Maybe I need a rabbit-fur coat...

In Chicago it’s dark by 5pm: the sky a rich indigo with the street lights shining yellow above the icy streets. But later, the sky becomes a dusty rose against the black etching of bare branches. It’s quiet. Cars are scarce and the sidewalks are empty. There’s a bunny in our yard that leaves little tracks in the snow. It welcomed us here on a hot September day—scampering down the walk when we first pulled up to the house after driving 11 hours from Atlanta. And now, as I look up at the pink, glowing night, it huddles in its winter coat, nose twitching and small nubby ears perked at odd angles while I watch it from our back porch.

I’m here, as usual, on my small plot of land in Chicago. Where I was yesterday and the day before and where I will be tomorrow and the next day. I am house-bound; exceedingly busy with the tasks of motherhood and the running of our house. The small, mundane orders of the day are the ticks and tocks of my clock in this life I’m beginning to recognize as my own. I have always wanted to be a mom. I highly value the investment in my children that I am allowed to make by my decision to stay at home with them. This said, it can be trying. What happens to your identity as a woman, as an individual, when you become completely subsumed by another’s life. Or by the lives of three others, in my case. I am honored and I feel blessed by the opportunity and the importance of what my life is at the moment. But there is no worldly recognition or accolades for the stay-at-home mother.

I realize now what enormous confidence I have always drawn from how others view me. By my recognition as a thinker or student. By complements I’ve received about my style and my confidence. I never knew how reliant I was on these things—how they buoyed me up and held me strong. And now, as nothing other than a mother and a wife—how do you gauge successes? How do you take the measure of your days—calculate your worth in your own eyes? It can become a contest of how much you can get done—have you finished the dishes? Done the laundry? Picked up the house? And conversely, to have not done these things, to see your life as a battle lost because your tabulation in the banal doings of life has found you wanting, is a harsh blow to your valuation. Am I only this to-do list of mindless tasks? Mothering is the slow stewing of a complex sauce. And the results are out for many, many years. What is there to keep me going, I wonder?

My wise, beautiful sister said yesterday in her amazing blog, that “there is this one foot gap between our heads and our hearts- and there are lifetimes in that space. the head knows but the heart feels it- and the time travel between these two spaces can be tricky.” How true! And while my head believes in and knows the value of my day to day, sometimes my heart longs for a time when everything was simpler: when my life was mine alone. I’m hoping that my head can send a message of encouragement so strong to my heart that I will truly feel the contentment that I know is mine already, but that hasn’t been able to travel that distance—that treacherous path between the head and the heart. My life is so rich and so blessed, the things I gain from being a mom and a wife not only thrill me but make me who I am as well. But sometimes it’s hard to hear that.

And so, under this pink-tinged night sky, I stay as still as I can while the bunny watches my movements. It’s little footprints circle the yard seemingly at random—what does it eat? I wonder. But it finds something, surely. Rabbits have lived through Chicago winters since the beginning of time. I’ll be OK, too.

Ice Fishing

Here, there is silence. A thick covering of silence as white and heavy as the snow that carpets everything. Snow absorbs and mutes noises so that the world comes at you through a veil of cotton. The colors are bleached out like faded calico. There is nothing besides the white of the snow and the dreary bricks. But it is the silence that is most disturbing. Unnatural. Empty.

Life has different seasons. I am in a winter. The cold bare midwinter of Chicago, yes, but my own emotional winter as well. A time of fruitlessness. A time of suspended animation. A time of dearth. The landscape is monochromatic. The topography is flat. The branches are bare.

It’s hard here, in Chicago’s winterscape, to write and muse on life. Whenever, in Atlanta, I was stuck, I would simply head out to the front porch and look out over the tree line. Listen to the cicadas singing and the tree frogs croaking—the metallic unwinding of the Katydids. Or walk through the blanket of humidity and feel the tough, scratchy Bermuda grass beneath my bare feet.

But I must also remember that this blog was started in the spring. New growth. Budding leaves. The bearing of fruit. I must not begrudge myself this season of winter. Perhaps I should, instead, allow it to work on me. Allow my pulse to slow, allow my body to slumber. Maybe this is a time for reflection and cloistering. A time for incubation as much as for hibernation. Suspended animation, yes, but an active time nonetheless. When the lake freezes over, life continues beneath the ice.