It takes a village

Imagine if you will a nursery with pink walls, toys already safely put away, one toddler and an utterly exhausted mother. It is 8:30pm. Five stories have been read. The potty has been used one last time. The milk bottle is drained. The frog pajamas have been securely zippered. Now, it’s just time to sleep.

The mother gives one last hug to her two and half year old toddler, lays her down in the crib and says goodnight. She sits on the floor one foot away from the bed. There is no physical contact, no eye contact, no further conversation beyond a whisper. At first, it seems like the night will end peacefully.

Then the toddler opens the night’s battle, “Mommy, hug me.”

“Goodnight,” says the mother.

“Mommy, hold me.”

“Goodnight.”

“Mommy, hold my hand.”

“Goodnight.”

“Mommy, more bottle.”

“Goodnight.”

“Mommy, more pee pee.”

“You have a diaper on.”

“Mommy…” The toddler crawls out of bed. The mother puts her back.

“Mommy,” the toddler cries louder.

“Goodnight.”

“Mommy!”

The escaping, screaming and protests continue in the same manner for another twenty minutes until, in a final effort to get her mother’s attention, the toddler sticks her finger in her mouth and makes herself throw up. The mother is horrified. She turns on the light, cleans the vomit off, changes the sheets, and is tempted to give in. What’s one more night of rocking to sleep, and surely her daughter couldn’t have intentionally caused herself to throw up?

But then the toddler giggles, loudly. The mother narrows her eyes in disbelief. Her resolve returns. She repeats the goodnight routine and says “Goodnight.” She steels herself against the ensuing protests.

Ninety minutes later, the toddler has fallen asleep by herself for the first time in six months. The mother crawls out of the nursery, blurry eyed, guilt-ridden, her ears ringing with her daughter’s desperate cries for her. She can already hear her daughter’s conversations with her therapist. “My mother abandoned me when I needed her. I grew up feeling so unloved.”

Then the mother turns on HBO and takes a deep breath. The house is silent. She has not fallen asleep with her pregnant stomach wedged against the sharp edges of her daughter’s toddler bed, her hand instinctually patting a child’s stomach. No, for the first night in ages, she and her daughter’s bedtimes have been separated. She smiles wearily and thinks to call her husband and tell him of her victory. But she’s too tired. She just falls asleep with the remote in her hand, very very relieved.

The above describes my past ten days. Every three nights, I moved one more foot away from the bed in an effort to teach my daughter to fall asleep by herself. There were a few variations on the battle but the overall struggle persisted until Friday (the night my husband came home from the US) when my daughter finally slept through the night uninterrupted. She’s done it three nights in a row now. Last night, she didn’t even fight me at bedtime. She was snoring within seconds of her head hitting the pillow.

I’d like to take full credit for this turnaround in my daughter (and with my husband, I will J) but in reality, this was a joint global effort, a true example of why women need each other. The beautiful and open responses I got from so many other mothers helped me feel so much less alone in that dark nursery night after night, with no husband or family member on the same continent with me. The prayers everyone said gave me the strength to not totally cave in, and the encouragement I received about my writing has motivated me to use my newly rebounding energy to actually change some things about my life in Shanghai rather than just bake more muffins. Thank you to everyone.

Manika also taught me something without knowing it. Somewhere around the second or third night, as she slowly drifted into quieter breathing and deeper sleep without me close to her bed, I felt a strong pang of sadness. I suddenly wanted to go closer, put my hand on her stomach, and kiss her cheek. I realized that it was just one of many moments going forward when she would no longer need me, and I began to wonder how much of her dependency on me I’ve actually been encouraging to give meaning to my life here in Shanghai. Her challenges coupled with my pregnancy have been my excuses not to go out more into my world, to not commit too much to anything, to live as if I’m a transient just here to raise my children.

So after that night, I made a conscious decision to get out of the house, to risk getting tired and guilty about not spending enough time with my daughter, and to just try things whether they seemed feasible or not. I called a friend of mine who was looking for a writing teacher to teach a small class of aspiring writers, another friend who runs an online organic grocery company (mentioned in previous blogs), a real estate agent to explore the possibility of opening a space dedicated to freelance writers (many similar spaces exist in New York where writers can quietly work, meet together, network, encourage one another and get away from their children), and a lawyer to help me understand the fertility, genetics and stem cell industries in China (my previous area of expertise in the US). In short, I started throwing stuff at the wall.

