Random Thoughts, incoherent postpartum edition

I'm in a weird place right now, thinking-wise. More often than usual, I'm sort of alone with my thoughts (I say "sort of" because there are always people around, too, needing things and saying things…which is why none of those thoughts have time to go anywhere). Still: twenty-hour day/night blends where I'm holding Ezekiel and thinking, thinking, thinking. But it's all so fuzzy and most of it is not really coherent at all. I can't grasp anything. I can't take a thought to its conclusion. They all just…drift around as if my brain is a giant snow-globe, being shaken up every now and then.
It has meant a lot of worrying, strangely. I usually manage to keep this under control through busy-ness and general strictness with myself (what I read, what I dwell on), but it does come in waves, and this last few months the swells are higher than usual. Maybe because of so many hours awake at night?


Or maybe because the Unknown is always alarming, and anything I'm not currently doing is "unknown" on some level. And right now I'm not really doing…anything. So everything looms menacingly in the future. I feel "recovered" enough that I feel I ought to be getting back to real life, but fuzzy enough not to want to.

They aren't rational worries, most of them, but that doesn't stop me. I mean, some of it's folk-tale-level silliness; what-if-I-grow-up-and-have-a-son-and-that-axe-falls-on-his-head–level silliness. I try to say to myself, "What would make this thought-cycle go away?"—and if there is something that would, I do it. (Even if inconvenient/irrational.) But for most of them, there is nothing except time and daylight and…faith, I guess.

That's not to say I'm feeling deeply unhappy, thank goodness. I feel rested, in some non-physical ways. I have moments of pure happiness. There is nothing like holding a newborn and examining his sleeping face, feeling his breath rise and fall against your skin. Obviously there's a bit of panic behind it too. I know how fast it goes. And this is that melancholy time of year for me. Still, I feel almost giddily content and full of love, much of the time.

Compounding the problem: every time I DO manage some sort of back-to-real-life effort (making dinner, for example, or preparing lesson plans), I am immediately overcome with dread and sadness that I'm missing one of the few precious moments of Ezekiel's new-baby-ness. I should just be gazing at him! Snuggling him! Taking photographs! (I feel this even while I'm simultaneously full of exasperation at how slow it is doing everything one-handed and I just want to set him down for a minute without him crying!)

Speaking of photographs, it's alarmingly like superstition, this feeling I have that if I somehow get pictures of every adored bit of him, each expression and nuance of his little face, I will capture his SOUL and be able to hold onto his baby self forever. I know this is untrue but I still believe it on some level, and I'm annoyed at myself for it. Cute pictures aren't nothing. But they don't do THAT. (And then there's the worry that even when I'm taking his picture, I'm somehow missing out on "enjoying the moment.")

I guess the urge to write things down (as I'm doing now) is similar. Writing does help you remember, but it doesn't stop time. Still, maybe I'm not giving it enough credit. I do like reading through old posts on this blog much better than I liked reading through a traditional journal, when I kept one—

(In one of my favorite books, the main character spends months writing a novel of which she is vastly proud, and when she finally gets the courage to send it off to a friend for feedback, he responds with a postcard bearing just two words: "Sentimental drivel." If I could send a postcard to my past self, it would say the same thing.)

—though I loved the comment on this post: "They tell me that eventually one’s charity becomes so great that it extends even to one’s past self."

I feel like I've spent a lot of time (lately? My memory is so sketchy right now, I'm not sure what is usual and what isn't) trying to reconcile opposites; or maybe, like Joseph Smith said, to "prove contraries." I take that to mean you have to struggle with them, trying out both sides. Leaning too far one way and then to the other as you seek the balance. I guess I've been doing this for a long time: trying not to let my appreciation of current stages devolve into a dread about how quickly they will pass. Trying to balance living life, and recording it. Trying to figure out how to have progress and peace at the same time. But having a new baby really sends me careening (more than usual?) back and forth between the two poles. I discovered this passage from Rilke's long poem, Duino Elegies, that feels like a perfect description of it:

O trees of life, when does your winter come?
We’re not in accord. Not attuned, like
the migrating birds…
We’re conscious of blossoming and withering both at once….
But we, giving ourselves to one thing,
feel it’s at the expense of another. Conflict
is our nature.

Nature seems to accept her cycles so gracefully! The leaves on the trees, the migrating birds—they do what they're supposed to do in the season they're supposed to do it in, without any apparent angst about what's ending or what will come next. Why can't I be like that?

Someday, maybe. When I learn to really have the certainty (instead of just the HOPE!) that nothing good is ever lost.