One of the trickiest things about writing this blog is being sure to protect the privacy and integrity of the people about whom I tell stories.

I would publish blog entries daily if I could somehow figure out how to do it anonymously (and if I had a live-in nanny and driver who could shave hours off my day for me.)

Because, on the daily, I experience emotions that are so intense, I want nothing more than to write about them and release them from my body—jealousy, rage, frustration, confusion, and exhaustion, to name some of the ugliest.

I want to write a post on how I wish so often my mom and I were the kind of mother and daughter who go shopping and to lunch together.

But we’re not.

I want to write about how I don’t understand why my sisters and I struggle to support each other unconditionally and why we are so critical of each other’s lifestyles and life choices and why, only now, have we started to try and allow grace to enter in to our relationships with each other.

But I can’t.

I want to write about how my friendships have changed and evolved and dissolved and how some of the people I am now closest to, I didn’t even know two years ago.

But I won’t.

I realize that sharing my story is a delicate dance between connecting with others and isolating those who are or have been close to me.

Which is why this particular post has been one I’ve been rolling around in my brain for quite some time.

I would never want to insult or offend any of these women who have so selflessly walked before me.

Clara and Jennie

My mom and sisters and I have a daily text thread that usually makes me feel manic at least twice or five times per day.

Most mornings, my mom will begin the day by texting something reminiscent of, “Good morning to my five beautiful blessings. I hope the Holy Spirit’s love and grace flow into your hearts today like a refreshing river. I’m going to mass and then to Kohl’s, to spend my Kohl’s cash and use my 30% off coupon. I’m going to get some nice undershirts for the clothing drive at church.”

The message will oddly feature the emoji wearing a cowboy hat at the end.

This damn person. 🤠.

And then my blood pressure starts to elevate because there’s something in me that can’t comprehend the Holy Spirit using Kohl’s cash. And I start to lean more towards maniac and further away from peaceful mother.

There is something about that cowboy that makes me want to throw things.

That cowboy isn’t using dry shampoo for the sixth day in a row.

That cowboy isn’t placing a Click List order because there just isn’t enough time to actually enter a grocery store.

That cowboy gets to go to Kohl’s while I have to teach an extra lesson to my class today because my prep was cancelled yet again.

Clara

One morning, in the daily daughters text thread, my mom wrote, “Today is my mom’s anniversary of death. She used to sit in the kitchen all day in her slip and babushka and cook for everyone. She never left that kitchen. And she never complained. She was such a beautiful soul.”

My mom’s mom is Clara.

She had ten children in fifteen years.

She lived in an upper flat in a house in Detroit where, at one point, some of her children were sleeping three to a bed because there were only two bedrooms for all those people.

I know very little about my Grandma Clara except for the fact that she had a typewriter, diabetes, and is revered by her ten children.

And when I say revered, I’m talking, my Uncle Phil, a bohemoth of a man with a mustache and truck driver’s hat, will sob when he hears the song Serdeczna Matko (Beloved Mother) sung at a funeral mass.

Grandma Clara died when I was 1. My mom had been a mother for a little over a year when her own mother died.

So when my mom sent that group text, I sent one on the side to my sister, Clare, (Clara’s namesake), and said, “Did anyone ever stop and ask Clara if she was miserable? Because I sure as hell would have been. God help her.”

All I could think of is how I wanted so badly to time travel and sit in that kitchen with my Grandma Clara and ask her, “How are you feeling today, beautiful Clara? Do you need time to take a walk? Do you want to go back to bed? Do you need the name of a physical therapist who can help you heal your aching body? Do you want someone to hold your baby for you or play with your toddler for you so you can take a shower in peace?”

In the moment that I received the text, I wanted to put a sign on Clara’s Kitchen which read, “Closed today. Make your own damn sandwich. Clara needs to recharge.”

Clara lived in the time where people never asked her about herself. Self-care wasn’t even a thing and mama support groups existed only informally under other pretenses.

My mom told me once that Clara belonged to a group called EmCroKnitSew—a group of women who gathered on the regular to embroider, crochet, knit, and sew.

Well. I sure as hell hope that those warrior women shared their internal dialogue while they made blankets. Because, from what I’ve been told, that group would have been my grandmother’s best bet for an outlet to say, “I’m exhausted and I don’t feel like making a stew today and my husband is driving me absolutely insane.”

I write for Clara. I write because Clara couldn’t.

Or rather, she could, but she couldn’t say, “Being a mother of young children is so overwhelming that it breaks you and puts you back together differently. And, at the same time that you’re being put back together, you’re trying to scream why it’s so difficult and it feels like your voice is gone.”

So I will say what I have to say for both of us.

Jennie

My paternal grandmother is a woman named Jennie, who was orphaned as a young teenager and sent to live with a maiden schoolteacher who functioned as her guardian.

Her three younger sisters were sent to different foster families and were not kept together in the aftermath of their parents’ deaths.

Which, if I remember correctly, were from influenza.

It has been 16 years since I breathed the same air as my Grandma Jennie. She died only a year after burying her son, my father.

She had already buried her oldest son fifteen years prior and her husband, two years after that.

