This Week: My Baby is a Kid
Four years ago, I became a mama for the first time.
Dear fam,
Four years ago, at this very moment, I held my baby in my arms for the first time. Big Kid was born at 9:42 pm, after 23 hours of active labor and five days of sporadic pre-labor contractions. He came into this world screaming his little head off, with a shock of dark hair and the most beautiful face I’d ever seen. My wife and I held him close as he nursed for the first time. We cried and cried, tears of joy and disbelief. All those years later, I still look at him and can’t believe it. I made this person in my body and then pushed him out of me. And now he’s standing in front of me explaining how to kick a soccer ball.
What the hell.
For the last four years, I’ve been trying to make sense of a lot of things that just refuse to line up. Like, it doesn’t make sense to me that Big Kid and Baby weren’t in our lives once — what did we do without them?! — but I also can’t believe they even exist, because how is it possible we grew them in our bodies?
They’re little miracles. But if they’re miracles, then so are all of us, because we were all grown inside of other people (which is just crazy), even the guy cutting me off in traffic, and that’s really hard to comprehend.
My wife would say I’m being dramatic again. And she’s not wrong. But I think I have a tendency to get lost in the wildness of the world, the parts that we’re just supposed to accept as commonplace, and let them seep into my cracks ‘til I start to come apart.
It’s why I have an existential crisis every time I fly to a new time zone. How can I have just been there and now I’m here. I think most folks get through this by not thinking about it too much. That’s what I try to do, too, but it’s not really my nature. I’m always teetering on the edge of awe, trying not too fall off into wonderment. ‘Cause that can be a dangerous place, a place where you don’t know where you end and the universe begins.
Four years ago, when I gave birth to Big Kid, I also lost my mind for a while. Eventually, we called it postpartum insomnia and anxiety, and I got treatment and began to regain my mind, slowly, in the tiniest of increments. It took about a year before I began to feel anything like myself again.
I’ve tried to make sense of those months as well, and I’ve gleaned some wisdom from that exercise. I know now that I had undiagnosed ADHD, that I had been suffering from panic attacks for years when I got pregnant. I can recognize how my neurodivergent mind reacted differently to loss of sleep and hormonal imbalances. I understand that it wasn’t my fault. Well, I understand that on an intellectual level, at least. I’m working on the self-forgiveness part.
You know what’s amazing, though? I lost my mind and my body for the better part of two years, came out of it a changed person, never got back to who I was before.
And I swear to you that I would do it all again. Just to get to be Big Kid’s mama.
This kid is magical, y’all. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he makes me more than a little crazy. We have plenty of rough moments. Today, for example, he dislodged the sliding bathroom door from its hinge when I was trying to have one single minute of privacy.
Let’s just say I wasn’t focused on the magic at that particular time.
But he also hears things no one else hears, like a teeny-tiny bug or the softest motor whirring. He’s so sensitive to music that once, when we were jamming, I played a minor chord progression and he got so sad he cried for an hour. We paint and have water fights and make up songs about dinosaurs. He asks me questions I’d never even considered. He sees the world with sensitive eyes. He cares deeply. He feels deeply. He amazes me with his insights and wisdom.
Becoming Big Kid’s mama has made my life infinitely richer. Like when Dorothy lands in Oz and everything is technicolor. And we think ‘This is sorcery!’ and also ‘How can it ever have been different?’
Sometimes I want him to leave me alone so I can think a full thought from beginning to end and also I want him to never leave me because I love him so much.
Sometimes I am far too full to hold space for his big, big feelings and also I want him to know he can always trust me to be a vessel for whatever he’s experiencing.
Sometimes I don’t understand how I’m supposed to be doing this at all and also I know my wife and I are the only ones who can work out this puzzle.
I started this publication for a lot of reasons, but one of them was to stop trying to get all the ducks to line up in a row. I want this newsletter, the conversations with creatives, the essays about thorny topics, all of it to be a space for things to be messy. To not make sense. Because I keep trying to make it logical, but I keep coming back to something my overly dramatic, existential-crisis-having, sentimental sop of a self has been saying all along.
The magic of the world doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t have to — that’s part of living in the Chaos Palace. It’s messy as hell, at times maddening (literally), but the magic is worth it. I’d do it again, y’all, over and over again, if it meant I’d be able to have the awe. The learning. The astonishing improbability of it all.
Let me know about the things that are stopping you in your tracks these days. Share the amazement with the Chaos community in the comments.
Sending you love.
Shavua tov,
Mikhal
What I’m Reading
Not much, this week. But I did enjoy this article by my pal and colleague
about the history of abortion care via herbalism and why these remedies may need to make a comeback in the political climate of today. Also, published a great piece in (which, if you don’t follow, you should immediately subscribe to) about evolving science and pregnancy data. Lastly, wrote a very helpful and in-depth look at the new over the counter birth control pill in , both in terms of the data itself and the ways in which it will (and should) empower people with uteruses to take control over their reproductive health in an age of increasing restrictions.
What I’m Writing
I wrote a new Dreams of Chaos this week! Lora-Faye Åshuvud of indie legend Arthur Moon chatted with me about gender, letting the chaos in, and what it means to make a record that’s “incoherently coherent.”
Lora-Faye Åshuvud Dreams of Chaos
I met Lora-Faye Åshuvud, the visionary force behind indie rock’s Arthur Moon, because they went on tour with my wife. We were all a whole lot younger — my wife and I didn’t have any kids yet, for one — and both bands were playing all kinds of questionable venues up and down the east coast. I remember my wife texting me from the road, something like “this person is really cool, let’s be friends with them.”
Thank you for sharing your experience and feelings being a mom. Your article gives me a glimpse of the intense feelings you have throughout your pregnancy and after. I love that you maintain your sense of awe and wonder, and that your kid's sensitivity keeps that alive in you. The world is messy, and so are human relationships. As much as some people wish for everything to run on logic, it just doesn't work that way. Also, just because some of us are neurodivergent or highly sensitive, doesn't mean we don't belong to this beautiful and messy world ;-) In fact, the world needs us whose inner world and perceptions are different from the "main stream" to move forward and to expand in depth.