Journal Excerpt

“What is- soul?”

Try answering that one, in Chinese. A language in which, as I am rapidly realizing, my vocabulary extends only as far as barnyard and African animals.

What is this, anyway? She’s two years old. She’s supposed to be asking me where her Cheerios are. I am so unprepared for this.

Journal Excerpt

The Holy Grail of multiple motherhood has happened: both kids are asleep at the same time. This was something I took for granted until e.e. came down with some minor congestion and decided to feed every two hours and not sleep more than thirty minutes at a stretch. Perhaps sensing that I’ve been leaning towards a condensed version of our bedtime routine due to my need to get back to him, E has taken to not falling asleep without crying a bit every time.

After getting over the shock of the quiet and solitude, as usual I entertain fantasies of all the things I could do now (1. write about the five odd topics I’ve been wanting to reflect more on, 2. look up a pattern for a throw quilt, 3. try a new recipe, 4. respond to emails, 5. scrub the shower), before turning to the things I should do now (1. shower, 2. pee, 3. sleep), and finally deciding on the only responsible thing I ought to be doing (1. sleep). And I wonder why I feel like I never do anything with my life.

Thoughts from the Outside

I’ve never been away from the medical, scientific world for this long. It started in tenth grade with gross anatomy and lab research and didn’t stop until last July: a steady stream of problem sets, write-ups, standardized tests, patient presentations, clinic notes, journal clubs, and one match after another. We lived in urban places among people who were also all in medicine, or at least equally engrossed in their careers.

It feels sort of like I’m waking up. I’m discovering all sorts of things about myself I didn’t know. For one thing, my personality type may be different than what I’d thought my whole life. In Meyers-Briggs terms, medicine is a very STJ world, and my family, and I think Asian culture, is also pretty TJ, but I’m discovering I may actually be more of an FP. When given freedom to make major life decisions, like where to live or how much to work, I’m more driven by gut feeling and values than logic or rules. And when given the freedom to arrange my stay-at-home life and environment the way I prefer, I’m much more unplanned and aesthetic than I’d have thought.

I’m appreciating people from different worlds in new ways. For the first time, our small group doesn’t have a single other physician, or engineer, and no one talks about their job. Work is work; it’s not the only prayer request they have every single week. Odd, but refreshing. We talk about babies and fantasy football. No one has asked me once where I went to school, or what kind of operations I do, but they seem interested in the fact that I can knit, throw clay, and want to learn to sew throw pillows.

It makes me wonder how much of my life has been insulated because of medicine and my approach to it, because of living the majority of my younger years in a world that valued certain things, limited my ability to have a wider variety of relationships and life experiences, and narrowed the decisions I needed to make. I don’t regret any of it, but I see now that it was not the only way, and that was not the only person I could have been. If I could talk with my younger, driven self, I might suggest doing a few things different. Majoring in English or art instead of the sciences. Giving one of those guys asking me out a chance. Traveling instead of spending every summer in a lab.

It’s hard, perhaps impossible, to say whether any of it ought to have changed. I doubt I would have the freedom of choices in my career now if I hadn’t been so focused then, and I don’t take that for granted. But I’m also glad to be at a point and place in life where I can see things differently and learn in different ways. Ironically, I’m back in my hometown, in what truly must be a stroke of divine humor, though perhaps that is what makes all these changes so striking. I look around at familiar roads and places, and I am the same, but very different, and it makes me think.

A Particularly Savory Post

He tries so hard to fart sometimes that it cracks me up. His face gets three shades of red and purple, his mouth purses, his eyes get big and round, he tucks his double chin down, and it’s hard not to become his own personal poop cheerleader—come on! You can do it!

I’m sure there are all kinds of invisible things going on right now, like brain growth and such, but it pretty much seems like his main life activity is pooping. I’m becoming more convinced that sometimes he wakes up at night crying for no other reason than wanting to poop. And for a quiet baby who rarely even cries, he sure spends a lot of time grunting.

E is quite intrigued by all this. As a toddler starting to read potty books and sit on a practice potty, this is an activity she gets. She likes to go around reporting “dee-dee [little brother] number two!” and takes it personally if I don’t involve her in the diaper-changing process. She fetches the new diaper and wipes Desitin on his bum. She used to lather up his scrotum but has gotten more accurate since I informed her that’s not where the rashes usually happen. She liked to wipe the poo off too, but I put a stop to that due to her disturbing habit of wanting to keep the dirty wipe afterwards.

It’s ironic how much of my life revolves around poop. I remember the days it was my goal to avoid having to ever digitally disimpact a patient (made it, barely on a few occasions), and when it was my job to do an emergency rectal exam on trauma cases in the MGH E.D. The patient would come in, their clothes would get cut off, and three people would do the log roll while one person palpated the spine and I whipped out the lacrilube I always carried and did a rectal check for prostate and tone, shouting out the findings to some person frantically scribbling to the side. Ah, how far I’ve come.

