Talk Softly

I keep meaning to type a quick update . . . after so much turmoil earlier in the year, everything has settled down to the point that I find myself without much to say. I'm spending the summer stretching my budget beyond previously unimagined limits (this turned out not to be the best time to find a new job), planting peas and building "railroad castles" with my toddler, and enjoying what I can about the third trimester of pregnancy. Our daughter will be here in the middle of August.

Sometimes I feel remiss in not writing more. But I'm discovering the freedom of living beyond words. After years of school and desk work, constantly typing up all my ideas and feelings, it's liberating to live life without stopping to imagine its narration. Or as our son reminds us, when we get too worked up in debate and analysis around here, "Too woud, Mommy Daddy! Talk softwy." And sometimes, the quieter we are, the more peaceful it is.

I'm hoping that this might help when the baby is here, in those early days when our family is reduced to its fundamental functionings of eat and sleep. When Malcolm was born, I struggled to explain and express every detail of my Parenting Experience. Even my paradigm of being a "more intuitive parent" was entangled in intellectual conviction and cognitive research. Even the most intimate aspects of my family's experience -- our cloth diapers, our breastfeeding, my cesarean scar -- I strained to mentally justify, to respond to counteraguments (imagined or real), to politicize. Of course, it was good to care about my choices and even to become an advocate. But it exhausted me. At one point I realized that I honestly could not count higher than "two." And ultimately, mothering a newborn is impossible to think your way through (or around).

So we'll try again. To move through this next big challenge while really letting go of explaining and documenting it. To languidly answer "I don't know" to doctors and nurses who quiz me about infant care. To doze in sunbeams like a cat. To talk softly. To touch and feel and care for my children. Without rationale, without explanation. Accountable to no one but them.