Finding Rest...Not Just Sleep

“But my body doesn’t feel tired,” my daughter says, her bright eyes looking up at me from her pillow, just barely visible in the dark room she shares with her twin brother. She wiggles around; he’s been asleep for awhile now.

“Okay,” I whisper, “But it’s still time for bed. Remember what I’ve told you about falling asleep. Make your body as still as a statue, close your eyes, and think about breathing in...and out. And in...and out. Before you know it you’ll be asleep.”

She closes her eyes, though she seems unconvinced, and I creep out of the room, closing the door quietly behind me.

It’s 7:16 pm and as I silently walk down the hall to my own room to finish putting laundry away, I wonder how long it’s been since my body has truly felt not tired. What would it be like, I wonder, to lay down in bed and not immediately surrender to my pillow and, ultimately, sleep?

Because I do sleep now. Five years ago, with infant twins who woke us consistently every hour or two, when having at least one uninterrupted stretch of 120 minutes was the benchmark for a “good” night’s sleep, when they didn’t sleep through the night until they were well over a year old, I thought this day would never come. Back then, rocking first one baby and then another, I thought such incredibly broken sleep would be my entire life, both then and forevermore. People told me they would grow out of it and figure out how to sleep eventually, but my own sleep-deprived brain, still fully in the thick of it, didn’t believe them.

Though even now it’s not always uninterrupted. Many nights a kid or two steal in to find my husband and me, blessedly asleep in our own bed, because they need to use the bathroom, because they need more water, because they’ve had a bad dream. Occasionally, with three kids, we’ll have a night where I swear they’ve made a deal with each other to wake up at perfectly spaced two-hour intervals, and it feels like the horror of those newborn days all over again.

Still. Those people were right. Most nights, I get the sleep experts say I’m supposed to—the 7 or 8 hours recommended for an adult my age to feel my best. This was the holy grail five years ago, when virtually all I could think about was the next time I would get to sleep, when sleep came in nothing more than stolen fragments in my day. I’ve made it.

So then why am I still so tired?

Read the rest over on the Twin Cities Mom Collective.

When the Light Isn't Where I Left It

I’ve been mulling over the idea of going where the light is.

The thing is, that light? Where it is changes for me. As often as my emotions, maybe, these days. What brings me joy one day (one hour, one moment) can be anathema to me the next. 

Sometimes my kids are the light and the next minute I want to ship them off to Siberia. Sometimes cooking is the thing that steadies me and the next meal I don’t want to chop another vegetable, fry another egg, or mix together flour, water, salt, and yeast ever again. Sometimes I can’t get away fast enough to type up the words in my head and other times I look at an empty page, certain I won’t have anything to say ever again in my entire life. Sometimes I’m so glad Tyson is here and we’re in this together and other times I want to self-quarantine myself away from him. Sometimes I find hope in the grocery store, in the fact that I’m out— free! —from my house. Other times it’s the most depressing place in the world as I walk around and realize we can’t even see each other’s smiles anymore underneath our masks. Sometimes I find the light in the normal, ordinary routine of our days. Other days I want to scream in frustration at the mundane and instead find joy in wearing a nice top and jewelry, in hosting snack time on the front porch, ordering lunch for myself just because.

You see my problem here. It can make things difficult, this finding of the light. It’s not always where I’ve left it.

Still. As I mull this whole “go where the light is” idea over, Albus Dumbledore keeps popping into my head.

“Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”

I don’t only need to turn it on these days. I need to actively search for it.

It’s there. I (almost) always find it. Even when it’s not where I’ve found it before.

That breakfast light, though.

A real breakfast with a side of comfort reading.

School as an anchor in our day.

Just look how studious they are.

Unscheduled coffee break.

Unscheduled jump-off-the-Nugget-free-for-all break.

Chaos.

A teacher who captivates them with her videos as tulips listen in.

Lunch delivery. Just for me.

Happy sidewalk art.

Buds budding. The bluest of skies.

Friends who also live in your house.

Snacktime in the living room. (Previously absolutely, positively 1000% forbidden. Here we are.)

Friends who live in your house part 2. This time with LEGOs.

Cheers.

Impromptu PJ dance party.

The magic of books.

That evening light, though.

Flowers reaching toward the light, even as it fades away.

This post was written as part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to read the next post in this series "Go Where the Light Is".

Dear Twin Mama

Dear Mama,

I don’t know if you found out in a way similar to me, in a dark ultrasound room, cool gel over my still mostly-flat stomach, my husband sitting in a chair near my feet.

