birthday

And Now We Are Two: Loving My Baby on His Second Birthday

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

Loving My Baby on His Second Birthday (Photo: Young white boy in pajamas running out of frame)

“Up Up Up!” my younger son cries, jabbing the air with his finger. I swing him up onto my lap, resting him on my left leg. He continues to clamber up me, holding onto my shoulders. “Up Up!” he says again. I can only say, “Dude, you’re as far up as you can go!”

But that’s his personality – always up, always bigger, always faster. Like his nickname of Little Bird, he’s both tiny and longs to fly.

Even when I was pregnant, he was constantly stretching and kicking, reminding me of his presence. He came into the world in a rush, almost a month early and with a labor so short that I gave birth less than a half-hour after we left the house for the hospital.

And now he’s two.

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Thoughts on 33

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

I am now solidly in my 30s*. At 32, I was only a couple of years removed from 30, arguably not so old. Although I was the mother of a small child, motherhood still felt terribly new in so many ways. Now I’m the mother of a kid who will be going to preschool in the fall, with another on the way. While Sprout regularly baffles me, I’m still more confident in my own skills than I was a year ago. I have a suburban house, a Prius that is now paid off (woohoo!), listen to NPR on a regular basis (Snap Judgment is sooo good), and read books about cleaning, for goodness sake. I’m practically a walking cliche. And yet, I don’t feel like I’ve sold my soul. In contrast, I think I’m closer to the person I want to be than ever.

Thoughts on 33 Last year, I talked about how I had been able to be open and honest in what would have previously been stressful social situations. This year, even the nagging doubts have faded. On the few occasions I’m hanging out with adults and not literally chasing a toddler, I don’t have energy to waste on being anxious. I’m just relieved for a chance to talk to my friends.

For example, I went to a Hygge party at my friends’ house on Saturday, which is supposed to evoke the Scandanavian feeling of “coziness” and spending time with friends around a fire. While the candles and thick hot chocolate helped, I just felt so safe. Even though I never imagined that I would tell the story of pumping milk on the second floor of a convention center to anyone at all, much less my male friends, I was recounting it without a care. (Previously, the idea of telling any story involving my breasts was horrifying, much less one involving machinery.)

Even my parenting, which I was so sensitive about people judging in the past, has become more low-stress. Perhaps it’s because everyone knows toddlers can be a pain or I’ve tolerated my fair share of tantrums lately (even in public!), but what other people think just doesn’t weigh on me like it used to.

My self-acceptance is only part of my new-found contentment. Another part is that I’m realizing I now have a lot of the things I always wanted. I always wanted to be married and have kids. While everyone is influenced by societal pressure, I also love both of those aspects of life. In terms of my career, my general position is about as close as you can get to a childhood dream. When I was in third grade, I wanted to be a marine biologist studying whales in the summer and a famous novelist in the winter. While my plan lacked a fundamental grasp of how careers worked, science communicator is pretty damn close. And of course, I always wanted to help people. While frustration and occasionally despair sets in when I contemplate how much needs to be done and how little each of us can do, I do know that my paid and volunteer work does “make a difference.”

Looking over the basics of my life, I’m coming to realize that my frustrations aren’t because of foundational problems, unlike some people. I don’t want to throw everything out and start over. Instead, the places that make me wring my hands are issues where I need to tweak things or find a better balance. That’s a hell of lot better than needing to start from scratch.

The visioning work I did earlier in the year helped me gain this perspective. While nothing is fundamentally wrong, I was starting to feel stagnant. Entering my thirties, I was just going along without a lot of thought to plans that wouldn’t pay off for years. We were busy enough with the huge changes involved in buying a house and having a child, not to mention all of the daily tasks in-between, for me to be strategic about the vision for my career or other life goals.

But just planning for the year shook something loose. From bucket lists to visioning documents, I keep coming across tools and prompts to give me momentum. Seeing a path forward is so much more encouraging than feeling trapped. While my to-do list remains a constant – especially getting ready for the baby – it’s now always in service of larger dreams. Keeping the context for all of the things I “need to do” in the front of my mind is much more motivating and less exhausting than doing them for the sake of it.

While I don’t know what the following year is going to bring, I feel more grounded than I have in a long time, perhaps ever. It’s a good place to be.