Journal Excerpt

It is the one-month mark, and I have suddenly begun to feel more myself. I don’t remember emerging from the post-partum black hole until at least six weeks last time, so I’m grateful. For some reason I suddenly feel this urge to clean the whole house and furnish and decorate it properly, but D tells me that’s not important and just to take it slow. It’s like I suddenly woke up from a very long slumber and realized the bathroom counters haven’t been cleaned in a month.

I also feel my body becoming more familiar, like a rubber band returning to form after being stretched out for a while. I was feeling pretty good about myself, like I’d be pretty happy staying this size, until I tried on my old jeans for the first time. Major mistake. Was I really that skinny before? What was I, a stick? Did I have no hips? Was I human?

My wardrobe is a mess, full of maternity clothes that are now too big, some maternity clothes that sort of fit, and about three sizes of regular clothes. It doesn’t help that the clothes I feel like wearing are all regular clothes in the smallest size. Or that the ones I end up wearing are all sweat pants. So to celebrate feeling well enough to go out, I went and bought a pair of boots. At least my shoe size has never changed.

Journal Excerpt

There must be a variant of Murphy’s law that says: as soon as you settle into the sheets and get the pillows just right and calm your mind and feel you may be able to drift off into sleep, the baby cries.

Little Trifler

She insisted on taking this can of Diet Dr. Pepper to bed apparently, clutching onto it with both hands under the blankets, which explains why I found a can of soda among the sheets when making her bed later. This is sort of how things are around the house: I'll find two dried apricots stacked neatly on a random corner of the floor, one shoe on her foot but its matching pair on a side table in the corner of the living room, a stuffed rabbit tucked neatly into the baby's swing. You'd think all this was random capriciousness, but it's apparently quite calculated, as we find if we try to move anything--no, she specifically wanted the plastic spoon to stay THERE on the sofa. She usually follows instructions but with her own twist if I forget to be specific enough: if I ask her to put her brother's clothes back on the table, she will, but in the wrong pile; if I tell her to put my chapstick back on my dresser, she'll recap it but stick it carefully in the dresser drawer instead of on top where she found it. It's like a little fairy has come in and trifled with everything just the slightest bit when I wasn't looking.

Insular Life

I feel like I live a drugged existence. Nothing is real; nothing exists except this room, the bed I’m constantly going back to but never staying in for long, the rhythm of milk, his grunting and crying and the weight of him in my arm. Sometimes I stare for minutes lost in some small detail—the way his fingers splay while feeding or his legs curl up like an amphibian’s; the way he inadvertently pillows his cheek on his fist while sleeping. Sometimes I stare at nothing and just feel trapped, jealous of people who fit into their usual clothes and sleep through a night. Sometimes I feel up to a shower or brief outing; other times I’m too savagely exhausted to talk. Most of the time I live in a state of baseline fatigue that leaves me barely functional but not really myself.

Time has no meaning, and I never realized before how much I needed time to have meaning. He has existed now for three weeks, and that is all I can say for myself for the same period of time, that I existed. I helped grow his little double chin; I kept him from wallowing in excrement. My body healed itself from a good amount of its soreness and adjusted to making milk. That is something, D keeps reminding me; that is a lot.

I am most reminded of how much he’s changed things when I look at E. I look at her hands and they seem gargantuan; she seems much too heavy to hold; I changed her diaper once and it felt grotesquely huge. She seems more boisterous, willful, and demanding than I remember, but D says it’s only because I am more tired now. I am amazed at phrases coming out of her mouth I don’t recall her knowing; she blithely counted from one to ten yesterday so fast and accurately I couldn’t believe it. I sort of miss the days she left out the four and six.

I feel sad and a little guilty about this, but I don’t miss her as much as I thought I would. She takes so much energy to be around, to love, that I can only take it in small doses and then feel relieved for a reprieve.

But most of all this insular existence is lonely. I feel the people who love me reaching out through the haze, to run the world for me—my mom and husband have been amazing in this regard. Just yesterday D took a night shift so I could sleep between feeds, and I came back to our room to find the bed made with fresh sheets and glasses of juice waiting. But in the end it comes down to the baby and me at some quiet, ungodly hour of the night, my body exhausted and my mind wandering. This is how I escape the solitude; I think and imagine and wander through stories. I read through about ten books a week, make up new stories, revisit old ones.

But in the end I come back and it’s still me in this room with this baby. I lie in bed and pray for peace for my mind, rest for my body. I look outside and realize time has passed and the leaves are changing, and this is life, this is a life growing and my body healing and I try to be okay with it all.