A Reliable Chaos

I am not Jewish, but my husband and sons are, so I participate. I ask questions, I bake my mother-in-law’s kugel, I name the things I want to forgive or release and the ways I want to be better in the year ahead.

I like to call this period of the year The Season of Perpetual Holiday. It starts with the high holidays and rolls on through to New Year. Every month there’s something to celebrate, a gathering to plan for, a traditional meal to spend a chunk of your day making that is then devoured in under seventeen minutes and washed down with too much wine.

Neither my husband nor I grew up religious, but we both like traditions and knowing what to expect from a holiday, even if what we can expect is to completely fall apart from the stress of it all and feel grateful when the day has finally ended. You gotta love chaos you can plan for.

This year for Halloween my son wants to be something that I don’t fully understand, but know we won’t be able to pull off in the way he’s envisioning it. I’m already looking forward to disappointing him and forgetting entirely about the baby’s costume and just telling everyone he’s going as “a baby who should be asleep right now.”

When you become a parent, they should give you one of those Hi, My Name Is stickers, but instead of writing your name, you list all the ways you’re mediocre by modern parenting standards. That way when everyone else is showing off their organic hemp flour, agave-sweetened cake balls perfectly decorated to look like jack-o-lanterns, you can point to where you’ve written Shitty Baker and My Kids Eat Too Much Sugar on your sticker and avoid any additional conversation about holiday-themed baked goods.

I find parenting in the age of social media to be kind of a nightmare. It’s a world full of impressive try-hards and advice I don’t need but for some reason can’t help internalizing. The stakes of what to share and what to avoid are both completely pointless and seemingly dire. I try not to post any photos of my baby online because in the six years since I had my first kid, who and what can claim access to and ownership of images feels like it’s intensified in ways I don’t fully understand, so I’m just avoiding it altogether. It’s a shame because this baby is so freaking adorable and you all are missing out. Recently, I’ve been repeatedly running into a frustrating issue with a blocked milk duct in one of my breasts. The only resolution I’ve found so far is to take the wide-toothed end of a comb and rake it across my skin over and over again to break the blockage into smaller pieces so that the next time I nurse the baby he’ll be able to unclog the duct. It is extremely painful and a horrendous pain in the ass, so much so that I would happily abandon breastfeeding entirely except that at some point the baby decided he was 1000% done with taking a bottle, and trying to resolve that issue is equally frustrating. Part of me would love to share this experience more widely and commiserate with other breastfeeding parents who are stuck between a rock and a hard boob, but anytime you post something like that on social media, there’s always some dude you don’t know and have never interacted with who pops up in your comments like “Your breasts are life-sustaining and your baby thanks you every day for their gifts.” Yuck.

As we move deeper into The Season of Perpetual Holiday, everyone’s performative parenting will be on full display. There’s the Crafty Parent, with fabulous handmade decorations and family-themed Halloween costumes. The Baker Parent who knows how to properly pipe icing and whose homemade confections miraculously don’t look like they’ve been plucked out of a Dali-style hellscape. There’s the Meaningful Parent who figures out how to turn the lengthy holiday season into a true lesson on togetherness and giving rather than an endless onslaught of consumption. The Available Parent who volunteers for school events, hosts a Halloween gathering, and says things like, “We should find a time to all go apple picking.” There’s even the Over It Parent who makes a big show about abstaining from all holiday nonsense and pressure, which is its own kind of performance.

I have never even attempted to be the Baker Parent and I’ve given up on being the Meaningful Parent—I’m too busy trying to get everything done to stop and impart a lesson and I enjoy being alone too much to speak with any sincerity about the value of togetherness. I try my damnedest to be Crafty Parent, but god I suck at crafts and find them endlessly tedious. When it comes to holiday crafting, I am like an actor who is giving the best performance of her life but lacks authenticity because she was horribly miscast in the role. So this year, I will likely settle somewhere between Available and Over It Parent. I will be Available until that becomes too exhausting and then I will shift to Over It and try to act as if I am making an intentional statement about consumerism and the patriarchy when really I’m just tired.