 

*This sentence originally said, “I am in my mid-30s.” When I mentioned it to Chris, he protested, “No, mid 30s is 34, 35, 36. You have at least one more year.” Then he paused and added, “Because if you have one more year, then I have one more year.” Indeed.

32 Years of Disastrous Beauty

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

I turned 32 years old today. A quarter of the time – if I’m lucky – I feel like I know what’s going on and am at peace. The rest of the time, I’m mentally windmilling every cell in my body in an effort to move forward in some disorganized, chaotic fashion. While the feeling of flailing has accelerated post-Sprout, becoming a mother has made me much more honest about both my strengths and failings. At this odd, not yet mid-life period, I find myself more comfortable with myself than ever before while still being deeply confused by life.

Becoming a mother certainly hasn’t made me less neurotic. In fact, I hear the voices of imaginary critics ever the louder these days. After all, people can judge me not only on my behavior but my child’s as well! But I’m able to call out those neuroses more often and label them as false. It doesn’t mean they’re gone – you can’t logic your way out of something irrational – but they don’t have as much control. I can see them as a conflicting song rather than allow them to become the primary melody of my thought. It’s a bit like the guy profiled on This American Life who loaded all of the most awful things his brain whispered to him throughout the day into a software program. He then programmed it to email insults to himself several times a day. Between the sheer repetition and the re-contextualization, his mind stopped processing them as bad and instead could see them as absurd. For me, the way parenting has turned up the volume on my neuroses has forced me to face them, instead of allowing them to lurk in the dark, dank alleyways of my mind.

Many of my anxieties stem from a need to control situations, which being the mother of a toddler is about as realistic an expectation as thinking he can read Hamlet. Letting go of my vision of “what should be,” of what a perfect mom or “real adult” looks like, is like giving up a mental lovey. My ability to judge myself – and shamefully, judge other people – is what I fall back on when my brain gets lazy. Without those false standards as a safety net, I have to do the hard work of extending compassion and grace to myself and others.

And that’s only one of the weaknesses I’ve been forced to work on instead of just sweeping them to the side. If I want to be the best mom I can be, I have to be the best person I can be, especially in the social skills that have been my greatest challenge. Being self-aware of what I genuinely can improve also gives me something to push back with when my brain waves absurdly exaggerated flaws in my face. While I still have a long way to go before being a good listener, I think I’ve improved a little. Learning to truly pay attention to a person who doesn’t yet speak my language has taken me out of my own head more than an adult ever could.

Fortunately, stripping away the layers of fear and shame and guilt, like Elsa in the song, has enabled me to find my more authentic self. Sometimes it isn’t pretty – although I haven’t caused anything to freeze over (yet) – it’s true. My awkward teenage self was told by well-meaning but clueless adults to just “be natural” and I always wanted to say, “I am! They just don’t like it.” The truth was, I didn’t like it either, so I tried to hide it and failed miserably. Now, I’m at the point in my life that if someone doesn’t appreciate my quirks and isn’t willing to forgive my flaws, I’m not going to worry about it. I have enough people who do love me that I’ll spend my energy and time with them.

The times I’ve been able to actually embrace this freedom have been liberating. On a work trip in the fall, I went out to dinner with my colleagues and we talked and laughed and shared fairly intimate parts of our lives. A little voice said, “You should be more careful,” but I ignored it and I’m glad I did. As it turned out, I learned something in that conversation that helped me support one of those friends when her family was going through a crisis. At Christmas, my in-laws hosted their Christmas Eve extravaganza with their long-time friends, all of their friends’ children, and the significant others of the now0grown children. Normally, I’m jittery at these get-togethers, trying to remember the names of a bunch of people I kind of know and all whom seem to remember every detail of my life. This year, somewhat buoyed by my sister-in-laws’ excellent cocktails, I felt so much more comfortable and relaxed. I could just “be” without worrying – a new sensation for me.

I hope in my coming 32nd year that I can find more ways to embrace the mess, the authenticity, the awkward beauty that is me and the people around me and the world we live in. Because there’s a lot of darkness in the world and in my head. While we can’t get rid of the darkness, we can bring light and love into it. After all, love is patient, love is kind, and love never fails.