On the Edge of 2011

The boyfriend is sick with the stomach virus and sleeping in bed. The baby naps in a room down the hall. The older boy is at his father’s house. The house is still and eerily dark. It could be the middle of the night, but it is just shy of 2pm. It is silent except for my nails clicking of the keyboard and the white noise of the refrigerator hum. It is so quiet I heard the neighbor flush and I have never heard that.

I live in a 2200sq ft. apartment on the 17^th floor of a doorman, high-rise building on Wall Street. We have a roof-deck, a gym, a lounge and even a mini golf-putting situation in the basement. I never imagined myself living in a building like this. And yet, it has become my norm – although we are far from the average family on Wall Street.

First, there are not a lot of families this side of Downtown (they settle just to the west along the Hudson River in Battery Park City and further north in Tribeca). Secondly, we are an unusually artsy family; the boyfriend is a professional artist whose day job is a clown and the girlfriend (me) is an out-of-work, ex-advertising exec, wannabe writer. I have an 8-year-old boy from my previous marriage and now we have a 6-month old girl. We live a dream life and are very thankful and aware of it – and it’s limitations.

A year ago, I was 2 months into a 9-month pregnancy battling daily nausea, and living in a walk-up apartment above an Indian restaurant infested with bed bugs and breeding rats scurrying above my drop ceiling.

I have adapted quite nicely to my new living situation. But everything changes. The rent is going up and the 2-month free deal that we got that enabled us to afford this apartment is now not being offered. Translation: rent increase is $1,000. Luckily they gave us a 3-month extension to figure out a way to beg.

Last night I had insomnia for the third night in a row, and the worst of them yet. I kept insisting to myself that I was relaxed, but obviously reality proved otherwise. How I struggle to relax; it has been one of my life’s greatest challenges. I just can’t shut my brain off. I tossed and turned occasionally checking in with the clock. I would drift off and suddenly be forced back hard into consciousness in such a restless way that I’m not sure if I ever really slept last night.

This morning, I was playing with the baby; it wasn’t painfully early, about 8:30am – but it might as well have been in the middle of the night. She was sitting on the L part of my couch and I was playing alongside her. I got up and went to pick her up, but in the time it took to stand, she rolled herself onto the floor. Face first. Gasp. My couch is low to the ground, about 18” – but it was a wooden floor. She was fine – not a scratch or a bruise or any souvenir of the fall. But she cried to let me know she was pissed that I slacked off on the ‘mother should protect you and keep you safe’ responsibility.

One night last week my 8-year-old was also having a battle with insomnia. Maybe it was the last blizzard of 2010 or just a week off from school and going to bed way past his bedtime. He just couldn’t get to sleep and by 11:00pm, he came out to the living room with tears in his eyes, so clearly tortured by the desire to sleep, but the inability to let himself go there. I so hope he learns the road to relaxation earlier than I did.

But as I was strangled by my sleeplessness, just at the end of reason, I started to wonder what was keeping me paralyzed in this distressed state. I engaged in a mental game with myself where I played the devil and the advocate. I realized that I was partially anxious for the turn of the year. The change on the calendar dial – from 10 to 11. It seemed so asinine; it was just another day. But somehow, it got me a little nervous.

This past week I have been reflecting on the year - and how revolutionary it was to my life. It was so bitter at the beginning of 2010 but I made it to the middle, where in June our lives changed forever. We all tasted a kind of sweetness we just didn’t even know existed, nor did we know how much we yearned for it.

I am so thankful for how kind life has been to me this year and I’m just hoping the movement of the numbers or the realigning of the stars will not mean I’m due for more of the harshness that life can often dole out. As the clock strikes 12 and we change the dates after the slashes, there are so many maybes in front of us. So many opportunities, challenges, rewards. I’m sure 2011 will bring tears of joy and sadness, cold days and hot ones, and without doubt, lots of change.

Because as long as the earth is spinning and the clock is ticking, there’s one thing for sure: it will change – and we will adapt.

Happy New Year!

The Last Blizzard of 2010: The Wall Street Perspective

The last blizzard of 2010. New York Stock Exchange on Broad Street. NYC.

Jake in the snow in front of our building.

Stomping through the evenly plowed masses of snow near the stock exchange; Wall Street kept the streets clear for business.

In front of the New York Stock Exchange with the Christmas Tree. Pretty crazy that this is our neighborhood.

Jake is playing dead after a snowball / icicle adventure. In front of Hanover Park a block from our apt in downtown NYC. This was the same park the Queen of England visited this summer.

Mackenzie is not particularly happy in her first romp in the snow. Daddy insists she was happy the whole time until the end (when the bitter wind came). When I got her home and unraveled her, I found a melted piece of snow near her bottom. Good thing for diaper protection.

Merry Christmas from Wall Street

Are You Mensa Smart?

