Two Years

« Kaisla selects a pumpkin from the pumpkin patch. »

Kaisla turned two years old on Wednesday much to my disbelief that so much time has passed since she was born and I became someone I had never imagined I would; a mother. The first year was a blur of sleep-deprived disorientation as nothing could have prepared me for the transition to such a drastically different identity. I kept wondering if or how I would survive the demands of such a small creature on the days where I would walk to the local Starbucks and the bookshop next door just to keep myself moving and awake. Two years.

Two years. So many things have happened in two solar years. I left Finland just before she was born. I don't know that I'll ever be able to plumb the depths of life in Finland, but I can offer that it was a life-changing experience both for better and for worse. I wrote things here whilst I was in Finland to keep my mind moving and to keep it from dwelling on things that would not help me escape my despair. Writing is both an outlet and a discipline which can help organise your thoughts and set them free in ways a pen and post-it notes pasted around your office cannot. I can scribble "Diapers" and remember to buy some the next time I'm shopping, but to attach "Reinvent yourself - Stat" to my console on a little yellow bit of paper doesn't really get the job done. I started a blog at work, but it's not really the place to wax philosophical about such personal things and this will be a bit abnormally personal and a bit more scattered than usual. On the upside, there will be a cookie recipe arriving soon.

One thing about parenthood that I've noticed is that it makes you think about your own childhood and your life in general. I remember dumb things, like the time I became very adamant at a tender age wanting to know just what "afternoon delight" meant in the goofy, faux-folksy song from the 70s by the same name and my father and sisters giggling made me even more determined to know. Years later, I would call my mother from a London Pub to inform her of my epiphany in finally figuring out what said delight was all about. I was supposedly a very gifted child but, clearly, not so gifted in deciphering such things as human relations. And I worry what tiny, insignificant detail my own child will remember and cherish as she grows older.

The holidays are always an especially difficult time for me as there was the wonderful cookie baking tradition in our family where we would bake about 40 different kinds of cookies for my mother's patients and just about anyone who would eat them. Food is love. Certain aromas and music posess the power to transport me back to those wonderful moments of making cookies with mom. But then there would be her dark moods. One year, that 5'8", 115 pound, mad German woman lifted the christmas tree - lights, ornaments, and base - all by herself and chucked it out the front door. I will always remember standing behind her, astonished and afraid. We would continue to have a rather tense relationship and I remain sad that we didn't have time to quite patch things up before she died as I was always in awe of her. As I've gotten older, and especially now that I've had a child, I understand some of her conflicts, her anger and her resentment towards my rather carefree joie de vivre, but she was a hard woman to love. I often worry that I am becoming too much like her.

My father, on the other hand, was impossible not to love. He was a soft-spoken, gregarious Englishman who was an electrical engineer with a love of radios. We would watch Mission Impossible together, build Heathkit radios together, play chess together and generally got along terribly well. I'll never forget his parental conflict at watching me detonate a homemade explosive with a radio-controlled detonator as he was proud of my accomplishment but freaked that mom might find out. We covered up the evidence and agreed never to talk about it. :) He died 11 years ago last week and I have never stopped missing him nor fully recovered from the loss. I often worry that I am not enough like him.

It's an interesting journey through the mind reflecting upon your life, both where you've been and where you think you'd like to go. I returned to the ranks of the working in August, something I considered rather carefully before deciding to jump back into the game, and I feel like I'm slowly coming back to life after so many years of being dormant and after making a few bad choices after leaving BBN. Few places could compare to the demands, expectations and the talent pool at BBN, but this comes reasonably close. It has been a struggle mustering the mental discipline to deal with a challenging job in the wake of so many years of letting myself go and the sleep-deprivation that only a young child could provide. Nothing makes a person dumber faster than an extreme lack of sleep. But I feel like I'm on the upside of the curve.

I'm struggling with figuring out how to be a mom and be a valuable contributor to an interesting project at the same time. It breaks my heart when the daycare calls me, as they did Friday, to tell me that my baby had been both bitten by another child (on the arse! WTF?!) and peed on the potty for the first time. I'm conflicted, but at the same time I think she's in the right place and so am I. She has been as independent as her mother since she was an infant and being a SAHM just wouldn't be enough for me. I stayed with her for almost two years and I often hope that I'm making the right choices. The vulnerability in motherhood can, at times, be overwhelming.

« The original HFB in younger days thinking very naughty thoughts at the behest of the photographer, hence the goofy smirk. »

I ran across this photo in my filing cabinet lurking between two folders. The shock of seeing myself staring back at me from 16 or so years was a jolt to my senses. I had to sit down as the memory was immediate and vivid along with the realisation of who I used to be and whom I have become. The girl in the picture is the original HappyFunBall (HFB), named so after friends found the SNL short to have amusing similarities to she of the spontaneous whim and unpredictible reaction. She would play melancholy jazz on the baby grand piano in her flat and drink whisky with the windows open on hot summer nights and draw a small crowd from the neighbourhood escaping the heat of their own flats on the lawn outside. She had a boyfriend who made her toes curl on the first kiss and whom she should have dumped long before she did but the mindblowingly delicious chemistry in bed forgave so much...until he got the 19-year old lab tech pregnant. She used to wear a bowler hat, ride horses, tend bar and harvest eyes for corneas for an organ bank. She got nailed doing 135mph in a Saab SPG, but managed to get off with a warning instead of going to prison. She....she did a lot of crazy, stupid and fun things. She is HFB. Her head would have exploded if you had told her she would be a mother someday.

But, she is a stranger to the present me. I am no longer deserving of the HFB title from so long ago. I'm trying to get back a few pieces of her like her passion, her vivacity which are, at present, mere embers compared to the roaring flames they once were. I keep thinking about what I'd like Kaisla to remember of me after she has grown and I hope that she thinks of my sense of humour, my affability and my child-like curiosity fondly as these are the things that have not changed and will likely remain even after I figure out who I want to be now that I'm over the hill.

Kaisla is two and I'm two plus forty so I have a bit of a head start on her in figuring out who and what I want to be when I grow up...I hope.