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A couple of days ago I had a phone conversation with a friend who is still working to adapt after having her first baby. The conversation started me thinking about my experiences making the same sort of adjustment. I did not keep a live journal back then, so I can’t look it up. I can just do my best to assemble the fragments of memory floating in my head.

When I had my first baby I was at a transitional point in my life. I was 22 years old and just finishing college. Up until that point I had spent the majority of my life as a student. I was finally ready to shed school and do something else. Babycare slid right into the vacuum left behind by schoolwork and classes. I was emotionally ready to dive into a completely new endeavor. And dive I did. I immersed myself into motherhood. I remember feeling as if I’d finally gotten to the best part of my life. It was hard, but so joyful that I did not mind. I spent hours holding my baby and documenting every small step of her growth. My experience with the next three babies was much different. I kept expecting to find that joyful glow, but it was not as easy to find. My life was not as primed for transition as it was with the first baby. I had acquired things that I had to sacrifice to tend to the needs of the new infant. The joy was there, but not constant.

I’ve often heard people say that after the third child, one more hardly makes an impact. That was not true for me. Adjusting to four kids was by far the hardest. I think it was because I was really able to see what I was giving up to bring the child into the world and nurture him. I had begun doing the business accounting. I watched the baby and the accounting compete for my limited attention and energy. I watched my parenting of the other kids slide into survival mode as I struggled to keep everything above water. It was all made harder because Howard was so much less available to help than he had been for the other babies. His Novell job was siphoning off about 60 hours per week with an even larger percentage of his energy and enthusiasm. Schlock Mercenary demanded another 20-30 hours per week. I honestly do not comprehend how we all carried the load that we did. It was a long, hard pregnancy and a long, hard slog for the first months of Patches life as I attempted to establish a new equilibrium.

I remember people coming to visit me with my new baby. They would coo over the baby and talk to me. They all expected me to have that new-baby glow. I remembered having that new-baby glow with Kiki and wondered what was wrong with me that I did not feel that way. There were definitely joyful times, but they were interspersed with times when I could see clearly the cost in time and energy that was not spent on other important things. I remember feeling guilty that Patches did not get the same unadulterated love and adoration that Kiki received at the same age. I worried that my stress and tears would somehow be communicated to him and that he would be hurt by it. I worried that I would never be able to bond properly with him.

It did not turn out that way. I gave him what I had available at the time. Some days I gave him joy and adoration. Other days he merely got carried while I tended to other needs. It did not hurt him. Nor did it hurt him for me to hand him off to someone else for awhile so that I could refill my reservoirs of energy. As I recovered, and as he got older, I had more and more to give. There was more energy for joy and laughter. I slowly realized that love for a child does not have to start with a new-baby glow. Lasting love for a child is like love for anyone. It is built moment by moment, service by service. For the first six weeks it is all built by the mother (or father. Dads build relationships too.) From the moment the baby first smiles, that changes. Suddenly the relationship becomes a mutual construction.

Looking back, I can see the hard times, the struggles, the adjustments. I’m not eager to go back and do them again, but I am very glad to have them in my store of experience. If nothing else I can talk to my friend on the phone and understand what she is going through. Sometimes I can even find words that help.

Some people turn gift wrapping into an art form. Each gift is carefully boxed and wrapped with crisply folded paper. The package is then embellished with ribbons, bows, tags, or other forms of decoration. These packages then are stacked around the tree in picturesque piles. I admire people who put so much care and thought into the presentation of presents, but I am not one of them. I do try to wrap the paper around nicely, but I can’t be bothered to find boxes for everything. As a result the packages are often oddly shaped. I don’t use tags either. I write directly on the paper with a sharpie marker. My children accept this as normal present wrapping protocol. In fact, they take it one step further and use the sharpie to draw all over the wrapping paper. This year Gleek spent a long time carefully outlining christmas trees in black. Patches drew maps on the presents he wrapped. One year Link carefully drew a picture on the outside of the package of the gift that was inside the package. These scrawled-upon, lumpy packages are not beautiful, but they make me smile.

