Enough is Enough
This morning I woke up early from a dream in which I had won some kind of sweepstakes. It wasn’t the PowerBall jackpot or anything, but it was a significant sum, something to get excited about. Granted, I had a lot of weird dreams last night. For some reason, the vignette that sticks out most vividly is one where a friend from high school met me in a parking lot and handed me a tallboy can of soda, a white can with a wave of tan around the top. The flavor was listed just under this tan stripe: “diet vanilla prune.”
This was the image in my head, accompanied by those good lottery-winner feelings, as I swung my legs out of bed and said the words I’ve been starting most days with lately. “Good morning, babies,” I said to the two people I’ve been carrying around with me since early February. Sometimes I wait to talk to them until I feel them kicking me — something that they do often, and yet almost never in a way that causes me any discomfort. Perhaps it’s because my body is, miraculously, large enough to hold them. Or maybe it’s just because the excitement of knowing that they really are two little people in there is enough to transform the discomfort into wonder. If they are moving, I figure it means that they are awake, and their working ears can hear the sound of my voice after hours of nothing but crickets and congested snoring.
“Hi,” I’ll say to them. “Hi! Good morning, babies!” I then typically get up and walk to the bathroom for the zillionth time. Maybe I’ll take on my grandmother’s signature sing-song cadence. “Mommy’s babies…Mommmmy’s bay-beeees,” I’ll sing in a way that will surely come to mortify them if I can’t break the habit in the next decade.
If this is the first you’re hearing about my being pregnant, much less pregnant with twins, that fault is entirely my own. I mean sure, I posted on socials about it! But I have been meaning to write about it here for months. If I wanted to give myself some more credit, I would say that in a way, I have been writing about it for months. It’s just that none of that work has crossed the threshold of shareability. And there are several reasons for this.
For one thing, there is just so much to say. I started one would-be Metaforia intending a heartfelt revelation of the struggles I went through to get to this point. Another was to be an unpacking of the laden phrase “Single Mom by Choice,” especially in the current moment. I have voice memos and notes for both of these unsent missives. But they remain unfinished.
Another serious, if hidden, complication is that, from about week 16 of my pregnancy, I have suffered from with carpal tunnel syndrome in both of my hands. It’s a bizarre twist: even most women who have been pregnant (at least in my anecdotal experience) have no idea that carpal tunnel can be a side effect of pregnancy unless they happened to have experienced it themselves. And yet, it has been my one main physical complaint of these past months. At worst, it has had me up for an hour or more in the night, struggling to stifle finger pain via of one of the few remedies sanctioned for me: alternating hot and cold water. At best, it’s been a constant tingling and stiffness making it harder for me to do the things humans do with their hands — namely, nearly everything. Harder to cook, to bake, to knit. Specifically, it’s made it hard to use a pen or a pencil for long, and harder as well to add extra typing on top of what I have to do for my job. Voice memos are fun, but I really think best through a pen onto paper. So my writing output, of all kinds, has been stifled.
Of course, the biggest obstacle you will already have guessed: there is just so much to do. Most if not all of my personal projects have fallen by the wayside as I’ve taken on an increasing number of doctors’ appointments; a crosstown move from my third-floor-walk-up apartment (not to mention the finding of said apartment); the building of a soft nest for two helpless infants to land.
But I’m not trying to write a mea culpa, and I’m certainly not attempting a list of complaints. I’m trying to tell you a story. And it’s a nice one.
Early in my pregnancy— early enough that I was not telling people yet — I had the great pleasure of performing in a one night event with InHouse Theatre Company called Glimmer of Hope. An annual tradition, it’s not so much a play as a series of exercises intended to help those in attendance get into an abundant frame of mind for the year ahead. The grand finale is a candle carving ritual. I’m sure you’d love for me to explain what exactly a candle carving ritual involves, but you’re gonna have to trust me when I say that it’s pretty much all right there in the name. After the candles were carved, they were lit, and we all — performers and guests alike — sat in a giant circle and held a word in our minds that we wanted to carry with us as we faced the year ahead. And my word was “enough.”
See, on paper, it doesn’t make much sense for me to become a single mom of one kid, let alone two, in Los Angeles. I love my job, but it doesn’t pay easy, breezy, single mom wages. I am insanely grateful to have health insurance, but hardly any plans in America cover IUI or IVF treatments, which are notoriously expensive. Trying to become a mom was not a sound financial decision; it was not a financial decision, period.
At the outset of this journey, I’d lived in that third-floor-walk-up apartment (complete with 2-3 roommates) for my entire LA tenure and loved it. Having a child would mean needing to find a new neighborhood (Silver Lake is too pricey) and a new home (preferably one on the first floor, or with an elevator).
