Thursday, March 15, 2007

Isolated Musings...


It's too late to be writing anything. I should be in bed--after all, Sam will be up in a few hours for his middle-of-the-night bottle, which he still cherishes. But it's quiet now, quiet like it rarely is anymore in the chaos of my life.


One weird thing about suburbia is how isolating it is, despite being surrounded by people. At least that's how it is in my version of suburbia, anyway. When my husband grew up here, it was--for the most part--a community of people who had connections to this area, roots. Now it's a commuter stopover for metro Atlanta, and the people who are moving in to the million-dollar homes that are being built on every square inch of land around us have no ties here, no memories buried in the red clay soil they build their houses on, no sense of history to connect them to the towering pine trees they clear-cut to make room for one more ornate box with an oversized media room and no yard. We're always being challenged to take care of the earth, to make our carbon footprint smaller, reduce, reuse, recycle. But you can't force someone to care about things that have no connection to them. The people who live around me--and many times, I confess, the same is true for me--are only connected to their house, their immediate family. There is no sense of place, and that lack, that isolation, makes us selfish. It makes our lives impossibly small.


When you look at it that way, it's not the greatest place to raise kids, huh?


Maybe it's lack of sleep that's making me morbid and melancholy. Or the isolation. It's amazing how many people I see every day, but they are all strangers to me. Even at my son's preschool, I see the same people every day, smile at them and say "hello", but they are still strangers.


(And did I mention the traffic was so insane this morning it took me 10 minutes to get to Max's preschool , which is literally around the corner from our house?)


Growing up in the small-town, crazy church I did was mostly a pretty bad experience. And when I say pretty bad, I mean the pastor going to prison bad. It was scary fundamentalist, very scary--very cult-like. We were cut off from our extended family, our neighbors--anything or anyone outside of that church. I went to school there and spent my recreation hours there. It was its own weird and terrifying microcosm.


But even in the midst of all of that, you knew you belonged. You knew there were people who would be happy to see you when you walked through the door, people who knew you and your family and the intimate, mundane details of your life and would ask you about them.


In the book Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church author and sociologist James M. Ault, Jr. notices this in the congregation that is the focus of his book. He writes:


Virtually all the conservatives I met...spent their formative years into adulthood involved in a circle of relatives and family friends on whom they relied to meet day-to-day needs...extended-family ties [a term Ault is using to describe the relationships in the church congregation he is studying] were the building blocks of church life...


Though a life of mutual dependence within a family circle was commonplace among members...I met, it was foreign to people I knew in academia and the New Left, as well as to other educated professionals I knew. Most of us were prepared, from the moment we left home for college, to leave family dependencies behind and learn to live as self-governing individuals...In the process, we learned to piece together a meaningful life with new friends and colleagues alongside old ones. Our material security did not rest on a stream of daily reciprocities within a family-based circle of people...


Next to this in the book I have written in pencil "one of the hardest things for me to adjust to was the loss of family." And it was--it is. To this day, I still feel like I am looking for a place to belong to, a place to call home that is bigger than simply my little family. I have never again found that sense of a belonging in a church, no matter the denomination or size. I wonder sometimes if it is not why I always end up profoundly disappointed in any church I attend--I always feel like a stranger among strangers, all of us unknown to each other but with this mutual friend in common we gather once a week to commemorate. It's a feeling that's impossible to explain to those who have not experienced it. When we left the crazy church--a necessary choice, and one I am grateful my parents made--it was nevertheless a death for me of this family I once had and never would again (anyone who left the church was immediately excommunicated, and no contact of any sort was allowed by those still within the church.)


I'm aware that such conditional love made any sense of community I had illusory, but I still seek it wherever I go. The feeling of coming home, of being known. Here in these overcrowded, over-rich suburbs full of SUV's with anonymous faces hid behind tinted glass there is no silence, but so much isolation.


And for me, there is only the memory of what I once believed was real community. I still believe it exists, or at least that it should exist, but I've yet to find it again. Is that what this blog is about--another search for community? Perhaps. Probably, at least in part.


So, is community illusory? Does anyone else out there have that place where, like the song says "everybody knows your name"? Are we all strangers to each other? Is all of this the wild musings of an overtired, burned-out mother?


Comments welcome--if only to remind me I am not alone on this big blue marble.

