Then and now and then again
BLOG | For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about blogging – trying to blog – about the past 10 years.
Playing video games, 2007.
That’s probably why it’s hasn’t really been working.
How do you write about 10 years? Why?
It just seemed like I ought to, I guess, because it’s been 10 years since I left Vancouver, 10 years since that life ended, 10 years since I started my MA, almost 10 years since I met Nathan. And 10 feels like a significant number. It’s something left over from childhood, maybe. Double digits! Wooha! Definitely worth some sort of acknowledgement, no? (Or what about 20? This year’s anniversaries are fairly significant all around. There are things I could talk about.)
But alas, the more I tried, the more I hated everything I had to say. I hate most of my writing these days.
There’s no time. The baby is all-consuming. She’s on my lap right now, clamped to my left breast. As I write with one hand, she keeps pulling off to admonish me, “Stop, Mama. No, Mama! No type!”
But I won’t stop, because she’s not the boss of me.
I mean, she is the boss of me, but sometimes you have to push back, you know?
The truth is that the time has raced by. It’s been a disturbingly quick decade and what I remember lives in flashes.
Vancouver bridge, 2007.
The edge of the mattress on one last night in a bed that wasn’t mine. Pulling out of the alley with my ex’s stupid, tear-streaked face in the rear view mirror. And then days and days of driving, red roads in Wyoming, the Montana sky, Chicago traffic. That’s it. That’s the whole story of the road.
I arrived in Toronto and the very first thing that happened was a funeral. Viewings every day for three days. “I’m so glad you’re here.” (Ironic, I guess.) A body in a pink sweater enhanced by the pink glow of the lights they use in funeral homes to keep the skin from looking grey.
My parents’ house in the summer quiet.
Then the new apartment. A yellow vinyl sofa. Sleeping again in my high school bed. No curtains and the leaves making shadows on the wall. Street lights. Sirens and sirens and more sirens. Kids throwing keg parties next door. Walking by myself with the heat rising up from the pavement. That Toronto garbage smell. People from college. Trying to keep busy.
Living room at Walmer Rd. apartment, 2007.
One of the first ways I found to fill my time was committing really fully to my anorexia.
It takes focus – all that counting, planning, weighing, lying – to be good at starving. A restrictive eating disorder is basically a full-time job.
So, yeah. My first year in Toronto left these little flashes of memory. Lots of new people. Lots of old people I didn’t really like.
Gut punch after gut punch as my old life fell away, revelation after revelation.
I was always hungry. Drinking too much. Lying awake at night with my fingers prodding my hip bones, my own quickened heartbeat pounding in my ears. At 27, I was so anxious. I felt like I’d already run out of time.
And then I met Nathan, started again in earnest, and things were fairly stable for ages, until the baby and the move to Durham made everything new again.
That was then, but really, it’s the baby that marks the biggest change.
The Smeetch, eight weeks old, 2015.
The baby, the baby, the baby. She is every new thing, every everything, and my only real focus. Her birth is the definitive line between then and now.
Elizabeth Murray Selk. Murmur. Mur. Smeetch. The Smeetch. Pumpkin Pudding Pop. Smootch a la Bootch. (Nathan continues on in nickname-maker supremacy.)
My Smeetch is a difficult, demanding, willful, energetic, bad-at-sleeping child.
And SO smart. You’re not supposed to say that about your own kid, but she is. At 18 months, this babe could say most of the alphabet and count to 20. The pediatrician says her language skills are more like a four or five year old’s. This morning she presented me with a scribbled card in which she said she’d drawn “seven flying dinosaurs and a T-Rex saying ROAR!” She’s sat through an entire big-screen movie. She loves “big kids”, her “friends” (‘Ego, Avery, and Baby Mitchell, Jenna-Nico and Ruthie’oggie, specifically) the children’s museum, animals, puddles, and the beach.
Smeetch artwork, 2017.
Though she is sometimes hesitant to try new things, if you give her space and time, she always will.
When hoping to prolong bedtime she’ll say things like “I love Mama most”.
Or she’ll begin a litany of goodnights to everything from the entire cast of Sesame Street to every object in the room. Last night she even said, “Goodnight Daddy’s moustache” and the night before she said, “Goodnight Mama’s shoes”.
She loves to pluralize, sometimes incorrectly, and often points out “lots of peoples” in a crowded space. She regularly sings to herself (Twinkle Twinkle, Eensy Weensie Spider, Wheels on the Bus, Old Macdonald, etc.) but hates to be corrected on the words (or in general, which is, I suppose, reasonable).
Everything must be done “ALL BY SELF!”
She screams it at you if you try to open a door for her, feed her a bite of food, brush her hair or her teeth. She is endlessly determined and fiercely independent. Both brave and confident.
She has demanded, quite angrily, to drive the car.
At the same time, she spends a great deal of time attached to me like a barnacle.
I find it hard to be a mother.
I spent most of the past 25 years in love with and dependant on my solitude, but now, I am never alone. She loves to be in my lap, loves to have a nipple in her mouth, loves to hold hands. “Hold my hand, Mama!” she’ll say. “I need your hand.”
It’s impossible to say no.
It feels at times like her little fingers are constantly crawling over my skin, rubbing, pinching, tickling. Half of the bites of food I take are from her dirty little fingers, and far too many are damp from her own mouth. Countless times a day, I put my lips against some bit of her hot, slightly damp skin. I rub her thin, soft hair against my face. I breathe in the vaguely earthy smell of her. Her sturdy little toddler body presses against mine for most of every day and all of every night. All 25 pounds of her feel more like a part of my own body than their own weight. Hoisting her up is nothing.
She is uninterested in riding in a stroller. Refuses to drink milk from a cup. She wants to walk on her own, or be carried. Water is one thing, but if it’s milk, she only wants it from the source.
She is tall, like Nathan, and largely his twin, but over the past two years, her eyes have slowly changed from a stormy grey to my own dark brown. If you look at old pictures, her body is like mine.
Mama and Smeetch, not so different.
She is the cutest thing in the universe.
And the most exhausting. Life in general is exhausting. Nathan drinks eight cups of coffee a day and still falls asleep the second his head hits the pillow. Our lives are conducted on a very strict schedule and when I am not actively caring for or entertaining her, I am engaged in warp-speed housewifery. I am exhausted, literally all of the time.
Doing nothing. Having time. These things are hard to recall.
When I was young, I couldn’t imagine my future as an adult. I would try to see myself at 30, 35, 40, and become overwhelmed by the creepy crawly unknowing and impossible feeling that would slime its way over me as a result. For a long time, I wondered if that meant I might die young, join the 27 club. That was silly, obviously. I am now a full decade past that. It is a strange feeling, though, getting old. I still can’t imagine the future. It’s a waste of time to try, and luckily, I guess, I don’t really have time to waste.