Most of our gifts are wrapped at this point. The tree is surrounded. I frequently look at the and engage in my regular December occupation of reviewing in my mind who is giving what to whom. It is my job to make sure that all of these little people have plans for what to give each other. It is my job to accumulate those things and then help them wrap. It is also my job to balance the distribution of presents so that there are no cries of “Not Fair!” on Christmas morning. Because of this, I know what is in each package under the tree. I even know what is in most of the packages to me. On Christmas morning comes I’ll be delighted by the gifts. Surprises for the grown-ups have to be rare on a tight budget, because Howard and I discuss what would be the best use of Christmas funds.

Last year we traveled to my parent’s house for Christmas. That was really fun and we all enjoyed it. This year we are staying home and I am glad for the less frantic pace. I’m also glad not to have to haul piles of presents 800 miles in the car only to haul them all back again a week later. This will be a smaller and more peaceful Christmas than last year. But we’re not to the holiday yet. We have one more week before the holidays can begin in earnest. Four more days of school. I’m not sure who is counting them more avidly, me or the kids.

The band concert went far better than expected. After the last concert, I decided that I would not take all three younger kids with me again. But Howard needed to work late and the church party made all of my usual babysitters unavailable. So I resigned myself to hauling everybody, but resolved to do some things differently.

In the car on the way over I led a discussion about appropriate public behavior. We talked about not running in the halls. We discussed how we do not shout to our friends across the room mid-concert. We talked about how to be respectful the the performers and the other audience members. I then carefully defined some terms. “Stay with me” is not the same as “I can still see Mom so I’m okay.” It means that the children have to be close enough to touch. This is particularly important in the dark parking lot.

As soon as we arrived I handed out suckers from the stash of candy in my purse. I planned to provide a steady stream of snack food in the hopes that this would help the kids to sit still. It worked great for Link. Patches is still so small that he can’t see with the seat folded down, so he perched on the edge of the still folded seat. This, of course, led to falling into the seat crack multiple times. But he kept it pretty low-key, so I let it slide. Gleek also perched on the edge of her seat. She was completely absorbed by the music. She loved listening and identifying familiar tunes. How she did so mystified me because some of them were pretty hard to recognize. We were three quarters of the way through Waltz of the Flowers from the Nutcracker before I figured out what it was. After the beginning orchestra performed, Gleek became fascinated with the creak her seat made when she wiggled it just so. She turned to me eyes wide, “Mom! It sounds just like a violin!” Um…yeah it did actually sound like the violin’s we’d been listening to. I need to take her sometime to hear a professional violinist play. As each group came up and performed Gleek would decide which instrument she wanted to play. She is now planning to learn violin, flute, ocarina, cymbals, drums, harp, and piano.

Gleek’s level of excitement kept rising as the music continued. She was less and less able to be a passive observer. Her feet began to pound rhythms against her seat. Her hands wanted to clap along. More than anything she wanted to sing out loud along with jingle bells. I’d intended for us to all duck out at intermission since Kiki’s group was the first one to play. However I noticed that people were ducking in and out constantly. After each group there would be a surge of people leaving and others coming in to wait for their child to perform. I decided that we would give up our seats to some other family and we’d be gone before the kids were terribly over stimulated. Link and Gleek were a little disappointed to leave early. They were enjoying the performance. But I wanted to leave while I still had the energy to be nice about it. (Helping Gleek manage her energy was getting exhausting.)

It was the right choice. We got home and still had an hour for the kids to wind down. Or at least that was the theory. The chose to “wind down” with a rousing game of Monster Fight, which involves all of them pretending to be monsters and play-fighting over territories in our family room. Since they were playing happily I let the game continue until bedtime when all the monsters had a snack and crawled into their beds for the night.

