A River of Surprises

By: Sheana Ochoa

Last Saturday my boyfriend took me to the restaurant we went to on our first date and proposed. I’m thirty-nine years old and getting married for the first time. Some would say I did things a little backward: getting an anonymous sperm donor and becoming a single mother by choice (SMC) before meeting Mr. Right. Despite what many people think, from my experience, many SMCs would prefer going the traditional route by having a child with a father, but women have a limited window of opportunity to bear children and so a difficult, thoughtful decision must be made if she wants to have a family. This growing trend of SMCs is fascinating. It couldn’t have happened prior to the strides of the 1970s women’s movement. I can’t help but wonder how this generation of kids born to SMCs will be assessed.

I recently watched “The Kids Are All Right” in which the sperm donor resurfaces once the kids are of age and wreaks havoc on the family. My donor was not an open donor so my son won’t have the opportunity to get in touch with his biological father. I still maintain that as long as a child is loved and nurtured, it doesn’t matter if there is one parent or four parents; she/he will turn out “all right,” and even better than all right because so much forethought and planning is involved in bringing a child intentionally into the world.

In the case of my son, he is two and will only know my fiance as his father. The question now is, am I still an SMC? I still feel like one in the sense that I went through the process, pregnancy, and the first two years on my own. I can share my experience with other SMCs, but it’s true: I’m no longer single and I wonder how I fit in to the Los Angeles chapter I co-founded with a fellow blogger on TNF: SMC-LA. That also goes for this blog for which I am labeled as a single mother. Of course, single mothers can be vastly different from SMCs—the child having access to, or at least knowing, his biological father is only one variable of many.

I’m not one to label, but I should ponder my new role as a blogger for TNF. My fiance is Jewish. I’m a gentile. Does that make us an interfaith couple? He’s also half-Arab and I’m half-Mexican. So are we interracial as well? I’ll leave that up to the editors to decide. My how life is a roving river of surprises!

A Family Of My Own

By: Sheana Ochoa

This year was the first Christmas I did not have the money to buy presents for my nieces and nephews. Not one of them noticed (that I know of) last weekend as the family got together to celebrate the holiday a week before Christmas, which has become our tradition in order to let everyone’s respective families celebrate their own Christmas on the actual day.

It’s interesting how all these years I put pressure on myself to buy everyone gifts, sometimes dreaded it and spent money I did not have. In the end, it was always more fulfilling watching people open the gifts I had given them than to open the gifts I was given. But now I realize my motive behind giving gifts was not just the pleasure of giving, but of the satisfaction I got out of giving, the way it recreated some of that childhood magic I missed, especially when my nieces and nephews were kids.

Now I have my own son and at 28 months, he’s old enough to open presents and realize what’s going on. And there are also two other additions to the family, even younger than he is. Everyone’s attention was on the babies and my nieces and nephews, some now in college, became observers the way all my siblings had become once they started having families of their own. I’m the baby of the family and gift-giving was my way of holding on to that feeling of wonderment, missing the days of old when I was a little girl the night before Christmas so excited about the next morning’s festivities. For years, while my siblings had families of their own, I was still single. Christmas with them was my only shot at recapturing something I felt I had lost. Now I realize, it wasn’t something lost, but something I hadn’t created for myself yet.

Now I have my own family and this will be the first year on my own with my son. (Last year I was still ill postpartum and felt like a hanger-on to my sister’s Christmas.) For the first time since I was a little girl, this Christmas Eve, I am excited about tomorrow morning, watching my son open and play with his gifts, drinking coffee (I’ll make hot chocolate for him) and eating a big breakfast in our pajamas. My mother used to play Johnny’s Cash’s Christmas classics; I’ll probably play the Beatles. My boyfriend will spend the night and Christmas day with us; we’ve decided to take my son to the movies for the first time. Maybe that will become a tradition. Who knows? All possibilities are open and in the making: a family of my own.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Single Mother

By: Sheana Ochoa

I happened to be driving around Los Angeles on a Thursday afternoon when my favorite KCRW program, Bookworm, aired.  Host Michael Silverblatt was interviewing Nicole Strauss whose novels The History of Love and especially Man Walks into a Room present a voice I haven’t heard before, one of loss and identity and the magical “what if” without belaboring the post-modern tropes of metafiction.  At any rate, so I’m listening and I get home and have to take up the groceries just as the conversation gets juicy, just as Silverblatt asks the proverbial question of the artist and the need to sacrifice life for art, the need to isolate oneself at long intervals in order to create, teetering on solipsism. More importantly, he ponders how society’s judgment doubles when the artist is a mother. I’ll have to download the podcast to hear how Krauss responded, but it left me asking myself the same question.

