No Great Illusion

[nogreatillusion]

Instead of feeling this constant anxiety and pressure that the right thing is going to pass me by if I don’t hurry up and figure it out and chase it down, what if I believed that the right thing will come to me and I will know it because it will feel like home and it will be easy and the decision won’t be scary? What if I lived fully in the life I have now rather than keeping one eye on the door, waiting for some other life to speed by like a subway car that I’m desperate to catch? I don’t need to catch a different or better life. I can love what I have right now. I can be open to the future, to change, to newness, but I don’t have to live in a state of discontentment and unrest in the meantime. I can let this be enough in the present moment. I can relax into the life I have, and the future that will pull me forward like a steady stream of water. I am not stagnant or drowning. I do not have to swim for my life.

[nogreatillusion]

Quick note:

If you reply to a stranger’s very personal poem with unsolicited life advice that is also slightly tinged with threat, please consider that you have entirely missed the point.

[nogreatillusion]

Robins

My mother taught me

to wish on the first robin

of spring

but this year

I was busy and there

never seemed to be time

for things like wishes

when there is just

so much laundry

to be folded

and apples

to be sliced

and anyway, I didn’t think

about the robins

because I was thinking

about the grocery list

and the meeting

we had last Thursday

when seven members of the staff

told us we should think

about taking my son

out of their school

and I didn’t even

scream.

I don’t know if it is

this way for you,

but for me, it is nearly

impossible

to listen to my own mind

and ask it what it needs

in a house full of children

and their noise

and their needs

and I have only been a mother for

7 years —

nearly 8 if you count the 9 months

I grew and carried and worried

and vomited, which of course,

I do —

so I am still just figuring things out

like how to remember

to make lunch for myself

on busy days

and how to leave the house

without a single other person

buckled into their car seat

and complaining

and how to say

TOO MANY SOUNDS

when there are simply

too many sounds

like the vacuum,

the tv, the air purifier,

and three children who are each

biologically designed to demand

my attention above all else

and the thing is that when

I find myself in a rare quiet

place like my favorite

corner of the library

which has a stone wall and

windows on two sides

I am struck by

my own voice rising finally

to the surface

and how I have missed her

in the chaos and cacophony

and I tell her how things are going

(badly, but I am stronger

than I used to be)

and she tells me what she needs

(a good book, some quiet,

and a Pepsi from the soda machine

because they don’t have Coke

but she doesn’t mind)

and outside the window

there are so many robins

and we watch them

together

before it is time

to go home.

[nogreatillusion]

Arlo says, “I’m sorry for saying I didn’t want to do the schedule, mama. I’m still not going to do it, but I’m sorry because I know you worked hard on it.”

And I laugh because it’s sweet and stubborn, wonderfully defiant and empathetic. My god, parenting is so much about making plans and then giving them up when they don’t work anymore.

Two nights ago, I crept into the kids’ room after bedtime to tell Thora I saw her painting of the solar system and that I thought it was gorgeous. She told me she loved me (rare and thrilling!) and asked me to lie with her, so I climbed up to the top bunk, careful not to wake Arlo sleeping below. She told me that Uranus rotates on its side because of a big crash. I told her that I didn’t know that and then we lay together in the dark, thinking about planets and painting. I felt an almost overwhelming amount of tenderness.

Marigold opens her mouth wide for a large slice of apple. She reaches for her favorite toy — a colorful, spinning wooden cylinder with a ball inside. At nap time, she rolls to her belly right away, snuggles into her mattress. When she wakes, she lifts her head, babbles, and squints when I flick on the light. She wiggles her hips on the changing table.

*

Things have been hard. The school calls. Arlo got removed from class again. We have a conference with his teacher. We speak to his doctor. We strategize at night, after the kids are in bed. How can we help him be happy? We just want him to be happy.

Thora points at the feelings chart face with the label “Cared For” and says “I never feel this.” I know it’s not really true — that our brains can trick us into believing our momentary feelings are permanent despite all evidence to the contrary. Still, I take it personally and feel like a failure.

Last night, I had a mental health spiral and this morning I got angry with the kids for refusing to get ready for school for the millionth day in a row, and then I apologized for yelling. Afterward, I went to the dentist to have a cavity filled. The anesthetic didn’t work and I cried the whole time, tears streaming down my cheeks and into my ears as she drilled. It was deeply embarrassing.

As soon as I got home, I had a massive allergy attack. Marigold was fussy and crying so I put us both in the bathtub. I let her teethe on the bath toys and tried not to think about how dirty they probably are. The hot water ran out quickly.

At some point, there will be a depression I can’t come back from — a low so low I can’t claw my way out of it with books or texts or wine or visits to my therapist.