This has been a week of cleaning up messes. During the two weeks of book shipping I do not have time or attention to spare. This means that the fridge accumulates left overs. The piles of dirty laundry grow exponentially. The dishes don’t get out of hand, but the garbage does because we start eating food that can be microwaved in 2 minutes or less. I’ve spent the last couple of days cleaning up after all of that. Things are beginning to be more organized. Bloggable things accumulated during that time as well. So in the interests of cleaning up, here is a hodge podge of subjects:

At this time of year it seems that every organization feels a need to commemorate the Holidays. This means that my calendar is quickly cluttered with events that other people have scheduled me to attend. Naturally this leads to some conflicts. This year for maximum convenience three major events were scheduled in exactly the same time slot on the same day. This evening from 6:30-8:30 there will be Patches’ preschool concert at a nursing home, Kiki’s band concert, and a church congregation party. All of these events are for the whole family. In some ways this simplifies my planning. We can not make all of these events, so we’ll go to the only one that has course credit attached. Band concert here we come!

I grew up believing that crusts are more nutritious than the center of bread loaves. I still didn’t eat them, but I felt vaguely like I ought to. Then I grew up and learned to make bread from scratch. That was when I figured out that the only difference between bread crusts and bread is how thoroughly the bit of dough is cooked. If anything the crusts are less nutritious because they’ve been cooked more. Ever since I’ve felt vindicated in removing the crusts from my sandwiches. I even remove crusts from the sandwiches of my kids even though part of me decries this as wasteful. I have never once told a child that crusts are better for them. However somebody must have imparted this particular myth because one day I walked into the kitchen to hear Gleek very seriously telling Patches that he should eat his crusts because they would give armor to his bones. I tried to counter this piece of folklore with some scientific fact, but the kids would have none of it. They all like the idea of having armored bones. Alas this fascination with armored bones has not increased crust consumption. Instead they just speak of it very seriously when they leave the crusts on their plates.

One day Link came to me to ask very seriously which constellation he was. I was a little confused because I was pretty sure that he wasn’t a cluster of stars. Further inquiry uncovered the fact that his class had been talking about the Zodiac. Other than knowing that I’m an Aquarius I’ve never paid much attention. We went to the internet and discovered that Link’s sign is Virgo. I looked up at him and told him this. His face crinkled in dismay. He’d been hoping for the scorpion or the lion. No 10-year-old boy wants to have some girl as his symbol. I told him to wait a moment and I looked up the Chinese zodiac. We quickly discovered that Link was born in the year of the ox, as was I. He thought it was really cool that we were both Oxen. I breathed a sigh of relief that the Chinese zodiac had provided a more acceptable symbol for my boy. I remember my own dismay at being an ox when I learned about it as a child. I wished for the year of the horse. But now I’m glad to be an ox with Link because it turned the day into a happy one. For kicks we looked up the rest of our family. Link cackled with glee to learn that one sister was a snake and the other was a pig. But the highlight was discovering that Howard was born in the year of the monkey. Link practically danced with delight because he knows Howard thinks monkeys make everything funnier. Link ran off to tell his dad about the delightful discovery.

When I first got married, I was very excited about setting up housekeeping. I joyfully collected dishes and towels and blankets and sheets, trying to turn a bare basement apartment into a comfortable home. I used the home I grew up in as a model to make sure that I was properly stocked for anything that might come along. The first time I went to clean my new domicile, I discovered a missing component. I had no rags. My mother had a big box full of rags that we used when cleaning the house. There was a variety in there, some perfect for mopping up spills, others ideal for wiping windows. The rags were uniformly ratty, but they were useful.

I determined that I could not properly set up housekeeping without rags. I trundled myself off to the store to buy some. In the linens section of the store I realized that there was no way to buy rags. Everything there was shiny and new, not ratty and useful. I wandered for awhile, puzzling. Eventually I bought a stack of washcloths. I took them home and attempted to clean. The washcloths were not good for windows, they left streaks. They were acceptable for mopping up spills, but the kitchen towels worked better. The washcloths weren’t very good for scrubbing either. They were ideal for showers and baths, but I didn’t want them to be washcloths. I wanted them to be rags. I needed rags for my house.