“Congratulations!” the ultrasound tech said. Or maybe she said, “Surprise!” I no longer remember exactly how she began her announcement.

I am, however, 1000% confident in what she said next: “It’s twins!”

I started laughing. All I could think about was our mothers, both expecting their first grandchild, little knowing it was actually TWO.

My stomach didn’t stay flat for much longer. It grew and contorted, and then grew some more, impossibly more. Mine was lopsided, actually. My daughter, Baby B, wedged herself sideways on top of her brother, creating an egg shape around my enormous middle. It was nothing like the cute little basketballs I saw other expecting mamas carrying around.

Though of course none of this was like the other mamas I saw around me, those with “regular” pregnancies and singleton babies. I mentally compared motherhood to those I saw around me. It’s hard not to. None of this was anything like what my friends were going through.

Read the rest of my love letter to new twin mamas over on Mama Year One.

Week Five

I’ve been writing things down here and there since the coronavirus really started to impact our lives. I’ve shared some of this as snippets on Instagram but if you’re interested in reading more, feel free to read through these lightly-edited words. As this essay says, I’m craving to see what people are thinking/doing/feeling through all of this. Maybe it’s helpful to use my own still, small voice to give some words to what we’re all going through at this moment in time. You can find Week One here , Week Two here, Week Three here, and Week Four here.

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Monday, April 13th
“I've been more aware of the passage of time since Kindergarten began, knowing that at this time next year the twins won’t be in Kindergarten but in first grade, and then second, and so on. Somehow the days of toddlerhood and preschool seemed to shield me a bit more, when our days looked so much the same from one to the next.

I’m acutely aware of their days off of school now, where it feels like we’re just settling back into our normal, three kids snug at home, instead of disrupting what our true, new normal is of packing lunches and backpacks.”

...is a THING I WROTE on December 23rd. Bless my heart.

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I’ve just been assuming, through all of this, that summer is cancelled. I’m assuming they’re not returning to school (though that breaks my heart). I’m assuming there will not be a dance recital (another thing that breaks my heart). I’m assuming there will be no t-ball (again heartbreaking). I’m assuming there will be no PlayNet, zoo camps, Big Chip vacation, or trips to parks and beaches (my heart is gone).

I’ve more or less made my peace with this.

My light at the end of the tunnel is assuming the kids will go back to school in the fall. School even starts really late here this year; since Labor Day isn’t until September 7th, the first day of school is September 8th. It’s about as late as it can possibly be.

My heart is set on this. My dad dared to suggest that the kids wouldn’t even go back to school in the fall and it’s a good thing we’re practicing social distancing or I would have STABBED him. Even though I understand, in the darkest, most remote corners of my brain, that this won’t really be over by then and that NOT returning to school in the fall is an actual possibility, I just cannot even with the idea of it right now.

Though that didn’t stop me from sending Caden and Brooklyn’s teacher an email last week to request they be in the same class again next year. I don’t want to deal with two different first grade teachers for distance learning. Just in case.

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Wednesday, April 15th
Mornings are the hardest. The waking up and the getting up. It’s just the worst.

Back up. Maybe I shouldn’t say mornings are the hardest. It’s the whole getting out of bed part that is.

I’ve never been a morning person. Never, ever, ever. Mornings are only nice in theory. 5:00 am is NOT a nice time. I don’t even think 6:00 am is a nice time. They are dumb times when reasonable people (and children) should still be sleeping.

Still, I used to get up at 6:30. A mere month or so ago when the kids still had things like buses to catch and there were lunches to pack and I had a minivan to drive to places like preschool. There were things to look forward to in the day, or at least in the week.

Forget 6:00 now. Forget even 6:30. Now, even when 7:00 rolls around, I close my eyes against the inevitable like ugh.

The first couple of weeks were different. Then it was like grief. I woke up with anticipation, the sunlight glinting through the blinds, before it would hit me. I would remember, all over again, that this wasn’t just a bad dream. That we couldn’t go anywhere. That coronavirus was a real thing. That the whole world was dealing with this and the kids don’t have school and what bad news would come today?

Now it doesn’t hit me like a revelation each morning. It’s simply reality. Now I wake up and think, “Oh. Here we go again.” And it takes every ounce of strength I have to pull myself out of bed. Even though I just throw on my glasses and some sweatpants and walk downstairs to get coffee. The monotony of our days is it’s own brand of exhausting.

(The coffee helps. So does sunshine.)

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Thursday, April 16th
My moods seem to run in roughly three-day cycles. I usually have a pretty good “this is all fine!” day followed by a day full of “meh” and ending with a “this is awful and terrible and I’m angry and sad and I hate everyone and everything” kind of day.