As I’ve mentioned before, I struggle with energy deficiency so I have to put my toddler in daycare.   Sending him off all day during the week leaves me with (you’d think) plenty of solitude, reflection, time for writing.  In actuality, I’ve found that time shrinks up as quickly as it used to when I was a full-time teacher.  When I first came up with the idea of daycare I suffered from guilt as I imagine any mom would who has to leave her child, although the typical reason for putting one’s child in daycare is work.  I compared myself to these “working” mothers and felt I did not have the same rights they had because, even though I was also working part of the day, writing, I was doing so from home where my son could just as easily be present if I were healthy.  And yet, why, just because I work from home, should I feel more guilty or guilty at all for sending my son to daycare?  After the first month, I realized it was a great outlet for him; he was making friends, learning social skills and being more active than he would be with me at home.  The guilt dissipates and then returns.

The point is that our society does not hold up the work of artist as seriously as that of other professions.  This is due no doubt to the fact that most artists struggle financially in a society lacking respect, support and a sense of purpose for art. There is a lot of material on this issue, the lack of government funds for the NEA just one example, and it’s not my intention to rehash it here.

What I do want to examine is why it is that the artist, devoting countless hours to her work, who also happens to be a mother, could be construed as a “bad” mother, while a mother working outside the home, maybe even taking business trips, is not a bad mother?  And what about fathers?  How are they so conspicuously excluded  from the “bad” label?  The answer lies in our deified, puritanical work ethic whose attitude is that breadwinning is synonymous with parenting.  The distinction is what needs to be clarified, and none better to do so than third wave feminism, which is still vaguely defined, and now includes more men than ever, while also being colorblind, but not genderblind.  Just ask anyone under twenty and the fact that our president is African-American is as natural as the fact that he is a man.  Why haven’t we surmounted the same hurdles with our attitudes towards women?

But again, I digress; I’m not writing to correct the bra-burning connotations of feminism in order to clarify where we stand as a nation in our treatment of women, but as an artist who has become a mother and subsequently struggles with guilt. The fact that I chose to have my son on my own, intentionally without a father, magnifies the judgment of selfishness in some circles.  As his primary care giver, I am vulnerable to the same feelings of guilt and second-guessing I imagine most moms experience, even stay-at-home moms.  Add to that a need for reflection, composition, revision and I’m left doing less writing and more mothering.  Not that I would trade one job for the other, but taking the perspective of Joyce’s young artist who grappled with his devotion to his family and his art: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”  Joyce saw how the artist’s work is no different from a parent’s: they both render the individual invisible, sacrificed to a higher purpose.  And so the best way I know of being a “good” mother is to remain doing what I love the most (not “beyond or above” but in concert with loving my son): writing, creating, feeding my artistic imagination.

Joining the Family

By: Sheana Ochoa

For the most part my family is like a litter of cats: we huddle together when it’s cold, but we also have our fights, walking away from one another with our tails high for weeks, sometimes months, until enough time has passed to pretend there was never a problem. I don’t operate well within this dynamic because I like everything out on the table. I tell it like it is and if I have a problem I like to get it off my chest. Between communication breakdown and other, typical family dynamics, my family hasn’t always been the “Leave-It-to-Beaver” model my mother tries to create. Each of us has broken her heart at one point or another. (I wonder if that is what I have to look forward to with my son, Noah?) But this year, gathering at my middle brother’s home for Thanksgiving was different: a glimpse back to the idyllic family whose house all the neighborhood kids wanted to play at, the family people looked up to as a pillar in the community. The family I’ve missed, but had learned to accept no longer existed.

There are five of us siblings: three boys, two girls. I’m the baby. The holiday began with my sister picking up her daughter who is attending her second year at Occidental College. We planned to have them swing over to Culver City to pick up Noah and me and take us with them to Thanksgiving with the family. We were in no hurry and made a pit stop in UC Santa Barbara to visit another niece and her boyfriend before they left to spend the holiday with their respective families. We spent the night in Cayucos at my sister’s late mothers-in-law’s on the water. Noah had his first taste of winter seawater. The brisk, cold tide barely washed over his feet and he toppled over, startled, soaking his clothes. Thanksgiving morning we drove through the beautiful wine country of Paso Robles toward my brother’s house in King City where the family gathered this year for Turkey Day. He lives in the remote hills of oak trees and pristine air, the sky baby blue and clear.

