Mnemosyne, Part 1.

I was supposed to be living in a cabin in Mexico by now. The plan was straightforward: go to college, major in art (but do graphic design on the side, because that’s easy to teach yourself) and then take a year to hike the Appalachian Trail after graduation.

By this time I already would have ridden my bike across the United States and traversed the entire length of the Grand Canyon, and maybe take photos for National Geographic or something to pay the bills. I expected that after that I’d live at a national park for a while, maybe in the Rocky Mountains or Grand Tetons, probably as one of those park attendants who lives in an RV and kayaks a couple of times a week. After that, it’s time to head south, and find a little town in southern Mexico where I can live without a car, and where people take naps and play soccer every day.

I’d have my own coffee plants, so I could roast my own beans, and boot up my state-of-the-art Apple iProduct in my hammock (my INSIDE hammock) to communicate with my fawning clients via whatever high-speed satellite connection I was sure they would have inside computers by then. I’d whip up a website or something and make some money and then hop on my motorcycle and head into the city for an ice-cold Coca Cola at the cantina. I’d probably spend my evenings reading Tolstoy or teaching little Mexican kids how to play the guitar. That was the plan.

Last month I turned 27 years old. To me this seems both unfathomably old and unreasonably young at the same time; this paradox grows out of the fact that while I still struggle with the transitional insecurities of youth, I’m getting a little bit bald in the back, and am constantly confronted with questions of real consequences and value. This year has been the strangest in my life so far. Secretly, (or perhaps not so secretly) I’d be happy if it remained so for the rest of it.

In review: a design degree at 22, married at 23, mortgage at 24, kids at 26. Instead of living in Mexico I’ve found myself embedded in the ‘burbs outside of the perennial City of Suits, and instead of riding my motorcycle to the cantina I tend to ride a train to my quiet street where I hang out with my quiet wife and our three less-than-quiet children. I work at a perfectly stable job (which I love), where they let me wear t-shirts and take coffee breaks whenever I want, but it’s essentially a 9-5 career just like any other. Sometimes I play X-Box. Sometimes I read William Gibson novels. I’m really concerned with how the trim in my house isn’t a consistent shade of white, and I own a minivan.

Last year, when I turned 26, my thoroughly pregnant wife treated me to a night of “watching any movie I wanted to,” and since I have impeccable taste, I chose Scott Pilgrim vs. The World for our evening feature. As Xtina was reclining on the couch, she started making little “oof” sounds that told me the babies were kicking. They had recently started to move around in a noticeable way, though to this point their tiny kicks were too faint for me to feel with my hand. She said that it felt a little bit like she had a bunch of feathers in her tummy, very faint, and not something that was easy to explain.

“Quick, put your hand here, I think it’s Oliver kicking!”

I put my hand where she pointed, and waited. Nothing.

Meanwhile, Michael Cena was doing all kinds of kicking on-screen, empowered by the endorphin-fueled power chords of Beck and the frenetic, LSD-inspired world of Nintendo coin showers and Jason Schwartzman wielding a samurai sword that was probably 2x larger than he is in real life. Schwartzman had just swallowed his gum, and in a moment of purple-faced fury started to growl “YOU…MADE ME SWALLOW MY—”

*Kick*

Heart racing, I had felt that one.

Things changed.

The Part About Fear, Where it Sounds Like I Don’t Love My Kids and I Am a Selfish B*stard, a Little Bit.

1. On the illusion of control

I do think it’s worth pointing out that it’s been a long time since I’ve been under any illusion that I have actual control of anything in my life, and am content in that truth. Once your doctor looks at you with a face that registers genuine shock and tells you that you’re having two children instead of one, and after that three children instead of two, you get over any control issues that may have been lingering. What I still held onto tightly though was the ownership of my perspective.

Since the kids were born in early March, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Value and Perspective. I think this is a natural thing for new parents to go through, especially young parents for which having children is a natural progression, but not a struggle. Questions of how to spend my “free” time and the structuring of family/career balance have been natural topics of consideration, and frankly, of worry. The added knowledge that whatever new impacts a baby would bring to our lives would automatically be multiplied by three was a pretty heavy cloud over my head in the early days, one that seemed to appear and grow in proportion to Christina’s inability to be active in the later stage of her pregnancy, and remained through the early stages of the kids’ lives, which included a 5 week hospital stay and 24 total daily feedings. I struggled with two different feelings: one, of total adoration of these children and being awed by the miracle of their safe, healthy birth after a very unsure (and short) third trimester, but also I was constantly aware of a slight undertone of panic in my mind, one that feared that these kids would quickly wrest the steering wheel out of my hands and leave me scrambling to catch up.

