2011 - Talk Birth

and threads of your fears.
Wrap your child’s cries around
the skein of your days.
Stop racing to meet your familiar ways–
know change
will always beat you.
Lower that small fist of resistance
still struggling to rise within you–start now–
unclench your life.
———
I feel like I have spent my whole mothering journey trying to unclench my life and to surrender fully to the
rhythm of life with small children. I ”should” myself a lot about this actually, telling myself about various
things at various points during various days, ”you need to just give up. You need to surrender. You need
to figure out when to quit.” To be clear, this can be about things as simple as fixing myself breakfast or as
complicated as wondering if I should give up blogging. As I’ve referenced, I’ve been going through a period
of internal debate about my blog and my writing and wondering if I should just stop writing for a while.
I feel like I am constantly awash with blog ideas and can spend the better part of a day waiting for the
opportunity to finally have a few minutes to write one. While I really love it and find it fulfilling to do, I
don’t like the tickling feeling that I’m spending so much time waiting to write about my life, that I’m not
actually fully living my life. And, I do not like the frustrated, blocked, squelched, and denied feeling I get
when I’m not ”allowed” the space in my day I feel like I need to write (see my post about ”[2]my music”).
So, I’ve spent quite a bit of time moaning and groaning about how I just need to know when to quit. I
also somewhat coincidentally stumbled on a blog post by [3]Progressive Pioneer about quitting blogging, in
which she makes a lot of interesting points about the ”darker side” of blogging.
And, duh, I know some people reading might think, ”it’s simple. Just write when you have time
and don’t write when life is too hectic. It’s just a blog, dummy.” And, I know that maybe someone will
comment and say that I just need to find, ”balance” (which is why I already wrote about that [4]here).
I know myself well enough to know that isn’t how I work though—I am very black and white about my
responsibilities. Either I can make room in my life for something or I can’t. I cannot STAND having things
lurking in the back of my brain that I want to do, or should be doing, or thought I was going to be able
to do. I either have to do them, or cut off the possibility all together, otherwise they haunt me. I am
almost pathologically responsible and it is impossible for me to ”just relax” when I have a to-do or ought-to
or thought-I-was-going-to-get-to hanging over my head—even if they are completely self-imposed. Despite
parenting for almost 8 years, I continue to have trouble realizing when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em,
often struggling to keep working on something or doing something, even when it would make more sense to
just quit—or, perhaps more rationally, take a break and come back later.
But, a couple of months ago as I struggled to complete something and simultaneously berated myself
about not knowing when to quit, I also had a companion thought—is this what I want to teach my
children? That when something feels difficult or is hard work or feels like a struggle, you just quit?! Do I
want to raise children who give up when something isn’t going perfectly smoothly? Do I want them to learn
to just throw up their hands, throw in the towel, and never raise a small fist of resistance? If I’d ”known
when to quit” trying to have another baby, I wouldn’t have Alaina right now. She is here expressly because I
didn’t give up. I kept going even though it was hard and I felt like quitting and I even felt like maybe I was
ignoring signs that told me I should quit. Maybe I’m actually glad I haven’t yet learned when to fold. So, I
hold companion thoughts, that there is grace and ease in surrender; it makes sense, is harmonious, is zen.
And, it is brave to try again. To not give up. There is beauty and strength in persistence and in refusing to
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