Monday, March 05, 2007

Hello? Is Anyone Still Here?

Yes, I know--it's been a while. A long while. In cyberspace, probably the eqivalent of a lifespan plus a couple reincarnations, if one believed in that sort of thing. But I have a reason, really. A good reason:

His name is Samuel. Samuel Gregory, to be precise. Born November 30, 2006 at 5:27PM and weighing in at an impressive 8 pounds, 6 ounces. Here he is, newly minted and about to leave the hospital to venture into his new home in the suburbs. No wonder he's praying...

Immediately after coming home and commencing with his waking-every-two-hours-to-eat schedule, he proceeded to come down with a nasty illness called RSV. For the uninformed, this is an ugly little viral infection that attacks the upper respiratory system and is particularly awful for babies, especially premature babies. Sam wasn't premature, thank God, but he was still very, very sick. He got bronchiolitis from the RSV, had to have breathing treatments, and was gasping for breath, unable to eat much at a feeding due to all the congestion in his tiny, little nose and lungs. His every-two-hour feedings changed to every-15-minutes feedings, and my husband and I basically didn't sleep at all for about a month. There was a time when my prayer life consisted of me paraphrasing the poet Stevie Smith: "Dear God, help me--I am not waving, but drowning!"

Suffice it to say, I am still alive, it is now March, the willow tree in our back yard is sprouting chartreuse shoots from its dry branches, and I am only beginning to recover from the whole process of giving birth. Sam is now fine, fat, and healthy--and has blessed us with a move to an every-four-hour feeding schedule, which is very civilized of him, I think. Here's the most current pic:


Cute, I know. Those dimples break my heart. (sigh...)

So anyway, when I left you it was the end of August and I was pregnant with this little guy, as big as a house. The last trimester of pregnancy leaves you in a stupor--at least that's how it affects me. I was lurching about the house like the ungraceful behomoth I was, stuffing all available food into my mouth, clutching my aching back, and spending all my creative energies grumbling about heartburn. I thought I should spare whatever readership I have from such alarming rants as might come forth from such a person.

Pregnancy and motherhood as a whole are something I have ever done gracefully, for that matter. I am no earth mother, no fertility goddess. Pregnancy is no fun, believe me. The only good part is the baby that comes at the end. And while I feel more at ease with motherhood than pregnancy, it isn't easy or even natural for me. In fact, it can often seem downright unnatural for me. I crave silence, long swaths of uninterrupted time in which to think. I love order, serenity, peace. Chaos and stress makes me break out in hives (literally). Motherhood is the antithesis of all things comfortable for me--dirty diapers, screaming, dirty laundry, dirty house, dirty kids (note the "dirt" theme here), constant interruptions. In fact, I've already stopped writing this blog twice--to put my preschooler down for a nap and to feed, change, and burp his baby brother. It is not a writer's life by any means.

Yet I keep having children...Why is that?

I remember when I was much younger (and even more clueless than I am now) sitting in a McDonald's with my then-boyfriend and the two of us snorting in derision over those foolish couples who simply must have children. "How selfish," we decided. We could not possibly think of a positive reason to have children. Adopt, yes, because then you would be giving a home to a child in need. But not the whole going through pregnancy to have your own biological child thing. We concluded that the need to do so must be the result of one's desire to either a) life their life over vicariously through their children, or b) replicate themselves so the glory of their children reflects back on them. These were the only reasons we could think of then.

Fast forward 15 years, and I still can't really give you a great reason to have children. But then, I can't give you a reasoned explanation for love, either. There is some primal element to it, some need beyond reason. Something. It's as close as I've ever gotten to seeing a small tear in the veil between the known and the unknown, Heaven and earth. Giving birth is a strange mixture of realer-than-real and mysticism bordering on the miraculous. It's blood and prayer, sweat and spirit.

Like marriage, motherhood is hard for me. And just as necessary. It's as simple--and complex--as that. Both have changed me, honed me, made me better than I was. To love in such close quarters--in marriage, as a parent--such love requires you to plunge in, deeper than deep, to hold your breath and keep going, even when it feels like drowning.


So...welcome Samuel, whose name means "God has heard our prayers". Thank you for joining the cast of characters in my life.

And thanks to all of you who are still reading this blog, despite my dreadfully long silence. I've missed being here.