the baby in. And I did — for 23 days.
Still, he wasn’t able to breathe on his own at birth. And so, when I was discharged, I went home from the hospital without him.
It was so weird to be a parent without a baby at home. We visited him multiple times a day, but for a while, we couldn’t even hold him. There was everything to do and nothing to be done. The NICU nurses picked up on my nervous energy and gave me a chore. They told me to buy a laundry bag they could put the baby’s dirty clothes in. Thrilled to have an important errand to run, my husband and I went to a nearby store and bought a cotton duck canvas laundry bag and a fabric pen. We wrote the baby’s name — a name we were still getting used to — in capital letters along the drawstring.
And that moment — buying that canvas laundry bag and writing the baby’s name on it — that’s what made motherhood real to me. That’s when I became somebody’s mom.
I don’t consider myself a sentimental person, but I still have that damn bag. For the longest time, I treated it like a commonplace object, not something precious. We took it on family trips. I threw it into the dryer on high heat. I think I even let that same kid take it to camp a couple of times.
But the more time passed, the more I realized that the laundry bag was a historical artifact. A relic of our very first days of parenting that we should preserve.
Twenty-five years later, my youngest child is getting ready to move out and I spend a lot of time thinking about the relics of my kids’ childhoods. What’s junk, and what’s important. What to keep and what to give away. My youngest, my caboose, is a second-semester senior, and once again it feels like there is everything to do and nothing to be done.
To be clear, I am not sad about becoming an empty nester. I attended my very last parent-teacher conference last week and walking out of the classroom afterward felt like walking out of jail. I’m ready for the change of pace, having fewer domestic responsibilities, the freedom. As a dear friend one said, I am ready to stop carrying my son’s weight and — more importantly — he is ready to carry his own.
Still, I am struck by how much the second semester of senior year feels like pregnancy. You know you shouldn’t wish it away, yet you’re literally counting the days.
By the time I had this baby, my third, I had been pregnant eight times. The doctors told me it was a bad idea to get pregnant again, so I had my tubes tied after he was born. I knew he was my last and I was sad. But knowing that also helped me enjoy motherhood in ways I couldn’t with my first two.
When I nursed him in the middle of the night, I imagined mothers all over the world doing the same thing at the same time, and felt like I was part of a sisterhood of sorts. I was too tired to realize that the moms in Europe, Africa and Asia were in different time zones and therefore not doing their nocturnal feedings when I was, but that feeling of solidarity got me through it. It made me feel part of something bigger.
I’m feeling that again a lot lately. When my boy wakes me up to tell me he’s home safe. When he asks me to give him a back rub while we watch TV. When he tells me which colleges said yes to him and which said no. Countless mothers before me have danced this dance. And yet it still feels special to me.
I don’t know what the precious relics of this era will be. I probably won’t recognize them at first. But, eventually something will make it all feel real.
Hang in there,
Also on my mind
If you’re one of those people who loves e-books, but doesn’t love Jeff Bezos, have I got news for you: Bookshop.org now offers the convenience of e-books with the bonus benefit of supporting small businesses. Read more here.
Jenni Britton of Jeni’s Ice Cream fame is trying something new: turning food scraps into healthy, high-fiber snacks. Yum? (Caveat emptor: I haven’t tried these yet. If you have, tell me what you think.)
Photo: Floura.com I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of generative AI being the default setting for so many tech products. If you want to opt out, here’s how to toggle off Apple Intelligence on your Mac, iPad and iPhone using iOS18.3 and here’s how to get rid of the pesky AI summary that appears at the top of the Google search engine results page (and is often wrong!).
Gloria Steinem has lived in her NYC brownstone for more than 50 years. Watch her 11-minute house tour here.
The Ezra Klein-iest of all The Ezra Klein shows: “Don’t believe him.”
My mom was always cold until my sister gave her this electric faux fur shawl. She snuggles up in it early in the morning while she reads the paper and says it makes her feel like a ‘30s movie star.
The coziest shawl of all. (Courtesy my mom) - of says we’re thinking about “emotional labor” all wrong, starting with the name itself. I found her history-rich perspective really interesting.
ICYMI, this story about how Barbara Kingsolver used proceeds from the sale of her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Demon Copperhead,” to open a recovery residence for women who suffer from opiod use disorder in Southwest Virginia is set is uplifting and inspiring. Read more about Kingsolver’s involvement here. (I only just now noticed that there is no “i” in the author’s last name!)
Anna Lembke, author of “Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence,” showed up twice for me this week. First on The Interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and then in this article, “How to make peace with some of your addictions,” from The Cut. Fascinating stuff.
And a poem:
How Dark the Beginning by Maggie Smith All we ever talk of is light— let there be light, there was light then, good light—but what I consider dawnis darker than all that. So many hours between the day receding and what we recognize as morning, the sun cresting like a wave that won’t break over us—as if light were protective, as if no hearts were flayed, no bodies broken on a day like today. In any film, the sunrise tells us everything will be all right. Danger wouldn’t dare show up now, dragging its shadow across the screen. We talk so much of light, please let me speak on behalf of the good dark. Let us talk more of how dark the beginning of a day is.