Noah is absolutely enamored with my older sister. In fact, if I attempt to interact with him he swats me away, “Don’t like jugo!” or whatever it is I’m trying to offer him. So, I don’t have to entertain or tend to him; he just goes from grandma to auntie to his nieces who are old enough to be his aunts.

This year distinguished itself from any other year I can remember. The men—my brothers and brother-in-law—didn’t spend the whole day and night with beers in their hands screaming at football games on TV. Even at the height of the Jets game, they were outside in front of the fire talking. I joined them with my obligatory piece of pumpkin pie and whipped cream. Noah sat on the deck playing with the new puppy, Moose, the yellow moon spying a happy family between the oak branches.

Once we were all sufficiently satiated, we settled in the family room to watch old videos my brother had taken of past Easters, Christmases, his wedding. My older nieces and nephews now in high school and in college were Noah’s age and I fell in love with them all over again. I was oohing and ahhing through the entire retrospective. And I thought about how I’ve been recording Noah’s main events and how fifteen years from now we will all be sitting around one holiday watching him and his other two cousins his age oohing and ahhing and looking at ourselves and how much we’ve aged. It went by so fast and every day as Noah comes up with a new word –“rainbow”, “catch”, “picture” –I can feel the time passing as if I am an hourglass emptying of sand. Not that I’m running out of time, it’s just sifting away with each day that passes.

The highlight was Noah’s first haircut, with everyone gathered around. They were teasing me that it looked like a mullet so I gave in, watching his chestnut hair fall to the deck. Noah sat there like a king upon a throne as my sister cut off his locks that had grown so long in the back. Of course I kept some as a memento.

It’s the morning after now and my sister’s son has a football game tonight in Visalia, in the central valley where they live. We’re all going. It will be cold and I still haven’t learned the game. My father will be there (he had his own Thanksgiving with his wife) and I can give thanks as I did last night when we were all gathered together like a family; a second Thanksgiving.

Funny thing was, I wasn’t planning on coming this year. King City is a good five hours from Los Angeles and I thought it would be too much traveling with Noah. But since my sister was coming down to LA, I agreed to drop my life for five days and go with her. I have to remember it isn’t about me anymore. It would have been easy to stay home, spend the holiday with friends, but I’m a mother. I owe it to my son to cultivate relationships with his extended family and after seeing the videos last night I regretted not bringing my video camera.

It’s the morning after and coffee is brewing. My brother and his wife are cooking bacon and eggs, beckoning my distended belly to the breakfast table. My mom’s husband just hit the road back to Three Rivers; he won’t be coming to the game, but my mom will come with my sister, Noah, and four of my nieces. As I write this it sounds almost cliché: gathering around fires, watching old family videos, bodies lain around the house on couches and blow-up beds, the Beatles on rotation. I’m glad I waited to have Noah; everyone’s more mature, more appreciative of family. I can’t remember feeling this comfortable and grateful; I can’t remember feeling such a part of my family. I had to become a mother to fully get this, and really, there’s nothing, nothing more important in life. Breakfast, the Beatles, my brothers and sister are waiting. I’m going inside to join them.

Motherhood 101

By: Sheana Ochoa

This morning my two-year-old and I attended a class sponsored by a Los Angeles-run program, Ready by Five –the idea being both parents and children attend a mock classroom situation wherein all the skills a child needs when he starts kindergarten will be acquired, from playing with other children to picking up toys after playtime.  I had to wait over six months before the 13-week class for my son’s age group started a new session, and today I found myself among fifteen kids between the ages of one and two and half and their respective caregivers.

I was surprised and pleased to discover the entire hour and half was held in Spanish.  I’ve written before how I want my son to be bilingual; this not only helps his Spanish, but mine as well.  I didn’t assume every other person there would be Spanish speaking.  I thought there would definitely be other minority groups: African-American, Asian, Philipino, but it was all brownies and boy was I in my element.  I’ve always felt more comfortable with Latinos than with whites.

I’m half-Mexican, but I’m fair.  The only other white person in the room was the child psychologist who also spoke Spanish.  The morning started off with playtime followed by clean-up time and then we were asked to gather in a circle, with our children on our laps.  My son was distracted by all the animal figures and we arrived last to the circle, but this did not deter him from walking straight into the middle as if he were about to break dance.  The other children slowly followed in tow as their mothers/grandmothers let them go.  We sang songs and then we all sat together and ate Cheerios, which I was happy for because after offering my son Cheerios this morning, followed by waffles, eggs, fruit, and yogurt, each of which he declined with a definitive “Nooooo,” I gave in and gave him a Cutie (a tofu ice-cream sandwich).