It’s not always a three-day cycle. I might have one great day followed by three meh days followed by one of pure rage. Meh is more my baseline these days. I rarely have more than one good or truly awful day in a row.

Recognizing the cycle helps. While the good days don’t last, neither do the bad ones.

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Things seem to have leveled off to an extent. Life feels more or less normal now The news cycle has flattened out. A few weeks ago, no matter how often I picked up my phone, I would find new news, new stories, new information. I was getting multiple emails from school each day as they detailed the newest orders from the Governor, here’s when distance learning begins, here’s when you pick up your student(s) materials, here’s your log-in information, here are updated versions of ALL of that.

(And let us never forget the emails from every restaurant and every store and every activity we’ve ever done in the past decade to update us on “here’s how we’re dealing with COVID-19” and/or “let’s stand together in hope” and it got really weird.)

My phone use has flattened off. It’s still higher than pre-COVID-19 levels but not by much. Life certainly doesn’t look how it did “before”, but the new normal has settled in. I KNEW it would, a few weeks ago, I knew theoretically we would all psychologically adjust and yet it seemed impossible at the same time. But, here we are.

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Friday, April 17th
For the record, these are the clothes I’ve been living in:

These pull-on jeans. (Seriously as comfy as leggings but feels like I’m trying.)
These sweatpants.
This bralette. (RIP bras with hooks and adjustable straps.)
These leggings. (Soft and cotton-y. Not squish-you-in supportive.)
This sweatshirt.

Week Four

I’ve been writing things down since here and there since the coronavirus really started to impact our lives. I’ve shared some of this as snippets on Instagram but if you’re interested in reading more, feel free to read through these lightly-edited words. As this essay says, I’m craving to see what people are thinking/doing/feeling through all of this. Maybe it’s helpful to use my own still, small voice to give some words to what we’re all going through at this moment in time. You can find Week One here , Week Two here, and Week Three here. Related: did we really just finish week FOUR of this??

Monday, April 6th
I’m so entrenched in this now it seems like this is how life always has been, is now, and shall be forever. 

Probably not though, right?

Our daily schedule looks something like this:

Breakfast and free play before 8:00 am. 8:00-9:00 gives them an hour to get dressed, brush their teeth, pick up their bedrooms, and do Cosmic Kids Yoga. 9:00-11:00ish look like reading and math, a snack ay some point, and their “specials”: art, music, science, etc. Add in a few breaks as needed. Especially for Nolan. Though he’s essentially become another Kindergartener. Caden and Brooklyn’s teacher has been sending out these fantastic Number Corner videos each day and you should hear Nolan shouting the answers at the screen. Their teacher sent me an email last week saying, “I should just add Nolan as another student. Poor kid! I hear him in the background on all their videos!”

11:00-Noonish you’ll find the kids on their tablets. Caden and Brooklyn connect with their teacher through the Seesaw app and it’s Caden’s GREATEST JOY in life right now to send her videos detailing his latest LEGO creation or our backyard or random things in our neighborhood. I let them play games while I make lunch. (Huge shoutout to Khan Academy!)

Noon-1:30 equals lunch and quiet time. Caden and Brooklyn seem to have forgotten how to do quiet time. Mostly Caden. Particularly the whole “quiet” part. It’s getting better. Though it’s frustrating because it took Nolan the better part of the past six months to do quiet time successfully, and JUST when he was really getting into the rhythm of it, Caden and Brooklyn were back home and it completely threw everything off.

1:30-2/2:30 is screen time, a show or two.

After that it’s snack and outside time. Fridays they get a movie. If it’s gross out they can either play or we bake something or paint or whatever but that (thankfully) hasn’t happened much yet.

Really, our afternoon schedule looks how it always has, and I think that familiarity is comforting to us all right now. 

I do pretty well in the mornings. The routine is comforting. I hit a wall by lunchtime. I want time to myself and that’s hard to come by (see: homeschooling, they’ve forgotten how quiet time works). And I have my own list of to-dos that range from writing deadlines to ordering household items from the store to replying to emails to WHATEVER that seem virtually impossible to accomplish right now. Tyson’s been getting done with work between 3:00-4 00 and that helps.

I suppose it’s similar to how it felt at the beginning of the school year, where it seemed so hard to find a new rhythm but then I did. (Related: I’ve been a mom for six years and had JUST sent two off to school and Nolan to preschool for 8 hours a week for all of SIX FREAKING MONTHS and then this happened. It’s just cruel is what it is.) This is new to all of us and nobody has found a rhythm yet, at least not consistently.

