New Home, New Baby, Long Winter

Feb. 25, 2007

Winter is finally almost over. It’s been good…and not so good. The baby came in the fall, and I floated through the fog of sleep deprivation until I woke up in full winter to a rip-roaring blizzard culminating in more than 15 inches of snow. My husband was unable to get to his new job; even if the snow had been shallow enough, we had somehow lost our snow shovels in the move from city to country. Oops. Thankfully, one of our few neighbors was nice enough to clear our driveway with his snow plow, and he didn’t even ridicule us about our lack of snow shovels. (Well, at least not to our faces.) Back when a quiet winter in the country was still a novelty, I was most impressed with the behemoth green machine that re-opened the world to us, and did not yet feel the isolation of our new place in the world. But as one winter storm rolled into another, and nights remained a blur of endless feedings for the baby, the grays and browns of the landscape seeped into my psyche and left me feeling, at times, abysmally lonely.

Throughout the winter, I viewed the new baby with a variety of emotions. Most often, it was incredulous joy—how did we get so lucky? We have a beautiful, healthy baby. And when Evan, my oldest, holding his new brother, looked up at me with tears in his eyes and love for his brother on his lips, I thought life couldn’t get any better. Sometimes, though, I felt despair, wondering why little Jackson wouldn’t sleep and if he ever would. And then there was the ugly mother-guilt I’d feel when fresh snow would close the schools and I couldn’t take my oldest son outside to play: we couldn’t count on the baby to sleep long enough to pile on the layers required for outdoor fun. I admit, on the really trying days I wondered why we wanted to do the baby thing again. There is a 7 ½ year gap between oldest and youngest, and either I don’t remember the difficulty of sleep-deprived days, or my body and brain don’t bounce back as easily in my thirties as in my twenties.

Over the course of the winter, a season of new motherhood and stillness and waiting—waiting for spring, for opportunities to make friends, for my husband to get home from work, and most of all for a good night’s sleep—I forgot why I had ever wanted to move to mid-Missouri. Oh, there were times when I’d catch a glimpse, like the night that Evan and I took our sleds outside our front door to slip and slide by the light of the moon, or the day balmy enough to take a brand new baby out to greet a few of the neighbor’s horses. But too often these moments were overshadowed by the pervasiveness of the waiting, and it dragged me into a deeper and deeper funk until I spent a weekend drifting through seed catalogues, dreaming of my biggest and best garden ever. Oh, yes! Every seed packet I ordered lifted my spirits and sent a shiver of excitement through this city girl hoping to make it out here in the country. I would last until spring, after all.

The seeds have now arrived in the mail, a grow light has been installed to give my garden a head start, and I am eagerly awaiting the heady days of early spring. Last week, the weather even warmed enough for a bit of nighttime stargazing, a magical part of this new rural lifestyle. Here, at the tail end of winter in my new home, I am doing okay. I’m still waiting for spring, and I’m still waiting for my husband to get home, but the baby is doing okay in the sleep department. Not great, but I’ll take it. Spring is just around the corner, and things are looking up.