So, when the last half-hour comprised of the adults sitting back in a circle without the children to offer up ideas for future tertulias, I brought up my concern with getting my son to eat what I offer him.  I was glad to know others had the same concerns along with throwing food, potty training, and discipline in general.

I’m doing this new motherhood thing by intuition.  I’m proud to announce I’ve been consistent, patient and loving with Noah, but you always feel you could be doing better.  For instance, I didn’t realize he was ready to begin saying “please” and “thank you,” and if it weren’t for daycare, he wouldn’t know these pleasantries.  I feel so proud of him when I hear him thank someone after receiving something, but I can’t take any credit there.  I don’t even want the credit.  I just want to know what to do and when to do it.

What I observed overall was that not once did my boy whine the entire hour and half of class.  This was revelatory, because the minute he wakes up most mornings he’s whining for his “baba” or for “Barney.”  (Me, the woman who hasn’t watched TV in over a decade and intended the same for her son, but found his attention span at 6 months to watch Baby Einstein abnormally long and, especially when I was ill in bed the first year and half postpartum, a godsend.  So, I check out DVDs from the library every week and we watch them together for better or for worse.)  The point I was trying to make is even when I pick him up from daycare, before we even get half way down the street, he is already whining to get out, or to go home, or for a ball, etc., and to not hear him whine for that hour and half was so enjoyable. We were in the moment. We played.  We sang. We wanted for nothing.  Now, how do I replicate that at home?  Ah, there’s the rub!

On Time and Being

By: Sheana Ochoa

Yesterday I had to put my dog down. I wrote about Chloe in an earlier blog, how she’d been my constant companion for the last 12 plus years. How she was always there for me, through all my relationships and their break-ups, my achievements, the conception, pregnancy, and birth of my son, and my chronic illness that developed when she was five years old. She had cancer near her cervical spine, a spot precariously close to her brain. The day after I took her to the vet she declined quickly, couldn’t stand or lie down without pain, dragging her feet when she walked. And so when the diagnosis came in two days later, I spent that night lying by her and saying goodbye because I knew I wasn’t going to let her suffer.

I’ve had to make two very difficult decisions in my life: the first was to stop breastfeeding my son after a month because I had become bedridden. The other was euthanizing my best friend. I held her as the vet injected an overdose of anesthesia. Before he came in I repeated the serenity prayer so that I knew it was god’s will and not my will to put her down. I didn’t want it to be because I was thinking thoughts like: “Am I doing this because I’m not strong enough to watch her suffer?” or “I can’t afford the treatment.” I wanted to make sure there was no selfish motive behind my decision because if there’s anything a pet will teach you, it’s to be selfless. So, I prayed like a mantra and it calmed me down. I was able to ask the vet to come in and administer the overdose. I was able to hold her in my lap and tell her I loved her and thank you, thank you, thank you until she drifted away. When she was gone, time stopped. That was yesterday and time has not resumed, sometimes it moves in slow motion the way it feels being in a car accident, but mostly it’s just ceased. Chloe’s gone.

I know the worst thing that can happen to a person is to lose their child. I imagine when a mother or father loses his child, time stops. Time, a man-made construct, has no meaning in death. It isn’t because time has stopped for the dying. It is because the illusion of time suddenly kicks in. Nothing matters but the present, each second is the same, not a movement forward, just another space.

Living without time is raw and very real. The rub about living in the now is you can easily lose perspective of the world in which everyone else operates. Most people regret or dwell in the past or perseverate and fantasize about the future. In this world, in this country, you have to accept time so you can manage it, get the work done that you need to accomplish your goals, set aside time for yourself, set aside time for your friends, your children, and your dog. You can’t ignore that even though it is an illusion, time moves and we grow old and we run out of it. But the truth is, if you live in the present, you cherish more the moment at hand. I haven’t stopped crying since my dog passed. It wells up and I’m grieving and because I have no sense of time, I don’t try to suck it up or otherwise control what I’m feeling. I just am. I just am.

In the Beginning Was the Word

By: Sheana Ochoa

I spend a lot of time thinking about language, its power to manipulate or motivate, persuade or pacify, incite or mollify. Oral or written, language is an unlimited resource that is underused, misused, and sometimes used to transform for the better. So, when I read my co-blogger’s (another choice mom on this site) latest piece about how when her daughter finally said “mama,” not by accident while babbling, but in reference to her mother, she described it as having been “called into being.” She became her daughter’s mother. The phrase made me think about the Dickensian refrain, “recalled to life,” and how like Dr. Manette, I was recalled to life for the sake of my offspring. Without language, even though it is arbitrary, we don’t have a way of making sense of the world, or relating to one another. Language pins down our experience.

