self-sacrifice and other puzzles of personhood

This is how I was feeling on Saturday.

Expansive, free, golden. I spent it with the kids doing the most mundane things, but we did them all with gusto. The morning was cool, the farmer's market cheerful, the swing set inviting, the afternoon sun glorious. We drove home from errands with all the windows down, listening to many good songs on the radio at a volume inappropriate for tender ears. Despite the fact that I was spending a lot of time with small people who regularly hang on my legs and beg to be picked up, I felt a particularly happy sense of space and freedom.

But today began with Gabriel's all-too-familiar croupy cough echoing down the hall around 4:30 am. There is something fundamentally and deeply distressing about one's child not getting enough air. I always feel panicky when I hear that barking cough, and I did this morning too.

But it's happened many times, and I must confess, in the early morning darkness a disappointed realization followed closely on the heels of the panic. Before I made it to his bedroom door I bid a sad adieu to all the things I wanted to do today. Goodbye, gym and doctor's appointment. Goodbye, rainy day baking with Gabriel. Goodbye, naptime writing.

This morning made me think of the early days with my babies, days of operating with only one free hand and having to think strategically about using the bathroom. How quickly we learn that our agenda is vulnerable at every turn! And how frustrating it can be to try and muscle through things, denying the power of a tiny baby to make even the simplest tasks impossible. There is something I had to learn, about opening myself, loosening my long fingers and holding the controls with a lighter grip.

Just like his baby self, Gabriel would get upset if I left his side. As our doctor said this afternoon, you don't want to upset a "crouper." Agitation worsens the barking and wheezing. So I told him we would stick together today, which we did. I canceled my doctor's appointment, we said goodbye to Frances and Mike, and I set about following his lead.

It was surprising, how hard I found it. I love spending time with my son, but today he was a moody, slow-paced, home-bound version of himself. He wanted to make train tracks together. Sure, I said, my back turned to him as I clicked on WAMU to stream the Diane Rehm in the family room. It was a weird gesture of self-assertion, some clinging to my own interests and directions. Yeah, I'll play trains, but you're not the only thing in my life, you know! And of course I couldn't listen to the show and listen to Gabriel, and the noise was irritating, so I turned it off.

The day featured a series of abandoned emails, laundry left on the stairs, magazines dropped back down immediately after picking them up. Why was it so hard to just be with Gabriel? I felt like I finally found my way to him after an abbreviated early nap. He woke up way too soon with the awful barking, crying and grumpy. After many unsuccessful attempts to soothe him we sat down in front of the laptop and found an innocuous kid's show on Netflix. He soon quieted and assumed the hypnotized video look, which was my cue that I could sneak off and assert my independence elsewhere in the house. But I didn't. I snuggled down into the cushions with him and almost fell asleep, warm and heavy together.

It was my homemade time turnaround. My acceptance that we were going to be here now, so to speak, and do it together, and that was so much better than what I had been doing. We played with cars. I helped him decorate a little pumpkin in the pure style that Gabriel wanted to pursue, featuring stickers and a lot of glue.

We sat down on the floor and sorted acorns. These are our alphabet acorns, collected on Saturday, then painted and written on.

By "sort," I mean we sat on the kitchen floor, lazily rolling them around while Gabriel cracked himself up by misidentifying letters. He insisted that A was G, and K was P. Ha ha!!

But it actually was kind of funny. Just because we were all, you know, being here now. A person just feels happier, quicker to laugh, when she lets go of her grand schemes and self-insistence. At least, I did today.

But here's what I'm wondering: is what I'm describing self-sacrifice? Is the gesture we repeat over and over as parents - relinquishing control and coming to meet our children wherever they may be - is that good for us? Does it help us grow? (And if so, in which direction?) What does it mean to slow it all down and pace ourselves in a new way? To be able to give up our plans at the drop of a hat - or the sound of a cough?

It is part of why so many of us feel ourselves to be firmly planted in adulthood only when we become parents. Of course, I often feel like a kid. And as I kid I was always ready to be a helper, to be good, to go out of my way. It was a little bit nuts at times, and I still do it: is there some way I could inconvenience myself for your benefit? Oh please??

But when I was a kid there were limits. I would be awfully mad at anyone who interrupted me during the last thirty pages of my novel, or suggested I wouldn't be able to go out tonight after all. What does it mean that we learn to place others' storybooks and evening agendas at the center of our lives?

And why do I feel so much happier when I give it all up and sit down with the acorns on the floor?

I will not attempt to answer this now. It is good for our children that we give them baths even when we don't feel like it. I think it's good for us too, but ... it's a bit more complicated. There's gender stuff to muddy the waters, there's preserving space for ourselves. There's definitely an upside to dirty kids.

I do, however, feel confident about one particular good thing that comes from being here now - living in homemade time - with my kids. It comes with a deeply peaceful sense of intimacy, one that begins with nursing (an ultimate gesture of giving oneself away, if ever there was one) and grows with days like today.

Frances and Gabriel asked if we could do Songs in the Chair tonight, after many months without, and many months of the two of them fighting over who gets to sing a song - any song - in competitive efforts to prove their abilities. Songs in the Chair is when the two of them climb into the glider in Gabriel's room and get snuggled up, and I sit on the ottoman facing them. I rock the chair back and forth and sing lots of favorites to them while they sit open-mouthed, staring at me with the same unblinking big brown soul-windows open so wide that I struggle to return their gaze without looking away or laughing or crying. 

I sang Wild Mountain Thyme, and Goodnight Irene, and All Things Bright and Beautiful, and the Donovan song Happiness Runs. They sang with me, moreso than in the past. They were so big and so little at the same time. I felt us to be rocking and singing together, if only for a moment, in some kind of intimacy that touches timelessness, a place where love is greater than death.