I decided that the problem was because the washcloths were new. Once they had been broken in, they would be better rags. So I abused the washcloths. I left them out in the sun. I washed them repeatedly. I tugged at them. I bleached them. It did not take long for the washcloths to go ratty. But this did not improve their performance as rags. They just went ratty and dissolved completely. I was back where I had started.

Almost 14 years later I have a box full of useful rags and I understand why my early attempts to acquire them failed so badly. Rags are the survivors of the linen world. They are the cloth diapers that remained intact after years of mopping up baby spit. They are the kitchen towels that have soaked up so much koolaid and chocolate milk that you can’t even remember what the original colors were. They are the towels that got left outside in the summer sun for months and yet remained intact. There is no way to know when you buy something new if it will one day be a good rag, or if it will just become garbage. The only way to make rags is by using things for years until one day they are too ugly to display in public, but too useful to get rid of. It takes time to acquire a useful rag.

I call this experience “the parable of the rags” because so often in my life I am impatient. I see something up ahead and I want to get there right now. But I am beginning to understand that somethings are better if you wait for them. Some things require patience and hard work before they can exist. And if I try to rush ahead I will only end up holding a pile of useless threads.

Yesterday I was sitting in a Sunday School class when two women behind me decided that they would rather have a conversation than listen to the lesson. I’m not bothered by a few whispers here or there (I’ve been known to whisper myself on occasion.) Usually I can tune-out the whispers and just listen to the lesson. Or I can tune-out the lesson and just listen to the whispers if I prefer that. On a rare, multi-tasking day I can follow both. Yesterday was not a good multi-tasking day. Yesterday was barely a solo-tasking day. I found myself unable to follow either the lesson or the whispers. The two sets of input clashed in my brain and turned everything into static. The only solution I could find was to tune out all aural input and just think my own thoughts.

I’ve had that experience before. It happens to me frequently when I’m tired or over stressed. The kids talk over each other and it all becomes a senseless wash of noise until I want to yell at them to all be quiet. I am fortunate that this only happens on my tired days. For people with auditory processing disorders every day is like that. I don’t know how they stand it. I usually end up fleeing. I turn off as many noise sources as I can. The filter goes off. All music gets turned off. Video games or movies get turned off. (Unless that threatens to create more noise in the form of child protests, then the volume just gets turned down.) I shut myself away, craving silence so that I can hear myself think. Because on really tired days the noise static blocks out my thoughts too.

I think this particular tired/stressed state is triggered by an input overload. This often gets discussed for newborns. The doctor will tell new moms that the baby is colicky because he can’t filter out any of the sensory input and so gets over-stimulated. I’m an adult. I can filter my input, but often I don’t want to. I want to read dozens of blogs, and the news, and listen to music, and watch movies, and talk to the kids, and do the accounting, and ship books, and plan for the next week, and wash the laundry, and, and, and. I switch from one thing to the next without stopping or pausing. There is no time for things to settle. I have no time to process one experience before I’ve shoved three more things into my brain. Some days are slower and allow me time to process, but lately there has been no time, no space. No wonder my poor, tired brain just gives up and stops interpreting for me.

The book shipping is over. There are a hundred small things that I need to catch up on because they were neglected. I could fill my whole day with getting them all done, as I did today. But the result is me feeling frazzled and discouraged by the end because all the input is turning to noise without meaning. I need to remember that one of the most important parts of re-establishing normal is to give myself the space and time to feel calm. I need to pause and remind myself why I want to do the things on my list. If I do that, then the sounds of the children become reason for joy rather than noise.

I was hoping that I would be able to avoid being a jellyfish like I was the day after the last book release party. Nope. I’m definitely jellyfishy today. I drift, mildly aware that I should probably tackle that mountain of laundry or feed the children. If I bump into a task, I do some work on it, but I can’t seem to move myself with any sense of purpose. I think more sleep is needed.