BY: Stephanie Wolff Mirmina
When a child enters the world through you, it alters everything on a psychic, psychological, and purely practical level. You're just not free anymore to do what you want to do. And it's not the same again. Ever.
~Jane Fonda
It was the shoes. Definitely the shoes that were pushing me over the edge. I caught the tiny sneaker just as it was about to hit the dirt. My son squealed in protest. I was one step away from a nervous breakdown. We were on vacation. Well, technically, my thirteen-month-old son and I were on vacation. My husband was working at a month-long conference in Geneva -- the perfect opportunity for us to play and explore.
At first, I felt a bit guilty, a bit greedy even, anticipating this trip. It was quite a stay-at-home mom's coup: a month in Europe with husband, all (most) expenses paid, great apartment, my own agenda. I loved exploring new cities. It was my thing. I don't do rope bridges in Borneo, camp out for Burning Man or "summit," but I can really work an urban Lonely Planet guidebook. Leave no café unturned. I actually felt sorry for my husband, who would be cooped up in an office. I pictured myself at restaurants, markets, museums. I even dredged up my high school French.
So really, the inappropriateness of having a nervous breakdown while on such a glamorous escapade just seemed, well, gauche. How could this not be going well? I had a city map. I had an all-access subway pass. I had extra milk. And I was at the playground holding onto my son on the wooden rocking horse and about to cry. The added faux pas of crying at a playground just made things worse. How could anyone be sad at a playground? I guess the same way one could be sad at a carousel (yesterday), a street market (the day before), and a botanical garden (last weekend).
So, the shoes. His feet repelled them. And the socks they rode in on. I was constantly replacing them, wrestling him in his stroller to try to replace them, or worrying that his feet were going to get frostbite when I no longer had the strength to replace them. I knew things had gotten bad when I snapped at the fifth grandmother that day who grabbed my coat to reprimand me for his not wearing shoes.
It was only a symptom anyway. It wasn't the shoes. Even I could see that. No, it was also the sweater. And the jacket. And the hat. And the not wanting to be put in the stroller. And screeching on the tram. It took us longer to leave the house than it did to be out before we had to come in for a nap. Sometimes we did not even leave the house in the morning before the eye rubs and yawns started and we unpacked, undressed, and went back to bed.
I don't know why this was such a shock, not getting anything done. We don't get anything done at home. If we get dressed, have a bite to eat, and make it to the market before it closes to pick up some bananas, we're high-fiving each other all the way back. And that's when it hit me. I thought I was going to be on vacation. I needed a vacation. One appeared before me. I jumped at it. I thought it would be a nice change of scenery -- that I could maybe escape the sameness of life at home. What I forgot was that I now traveled with my own little self-contained life. Which, I guess, is more or less true of everyone. Wherever you go, there you are. You travel around the world only to confront the same baggage (no pun intended) against a different backdrop.
Only this was the concrete version of that metaphysical truism. I literally had my baggage attached to my leg as I tried to cook dinner. It came with me everywhere. It made its presence known loudly and often. Obviously, the problem was that my son did not know we were on vacation. He carried on with the same attention-getting tactics that I was mostly able to ignore back home.
I could appreciate the good and the cute -- the giggling, the snuggling in, the saying "nana" for "banana," the eye crinkle -- as much as anyone, but it wasn't enough to get me through the day with my sanity intact. As soon as anything "less than good" happened, I immediately put forth so much energy wishing things were different that I worked myself into a funk and negated any residual good parts. Why can't he nap for more than a half hour? Why can't he eat the green bean instead of throwing it? I fought with myself far more than my son did. It started to seem as if the days were all bad, punctuated occasionally by something going well.
I think I had the feeling that if I could just get the day to go smoothly, I could have time to get back to my own agenda. But as I thought this, it was slowly occurring to me that this taking-care-of-my-son thing was my agenda. It wasn't something to get through before I could get back to my regularly scheduled day. This was it. Keeping my son safe, happy, well-fed and diapered. This was the job. This was what I was doing with my days. This was the work of parenting. That it took thirteen months and seven days for this to sink in staggered the mind a little. Was this denial a result of some latent post-post-post-partum depression?
It was like that picture-in-picture function on televisions. Your main program is running large on the screen, while the secondary program runs in a tiny box in a lower corner. If you try to watch the tiny screen all the time, it will take all your concentration to ignore the big screen, and probably give you a headache from all the squinting. It wasn't designed to be used that way. The large one is the main program. If you want to focus on the other for a while, flip the images. Otherwise, watch what you've got.
I wanted that. I wanted to appreciate what was looming large in front of me. I didn't want to fight with myself anymore over what should be on the big screen. I had two choices: denial or acceptance. Acceptance seemed more functional. The big picture could remain in focus: I was in charge of raising my son all day. Children are messy. They don't listen. Why double my misery by denying that any of the above is real or expected? I obviously had some work to do, but I was starting to get that my problems didn't seem to be stemming from Geneva, the weather, or my husband's long working hours.
As the afternoon chill settled in, my son looked up at me from his playground horse and whinnied, a big grin spreading across his face at his own cleverness. His other shoe looked up at me from the fresh mud below. My son was having a good time. I decided to join him.
http://www.beliefnet.com/Inspiration/Chicken-Soup-For-The-Soul/2009/11/Waiting-for-the-Other-Shoe-to-Drop.aspx?source=NEWSLETTER&nlsource=49&ppc=&utm_campaign=DIBSoup&utm_source=NL&utm_medium=newsletter
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