Grandma Jennie had done some serious burying at that point.

Now that I try to conjure up a visual of her in my mind, I realize that Jennie’s eyes never smiled. She may have politely laughed here or there when something funny happened, but it’s as if she experienced so much hardship that her eyes refused to cave and follow suit.

On Sunday mornings, when we visited her after church at her home in Detroit, Grandma Jennie sat poised on the edge of her couch, legs crossed, cigarette in hand, her ashtray on an adjacent coffee table overflowing with ashes and discarded butts.

There was a glass cookie jar on her kitchen table which sometimes had stale windmill cookies with almond slivers in them.

For my birthday each year, the two best gifts always came from Grandma Jennie:

1. A garbage bag full of junk food. And good stuff, like Bugles and Cracker Jack, not just generic potato chips.

2. A perfumed potpourri container outlined in pearls which held all of the pennies she had collected that year.

She had a party line.

Please allow me to repeat.

This woman, this sweet angel who buried her parents as a child, raised four children of her own, didn’t have a driver’s license, and refused to buy herself clothes anywhere other than garage sales, had a party line.

Not only did she have a landline, but she had to share the damn line with someone she didn’t even know.

It breaks my heart that she didn’t have the need for her own landline.

That phone never, ever rang when we were there.

I also want to time travel, go find her, hand her a cell phone and say, “Text me, Grandma. Text me from your bed because you need someone to confide in and you need someone to unload your life burdens on. I can be that person for you.”

She didn’t have a Pinteresty sign in her kitchen which read, “What Happens At Nana’s Stays At Nana’s.”

In fact, we never once spent the night at my grandmother’s house.

It was an unspoken agreement that that would certainly be too much.

And, now that I am a mother myself, I can see why.

Being around young children and loving them requires a great deal of capacity in one’s heart, and, at that point, Jennie’s heart had been broken so many times. Entire compartments of her heart had closed.

From what I know, Jennie never attended grief support groups.

Imagining this tiny little woman, no taller than a third grader, carrying the deaths of the five people closest to her, brings me to tears instantly.

No one ever said to her, “How are you really, Jennie?” (That’s what we say at Honey, the wellness center for moms which I attend. It’s genius, because then no one feels the need to answer with the obligatory, “I’m good.”)

No one ever offered to listen to her share the difficulties of raising herself or of feeling unequal in her marriage or of overwhelming grief.

She didn’t have a mother who she could call for help when her babies were sick or a best friend to commiserate with or a doting aunt who begged to take her children for the weekend so she could refuel.

She didn’t have the opportunity to write a blog to provide community and connection for other mothers in her same life stage.

So, I write for Jennie. I write for Clara and I write for me and I write for Jennie because I was so young still when she died and had no idea how this responsibility of motherhood would change me. I could not even begin to understand how I would be so privileged to live in a time where I am valued as an individual and not always silenced when I try to speak.

For my sweet Clara and my precious Jennie. I vow to walk in the paths you have so beautifully worn for me and will create a legacy which always honors yours.

Our son will be baptized today on the altar at the church where my father’s walnut-colored casket rested during his funeral mass so long ago.

Maverick Douglas carries the middle name of his grandfather who has been gone for nearly seventeen years now.

My father has never met any of his grandchildren.

He was not present to hear any of his daughters announce any of their pregnancies.

He was not alive for my college graduation, my wedding, the births of my children or anything in my life that has happened in the last seventeen years.

He was never able to set foot in a classroom which had my name on the door.

He has never met Mark.

I did not walk down the aisle with him at my wedding and the last time I held his hand, he was in a hospital bed, his skin paper-thin, his cheeks sunken and hollow.

I was a child then. I am a mother now.

I said goodbye to him for the last times in a hospital bed and on an altar.

I said hello to my son for the first time in a hospital bed and today, will baptize him on that same altar.

The beauty of these moments is something Heaven-sent.

It is a feeling so pure, so primal.

It is the answer to a prayer I have prayed for the last seventeen years.

“God? Make this all feel better. Please? Please let air pass through my lungs again in the same way it used to. Let my brows stop furrowing and my voice stop quivering and my eyes stop resting so heavily.”

Saying Goodbye

In the early morning hours of February 25, 2003, I stood next to my sweet dad’s bedside, wearing the pajamas and glasses I had haphazardly thrown on when my mom called suddenly to tell me it was time.

“The doctors said it’s time, Sarah. He won’t make it through the night,” she told me. “Go get Audrey and come home.”

“I’m a kid,” I thought to myself. “It’s a Monday. I’m not supposed to be in a hospital on a Monday. I have to student teach tomorrow. He has to go to work tomorrow. This wasn’t the plan. He has kids. He can’t go now.” My hands shook and my voice quivered as I called Audrey to tell her to pack a bag so we could go home.

Once I finally arrived at his bedside, I entered the room, knelt down next to his bed, and began to softly sob.

“Dad?” I cried. He lay there unconscious, a shadow of my familiar father. He couldn’t draw me near or console me in any way.

Cancer had ravaged him. It had stolen his breath and his hair and his spirit. It was the only thing which had ever noticeably scared Doug Zwirner.