And so you can imagine the other day while rushing to get my two-year-old to daycare so I could make a meeting, and he is looking in the refrigerator at all his options although he knows he eats breakfast at daycare, and he inadvertently topples over a precariously-opened jar of applesauce all over the floor and I exclaim, “Shit!” and he parrots, “shit,” I feel like shit.

I’ve been trying to raise my toddler to speak Spanish and English. Since he was three-months I started playing peek-a-boo with “¿Dónde está Noah?” And I use “dónde está” for everything: dónde están los ojos? dónde está tu baba? dónde está Elmo? And yet his first grammatically correct four-word sentence the other day when I left the room was, “Where are you, Mama?” Hello? What happened to dónde está? Are you even listening to me? Based on him mimicking the SH word, I guess he is listening, but what kind of selective listening is that? It’s not like I say the SH word all the time, not even close to how often I say “¿Dónde está?”

It’s not that I have any prejudice against cursing, but I don’t want others hearing my newly verbal toddler swearing. My reverence for language is in its power, not in its use, which I can’t control. I can however try to use the written word or my own verbal communication to enlighten or entertain.

I really want my son to be bilingual. I also want him to be a good writer and reader, but other than being an example, I can’t control his proclivity for language any more than I can control the weather. It’s just nice to imagine us experiencing seminal characters together, Peter the Rabbit, Pip, Harry Potter and Jane Eyre. It would be nice if a bedtime story really were a bedtime story and not just another form of play. Right now he has no interest in the story of any given book we’re reading. I won’t have finished reading the first sentence on the page and he’s ready to turn to the picture on the next page.

After writing about all this I feel better. That’s always the case after writing about something on my mind. I just have to pin down my experience. It breaks me out of the prison of my head and recalls me to life.

Mommy’s A Writer

By:  Sheana Ochoa

My son who just turned two asked to sit up on the chair at my writer’s desk.  Then he looked over at my manuscript, an inch-and-half-thick stack of typed pages and said, “book.”  I know it’s a book.  I know when it’s on bookshelves others will know it’s a book, but how the hell does he know it’s a book?  He doesn’t call my steno pads, or stacks of personal papers books.  To have my son identify the mess of stacked white sheets as a book was somehow revelatory and even comforting: Mommy’s a writer.  I need him to know my writing is important and although it isn’t as important as he is, my work is a close second because it’s so wrapped up in my self-identity.

My son is not my identity.  I learned when I was pregnant that the baby growing inside of me did not belong to me.  He was his own person.  I wrote him a song that I’d love to record but I don’t have a singing voice:

If I could show you the way

If I could tell you the way

If I could carry you the way

I wouldn’t be loving you

I wouldn’t be serving you

I’d only be pushing you away

I’m here to be his guide, to love and nurture him and model for him how to become the best person he can be, which is a tall order especially when certain expletives escape from my mouth or I duck outside for an after dinner smoke.

My writing has been a source of self since I was a girl.  I own it like I own my name.  It first dawned on me when I returned to live with my mother after the divorce.  She had books on her shelves, something I didn’t have at my dad’s. I remember pulling down a small, antique looking book and reading the words: “She loves.  She is love.  And yet she is not loved.”  That play with language was irresistible.  I doubt I totally understood or identified with the lines, but they made me want to become a writer. I’ve written ever since; it is how I move in the world: through language, creating it, revering it, using it to work my way through depression, happiness, loss, and fear.

So, back to the point.  It came to me as a small miracle that my son identified this stack of papers I began back in the 1990s, a biography of Stella Adler, the woman who revolutionized modern day acting, as a book.  I’ve been writing the book in service to a woman who dedicated her life in service of another art: the craft of acting.  She never got the recognition she deserved. A man usurped it.

I never wanted to write a biography.  I always thought I’d be a fiction writer, weaving page-turning tales that make the reader feel the way I do when I finally get to the end of a good book: as if I’ve said goodbye to a close friend, our story together over.  Sure I could rereadAnna Karenina and Pillars of the Earth, the short stories of Borges and Alice Munro, but finishing a story must be the way it feels when your kid leaves the nest.  He can come back home, but it’s never the same.  There’s a loss. Somehow I’ve gravitated toward non-fiction, like my confessional poetry and this blog that tell the stories of my new life as a mother who chose to have a son by herself.  I’m finding non-fiction healing right now.  Maybe once I’ve published the biography, I won’t need to heal as much as I’ve had to this last decade and can lose myself in a world of fantasy.  Perhaps a children’s book?

