Nora Wormwood

I got into an old box of photos last night after my husband got home from work. Sometimes it’s easier for me to go upstairs when he gets home, because the girls are more laid back when I’m out of sight.

I’m fairly certain I’ve lost a huge amount of photos because of a stupid decision I made with my iCloud account several years back. Since it’s painful for me, it kind of haunts me, and I haven’t just called someone at Apple to confirm or deny this loss. But here in an old shoe box were a few precious prints of my time in Greece (and some from France and Sweden, too). I think if this is all that’s left, that’s OKAY. It’s like a small win of the hundreds of others are gone. I mean, when my husband did a gap year (through the same agency, but 15 years before me) he didn’t even bring a camera. I have to remember, in this age of constantly capturing and “remembering” through screens instead of eyes, it can be okay to pare down.

It’s still heartbreaking, though, to lose images and sometimes memories with them, but I’m learning maybe it’s an opportunity for gratitude. To focus on what I have, and not mourn what I have lost.

More thoughts on that here

During Aquarius season have been intense and vivid. I was biking around an affluent neighborhood in California. I was running on a sidewalk with teenagers (I was a teenager, too), and watching a boy gain on us from behind. It was terrifying, but he ran past us and was clearly after another boy who was just ahead of us. There was terror in the eyes of the boy being chased. I didn’t know what to do. Nobody had weapons, but I didn’t feel capable of breaking up this fight between two young men who were bigger than me.

The baby has been crying and babbling on and off since just after 4. It gets earlier and earlier. I’m exhausted just from typing about the baby every day. She keeps falling asleep again but now, at just last 5, I think she may be up.

I haven’t been on Instagram for almost a week now. I almost can’t imagine going back, really, but I’m sure I will. I hope it will look different, the way I interact with it I mean. I think a lot about how I’ve had two kids before 30 and most of my friends aren’t even thinking about children. I think, to them, my posts and writing must seem foreign and boring and annoying. But then I’m immersed in another land of blogs or accounts of women with children and I feel like compared to them I’m an outcast too. It doesn’t really matter where I fit into all of this, it’s more that I’m trying to figure out where I fit it or where I want to fit in.

It’s been surprising to me (although understandable) that since I’ve been taking this break from Instagram I rarely hear from friends. I understand Instagram is a catch all and where people check in and interact, but I need a break. It’s so strange to feel isolated further just because of not using an app. We all have phones and ability to text or call immediately, but you can just dip out of this app and people forget you ever existed on that space. I know this is coming off as narcissistic or whiny…that’s not my intent but that doesn’t really matter either. These are just musings of a mother about to start another long, long day.

I woke up at 4:30 today so…this must be the day. Today will most certainly be the day my baby sleeps until 6 or later. It’s a new moon in the sign of Aquarius, a very powerful new moon. I am always ovulating right around the new moon which feels so appropriate as it is a time for planting and setting intentions. A time for the first seeds of growth, and then you check back in once the full moon comes and see how things are moving along. I like these cycles for my life, and I’ve been thinking a lot about passages of time and how we mark them. A year into a pandemic, not really working, looking after two kids (after birthing one of them at home during said pandemic) has lead to a particular sense of time.

The baby woke up at 5 and the day started. It’s now 2:17 and she’s woken up from a half hour nap. Passage of time during a day looks like meals and naps and deep breaths. During a week looks like meals and training with my mother in law to take over her business, and CSA pickups, and movies. During a month looks like my baby’s age, birthdays of others, menstrual cycles, moon cycles. During a year looks like pregnancies and births and jobs and birthdays and hair growth.

I am still committing to this space. I’m typing on my phone with one hand, while I nurse the baby. Dinner is prepped but I need to fold laundry and clean the house and write intentions for the new moon. In time.

Something I’ve been digging

Has woken up, screeching and screaming at 4:58am. Again, somehow, I was already up and trying to get even more time for writing and reading before she woke. She usually wakes anywhere between 6-7. I know this is temporary. I know her top teeth are moving in her mouth.

It’s still a shitty way to start the day.

So I guess I’ll just end on something I find equally surreal, but also funnier than the baby whining and screeching before 5am. Something William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote for Universal Press Syndicate in 1996, “At St. John’s, real education is no dream”, featuring a very specific description of my now husband.

“The heat at midday was unmerciful, but George Robert Phelps didn’t suffer the burden of an academic gown. Tall, thin, redheaded, tieless, wearing eyeglasses and dragging his rumpled jacket at hip level, one wondered whether he was 17 years old or, at the most, 18. He had won a prize for an essay titled, ‘Music, Myth, and Philosophical Uncertainty in the Phaedo.’”

Was William F. Buckley Jr. hot for my 20 year old husband??

The baby woke up screaming, so this eliminates the hour of morning writing time I was hoping for. Instead, I offer this note I tapped out on my phone yesterday while trying to explain what was happening in my body:

The baby has been

Screaming at me since she woke up from her nap of just over an hour. I’m waiting for the Tylenol to kick in as my body is winding tighter and tighter inside with every scream, every strand of hair she rips out of my head, every time she turns her head away from the spoon I try to feed her with. I shake out a pile of “puffs” in front of her and this stops the screaming for awhile. I know she’s teething and I want to empathize, but I am tired. I have precious hours to myself these days. That’s it, two hours maximum. I’ve been waking up at 5 now instead of 6 so I can have an hour or more before the baby wakes up.

When she’s quiet I can try to regain composure. She’s very cute and funny and learning a whole lot, but she’s so fussy and needy, which means I usually have to hold her or strap her to my body in a pack. That’s okay, I know it’s temporary, but I can’t begin to explain the toll this takes on my body, physically, but psychosomatically as well.

I get a letter from a friend, the second letter from this friend. The first I meant to respond to and it didn’t happen. What am I supposed to say in a letter right now? It’s been a year of a pandemic with two small children and no childcare and taking over a business during nap time and those naps are so short now because two top teeth are coming in. Maybe it will look like: doing pretty well, how are you?