i'm still writing 2012 on everything accidentally.

i usually aim to write about one blog here a month, but i was really shocked to log in and see the last photos posted are from thanksgiving!  jeez, time just flies by, even when days sometimes seem to stretch on forever.

we had a pretty raucous little christmas here in davis california, a full house with the california rahmans and their bichon mandy, my parents and brother, later joined by my true blue buddy zach and his energetic black labs phoebe and joey...what an awesome little circus we had going for a few days!

most people would shudder at the thought of hosting double digits of family members over the holidays, but my fam is different.  benjamin franklin once so aptly stated, "fish and visitors smell after three days."  he might be right in most cases, but these rahmans really roll with the punches and make great houseguests (remember our adventures in the west virginia blackout this summer?).  for the duration of their stay, my home remained spotless, my children entertained, my refrigerator overflowing with freshly cooked goods daily.  i'd say i rather miss the big injection of life (and cleanliness) that came with all those guests.  here's hoping it becomes a new christmas tradition.


highlights of the holiday included a new standard for indian christmas eve dinner (in spite of the patriarch grinch trying to sabotage the effort), many games of dominoes, day trips to tahoe and napa, and a lot of food.  so much food.  wow.  and as usual, many people had great photo ops with our kids...we have precisely zero pictures with them ourselves--based on the photos of xmas 2012 onlookers will definitely wonder where david and i traveled to as company took over our house and assumed parenting responsibilities.
                           

                       
                       
                       

the month of december was pretty packed even before the holidays arrived.  with david's now more lenient schedule, we were at a different holiday party every weekend of the month, first for my running club, then for his hospital, and finally, in a grand romantic gesture, he whisked me away to see the nutcracker live and i think we both might have fallen asleep after confirming during the intermission that we had totally different interpretations of what the hell it's even about.  what can i say, at least we're equally unrefined.

david opted for more days off around christmas in exchange for working through new year's eve and day, leaving me to tuck in the kids at the end of 2012 and spend the last hours of the year just as i spent them each year of my life until age 23--on the couch, with my parents.  as it should be.

our end of year discussions revolved around the usual suspects...new goals for improving my knitting designs and skills, adventuring more into sewing, and more structured running...as i wondered if 2013 would be my marathon year, a ligament in my right leg began whining loudly in premature protest.  but i'm definitely not ruling it out.
                        
any new year discussion would be woefully incomplete without mentioning one very notable event in our family:  emily and eric welcomed their much anticipated twins, rosa and calvin on january 6.  i doubt i'll ever have to understand how parents of twin infants survive, but they seem to be doing quite well so far.  the competition now begins for who will be the most photographed children in the history of the world.

aside from all the excitement around the holidays, life has been droning on a little for us, or me at least, on the home front.  it almost doesn't surprise me anymore that i have *still* been unable to find work in a hospital.  i finally bit the bullet and began applying to some nursing agencies, which i'd reserved as a last resort because i never found agency nurses to be treated particularly well.  however, desperate times call for desperate measures, and i'm choosing to focus on the positive--fully deciding my own schedule, seeing several different hospital systems first hand, getting my foot in several doors (hopefully), etc.  i'm currently in the long process of completing an endless trail of paperwork, physicals, drug tests, vaccine titers, and online quizzes to gain compliance with all the major hospital systems in the sacramento valley.  perhaps in another month or so, i'll again find myself actually seeing patients, without a second of clinical orientation.  terrifying.  but, we always have to start somewhere.

my struggle to find work has put life on hold a bit, as i didn't want to enroll the kids in classes i couldn't shuttle them to, or to make other commitments we couldn't fulfill.  and, in spite of our temperatures still reaching the 50s regularly, i suppose winter is relative (northern california gets greener in the winter!  amazing!), and people still retreat indoors during these colder months (whereas in the midwest, any 50 degree day in january will have whole towns out in shorts playing frisbee and lighting up their grills).  just to seal the deal, at the advice of my personal podiatrist, i've was off the trails for two solid weeks, and i'm only now just inching back to my previous mileage.  this has all had an isolating effect on the three of us--the kids seem not to mind too much, but i have been getting major cabin fever, and that inevitably trickles down to them.

here's the thing.  parenting small children is hard.  very hard.  i imagine parenting large children is also hard, but can't yet speak from experience.  i realized quickly that while many moms in davis have the luxury of staying home with their children, because i fully believe that is what it is--a true luxury to be with your babies while they are babies, while they still idolize you and adore you, few of them are home with their kids all the time.  either one or all children attend school or daycare.  there are playgroups, activities, interests that allow adults to be adults, separate from their kids being kids.  and before we lived in such a highly individualized society, the whole village participated in the rearing of these little rascals.  not in this family.  it is all mom, almost all the time. not surprisingly then, one person doing the work of an entire village is exhausting and tireless, with little time and energy to appreciate the rewards.

i have given stay at home parenting a lot of thought now that i've really found myself in the thick of it, and really don't seem all too graceful or adept at it.  since i've started spending ALL my time with my kids, i'm suddenly overwhelmed with constant, nagging feelings of guilt and inadequacy i really never experienced when i worked part time.  struggling to appreciate my precious, ample time with them, trying to remember everything about them is so fleeting, that every day they are growing, that all too soon reese will lose that plump, open mouthed curvature of his cheeks when he looks down to focus on a project, a look only babies have, that bean has long since left behind.  and that she soon won't be looking so vocally for my approval, laughing at my funny faces, or asking me to stay with her in her [new big girl] bed.  i try, really i do, to remind myself that as we live and breathe daily, those delights, that magic, is all slipping through my fingers.

