We were in deepest farm country, visiting SIL and BIL and meeting Squirt, who is just the cutest baby we've seen all season, and given the ways our friends keep procreating, that's saying something. He's fussy but not screamy, he makes great faces, he loves getting patted very firmly on his back, and he much prefers to sit upright. He's three weeks old, and that's about the sum total of what you can say about a three-week old.
SIL and BIL are doing pretty well. They're a little testy, in that way that people who have been through something big and are currently pretty low on sleep can be, and they're facing a month of mostly living apart, which isn't helping their respective moods. But they've got some routines down, and they think Squirt's faces and grunts and little noises are adorable, the breastfeeding is proceeding apace, and the house is not a complete wreck, so they're doing very well, actually.
We didn't do as badly as I feared, but neither did we do as well as I'd hoped. One of the difficulties of this trip was that once we got there, there was be very, very little privacy to have the kind of couple time that helps us manage these things. We slept on the futon in the living room, so BIL or SIL might come downstairs at any point to warm a bottle or get something they needed or whatever. There was no opportunity to run out and do errands for them or anything like that. It was 40 hours of some pretty intense togetherness.
Which meant, of course, that I put on my cheerful face and just kept going. It's what I do in situations like that because my feelings of envy and desire and hopelessness and sadness and rage? Not their problem.
As we drove home I thought maybe we'd kind of escaped the emotional turmoil. I felt pretty centered. Exhausted, because I had taken Squirt from BIL at 5:30 in the morning and sent BIL back to bed for some much-needed rest (if they weren't going to let us actually clean or do laundry or anything like that, the least we could do was let them get some sleep), but centered. So we talked about what kind of baby stuff we would actually get and what we wouldn't bother with, how we would rearrange the bedroom when we got a bigger bed to allow for cosleeping, things like that. You know, cart before the proverbial horse things.
When will I learn?
Centered lasted exactly up to the point at which R declined our invitation for dinner. It wasn't that his declining was unreasonable or anything, and I hadn't been explicit about needing to see him for my emotional equilibrium because I'd seemed, even to myself, to be okay. So he didn't know, because I didn't know. But I. fell. apart.
I wanted an emotional blankie, I think, the kind of there-there attention that only people you're really and truly close to can provide. Ms. P, of course, is usually my blankie, but when it comes to the baby plan she needs some head patting too. And in the end, I didn't want it from anyone but R. It wasn't even that I necessarily wanted to talk. I just wanted to curl up in his general vicinity and feel safe together with my wife. I wanted my family.
We rallied and went to dinner with L&S to distract ourselves, which mostly worked through L needing to cry on our shoulders. Not exactly the plan and not exactly what we needed, but distracting nonetheless.
Since we're planning to start trying again here in a few weeks, I know the next chunk of time is going to be hard. We've been careening through our days, bouncing from one obligation and one friend-needing-support to another, and we need to do some serious nesting so our equilibria are less compromised by the slings and arrows of daily life. Every tarot reading either of us has had done lately has told us quite pointedly to attend to our own spiritual lives, so that's what we're planning to do. Meditation, prayer, journaling, you name it, it's in the plan.
We fall down, we get up again.