Salad Days

Yes, Ryan, my sentiments exactly.

How are you? It’s such a common refrain, and yet, if taken as a true inquiry, is such a loaded question. Often accompanied by a smile, How are you? is more of a greeting, a rhetorical question, really, because if life sucks, who wants to hear that? Sometimes I meet older women who clearly have amnesia. “How are you,” they greet me and my brood. Through their rose-colored glasses, they can’t see the bags under my eyes or my wrinkly shirt that I’ve plainly been wearing for days. “Isn’t this a magical time?” they say with a nostalgic smile, or something to that effect.

I can only laugh… Yes, isn’t this a magical time.

How am I, really? Lately, if I am to be honest, I’ve been vacillating between feeling okay to utterly miserable. With Wayne’s ample help, though, I am getting it done—school drop-offs and pick-ups, supervision of homework, changing diapers for two tushies, juggling the naps, errands, groceries, getting a semi-homemade dinner on the table—but I can’t say that I’m doing it with the best attitude. I’m tired and irritable. At an especially low point, I have cried to Wayne, while holding up and rocking my wailing newborn, “I don’t want it anymore…” It wasn’t my proudest moment.

Life with three kids is no joke. I will ascertain that the transition from zero to one was still the most difficult by far, two upped the playing level, but three—though not as completely life-altering as one—three is the game changer. It’s the first dropping of the atomic bomb, the introduction of air travel and its role in widespread epidemics, the release of flesh-eating gas and robodogs in The Hunger Games. Three—right now with a 5-year-old, 2-year-old, and 3-month-old who is supernaturally alert and has not yet learned to sleep well during the day—is hard.

Earlier this week, as I was trying to tell Wayne about my day while he was at work, I was repeatedly and irritatingly interrupted by Caedmon who needed help with the DVD player, then the selection of a show, then with the volume… And as I taxed my already-sleep-deprived brain each time in returning to my story, I all of a sudden realized that I was making this herculean effort simply to report that I had driven to the UPS Store with the kids and dropped off my Zappos return. That’s it. That was my day. And I was so defeated by how seemingly unproductive and uneventful my life had become that I actually had to go upstairs to lie down and wallow in some self-pity for a bit. Isn’t this a magical time?

And so it is that season again… My mom belly hangs over my workout clothes, still pristine, because I’ve barely gotten through my warm-up before Ryan has woken early from his nap—again. And I’m waltzing in the half-dark with him, willing him desperately to go back to sleep. My eyes hang heavy from multiple midnight wakings that I sometimes have no recollection of in the mornings. Soon, my face will be framed by the tell-tale postpartum baby hairs, but first the shedding like a Golden Retriever in July. My sister once related to me how a friend commented on a nursing mother’s serene tranquility, but we suspect that this serene tranquility is more likely extreme fatigue. That glow is from a face that hasn’t been washed in days.

And my time—oh, my precious time. My time, the little that is left over after a full day with three little kids, is spent either keeping our house from acquiring a biohazard designation or mindlessly scrolling through social media and then feeling guilty for not having kept my house out of the biohazard classification.

With the birth of each child, I will think that I’ve died to myself and have given up all of me, but no, with each additional baby, I’m newly squeezed until what I think are the last drops of my individuality, identity, and energy. (Moms with four or more kids, I’m convinced, are essentially zombies. Selfless, brave zombies.) This first year with a new baby has always been hard on me (probably because I am so incredibly selfish!), and so we brought Ryan into this world expecting the rough transition. Still, the complete stripping and re-stripping of my selfhood isn’t any easier to bear. Goodness, isn’t this a magical time?

A few years ago, I read the popular Like Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen. I didn’t love the book, but what I took from it, what stirred me even then as a mother of just one, was a quote from one of the last pages: "Those were the salad days, the halcyon years! The sleepless nights, the wailing babies; the days the interior of the house looked like it had been hit by a hurricane… Even when the fourth glass of milk got spilled in a single night, or the shrill screeching threatened to split my skull… they were the good years, grand years” (Gruen, 327).

Is this what I’m living right now? The salad days? The halcyon years? (Because if these are the halcyon years, I fear I have little to look forward to!) But there is a truth to these words that those well-meaning older women know, that even I know, because when my babies are all asleep, and though I’m dead-tired and grumpy as hell, I find myself snuggled next to Wayne in bed, scrolling through our day’s pictures of these kids who take so much out of me.

And so I keep reminding myself that whatever hardship we’re experiencing is fleeting. I pray for the grace of Jesus to not just get me through this time, but to get me through this time with a grateful and joyful heart… because if I lift my gaze just a bit, I see a grinning, imaginative 5-year-old playing with my spunky 2-year-old who adores him and copies his every move. He is leading her on a space mission, and yes, they have thrown off all the cushions from the couch again. Their joint efforts, to my chagrin, refill the space with reading material and surplus food and supplies from all over the house. But they are laughing, and cooperating (for now), and so happy and content as they shout for Mommy and Daddy to watch them blast off into the abyss. They are beautiful. And most significantly, they sleep. We made it through the rough with them, and look at our reward. Soon, I hope, Ryan will join their ranks … My arms will be free, and we will all play, take a nap, and it will be heavenly. But even before then, I have to recognize, even when I don’t always feel it, that I am, indeed, in the middle of a very precious and truly magical time.