In New York, any one of these things would take something like one to four months to stick. But this is China. The country has an abundance of workers, but not so many thinkers, creators, problem-solvers, or entrepreneurs. I have now been given a creative writing class to teach, I am building a marketing plan and fundraising budget for the online company, I’m still taking the interest temperature for the writing space but have already found lots of people to survey, a friend of mine is doing the first draft illustrations for a children’s book I’ve written, and I’m meeting with a lawyer about the IVF industry very shortly. I think I may have thrown too much.

But that’s okay. I’m much happier. I finally feel engaged in the Shanghai machinery. I have new projects to inspire and occupy me. I feel like I’m learning about China again and how it operates instead of just living in it. And I’m well-rested. Hopefully, in the weeks to come, my blog will be more about that then sleep deprivation. Hopefully, I can share a deeper understanding of China. And if kid trouble comes again? Well, I now know where to go for help and inspiration, and I also know that I can take it on. I just need a strong will and a tough arm to row through the occasional torrent of tears to the other side. I guess that’s why God uses childbirth (appropriately known as labor) to prep us poor mothers from the start.

I knew He has a purpose for everything.

Ever wonder why?

Today I started the day in tears again – a very frequent happening these days. My daughter, in a new and more determined effort to torture me it seems, woke up seven times last night in one nine hour stretch.

Regular readers of this blog will notice a theme – this Manika not sleeping thing. It is the single most dominant event of my life these days. It controls my ability to think, to function, to be in a good mood or a bad mood. I frequently have to cancel afternoon plans because I’m too tired. Never before have I encountered such a persistent, rampant, and uncontrollable problem and it is making me hate motherhood in ways I never thought possible. It’s also making me depressed.

To all whose immediate reaction is to say – “then do something about it,” I would like to point to my extensive library of sleep books, the picture montage of parents and stickers on the back of her bed placed in an effort to both comfort and reward, the highly regular bedtime routine, the elimination of the milk bottle as a falling asleep prop, the no television, computer or other stimulating tools three hours before bedtime rule, the relaxing baby massage I give every night before she goes to sleep, the $70 bunny sleep clock I’ve put in her room that indicates when it’s okay to get out of bed and when it’s time to sleep, and the three week “sleep without mommy’s help” process I’ve repeatedly followed only to have to redo. I am calling a sleep clinic in the UK today to try to create yet a new “sleep plan” for her in hopes that perhaps $500 - $600 will unearth some new path to success I haven’t yet designed. I even tried using grandparents during the holidays. But my two-year old daughter is tireless. She wakes. She wants mommy (and only mommy) to hold her and help her go back to sleep and if she doesn’t get it, she’ll sacrifice hours and hours of rest to win and scream repeatedly at the top of her lungs “Mommy, mommy, mommy,” until I wish she’d either just wear out her throat or I’d finally go deaf, once and for all.

On top of all this stress, I’ve once against lost my only other nighttime resource – my husband. Normally, this is to his job, which is very demanding. But these two weeks, he’s in the US. Sadly, his father passed away, although it was after a six-year battle with cancer so we all hope his soul is finally at rest. The culmination of these events – the complete loss of control of my life to a toddling tyrant, and my family’s first close encounter with the death of a truly loved one, have caused me to contemplate, “Why the hell are we here anyway?”

This is not some new thought, and for the longest time, I’ve believed I already had a satisfying answer. When I was very young, I converted from sort of nothing to Christianity. I’ve always been a believer in God (although my frequent swearing might not always point to my faith) and since I was very young, I’ve always found comfort in the knowledge there was a purpose in everything that happened to me – college rejections, job rejections, loss of a loved boyfriend or friend – and my primary belief has been that suffering teaches us to need God, to love in ways we haven’t thought possible, to let go of the illusion of control we have on life, and to remind us to live in the present and follow God. It has been this belief that has kept me from packing my bags, changing my name and running away to France after so many nights of incessant waking. Yes, I’m a zombie, yes my prayers for a sleep miracle go unanswered, but I’m learning that I can love even the most demanding of prison keepers. Bleary-eyed, headached and tear-filled, I can still find enough love in the morning to dress my daughter in matching clothes and make her oatmeal with just the right amount of honey. I have even at times, been thankful, for the newly discovered knowledge of reserves of strength I’ve found. When the time comes for true disaster – a long illness, the loss of someone close to me – I am no longer afraid the way I used to be. I now know I will find strength in those times too, because I’ve found strength in days through which I never even thought I could stay awake in places where I have not had one person to help me.

