MAMA'S BIGGEST LITTLE HELPER AND OTHER THINGS ABOUT STUFF

this is huck. huck is my dreamboat of a toddler. i love him more than i love marshmallows and back tickles, and let me tell you. that is some kind of love.

so, these are just a couple of janky photos from friday afternoon's trader joe's trip, but they seemed to have sparked a landfall of emotions and i hope you will forgive the wordy post that follows. 

the elevator at trader joe's was broken--again--and they were all out of shopping carts, so huck was the big man and got to haul the grocery basket around for his mama. oh boy he was so proud of himself. it about made my chest burst to watch his proud little body lugging that enormously heavy basket around. 

there comes this point in motherhood where you are suddenly "yours" again. do you know what i mean? i've spent a lot of time thinking about this because it is probably the strangest and neatest thing my body has ever done, but for those months where you're pregnant and then newly not pregnant and then nursing (or not nursing, too), you are living your every moment with tunnel vision, where all you see and all you think about are your baby. your body exists for your baby, in the most primal way. you think about your baby first thing when you wake up, the muscles in your arms become toned in a very baby-specific way, your boobs don't let you forget there's a baby to be fed at any time ever . . . and then one day they outgrow you and you're just you again. it's triumphant for a lot of women but i suspect there's a small sliver of us out there who positively grieve when that day comes. 

all along when huck was itty bitty i loved my new mom body. i would even go so far as to say that i did NOT want my old body back. under any circumstances. my hormones had completely erased my migraines and any occasional pimple i used to get, i had a physical purpose like i'd never had before, nearly 50% of my brain cells were tied up in trying to keep a baby alive, so it was hard to over-analyze or obsess over any stupid thing . . . and i had a really great rack! that was especially fun. ideally i wanted to do it again right as soon as huck's babyhood was reaching it's climax and then keep doing it over, and over, and over again. for as many babies as heaven would send us and as quickly as my body could take them. this motherhood thing just really works on me. and fatherhood has enhanced brandon in such gorgeous ways. so we were all systems go, the holbrook team. i just wanted to be a baby making machine. still do, but, you know, the best laid plans and blah blah blah.

so here we are. huck is fully out of the baby phase. he's carrying large grocery baskets around trader joe's for crying out loud. i can trust him to walk just behind me, minding his p's and q's. and once again, i am just me. full of brain space for plenty of worrying, migraines and blemishes are back from time to time, my arms have gone soft in that very sad, baby-free way, and as we all know, i'm not nursing anymore, cue the sad boobs. (by the way, i checked last night and i am still lactating, which i guess is comforting in case there's a zombie apocalypse and we run out of food sources or something?)

i'm still a mom, of course, and i still love it. i just love it differently. i mother differently. it's good in all the good ways, just not in that one specific kind of way, and so . . . i miss it. 

for a good long while this made me sad. profoundly sad. then there was the S-A-D, too (i know seasonal affective disorder is true and i love my mom and dad, amen), not to mention the lovely dark side of blogging that most bloggers never want to talk about--and who can blame them? (hey guess what! no matter how hard i try to "fix" what people don't seem to like about me, some people still won't like me. revelation of all revelations! hello my name is natalie and i am a reformed people-pleaser.) i'm ashamed to say it, i guess, but i've let it all get me down recently. since december, i've let the circumstances get me down and i haven't been me the way i want me to be me. 

brandon is going through a stressful time. i'm not going to write anything further about that because it's not my story to tell, though i know brandon wouldn't mind my sharing this little bit. brandon is stressed. the other day as we sat on the couch with our legs all wrapped up together while he let it all out, vented all his frustrations into the air, i realized that what's missing is just his groove. he just needs to find his place in it. 

and then i realized that that's what i've been missing, too. oh duh, natalie.

when we were in idaho and i worked at that awful soul sucking place and brandon was a student and we were so terribly poor and i couldn't get pregnant and my insurance wouldn't let me find out why, that was a dark, dark time for me. i was so deeply unhappy. i had no control of anything in my life, in the most basic and obvious ways. and i remember realizing one day that my circumstances weren't going to change any time soon, and i wasn't going to be able to wish any of it away, and this was it. this was it and i had to find my place in it. i needed to make my groove. one day, while driving home from work under a july evening sun, i realized with a sense of urgency that i had to make my happiness my number one priority, that very moment, or else i'd never be happy. if i couldn't be happy now, what business did i have being happy ever? if i couldn't be happy then i didn't deserve happiness ever. that night i sat down and wrote every good thing about my weekend into my long-neglected blog. i poured everything i had into making those good things sing. i did it every night, some i published and some i didn't, and after just a few nights it was like the sun had dawned inside me, brand new and ready to roll. i was still at my horrible office, we were still hilariously poor, my body was still stubbornly broken, but i had finally found my place in it. i had created a place, a groove inside of the pain where i could actually thrive. 

in that way, my time in idaho sort of became this mythic, impossibly huge time in my life. even while i was living it, i was aware that it was taking on a significance far bigger than "a place where we lived." my own private idaho, brandon calls it. i think of idaho as the goliath that i tamed, and as a birthplace of the parts of me i am the most proud of.

idaho has been on my mind so much lately. especially after these long months of feeling frustrated and literally sick to my stomach over things beyond my control. i am so grateful to have finally remembered, while sitting on the couch with my poor stressed out husband, that what really matters in life is not beyond my control at all. because i am in control of making my groove. i can find my place here in this place. as a mother to a perfect, lovely toddler, as an accidental business woman, as the owner of a yet-again temporarily-infertile body. it's an ongoing process, you're never done reminding yourself to be happy. 

i'm not sure when another little baby will come and i'll get to be supermom with the happy hormones. crap those new mom hormones make being happy easy on me. (maybe next time those hormones won't make me so happy, these things are possible, too.) i do hope it's soon but i'm okay if it's not. i feel sometimes like the timing isn't right, and i'm at peace with that too. the time will come, but first it's the time for THIS. whatever this is. in a lot of ways, this little mirror back to my idaho life has been wonderful. and oddly comforting. sometimes the Lord sends you trials to prepare you for your blessings. i believe in that. one for one. the trial of idaho prepared me for the very best blessing this life has ever given me, and that would be my huck. my huck has been the ocean and the sky of blessings.

i'm finding my way to the top of it again. so to that i say, groove found. bring it on.