Updating

My husband and I spent Thursday night (our first child-free night in months, as the kids were spending a long weekend at my parents') picking out flooring and fixtures with the contractor we recently hired to do some updating in our bathroom and kitchen. As with much of my child-free time, it was neither relaxing nor romantic.

I grew up in a house where for most of my childhood problems from dysfunctional toilets to stalling cars were solved with a trip to the library for the appropriate how-to guide, a fair amount of cursing, and eventually my father's own hands. After our evening with the contractor, I felt stressed and agitated.  My husband, who grew up in a family where every dilemma from an unhung picture to a burnt out taillight was solved by paying someone, asked me what was wrong. 

"I just want him to like me," I told my husband of the contractor, "and also to think I have good taste."

"You don't need to care whether he likes you," he explained patiently, "that's why we're paying him money."

The next morning, I started in on the ambitious redecorating project I had planned for the girls' room. As I set to work transforming a heap of leftover furniture into a new bedroom "set" for their room, I examined my motives for turning a sunny and responsibility-free summer weekend into an episode of Trading Spaces.  I decided that my sudden DIY fervor was driven by a need to prove my own handiness and self-sufficiency so that I might feel better about hiring someone to remove the faux-tile and crumbling vinyl the previous owners left behind.

Later, after we'd filled a contractor bag with the mountain of neglected stuffed animals and torn up board books that would go out with the trash, I announced urgently for the third time since we'd started cleaning out the room, "We need to have another child." 

Calmly, my husband dared me, "Sure."

In that moment, as I imagined rolling back the clock to pregnancy, infancy, toddler years, I realized what it was all about, all my priming, painting, drilling, decoupaging, for goodness sake.

I cannot keep Big E from drifting toward tween-hood, but I can take the bed I slept in through my teenage years, the one whose scrolly white metal and brass accents seemed impossibly glamorous at the time, and spray it a suitably little girl pink for her.

I cannot keep either of my girls from growing out of their clothes, their shoes, their babyhood, their toddlerhood, and, always on my mind lately, their childhood, but I can use chalkboard paint and casters to make personalizable underbed storage of the drawers from the little dresser that held Big E's 2T dresses and footy pajamas.

I cannot change the fact that Little E outgrew her toddler bed (or that we admitted this to ourselves about a year late), but I can paste her big sister's old headboard with cute puppies and kittens and varnish it over and over to convince myself that she will always love cute doggies just as she does now.

And the butterfly wall decals that I affixed above Big E's bed.  I wish that I could say that they are about embracing transformation or something equally lovely, but really they are about the constant scorekeeping between the girls, the arguing and accusing and fit-throwing that has me feeling like the kind of angry, yelling, furrowed-brow mother that I had never planned to be.  These butterflies are about how miffed I knew Big E would be by Little E's dogs and the frustration that I channeled into my vise grip on the handle of the race car cart as I pushed the squealing, squabbling girls through the endless Home Depot trip to stock up on spray paint and casters and drawer pulls.

Chalkboard paint and decoupage medium won't keep my kids from getting older every day, just as mourning the passage of time won't guarantee that I appreciate each moment I'm in. And having a baby to reset the ticking clock won't forestall all the growing and aging and changing.

And besides, where would he sleep?

Dream: For my girls, on the close of another year

I was raised without religion and as a result, my knowledge of The Bible is basic at best. Yet at this time of year I reflect on my cobbled understanding of the Christmas story, and I feel a rush of recognition; though I'm pretty sure this is sacrilegious, I find communion in the story of a woman who, in the dark stillness of a December night, experiences a miracle of birth and light. 

It happened to me, too.  Twice.

Big E emerged into the December darkness to make me a mother seven years ago.  I labored for 24 hours, battered by the pain but unrelenting in my determination to have a drug-free birth.  In the last late night hours before Big E was born, I was delirious with pain and fatigue, moaning to the midwife, over and over like a mantra, "I'm dying; you're killing me."

When my husband and I headed to the hospital through a cold, dark December night four years ago, I thought they'd probably send us home.  Though the contractions were coming a minute apart, they were nowhere near as crushing as I remembered from Big E's birth.  No longer as rigid in my convictions, I was open to an epidural this time around, but the opportunity never presented itself.  Little E was born 45 minutes after we arrived at the hospital, to the sound of the Christmas carols our nurse had switched on in the birthing room.

