Cherry Blossoms

I love the cherry tree that takes over our whole deck with its blossoms this time of year, and fills the whole view from our bedroom window. Probably one of the things I'll miss most when we leave.

Moving

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” – William Morris

We are preparing to move at least three times in the span of the next few months, and it is like torture. Moving is possibly worse than labor. Definitely. Right now it involves packing up all our stuff into storage, leaving our furniture in our current place, and moving with a few suitcases to another furnished apartment for two months (so our owners can sell our current living place). Then it will involve lugging everything out of state to our new place. Presumably a house we will have bought. Otherwise to a temporary place, which I try not to think about because my mind can’t manage that at the moment.

I fondly think of the day two months after we were married where we loaded up everything we owned on earth into a minivan and drove down the east coast. A minivan. I think the biggest item we owned at the time was an office chair.

But of course this is a good time to consider what it means to live in simplicity. I used to think about that a lot when I was younger: about this discipline of simplicity, what it means to have an inward life focused only on what mattered most, and to have this outwardly reflected in the things I did and what I owned and surrounded myself with.

Life seems to have gotten more complicated since then. We’ve expanded from one room, to a one-bedroom apartment, to this three-story condo, and now perhaps to a whole house. Our immaterial lives seem the same: more weighed by responsibility, less abandoned to the spiritual and communal.

Parenting is like this too. It can seem complicated. We’re on this email list for local parents, and it seems to be full of people looking for advice on the best toy, or activity, or swim instructor for toddlers. But I like how we’ve kept E surrounded with relatively simple things. She has a few used toys and clothes; her activities are mostly drawing or reading, exploring the house or outdoors. We talk and laugh and pray. We hang out with her, which I think is the most important thing.

So I’m trying to approach this packing in the same way. What do I really need? What brings me joy and beauty? And I’m looking forward to having a place of our own. Secretly I’m obsessing about finally getting to do some interior design, but really it will be nice to have a place to settle for a while. More on that later.

Journal Excerpt

I tell her all the time that her butt is like super-tender tofu and I want to take a big bite of it. This sounds much more charming in Chinese.

She has recovered from an ear infection and is disgustingly adorable these days. So far my favorite period of her life has been about the six to thirteen-month window, but this must be another honeymoon period. She follows commands, tells us when she poops and when she’s hungry, laughs easily, kisses and hugs on command, and sleeps effortlessly for long periods of time. If I repeated that last sentence to myself when she was a month old, I wouldn’t have believed it. I can see the Discipline and Toilet Training thing looming up ahead, but so far she hasn’t really required the former and we feel okay procrastinating the latter.

The best example of this is how she’ll throw things into the trash for me. I’ll point to a piece of trash on the ground, ask her to throw it away, and she’ll pick it up, get all excited speed-walking to the kitchen, pull out the trash can drawer, put it in, close the drawer, patter back quickly and say, “more?” She sticks out her belly and swings her arms while she’s walking like she’s real pleased with herself.

The Zoo

I took her to the zoo today. Which is like saying I took her to Disney World during spring break. We got there the moment it opened, and there were already about thirty school buses lined up, with kids in matching shirt colors streaming through the gates like the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. Apparently Fridays in April and May are prime field trip days. The only other people there were power moms, chatting on their cell phones while pushing five hundred-dollar strollers that hold three children at once along with the contents of an entire refrigerator and changing table.

E and I enjoyed zooming along in our little thirty-buck green stroller. She swung her legs and peered around at the other kids. The little girls seemed to like looking at her and one even called her “gorgeous” which put me in a great mood for the rest of the trip.

As a game D will sometimes tell her to shout out certain words (like “bus!” if she sees one while we’re driving). Apparently he taught her the Chinese word for leopard, because now every time I suggest going to the zoo she says “bau4!” over and over non-stop. So of course we were obligated to see the leopards, who happened to be mating today, which made me grateful she was too young to ask questions. Afterwards they lounged on their backs, which made her say “dap-dah” (for diaper) loudly over and over. Apparently anything on its back with its legs in the air is about to get its diaper changed. Again, grateful her words don’t make sense to anyone but me.