I always thought I was smart. I always scored in the 99th percentile on all the standardized tests and such. (Although the SATs were a bit more challenging, but I still scored up there.) But the other day there was a short lifestyle segment on the local news about Mensa, the International High IQ Society. To join Mensa, you must have attained a score within the upper two percent of the general population on an approved intelligence test “that has been properly administered and supervised.”

This peaked my curiosity. I went on their Website and started taking the 30-minute, 30-question Mensa Workout. I did not adhere to the time constraint, but I will say that I think I spent up to 20 minutes on a few of the questions – and those weren’t even the math ones!

This same segment that intrigued me to the Website featured the newest Mensa member, a 5-year-old boy. Seriously.

If anyone wants some brain stretching, I’d dare say the Mensa Workout is fun – but it was certainly refreshing to feel the cerebral gears spinning.

You can find a list of prominent Mensa members here.

And So the Days Go By ...

I wrote this over 6 weeks ago and rereading it, so much has changed – especially the ROCKING, which is gone, gone, GONE! Sleep training is a tremendous gift parents can give their children and themselves. I cannot say enough about it – and because it’s such a personal issue, I won’t. I’ll just say that it has revolutionized our baby-centered lives.

I am preempting the following piece by saying that the elements of your life you focus on almost compulsively are gone by the time you figure them out. Lesson learned: when you figure it out, they switch it on you … and if it happens to be a few months of smooth sailing, don’t worry - daylight savings time will come along and kick your ass.

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I realized I hadn’t blogged in over a month. Last thing I wrote about was our summer family vacation. Now it was into November – the day he broke out the North Face jacket. I think back on October and it’s a blur. A month highlighted by a trip to Kansas City for his sister’s wedding. Her first plane ride. Her first Halloween. It was a month of continued firsts – but the days went by.

I look at the clock all the time, a ticking in my head of schedules – by the person – by the day. When do I pick up the boy? What time does the baby need to eat? When is his gig on Sunday? When is the next pediatrician appointment? Is it the day of after-school?

The days go by and mid-week I get a break. I don’t have to drive him anymore so I can go back to sleep when the baby naps. Mondays are the hardest in the early evening. Homework, dinner, bath, rocking. This is how it is to be a parent; it goes by so much faster. You live for the smiles in between. For the giggles. For the sound bytes and snapshots of your life.

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My baby is 5 months old today. Almost half a year of our lives have passed with this sweet girl that serves as a heartbeat to our days.

These last two months were drastically different from the first three. Obviously she is more alert and a big smiler and laugher – but gone are the days of sleeping all day. She was amazing for those first few months and during our (2-week!) family vacation through New Hampshire and Maine. She slept and ate like a champ – but as they grow, and stay awake longer and want more entertainment – less time for mom and dad to get anything done. This is especially challenging when you work from home and are trying to kick off some important projects off the ground.

Most days I feel lazy and tired and am hard on myself for being a slacker. It seems minimal and inexcusable to just get up and feed, dress, play with, put to sleep, bathe and keep putting baby to sleep.

The last two months there was also a lot of rocking. So much rocking that I’ve been thinking there should be a new-mom exercise video involving rocking. Side effects of said rocking include lower back and neck pain (from looking down at falling asleep baby). Positive side effect is slight cardio and a pseudo-six pack that sits above the jelly belly souvenir of my pregnancy.

Early days of rocking were blissful. A slight motion would send her eyes rolling to the back of her head and then the sleepy smiles would start to pop up around her mouth. Sweet dreams or muscle spasms – it didn’t matter. I could hold her in my arms for hours and not get tired; watching the slumber enter her face and then her limp and heavier body.

Now that she’s just about 13 pounds, I feel her weight sooner and more severely. We rock her before each nap – about 3 a day and then the major night sleep. Lots of rocking and my back doesn’t like it. I try to be conscious of my posture, periodically checking the full-length mirror in her room to see if my bad rocking posture is what’s causing the ache in my back. My posture looks perfect. I tighten my abs and try to use those to do the swinging, but know that I’m suing all the other muscles I shouldn’t. I’m good at that – knowing exactly what I shouldn’t be doing but not knowing how to stop doing it anyway.

We were somehow able to live with the rocking that seemed to overtake our lives because she was such a happy baby. As soon as she opened her eyes, she was a Smiley-Pete … and as a bonus, I had a particular knack for getting her to giggle. Surely there is no more potent a medicine than your baby’s giggle.

Other major changes in the last two months have been the introduction of the bottle. We waited over three months before we introduced a bottle. This created a domino effect of positives and negatives. On the plus side, I was given a leash longer than two hours that I could be away from my baby. On the negative side, she now preferred the flow of the bottle to the flow of my boob and decided to go on a boob strike for most of the day. I started to pump … all the time when she stopped taking the boob – and then I was either pumping or rocking. Or driving.