I am a writer for myself, and a mother for my son.  One day, because I did not show him the way, he will discover his own.  Who knows what that will be.  A vet, lawyer, oceanographer, inventor?  He will be blessed to find a calling he loves like I did.  That would make me a very happy mother . . . and writer.

Meditations of a Choice Mom

By: Sheana Ochoa

I recently interviewed a parenting expert who has written over 23 books on parenting and appears on shows like Dr. Phil and The Today Show. I was interviewing her about disciplining the preverbal toddler for an article I pitched to a magazine when I decided to just go ahead and ask her, the expert, what she thought about women who intentionally choose to have a child on their own, a child who would be brought into the world without a biological father.

I did this, I thought, because I want to write about how children of choice moms fair compared to the conventional mom-dad household (which is actually pretty non-existent today anyway), but after hearing her response, I was surprised by the way I felt. Basically she iterated what many choice moms who have written on the subject say (however this woman was objective since she is not a choice mom). I’m paraphrasing here but she said women who plan to have a child are committed to parenting and any kid with a parent like that is already ahead of the game.

This wasn’t coming from the theoretical mouths of psychologists or sociologists, but a real educator in child development whose work is dedicated to rearing confident, well-adjusted members of society. I felt redeemed without having realized I ever had previous doubts about my decision. If I debated the issue, I may not have my beautiful son today.

It was relatively easy for me. My family and friends didn’t question my plan to have a baby on my own. I never had to deal with the judgment many women face both in the workplace and in their personal lives. Without the judgment, I didn’t have to judge myself, but somewhere still and quiet in the back of my mind was this thought: my child won’t experience what I have had with my father.

I’m daddy’s girl. Not in the here’s-a-car-at-sixteen and tuition-at-an-Ivy-League daddy’s girl, but the kind of girl who was always found on daddy’s lap, and even with all of his faults and after having become an adult, I still have this child-like perception of him as a hero. Of course, my son can have that with the man I decide to make a life with. His father doesn’t have to be biological, but the still and quiet thought that nagged at me disappeared after speaking to my interviewee, and that was nice.

Love transcends blood. My son will keep my last name even if I do marry, and before having my son, I decided I would keep my last name, an ancient Basque name originally spelled Otxoa, which means Wolf. So, it isn’t as if he doesn’t have a strong bloodline, and perhaps it’s high time children take on their mother’s line anyway. In some small way I’ve created the matriarchal society I wish we lived in, one that would balance out our phallocentric one where the naked, human body is prohibitive and sex education inadequate while TV, films, video games, even cartoons are replete with violence and bloodshed, in which women make seventy-seven cents to every dollar a man makes, in which the industrial war complex is STILL fueling our economy. I could go on and on, but that’s another blog . . .

A Second Childhood

By: Sheana Ochoa

Being a new mom, anyone would guess my life has undergone a tremendous transformation, which in my case was compounded by the fact that I became ill post partum. Consequently my son and I were exiled (as I saw it) to the central valley so my family could help me with the baby. After spending a year and a half in the armpit of California, I was able to return to Los Angeles and resume/begin life.

Leaving LA on the eve of momdom, I entered a kind of limbo. And now, just five months back in LA, I’m realizing how different life with a child is from my previous life as a single, itinerant feminist circuiting LA in her Jeep Wrangler. Turning in the Jeep after its lease expired was excruciating for me. I kept re-leasing new Jeeps every three years and enjoyed the privilege. But Jeeps aren’t safe so it was the first thing that had to go.

The roommate I always had in order to have extra cash flow also had to go. The baby needed a nursery. And now I had to budget for diapers instead of mani-pedis. When we returned to LA, we relocated into a new neighborhood (more working-class, less hip) so I could stroll my son to daycare three blocks away.

So, a lot has changed. But mostly, I’m just so intrigued by this little angel/devil living in my house. Everyday there’s something new: a new word, a new gesture, a new expression, a new detail he notices. Before my son, life didn’t have such newness. I tried to be aware and appreciate life, but that task is so much easier with a child who is seeing and doing everything for the first time. Through the eyes of my son, I have been given a second childhood. In three weeks we get to celebrate his second birthday in our own home. I can’t imagine a better gift.

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