so easy with one

Stella naps. One of my guardian angels came this morning to take Hamish to daycare, so I wouldn't have to schlep the kids in the car with my back ailment. My other guardian angel will pick him up and take him for the afternoon. So that leaves me with Stella.


Now yesterday, My GAs took Stella and left me with Hamish. They offered to take him too but I declined, still clinging to supermom shreds, hellbent on not giving up entirely, and also desperate to experience one-on-one time with Hamish again. It's been a long time since he and I have been together, just us. It was pretty glorious. He played independently and I took a shower. We cuddled and I tickled him and he sat for a few bites of pasta and regaled me with tales of what we do in the summer. "We play toys." But he refused the broccoli which made me think I played it up too much and shouldn't even have mentioned it and why don't I know that rule by now, the "don't make vegetables too important" rule?

Talking with him and just being with him without interruption was really just extraordinary. I told my mom about it on the phone. I said, "It's so easy with one!" and you know what she said? "It's so easy with three!" Because she has four. I'm the baby. I knew I'd never know this ease if it weren't for Stella, so yeah with the irony gong. But it made me think that next fall, when Hamish goes to preschool a few days a week, that maybe I will put Stella in his old daycare a couple days a week so I can have one-on-one time with Hamish on a regular basis. A mom I met at the preschool, a mom who happened to attend sixth grade with me back in Philadelphia no less, small world Brooklyn, said about her own two daughters, that it's easy to be alone with the oldest and it's gotten easy to be with both of them, but being alone with the youngest, her youngest is two, is hard. So there you go. From an expert.

Took 400 milligrams of ibuprofin this morning and will do some bent-knee sit-ups and other assorted exercises I found on the internet. But after Stella peed all over the bed and her jammies at 4:30 this morning I just couldn't get back to sleep, and so I laid there in pain obsessing about the fact that if I don't get some regular exercise I'm going to literally fall apart. And that my life seems tailor-made for back troubles, with the sedan I've got to crouch through with the car seat, and the bottom bunk to make, and the two flights of stairs with the groceries and laundry, how everything seems so low to the ground and how everything important needs to be hoisted...

And then I thought that if I didn't have my back pain to worry over, it'd be something else. Which reminds me of that sappy but illuminating book, Loving What Is, by Byron Katie, who suffered a decade-long depression when her sixteen year-old daughter was addicted to heroin, which is heavy, right? And on the floor of a halfway house, she had a breakthrough, and realized that everything, and she means EVERYTHING that is happening in the world, and in our lives is supposed to happen, and only when we argue with reality do we lose. And I'm trying really hard to get a handle on my "shoulds" because thinking that things should be different than they are, as Lady Byron says, is like "arguing with raindrops." Or an eight-month old baby who's just woken up crying. Sigh.