However, lately, those beliefs have not been enough to satisfy my soul. Yes, it is a joy to serve in motherhood, yes I’ve impregnated myself for the second time despite all of this (although that I will attribute less to foresight and more to too much alcohol drunk in the company of my too willing husband), but it is not enough. I simply cannot imagine I was just put on this earth to serve my daughter and husband only, that this is the solace with which I’m supposed to sustain my soul. If it is, then why am I not actually happy in this knowledge, and more importantly, why am I not at peace the way I used to be with this belief tucked in my heart?

Instead, I am constantly conflicted, mainly because I’ve always believed I have another purpose as well and that is to write. That isn’t to say I’ve always fancied myself some God-ordained, super-talented writer, but I do know that I was put here to do it, good or not. I have always felt called in this direction, and I’ve sacrificed many things in my life for this. When I was a teenager and young college student, I completely abandoned my relationship with my father and his approval to pursue writing. When I started working, I gave up nights out and a social life to get up at three or four in the morning and write before starting my day. In 2004, when I left the world of investment banking, I also completely sacrificed financial security. I did this all with blind faith in the voice I felt inside of me. And yet, I’ve still had nothing ever published, my novel continues into its sixth year (Kiran Desai took seven with no children, so I’m still optimistic) and even if I am published, there is no promise that money will follow. The only occasional affirmation I get from people are the kind words of friends reading this blog.

In that way, writing is much like motherhood. It does not yield much to my control, it does not demonstrate noticeable daily progress, there are no real milestones, no way to predict how efforts will result in the future. With this awareness, I have searched for connective lessons, ways to draw on one experience to assure me that the efforts in the other realm are worth it, ways to use one struggle to bolster my spirits in the other. But those efforts to knit some mental web of support are also failing me.

So I find myself asking this question anew – Why are we here? The context is deeper now than it was when I first asked and answered it as a teenager. What I’m really wondering is, why do we have a temporary physical existence and this deep spiritual journey intertwined when the two are so clearly incongruous? Before Manika, my physical existence simply wanted financial sustenance, and so the battle was simple and identical to many artists – I work a little for money, I write when I can. At times, I wanted more money so I worked harder. When I wanted less money, I wrote more. Over the years, I found a balance I could control. Now, there is no balance to be found. My physical existence desires sleep, time for my own self, some external validation of my talents, some monetary rewards for my efforts, and my waist back (how I miss having a waist). My spiritual self is calling me to be selfless in serving my daughter, to learn to make peace with a country I am not comfortable in for the sake of my husband, to live in depths of solitude and isolation that I’ve never known before. But it also continues to call me to write, an activity I cannot do without sleep and some sense of daily stability and control, without some satisfaction of my physical wants. So round and round the struggle goes. I’m completely confused and discouraged. If my purpose is to live for my family, I am joyless in it. If my purpose is truly to write, then I need some grace, some mercy, some divine hand of strength to help me continue. And if my perspective is simply wrong altogether, I need a new lightning bolt of wisdom. In all ways, I am hungry for an answer.

Today, I don’t have one. All I know now is that having this hunger must be part of why I am here, it has to be part of the answer. This is the purpose I’ve assigned it, if for no other reason than it makes me aware of my soul when the daily grind could make me forget it. The rest will have to come in God’s time or perhaps never. All religions have some sort of explanation, but their differences show that there is no one answer. Instead, their universal instructions seem to be to remain open to God, and seek Him in times of struggle. Sometimes we’ll get a miracle, sometimes we won’t. The miracles show us God’s love. The silence is his method of tough training I guess.

So for now, I will just try to wait and search. Perhaps I am still meant to write, but not today. Or maybe I’m just meant to write this – my blog – instead of my book or my short stories. Perhaps my words are meant for another mother today, and they will offer some comfort. Perhaps my daughter will someday be President and this will of hers will be what I’m most proud of. Perhaps me and my husband’s future success and livelihood lay in China, and someday I’ll be so grateful I came here. I don’t know. Only time will tell, I’ll just have to patiently and openly wait.

In the meantime, I still have my credit card ready. Pretty soon that sleep clinic in the UK will be awake. I’m ready for day three of my latest “sleep without mommy” sleep plan. God may ask us to wait patiently for answers, but nowhere does He say to stop living (or problem solving) in the process. After all, he did give me a brain, $600 and a Masters Degree for a reason too, I think.

I hope.