Money aside, I have almost no family in Los Angeles. And I would need so much help. Now, I may have been born a natural mothering type, but I am not the type who naturally asks for help. I often think, with a mix of pride and shame, about getting a mattress up to the second floor of my first California apartment. It was not long after my move (to Orange, CA) in 2012. Not knowing anyone well yet, I chose to carry — well, hoist and drag and pull — the mattress up the stairs by myself. A few weeks later, having met my neighbors across the hall, I still put my gigantic IKEA bookshelf together on my own (in bold defiance of the pictograms on the instruction booklet cover) before knocking on their door to ask for assistance in standing it up off the floor. The most insidious part of this trait? It’s never been that I fear or dislike asking for help, at least not consciously; I just tend to forget that it’s an option for me.
Anyway, those are the items in the “con” column of this whole single motherhood thing. Of course, I didn’t decide to try and become a mother “on paper” (unless you count the play I wrote on the subject, and the subsequent screenplay, both of which helped me work through my feelings on the matter…but you get my meaning). There was no pros and cons list. It was simply a stone I could not leave unturned. I couldn’t live with it unturned. Eventually, finally, just a few weeks before my 41st birthday, it did turn.
And so, back at candle carving, “enough” was my word, because it would be my prayer throughout my pregnancy and maybe forever now. Please, let whatever we can have be enough. Abundance would not be necessary. Somehow, we needed to have the pieces fall into place: room enough to live, time enough to prepare, people enough to help us. For some reason, I already had a seed of faith that we would, indeed, have enough. But I needed to hold tightly to that bit of faith lest I collapse at the magnitude of what lay before me. So “enough” was also a reminder. Trust that enough will be enough.
This pregnancy, I now see, has been the single greatest act of faith of my life. Faith in God, to be sure. That faith above all — faith in the loving arms of the Universe to catch me (us) when I (we) leap. But also faith in my people. My family, yes. But it’s easy to have faith in my family, infinitely blessed as I am with a universally caring and supportive one. What about the network of people I’ve built up along the course of my life? Especially my life here in Los Angeles — my solo life? Grad school, my professional life, my church community? I needed faith that they would catch us too.
So, back to this morning. I’ve woken up from my weird dreams. But let me fill in some details. I’ve woken from a night of sleep that, for the past month or more, has ceased to be interrupted by wrenching hand pain. For the past couple of weeks, that sleep has been aided by a wonderful pregnancy pillow that a friend — someone I just met last year! — got for me from my registry. Beneath that is a mattress that I’m pretty sure my father paid for, sitting on top of a bed frame that we built together in early July (and by “together,” I mean that I read the instructions and handed him parts while he did all the actual building).
Had I swung the other way out of bed, I’d have found my legs just beside the carseat box that I’ve been using as a nightstand until the rest of my furniture situation is sorted out. It’s one of two carseats that made up the very first baby gifts I received, way back in May or June. Some evening I returned home from a long day to my old apartment and the boxes were just sitting there on the third floor landing outside my door. Two brand new carseats.
To the left of that box is the tiny nursery I was able to carve out of the first floor apartment I managed to find on my first day really even looking. Its walls are covered with peel and stick wallpaper, painstakingly chosen by myself but expertly hung by a couple from church who asked how they could help so many times that I felt I needed to give them a big assignment. While they were at it, they built the crib my family pitched in on.
In the other corner of my bedroom is my desk, which made it to my apartment not in the cargo van I rented, but on the back of a pickup truck. When the movers I hired couldn’t fit that last piece of furniture into the van (because I’d chosen too small a vehicle), one of them offered to just drive it over to the new place himself. Just to be nice.
Walking out into the living room, I’d see a ton of furniture, some of which my father brought over all by himself, some which James (who, while not biologically related to me, is somewhere between a brother and a cousin, and now my neighbor) stepped in and insisted my father not attempt to carry. I’d see a handmade toy box a friend presented to me (us) just last week. I’d see the beautiful bookshelf — the biggest size of IKEA Kallax — that was hammered and Allen-wrenched together by three friends one July evening with practically no assistance from me at all.
This is just scratching the surface. I told you that there was just so much to say. And there are so many more stories, so many more thank yous, that I could offer, and have, and will. While I will definitely need to continue to pray for “enough,” to remind myself to have faith in the promise of “enough,” what I have actually received over these past few months feels a lot more like “abundance.”
What I’m saying is, I think my dream was right. I did win the lottery.
And “diet vanilla prune” is probably just Diet Dr. Pepper.
I didn’t know you were pregnant until I read this! Congratulations! It is a wonderful thing to have family—biological or chosen—surrounding you at a time like this. These are lucky babies, to come into the world with an abundance of love, not just with enough. Obviously if they’re both girls, you have to make them Jessica and Elizabeth.