but, distance makes the heart grow fonder.  and with no distance, not for a moment, not in our home, not outside, not in the car, the shower or bathroom, not in my bedroom or on the couch, not while stirring a pot, pushing a vacuum, holding a book, fork, cup or pencil, is there every any distance.  and without a job, that is every minute of every day.  and so, it's easy to take it all for granted.  in fact, it's easy to feel really miserable amid the constant joy and miracles of watching two babies grow into beautiful little children.  if that doesn't make you feel guilty and inadequate, you have no soul.

as i see it, there are two ways to parent toddlers:  brute force, or constant psychological manipulation.  the former requires less mental energy, but more tolerance to screaming tantrums that can last hours.  i have always had freakishly sensitive ears.  i despise noise and relish in silence.  i request david watches football on mute.  so tempting as it is to make it clear by sitting atop them that if i say now is the time for a diaper change, NOW is the time for a diaper change, we almost always go for the latter.  which means that, depending on david's schedule, i might go days, plural, without ever having a conversation above a 2.5 year old's comprehension level involving an intricate and deft degree of manipulation leading them to believe what they are about to do is their idea.  with no adult to laugh off the absolute absurdity of this constant battle, it's all too easy to feel like a lunatic.

day after day, the routine, the feeding and brushing and changing and reasoning against reason, all carried along by a constant stream of perfectly timed, perfectly phrased suggestions to move from one activity to another without screaming, a daily operation that would put an fbi sting to shame.  any brief moment of escape is a reminder that again, laundry is calling to be folded, food to be prepared, dishes to clean, floors to sweep, though i just did exactly those things not a few hours ago.  in the constant repetition, it's easy to feel adrift, like nothing i do has any lasting impact or really matters (especially coming from a career where even on my worst day of work, i still probably changed someone's life for the better).  as a very task oriented person, it's incredibly challenging not to have the satisfaction of checking things off the list, because the same tasks just keep arising over and over again and are never permanently complete.  it's difficult to feel accomplished or content in that context, though of course my rational self is pointing to the obvious, that of COURSE what i do matters, that what i do when i care for my children matters more than anything else i could possibly hope to do.  but it doesn't feel that way.  which provokes a lot of guilt--how can this opportunity not be totally satisfying to me?

as parents, it is so easy to blame ourselves.  something must be wrong with me, that i do not find every day an utter joy to behold with two healthy, lovely little children who are the envy of all of davis with their manners and sweetness and remarkable hair.  how can i lose sight of the huge rewards, not be appreciative that their clinginess reflects their profound love for me, that their alarming intelligence arises from the ways i have taught and challenged them, that their maturity is born of the expectations i have firmly set, that their empathy for those around them, down to their tone of voice and wording, comes directly from the way their keen eyes and eager hearts have seen me speak and act toward others?  undoubtedly, i have a lot to be proud of in those two in the here and now, not to mention all they might accomplish in the future guided by the strong and loving presence of their mother.

mostly though, i'm pulling out my hair and begging desperately for a break.  i find myself simultaneously so under stimulated yet overstimulated (from the constant invasions of personal space and assault on my senses of sound, touch, and smell) that retreating into a cave in the forest sounds all too appealing.  that's not a joke.  i fantasize about living as a hermit in the sierras.  and that's just life, isn't it?  in my own mind, encompassed in a larger social fabric, no matter how much i remind myself to appreciate the present, i'm always too bogged down in the difficulties of the present, clawing through today to just get to tomorrow, totally missing the todays in the process.  carving out any "me" time seems selfish in spite of knowing it would make me a better mother.  if i'm going to sacrifice time with my children, it should be for a cause that contributes to our family in other ways, like augmenting our income.  but what kind of person abandons their children to nurture total strangers?

there's a pervading myth in our society that women can have it "all."   there have been so many advances in women's lib, increased rates of education and salary, career advancement, but with a continued strong sense of who we should be and what we should mean to our families borrowed from generations past.  they are socially impossible, contradictory ideas.  we have become so focussed on having it "all" that, i really believe we're chasing an unhealthy expectation.  we can't have it all (unless of course, we already believe we do).  there aren't enough hours in the day, synapses in our brains, or patience in our hearts to be the best at everything.  and somehow, we, i, feel really bad about that.  knowing i want to be the best possible mother is a no-brainer.  but looking into myself to discover what exactly that requires of me personally, that takes real courage and maturity and introspection difficult to fine tune.

i know this is a very real and honest look into our family and into my mind.  a little heavy for a blog, to be sure, and i have hesitated to speak so frankly about in the past.  but if i'm thinking and feeling these things, there must be many, many others (can i get a hell yes?).  it's so easy to make this space just a photo album, focussing on the memorable *good* moments we share.  but if it is to be our history, then i feel it ought to be honest.  time will heal these wounds as it always does, and distance as the years pass will make my heart grow fond of the days where i always had two children in my lap, the sound of bean singing like nobody is listening, or the sight of reese dancing like this (why are there two videos uploaded?  gotta love blogger.  enjoy it twice.):

maybe someday bean will have a moment of quiet when her own little ones are tucked away for the night, and will wonder to herself pitifully how her mother ever got through it.  and she can come here and see for herself, i just barely did.  and hopefully that will surprise her.  hopefully, she will remember only good things.

so, in addition to my ongoing efforts toward improving my running, my knitting, my sewing, my various creative endeavors, let 2013 also be a year where i find the strength to continue identifying what makes me the best possible mother, even if i don't like what it might require of me to arrive there (that's parenting in a nutshell).  to strive to achieve balance in my own mind and to quiet my soul, so that i might be able to hear all my children are saying to help me do just that, rather than perceiving their actions as the opposite.  let me fill their days with good things, so that can be what they remember, and what they seek the courage to do for their own children.