A report from the trenches

2 under 2 wheewww boy

I am tired, and I have very acute neck pain, and I don’t know what to eat for lunch! I should mention that I had another baby a couple months ago. I buried the lead. Another perfect little specimen to care for and fret over for the rest of my time on this planet. It’s incredible, it’s marvelous, and logistically? It’s a fucking nightmare. There’s two of them, guys! We are on man-to-man defense folks, and I have never been one for sports metaphors, but I’ll tell ya what. It’s a more demanding defensive strategy than the defense we were playing before (two to one, does that even exist in sports?)

Cy and I checking into the hospital as parents of one, thinking it was just a visit to be safe and we were going to go home and watch House of Dragon that night (nope, preeclampsia, c-section, baby, no dragons)

Largely? The transition is easier. I’m way less stressed. With my first, I worried over every little detail. I was on the brink of tears for months and months. This time, I am wiser and less obsessed with doing everything right. I gave this kid formula from the get-go. That helped. Sorry, my beautiful secondborn, you might not end up in the gifted and talented program because breastmilk never crossed your lips, but Mommy got to feel like a human being and not a cow with sore udders. An over-stimulated human being, but a human being, nevertheless.

It’s just the multiple children thing. There’s less you can do to quell mayhem. Sometimes, in the car, they cry in different but equally impossible-to-ignore decibels, and my toddler insists we play Daniel Tiger on repeat. The only self-defence mechanism I have formed is dissociating entirely and genuinely forgetting where and who I am. In these moments, I am not a human being. Rather, I am a frog, breathing through my skin. A frog, driving a Jeep Grand Cherokee.

I’m so tired, and then, at the end of the day, in the rare and gorgeous moments when they are both asleep, I watch a slideshow of photos of them play on my new, fancy calendar. I look at videos of them on my phone. All day, I wish for moments without them; then, the moments come, and I miss them. It’s a sickness.

This blog was conceived out of the navel-gazing impulse to figure out who I was now that I had a child. I am still figuring that out with two. Becoming a parent is genuinely an earthquake for the sense of self, an internal tectonic shift that ripples upwards and fucks everything you think about yourself up. When I thought of myself, for the longest time, I pictured myself somewhere in a city. Riding my bike along the lakeshore path in Chicago. Listening to music, hopping on a crowded subway, and existing in the thrum, one small person in a crowd of so many. Now, I have multiple dependents. I live in the suburbs. I have spent more time on Reddit forums that debate the merits of a minivan versus a full-sized SVU than I care to admit. Today, I was allowed a few minutes to myself, and I did not listen to music or bop around the city. Instead, I brought my car to the car wash and sat in the massage chair in the waiting area. It gave me a very intense massage that actually really hurt. An insane thing to do, in retrospect, that probably reveals the precarious state of my mental well-being.  This is the new me, I guess. The old me is still in there, trapped under the rubble of broken-down Amazon boxes and used diapers.

No longer a city rat but a suburban mouse, sitting in a massage chair at the car wash, drinking sparkling water from the vending machine, feeling increasingly ashamed as the car wash got busy and I couldn’t get out of the seat because it was holding me down with its expandable leg bags. Am I making any sense? I’m a little sleep-deprived.

The nice thing is I have less time to worry about who I am or where I’m going. I still have moments of all-encompassing ennui, where I worry about defining myself in this new reality, but I genuinely have less time to do so. It’s pretty freeing, to find yourself increasingly less interesting. After all, the question of Who I am matters much less. Who are they? I wonder about the boys, with increasing delight. Who will they be?

As you can tell, I will be updating this Substack way less, but I’ll still be shouting my thoughts into the void (the internet) here and there to remind myself that I am a Person.

Mwah (said in the enthusiastic voice of my son when he gives his brother a kiss on the head)