We lasted about ninety minutes. Or rather, I did. Unfortunately the crowds made her too shy to walk much, so I was often holding her with one arm so she could see above the railing, and pushing the stroller with the other. Holding her these days feels like carrying ten sacks of flour. It’s like the way they used to make the girls in home-ec carry around a bag of flour to simulate having a baby, except that was nothing compared to this. I told her to hold on to mommy, in an attempt to get her to help hold her own weight, after which she very gently grabbed a fistful of my shirt with one hand. Touching but not that helpful.

Apparently I say “wow” a lot, and E has picked up on this, because she says “wow!-wow!-wow!” repeatedly anytime she sees something exciting—like an elephant doing tricks, or the same two cats on the couch every morning. Other than that, she was pretty pensive and quiet as usual. It’s hard to tell how much she got out of the whole experience but I tell myself it provided great unconscious cerebral enrichment.

Since staying more at home I’ve figured out what all the other moms do with their kids all day: go to the mall and museums in bad weather, and the zoo and parks in good weather. Coming back intact today made me feel like I’d passed some initiation rite. Not quite as bad as, say, taking my first night of call, but tiring nonetheless.

Journal Excerpt

She's into this copycat thing lately, which while amusing is sometimes counterproductive. It’s hard to get much sweeping done with her around, because she insists on doing it herself, massaging the floor with the broom with one hand while dragging the dustpan after her with the other. When she gets tired she sets the dustpan on the floor and sits down in it.

My constant allergies are finally catching up to me because she’s taken on pretending to blow her nose. She takes about five tissues out of the box, carefully wipes her nose and mouth with each one, then stuffs them all back in succession.

Unfortunately she caught us feeding the cats some deli meat once, and now she has a minor obsession with feeding everything anything. She offers the cats milk from her sippy cup, pieces of food from their bowl. She offers her stuffed toys and dolls anything she happens to be eating; if I make “mm-mm” sounds she considers that satisfactory and stuffs the food back into her mouth.

She loves to play her toy piano, but only if there is music sheet out. She insists on having the sheets open and pauses in her playing to turn the pages every now and then.

She has picked up on our diaper-changing routine. Today she said “dap-dah,” her word for diaper (and poop and fart), and I looked over and there she was lying on her back with her legs up, a clean diaper clutched in one hand and a packet of wipes in the other. I kid you not. I peeked into her diaper expecting to find nothing but lo and behold there was some poop! There is hope for teaching her to change her own diapers yet.

The Invisible Woman

D put it eloquently recently: “women have it tough.” To summarize: you’re a girl, you decide being a mom is important to you, but you aren’t married yet. So you pursue a career; you’re going along the path, some guy waylays you, you get married, have kids. And then you’ve got to make some kind of decision, compromise, sacrifice.

I look around and see all kinds of situations. Where I work, most people stay full-time and hire one or more nannies, or have grandparents who live with them. Some work part-time; some stop working altogether.

I still think staying home to be with your child is important, but it’s hard. Harder than working. I’ve been going on job interviews, and when discussions of my CV come up I feel like I’m reading about someone from another world. I guess I used to be someone who competed, was involved in things, took courses and overnight shifts. Now I wash dishes, only to wash more dishes. I clean up the toys only to clean them up again. I change diapers only to change more diapers. I can sing all the songs from Baby Signing Times and quote Goodnight Moon in my sleep.

I feel relatively invisible. Sometimes it feels like I end the day without much more to show for it than when I began. Everyone knew what kind of student or doctor I was. Who knows, truly, what kind of mother I am? It’s like you disappear under the radar except when someone judges you based on how well-behaved your kid was at some function or where they end up for college.

Of course no one knows me well enough to see what kind of mother I really am. But God does. He saw all the things I’ve done before in my life; now he sees the sleepless nights when she’s sick, hears the lullabies and silly songs and repetitive explanations. He understands my desire to be the one there with her, and what I am not doing in order to be the one changing her diaper or taking her for a walk.

Like all the previous things in my life, motherhood is temporary. I look back now on the days I was a serious pianist, or took a Shakespeare class. One day I’ll look back on the days I spent with her alone. This is a privilege, this time with her, and it will pass like any other time in life. One day it will be more obvious than it is now that she never was mine. And what matters in the end won’t be what I have to show anyone for it, other than God, who is the only one who ever really sees me, anyway. And the only thing in my life that never changes.