Also, have the official screentime recommendations been lowered to “whatever the hell you need to survive” yet? Because while the 2-hour maximum was incredibly easy to meet before—Nolan usually had less than an hour a day and Caden and Brooklyn had nothing beyond anything they did at school—we’re now on overload over here. Between yoga and schoolwork and the screentime-just-for-fun they’ve always had in the afternoon, we’re easily hitting 3 hours a day over here, if not more. And we’ve been saying “yes” a lot more. You want to play on your tablet for 20 minutes until bedtime? Sure. We’re saying “no” to virtually everything else right now.

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Wednesday, April 8th
When I wrote last fall about being sad that Caden and Brooklyn went off to school and that everyone was right when they said “it all goes by so fast” I DIDN’T MEAN I ACTUALLY WANTED THEM ALL BACK HOME. COME ON, UNIVERSE.

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I’m sitting at my desk, in the semi-darkness, and I heard a car drive by with the music blarimg. It reminded me of being 16 and getting my license. This time of year always does.

I actually got my license in February. It must have been warm that year because the snow was already melting— I think it was right after Valentine’s Day. And I remember, not long after, in March and April, the melting snow, rolling down the windows just because it was sunny and 55 degrees, blaring my own music because I could. It felt like freedom.

I think of that every year at this time, when it’s sunny and just barely warm enough to roll down the windows. I’d turn up my music, but these days it’s more often NPR or a podcast and that’s not quite the same. Also, this year, it doesn’t really feel like freedom.

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Thursday, April 9th
I saw a school bus drive by today and it was the strangest thing. Usually my life is full of school buses. Even before Caden and Brooklyn went off to school; we can basically see the high school from our backyard. We can hear the football games clearly in the fall. And less than mile down the busy road behind our house is a middle school and an elementary school. Buses drive back and forth all day, usually, during the school year.

When Nolan was a baby, he would wake up from his afternoon nap just about the time the buses were all lining up to pick up the high schoolers. We’d sit in the glider in his room together or look out the large windows downstairs as he would chant, “Bus! Bus! Bus!”

Anyway, I saw a bus yesterday. I have no idea where it came from or where it was going. And it was as strange as seeing one in the middle of July.

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Friday, April 10th
The other day I drew an activity on the sidewalk in front of our house. It began with hopscotch and then into frog jumps, transitioned into running and hopping on one foot and skipping around in a circle to turn around and do it all again.

I can see it from where I type here, up in our bedroom. There’s a girl outside now, maybe 11 or 12 years old. She’s been going back and forth on our sidewalk for the past seven minutes or so and it makes me so happy.

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It makes a lot of sense to me that Easter is the first holiday we’ll celebrate in this strange new world. Easter to me is a story of contrasts: grief and joy, dark and light, literally a story of death and life.

It feels like we’re holding a lot of those contrasts right now. We hold those swinging, opposing emotions: our own grief and joy, dark and light, and even death and life. 

Today is a dark day. As Glennon Doyle says, “First the pain. Then the waiting. Then the rising.” We’re in the middle of this right now; just at the very beginning of so much waiting. Though, sometimes, we’re still in pain. Maybe, just like the stages of grief, the pain and the waiting aren’t so linear as we’d like to think. 

Still, this year, we wait for our very own rising.

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Joining in today with Laura Tremain’s 10 things on the 10th prompt. Today’s is 10 things you miss.

1. Seeing friends and family. The kids want nothing more than to be able to play with their neighborhood friends. 

2. Hair cuts. There are some split ends up in here. 

3. The kids going to school. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

4. Certainty. Everything is so up in the air right now. We don’t know how long this will last or what our new normal will look like when this is all over. I’m assuming that summer is cancelled and the kids will go back to school in the fall but...will they? Tyson and I will be celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary in October and were trying to decide whether to live it up in New York City or take a tropical vacay. It seems unlikely either will happen now. 

5. Pedicures. But for real.

6. Being able to run to the store for random things. Like, I accidentally bought sugar free coffee syrup yesterday and almost GAGGED into my coffee this morning but I can’t (or at least won’t) just run to pick up another one.

7. Going outside without it being weird if there’s another person in my general vicinity.

8. Eating at restaurants. Drinking at breweries. Getting takeout without wiping the bags and containers down.

9. Options. Like, before I might have CHOSEN to stay home instead of go to that party/event/night out but at least I had the CHOICE.

10. Thinking. As in, about anything other than COVID-19. Also please see #3: the children are home and it is LOUD and I just want a MOMENT to complete an entire sentence in my own head.