I’m scared. I don’t want to die but I don’t know how to live through this. If you asked me to point to a face on the feelings chart, I might point to “Cared For,” and say “I never feel this,” but it wouldn’t really be true. It’s just the way our brains trick us.

[nogreatillusion]

I made this rule that if I feel severely depressed, I’m allowed to go on ThriftBooks.com and order as many books as I want as long as each one costs less than $10. It’s a good rule and I genuinely think it’s as useful as any other coping mechanism, so feel free to borrow it. If you’re ever thinking about suicide, I’m giving you permission to do this instead.

[nogreatillusion]

All you need to know about my life right now is that the precise muscle I have strained in my neck is the one I use and overuse to lean slightly forward and to the left to kiss my baby in my arms.

And still I kiss her.

[nogreatillusion]

There are days when I feel deeply in love with life, where I greet the future with curiosity and welcome. And there are times - sometimes even in the same day! - when I am struck by the realization that I am not going to make it. Or rather, that the depression is going to kill me before anything else does. And even after all this time, it’s such a shock. Such a disappointment.

I think people live as long as they can and sometimes it’s not very long and that’s no one’s fault, but it sure doesn’t seem fair.

[nogreatillusion]

Oh, is the work of my life trying to figure out how to be some version of myself in spite of the grief and the fear and the choices of others?

Has it turned out that motherhood is less about teaching and shaping and helping and more about witnessing without judgment?

Oh, am I going to have to find a way to go on, unlinking my happiness from theirs?

What a heartbreak, to have to give up on fixing everyone else in order to fix myself.

[lena-oleanderson]

also a poem from the new, unreleased collection. very possibly my own all-time favourite.

[nogreatillusion]

Like some turn of the century invalid wife, I keep to my bed, rarely even venturing downstairs. I see my children briefly, at bedtime, when they clamor into the bedroom, burrowing under my velvet duvet, begging to stay a little bit longer.

Beside the bed — a trash bag for catching vomit, balled tissues, a bag of jolly ranchers for banishing the metal taste from my mouth. On the dresser — pill bottles and boxes and empty wrappers. Pills for the nausea, pills for the depression, pills for the baby, pills for the heartburn. Vitamins and sleeping pills. Water glasses. Empty cans of seltzer and ginger ale.

I hear Ben sing the tooth brushing song. Ice slides noisily off the roof. I retch into a bag and wipe my face on a towel still damp from my bath. The children argue over whose story will be first.

The baby is the size of an avocado this week. I turn names over in my mind, but none of them sound right. I want a name that reminds me of open space and joy, wildflowers and hope. I want to remember that I am carrying a whole second life, that everything is possible.

[nogreatillusion]

I’ve kept food down 3 times in the past 5 days. I feel like a ghost.

I don’t know how to get through this. It’s hard enough to be a person. I don’t know how to be a parent through this.

[nogreatillusion]

On the last day of 2024, I threw up twice and barely left my bed, except to visit the doctor.

I saw my baby move on the ultrasound, suddenly looking like a real baby and not simply a blob.

This was, undoubtedly, the worst year of my life. I lost my grandma, almost lost my mom, and very nearly lost myself. Fittingly, I have capped off the year with 24 hour morning sickness so intense and prolonged that I have struggled to remember why I want to be alive.

But the fact of the matter is that I do. I want to live. I want to bring this little life into the world and I want to experience love and joy and life’s strange surprises.

I almost didn’t make it through the year, but then I did. And I brought someone with me, too.

[nogreatillusion]

I am ready for something enormous and wonderful to happen.

[nogreatillusion]

Just once in my life I would like to tell one of my parents a goal or dream of mine and have them say “oh wow you would be so great at that, you should go for it!”

I wonder what that would be like. If someone in your life is that person for you, never let them go.

[nogreatillusion]

Libras yearn for beauty. That’s what they always say. Is it any wonder I should miss my own so much? I am not entirely myself when I’m not surrounded by beauty of one type or another. I hide this from Thora. She’s a Virgo: practical, critical, analytical. She’s not preoccupied with beauty, and while I think this is good, I find it foreign. Isn’t that the way of children? Admirable and unknowable. I love most the way they are entirely themselves, how little effect I seem to have.

Everyone in this house is some sort of perfectionist, each of us carefully tending our individual gardens. We are all stubborn and particular in our own ways. What is beauty if not an instrument of control? We’re all just trying to make sense of the world.

[nogreatillusion]

Oh my god I am coming back into my own life. Like a timid stranger, unfamiliar with comfort, I am being asked to take a seat and hesitantly choosing the hardest chair.

[nogreatillusion]

I am going to stuff my life so full of good things that there will be hardly any room left for sadness, loneliness, pain, hurt feelings, or self pity. I am going to turn my life into a magpie’s nest of marvels. I am going to weave a tapestry of my joys.