2. On fear, and the loss of imagination

Perspective is a hard thing to nail down. Since it’s essentially the lens through which we make decisions and not the decisions themselves, all you can really see are the results of a perspective. Up to the point where I felt that first kick my perspective was always one of steady progress, working towards goals, never stop moving and never stop building. Those goals had changed over the years (the Appalachian Trail hike had been condensed to a 3 day, 30 mile trek through Shenandoah Valley the year before) but my determination to always improve on what I had already completed was what fueled the slow burn of my creative development. My imagination, while not a particularly nimble creature in comparison to others, was something I guarded more than anything else. The inevitable reality check of triplets was scary. Would it diminish my desire to create new things? Would I slowly stop caring about what I ate and get fat, be too tired at night to do anything but watch TV, not ever go to grad school? Most of us have grown up in an environment that frowns on “unnecessary risk,” one that views relaxation and lack of pressure as the desirable state of being (why is it that retirement is such a driving force in our society, after all?) and the home is often the physical manifestation of that attitude. Would having kids drive me deeper into suburban safety, a place that I already felt like I was teetering on the edge of? My perspective has been that to embrace safety is to lose imagination, and to lose imagination is to grow stale, and to grow stale is to become irrelevant. That was the last thing I wanted. I remember following middle-of-the-night solo feedings with 30 minute chunks of a Frank Lloyd Wright documentary or careful perusal of Eames photo retrospectives as I tried to understand how people grew older and yet maintained their creative vigor. Ironically, FLW was a terrible father and the Eames never had any kids, facts which were perhaps a little bit lost on me at the time.

3. The fear of detachment

The other fear that swirled in my brain was the unknown of how the kids would affect my relationship with Christina. I’ve actually heard the topic of relational prioritization discussed in the media more in the last year than I ever have before, perhaps fueled by the obscenely high divorce rates that we continue to deal with in the western world. It almost seems a given that once kids come they are given all-encompassing priority in the family, most often at the expense of the parents’ relationship.

“Kids first, then you, then me. If I have to choose, I choose the kids. You should too.”

To me, who believes that a healthy parental relationship is one of the quickest routes to relaxed and happy kids, that unknown was a scary one.

Stress is an interesting beast. I’ve lived on a steady diet of stress for a while, nothing unmanageable, but it’s been a constant for me since I started going to college. They say that a little stress is good for you, it can be what gets you out of the bed in the morning and to work on time. It can focus you, keep you awake when you need to be awake, and help you hit deadlines that otherwise seem insurmountable. The problem with a slow drip of the stuff is that after a while it builds up in your system, and you start to see signs of it that you wouldn’t have expected. The peak of my stress occurred in the last 2 months of Christina’s pregnancy, when we were in and out of the hospital several times a week as preterm labor contractions started hitting more regularly, and finally cultivating in a month-long stay beginning in February of this year. Christina was receiving injections and other meds to slow down the contractions, and we were never really sure how long they’d be able to keep the babies in there. The ramifications of early birth can be pretty severe, and her earliest hospital stints occurred early enough in the pregnancy where side effects of early birth would have been highly likely. I don’t ever think I’ve been mentally burdened with anything quite as heavily as I was with the weight of that insecurity. Every day I woke up wondering if that would be the day that I’d be a papa, and praying that the kids would be okay. That’s all you can do, right?

Thankfully,

We made it to 33 weeks. 33 weeks is still pretty early, 7 weeks early actually (but who’s counting?)

Coming Soon, Part II: Where I Grow Up and Finally Learn To Relax

8 Comments to Mnemosyne, Part 1.

  1. by Lindsay Moore on December 26, 2011 at 7:52 am

    Justin,

    You are a fantastic writer. And this is one of the most wonderful sentences ever written by a 27-year-old male: “I’m really concerned with how the trim in my house isn’t a consistent shade of white, and I own a minivan.” You are poetic, and very certainly one of the most creative people that I’ve acquainted. Carry on with your bad self. Mexico can wait.

    Happiest of holidays,
    Lindsay Moore

  2. by justin on December 26, 2011 at 9:52 am

    Thanks Lindsay, I appreciate your kind words and encouragement.

  3. by heather on December 26, 2011 at 9:55 am

    Fantastic writer, indeed. Great read; can’t wait for the next. Cabins in Mexico are overrated anyway.

  4. by Carl Stone on December 27, 2011 at 12:56 am

    Sounds a little like life to me.
    After a divorce and a decade of industry layoffs, I am getting ready to
    go Gold prospecting on motorcycle across the western United States.

    Wild and Crazy? Perhaps.
    But it beats sitting at home waiting for a call for a job interview that
    will most likely never come, my grandfather told me when I was a boy
    that when this happens, and it will, you have to get out and kick up
    some dust and see what materializes… he was a wise man.
    This party gets started this coming spring.

  5. by Erin on December 27, 2011 at 9:57 pm

    Wow, Justin, this is just incredibly well written and so honest. Cannot wait to read more. It’s rare to read such depth written so artistically by a 20-something. Thanks for sharing.

  6. by pam on December 27, 2011 at 10:26 pm

    how are you ten years younger than me, but infinitely wiser? hmm.

    lovely post! can’t wait to read more.

  7. by josh the neighbor on December 28, 2011 at 8:52 am

    dude…that was good. really good.

  8. by Becky on January 13, 2012 at 12:40 am

    Hey I recognize the writing of an old friend, but especially that trampoline…

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