Pantsless Weirdo

The bearings on the running dryer a few feet away from me are going bad, and the machine is loud. The front-load washer was “repaired” a couple of months ago with a brand new seal to replace the cracked old one, but it still leaks, and a trickle of water makes its way to the floor drain with every load. Both are ten year old appliances, which is arguably not old enough to need replacement, but both have seen better days. They came with the house, and we have no idea what lives they lived before we moved in. They have served us well, and we have often been less than kind to them. As exhausted parents with mountains of laundry that threaten to consume us—especially when we were exclusively cloth diapering—we often shove in loads that are probably too large, and are not overly gentle with the machines. The humidifier is running next to me, and the nnnnn-chhhhhh of my breast pump adds to the mechanical ragtag band. The snoring dog completes the ditty.

Although it is only 6:46 AM, I have been awake for nearly five hours, and out of bed for close to four. Our kids have struggled mightily for months now, and nights have been a dreadful stretch of hours when I never know how much sleep I’m going to get, how long I will be awake when one of the boys inevitably rouses me, or how any of us will feel throughout the day once everyone is up and going. We are a co-sleeping family, quite by accident, and although on mornings like these, I find myself wishing these kids would just sleep in their own beds and I could get ten hours of uninterrupted sleep per night, I know I will eventually miss these days. I will long for a tiny hand reaching out for me in the mostly dark room and a nursing baby snuggled in tight to my body. I frequently fail to remember that when I sharply shush my big kid or feel intense resentment as the teething baby latches for the fifth time in as many hours.

I have wrestled with whether to resurrect this blog. It does not follow the rules of today’s blogosphere, which demands optimized content and succinct, feel-good stories. It was never meant to be that. It was started to help me write about and cope with losing my mom in 2013. Before my mom died, I didn’t necessarily plan to have kids. And then, I couldn’t plan more than a day in advance for a long time after she died. Then, I had a child. And then a second one.

Spoiler alert: everything got more complicated after that, including this space. Do I write about my kids? Hide them? How could I be true to my own experience becoming a mother—the single most profound change to my identity in my 30ish years on earth—while protecting their right to privacy and autonomy? I still don’t know the right answer to those questions.

For a long time, I also had my own job to consider. That’s no longer a concern because I left that toxic wasteland in an epic leap of faith that has been a little slower to come to fruition than I had hoped and planned. But then there’s also my husband’s job, and his family, and who knows what else.

And then, if I do try to breathe life back into this, where do I start? Can I just jump back in? Do I need to write a synopsis? Introduce new characters? Every time I have thought about writing honestly about my own growth and changes and range of experiences over the past few years, my brain goes down several rabbit holes and I eventually shut down and fantasize about taking a coping nap.

Honestly, I wrote the intro to this sometime in December? January? February? I don’t even know. The kids still aren’t sleeping and everything is still so chaotic and I’m still overthinking. But I think I’ll publish this because why not? Insert pithy closing here.