Their personalities often seem as polar as the circumstances of their births.  Big E, on turning seven, has graduated from little kid status to just plain kid and scolds her sister for talking too loudly while she's trying to read, which she does almost ceaselessly.  Little E, now just about four, still hangs on my leg to be carried.  When I tell her she's too big, she pouts that she's just a little baby and I give in, wishing she were right, still loving her clinging presence on my hip.  While good girl Big E stands rod straight and loudly enunciates a line from the Daisy Scout Promise to the crowd at her investiture ceremony, comedienne Little E, slumped on my lap, slaps her forehead and moans, "Oh brother, this is taking forever," to the amused agreement of the parents around us.

I never could have known seven years ago what my children would be to me.  How could I have realized they would render me at once so immune and so vulnerable?  Their existence blunts the stings and throbs of my daily life, yet even the tiniest harms they encounter sear my heart.  They are my beacon, the beam that guides me, that filtered through the gray haze of hormones and sleep deprivation after Big E's birth and burned through the dusky gloom of my work troubles last year.  If they are okay, my world is okay; thus, I must always make my world okay so that they will be, too.

I cry nearly every time I have to clear their drawers of outgrown clothes, reminiscing over every chocolate stained T-shirt and threadbare pair of jeans, and yet I thrill at every new stage, every little skill mastered, every small step taken.  I hate that we have moved through another year, but I would never want to miss knowing the women they will become.

And bittersweet as it is to mark a year gone, I know that as long as my girls are anywhere in this world there will be light in mine.

Dream: The baby season

For the past seven years, this time of year, when the nights grow chillier and the foliage is blunted from scorching to rusted, has brought my mind to the same place.  More than harvest or Halloween, these late days of autumn are, to me, the baby season.

 On Halloween, 2003 my husband and I sat on the stoop of the house where we had a tiny second-floor condo.  I had been pregnant with Big E since early that spring, but it had been an anxiety-ridden pregnancy full of scares and complications, and it wasn't until a neighbor asked that night about my due date that I allowed myself to realize that I was, indeed, a pregnant lady, that in a few weeks we would have a baby. 

Three years later, on the same night, Big E, as a fairy princess, and I, eight months pregnant, trick-or-treated around our new neighborhood where we had our own house and no longer shared a stoop.  The baby who would be Little E was due in mid-December, one day after Big E's third birthday, and I reminded myself that I really was a pregnant lady and that soon that squirmimg, kicking hump in my middle would be a swaddled baby who would grow into a tiny person like its sister.

When the baby season comes, I think of these Halloweens and of the two December nights when I struggled and pushed and screamed my girls into being.  And I think of the bubbly anticipation of all the nights between, of knowing what was coming, but not exactly, of knowing when it was coming, but not for sure.  I don't think about the skyrocketing blood pressure of both my pregnancies, those painfully urgent and undecipherable infant screams, the gray post-partum lows, the sad sibling lurking in the background.  I don't think about the days when I feel like I might drown in all of the tears and scowls, the no fairs, the why nots, the she always get everythings. 

I do think about doing it all again.  I think about the sleepy babies nursing and stroking my hair, about toothless smiles and little hands grabbing my fingers.  I think about the drawings that say I love Mom, about little sneakers skipping along next to mine, and about giggling girls burrowing into bed with us on weekend mornings.

Then I remember: our home and our cars are at capacity with two children.  If our finances are strained now, what would happen when we started a new round of daycare payments, not to mention adding a third college tuition?  And, above all,  we are happy and unspeakably lucky to have the healthy, hilarious, lovely girls that we do.  Would a third enhance this or throw it all into chaos? 

If I were to have maintained the clean symmetry that I achieved in spacing the girls nearly three years to the day, year folding neatly over year like a paper fan, I would have trick-or-treated with a baby on my hip this year.  While neither my husband nor I can slam the door on the possibility of one more, with each day we are watching it slowly close on its own.

Yet, every once in a while, especially now in the baby season,  I reach back and stay that door, if only for a while.