With the start of school in early September, I had to drive my son to Riverdale and back 3 days a week. That means to school and then picking him up from school 5 hours later; 2 hours in the car each way. Many of early fall days seemed like this: Wake, nurse (or pump if she was still sleeping), breakfast for the boy, drive to Riverdale, drive back to the city in rush hour traffic, pump, eat, play with baby, rock to nap, drive back to Riverdale, pump, dinner, homework, baby bath, rock baby to sleep, night-night for big boy, make dinner for grownups, pump. Collapse.

The whole time I kept thinking when is it me time? Or time for me to write? The pregnancy was supposed to be my time to write – but instead I threw up for 9 months and wrote about nothing more than bodily excrement and sadness.

Now it’s supposed to be time to write and instead I’m rocking, pumping, cooking and wiping up spit-up and shit from everyone and everything.

I’m hard on myself but all the same, forgive myself and go another day without putting words to paper. On the car rides to Riverdale and back I write in my head. Different stories for different projects. I get angry on the ride because it’s two hours that I’m not spending being productive. I could be dictating or listening to books on tape (“research”) but alas when I bring the iPod I only blast the same playlist over and over. At red lights I take out the undersized hardcover notebook with the holographic picture of a lion on it. I take notes. I scribble down writing ideas. Inspirational thoughts that I could turn into essays, character traits for a short story or plot points for a novel. I have reels in my head. Names, events, places, descriptive scenery. But in 5 months I can judgmentally say I have not written anything productive.

I have milked and cooked and showered and bathed. I have driven for over 100 hours up and down the Henry Hudson Parkway and watched the trees change color and the sailboats get sparser. But the novel, the short story, and even the dozen of blog posts that never got posted – they’re all just a jumble of thoughts in my head and scribbles in the lion notebook.

Then there are the things on the things to do list that don’t get crossed out, but just get re-written when I make my new list on a new piece of paper with a new colored pen. It’s the unemployment issue I have to deal with. It’s the American Express erroneous outstanding balance that I have to fight because it’s from a ruined vacation over 2 years ago. It’s the Mac classes I have to take before the one-on-one runs out again. It’s the closet that never got organized. It’s the bedroom that never got the decorating finishing touches. It’s the ABC painting that I never finished for the baby’s room. It’s the book that’s only written in my head.

A New Look, An Old (Refreshed) Commitment

So it all started when I got fired and I realized I didn’t want to just another rebound job, falsely following another golden paycheck. Truth is money never turned me on; all I really wanted to do was write, travel and take photos along the way. This was, as my boyfriend clarified, called “my dream.”

(He is a role model for anyone who doubts they could live their dream. Not only does he believe in creating the life you want to live – he creates it and lives it.)

So I thought now was as good a time as any to try to create it. I started a blog and tried fruitlessly to commit to writing. But because I thought this was my public portfolio of sorts, I became hypercritical of everything I posted. Instead of traditional, short blog postings, I ended up posting random long rants in between what was happening in my life.

All the while, I was writing a lot, but publishing less and less. As time went on, life complicated the blog – or got in the way. But it was the other way around – this was the meat of the story and I wasn’t sharing it. My little boy and I moved in with the boyfriend, I got another job and left that, I got pregnant, I got nauseas, I had a baby … This was LIFE: Exclamation Point and while I was writing it all down, my perfectionism was preventing me from publishing it.

All my writing seemed incomplete. It seemed like non-stories; descriptions of events, emotional rants, whining in words. But only I judged it. I would open three files at a time, hoping to make one good enough for the blog. Then I would read them, come to the realization that they were better than I thought, but they still needed work – and I would file it away for another day.

This pattern would continue. I’d get a few moments, I’d open some old unfinished documents, read them, feel better about my writing, reaffirm that I will blog more often, commit to being less hard on myself, and then close the documents, blog untouched.

I can’t remember how many blog postings were dedicated to saying, “I’m going to be a better blogger and not be so hard on myself.” Seriously it’s no wonder I am such a commitment-phoebe.

So now here I am, at the end of one of the best years of my life and almost none of it is published. I am making a (pseudo-public) vow to write more, even if the quality is less. I will also back-publish pieces that I wrote documenting this year and others of my life. Raw emotions and anecdotes that have colored my world – and judgment free, I will put them on my blog to chronicle. Because that’s all it is; a written memory of the days that were.

Here’s to doing what I say. Oh yeah, and I have a new look for my blog. White background rather than the black, larger fonts, larger photos – and a new header (thanks to the boyfriend who took my obsessive doodles and funky-feed them).

Cheers to life: writing about it, reading about it, blogging about it and not judging it!

Note about the photo: Me, very happily jumping in front of the lighthouse on Monhegan Island in Maine. This was when I truly believed I could make my dream come true. Two years later, I'm starting to wonder, with a hearty dosage of doubt.