Cicada Season

Processing difficult times

Normally I’m a true believer in shitty first drafts and speaking my mind, but this week I have a job interview that involves producing a writing sample, and ironically enough, I’m feeling a bit of writers block. Or my version of it, where everything I write I immediately want to erase.

I want to complain about how the “back to sleep” study is poor science and goes against human nature, as breastfed babies belong in bed with Mom.

I want to brag, hipster-like, that I was talking about what a creep Doug Wilson is long before most of us had to give a damn what kind of “how to be more abusive” camp of his Pete Hegseth went to. My brag includes that I went mildly viral (ok, ok, more like a piece I wrote was linked in Slate Magazine and clicked on a lot) in part for calling Doug Wilson out for the creepy things he said about marriage and sex. But I really don’t want to get into details, because I’m feeling over it, and he’s not gotten any less creepier (or less influential) in the last decade since I did what I could to call him out.

I want to cry as I write that my Grandpa, about to turn 93, is not doing well. That he made it through childhood on a rural cotton farm that took two of his siblings (meningitis and drowning), an adoption after being orphaned twice, then had his infantry get overrun four times while he survived behind enemy lines as a teenager in the Korean War, only to watch himself outlive nearly everybody. His little sister. His best friend. The only original one still by his side being his wife of 70 years, who for the first time since she was 19 keeps having to go home at night without him, all because he tripped on a rug in between the tv and his easy chair. That unless something changes the trajectory, it’s seeming like he might become another statistic for the dangerous cascade effect around elderly people who have falls.

I assure everyone that if I wasn’t recovering from childbirth and caring for a 6lb one month old, I’d be buying a plane ticket down to him in New Orleans, joining my family in the rotation of visits. But really this phase of life scares me and I want to run away.

I’m up here, recovering more slowly than last time, realizing I’ve been my own delay in getting my blood pressure meds adjusted correctly.

I schedule my husband’s vasectomy appointment before I go back in to be seen for a swollen left foot and double vision in one eye. Bloodwork shows excessive platelets and elevated liver enzymes, residual effects of the preeclampsia, which hopefully will equalize soon.

I feel a little better as I take my four pills a day and look at this baby, clearly as amazing to have exist as any of them, knowing it’s the right decision to not to risk having another.

I visit my in-laws and tell them this will be their last grandchild. They laugh, completely fine with the news. She’s their 8th one. My father in law has had Dana Farber’s cancer team to thank for keeping him around to meet half of them. He meets this baby while resting after his latest round of chemo, suffering that we all hope can continue the miracle of life through his next scan on Wednesday and beyond.

I tell my husband, who is in a holding pattern, that he needs to get more help for his mental health. That this is what strong people do, because time brings hard things and doesn’t stop. He tells me he lacks the motivation. I reply that that’s a shame, and I hope he reconsiders, for me, the babies, and mostly himself.

At 2am I start writing. I wonder what will pour out. It’s all these things I want to erase because they are difficult, hard to have be real, but I don’t, because they are the truth. They are life. They are the things that happen. The things we must face and grow through.

In the morning I will dry my eyes and do my written interview, take the children to the pool, pick some grapes and plums in the garden, and nurse the baby while we listen to the cicadas buzz in the trees, the soundtrack to the beginning of this next season.