Like every year, I long for a lazy Season of Perpetual Holiday. We’ve been attempting to nail down our travel plans for Thanksgiving, but I am anxious about traveling with a young baby during such a busy period when airports will be packed and germs will be rampant. The rest of us can mask and be extra careful about what we touch, but the baby is at the phase where he both wants to touch everything in sight and wants his hands in his mouth at all times. We also don’t know what to do with our dog if we are gone for an extended period, not to mention our aging cat who needs medicine twice a day. I suggested to my husband that he and our older son could travel back to have Thanksgiving with his family and I would stay here with the baby. “Then you’ll be all alone on Thanksgiving,” he said. “That’s so sad.” But is it? As I told him, I would spend my day eating only pie and watching movies and I wouldn’t wear pants, and at the end of the day there wouldn’t be any dishes to wash because I would just take my empty pie trays (yes, multiple) and toss them in the trash and spread out like a starfish in my bed and sleep happily. How amazing does that sound? Way better than worrying about which horrible infectious disease the baby will contract from gumming the armrest of an overstuffed plane that took off three hours later than planned.

I’m exhausted just thinking about the holidays and yet, there are things I look forward to every Season of Perpetual Holiday. My mother-in-law’s kugel, for one. Stealing candy from my kid’s over-abundant Halloween stash after he goes to bed. Spending every weekend in December and at least a couple of weekends in November watching the same holiday movies we watch every year (I can add Too Much Screen Time to my mediocre parenting sticker). Getting to the last night of Hanukkah and discovering that we’re somehow two candles short and have to scramble around to find a couple of sad little birthday cake candles to fill out the menorah. Pie. I am always and forever looking forward to pie.

The baby turned six months old this week and I am both marveling that half a year has gone by since he arrived and surprised that more time hasn’t passed since it feels like he’s been here forever. He sits up, he attempts to crawl, he grabs big chunks of his brother’s hair and holds on tight and I have to explain that babies have funny ways of showing how much they love you.

I need to schedule a surgery that is not an immediate need, but that I can’t put off too much longer and I keep running into the issue of there being no good time to be out of commission for several weeks. I can’t schedule it for any of the remaining months of this year on account of all the holidays and their many obligations. Winter could work, but given the increased potential for bad weather and suboptimal walking conditions, I’d rather not also throw reduced physical capacity into the daily school pickup, baby-carrying mix. I don’t want to do it in March because the baby’s first birthday is that month and I’d just like to celebrate that without also trying to recover from surgery. Definitely not April because my birthday is that month and since I was newly postpartum for my last birthday, I really don’t want to spend this next one recovering from something. I guess I could go with May, but my anniversary is in May and gosh wouldn’t it be nice to be able to leave the kids with their grandparents and take a weekend trip. June could work, except we have a family wedding in June and we’ll have to travel and I’ve done a long car ride shortly after having surgery before and it is not fun. So I guess maybe I’ll plan for July, but you’re not allowed to submerge yourself in water for 6 weeks after surgery, and again, having had a similar, but less extensive surgery in the past during the summer, it’s a real bummer on a hot day to watch everyone else swimming when you can’t because you’re not allowed in water that goes up past your knees. That leaves August, but oh god August is a fucking nightmare with its end-of-summer and back-to-school insanity. I cannot imagine a worse month to be dealing with extensive physical discomfort on top of all the other existing frustrations and chaos.

Ultimately, whatever time I decide to schedule the surgery will be fine. My mother has already offered to come in and help with the kids while I heal. My husband has vacation days to spare, so we can make it work any time of year. My older son has already seen me through one surgery and is a tender and helpful home nurse. The baby is easygoing enough that we can benignly neglect him for a while without too much worry that we'll damage him beyond repair. But all the same, trying to envision when this will happen really hammers home the reality of how quickly a year can fly by when each month is full of obligations and occasions. Before we know it the baby will be a year old. He'll be walking and talking and turning into this little being that is both a progression of who he is now and a wholly different person. Winter will come and fade and spring will arrive and turn into summer which will melt into fall and then suddenly we'll be back in September. And September is a terrible time to have surgery because that's the start of the Season of Perpetual Holiday.