Cancer made him slower and more unsure and more unsettled.

Machines were the only thing keeping him alive until all of his daughters could get to him. He couldn’t open his eyes or respond, but I began talking.

“It’s okay, Dad,” I assured him, switching parent-child roles with him. “You can go now. It’ll be okay. Don’t be scared, Dad. You’re going to be okay. We’re going to be okay, too. And don’t worry about us,” I told him. I didn’t want him to feel badly about leaving us. And I didn’t want him to be scared about going to Heaven.

Now that I am a mother, I realize that the guilt of leaving his young family must have wildly spiraled throughout his mind, constantly consuming his thoughts at the same time cancer consumed his lungs.

Naming Our Son

Mark wanted to name our first baby Douglas Dale before we discovered, on the day after Christmas, that our first baby would, in fact, be a girl.

Mark’s father is Dale. He died six months after I met his son. I watched cancer come after another father and I watched it happen to the man I love.

So, two years later, when we learned, on Christmas Eve, that God had given us a son to love, Mark’s eyes glistened. I knew what he was thinking.

We would soon have our Douglas Dale.

It would be perfect, he told me. We would honor our fathers with our little boy.

But I couldn’t. I knew there was no way. I usually never am at a loss for words but I willed myself to stay quiet because I knew if I tried to say no, nothing would come out but pools of messy tears.

I couldn’t.

I couldn’t say his name every day.

Seventeen years later, my voice will still softly quiver when I say his name aloud.

There will always only be one Douglas.

He was ours. He loved fishing on Saturdays, bologna sandwiches, and polka music.

He smelled like Marlboro Reds and motor oil and he got pissed when he arrived home from work and the neighborhood kids had their bikes parked where his car was supposed to be.

He mowed the lawn with one hand and washed his car in the driveway on hot summer days. He made my sisters and I keep a garden one year to teach us the beauty of growing our own food. He used to wake up first and read the newspaper each morning while he drank coffee and smoked cigarettes.

It’s hard for me to remember things about him now. I have to recycle old memories because we haven’t made new ones with him in so long.

And I have spent nearly half of my life learning to live without him.

I couldn’t give all of that to my little boy to carry.

I couldn’t put the weight of being fatherless on Father’s Day on my newborn son.

I couldn’t write that name on lunchboxes and backpacks and yell it down the stairs at bathtime.

That name had already been taken.

And, Doug? In 2019?

Doug had a mustache, wore briefs when everyone else wore boxers, and bought his jeans at Sears.

It just couldn’t be Doug. I couldn’t share that name with anyone else.

So Maverick will carry Douglas as his middle name, but he will move throughout his own life with a name of his own, one not at all connected to loss and heartache.

And I will keep the memory of my father near to me still, as near as I keep my newborn son.

My wedding ring still doesn’t fit.

My c-section incision scar burns from time to time.

I have approximately zero professional outfits which fit and have been trying to figure out how to make flannel shirts and leggings look business-casual.

And.

There is a sixteen pound little-big boy who has captured my heart, my hands, and my breath and I have to leave him tomorrow for the first time to go teach other people’s children.

This leave was different than my first. (Not in the fact that all my time was unpaid. Because both leaves were FMLA, unpaid, thanks to them being July babies.)

I knew Maverick would most likely be our last baby, so I have tried feverishly to cherish each moment instead of wondering when I’ll next sleep for more than a four hour stretch.

Last week, when it was snowing during the night and I was feeding him at three a.m. in the rocking chair in his room, I closed my eyes, laid my chin atop his head, and inhaled everything about the moment.

I willed myself to remember what it felt like, smelled like, sounded like to have the baby God chose just for me in my arms.

I memorized the smell of formula, cold humidifier air, and Dreft for days in the future when I will need to recall it.

Because, one day, this baby is going to be a grown man and I’m going to be in a rocking chair, alone, wondering what he’s doing, wishing so badly to return to the snowy November night when he gazed into my eyes like I was the only person he ever needed.

This is the baby God thought was perfect for me.

I am the mother God thought was perfect for him.

And we have reached our next stage together.

I will carry him through this one. I will pack him up tomorrow morning in his little Carter’s outfit and zip him into his sherpa-lined carrier and carry him down the stairs to Suzi’s house.

A few years will then pass and he will walk into a kindergarten room and I will no longer be his only teacher.

We will do these transitions together.

And because I’m the mom, I will lead us for now.

There will most certainly be a day where my Maverick is as tall as his father, where I will fit under his chin.

One day, I will leave him in a college dorm room and cry like I will in my car tomorrow when I leave him at Suzi’s.

One day, he will hold my hand while I walk down a shaky porch stoop, my bones old, my muscles weak.

God chose us for each other. He knew we needed each other.

Maverick needed a mom who feels her feelings hard, who speaks her mind, who will always remember how desperately she prayed for her babies.

And sweet Sarah needed a son who loves her unconditionally, who grips her shoulder protectively while she holds him, who closes his eyes and smiles a toothless smile while she kisses his cheeks over and over.

Cognitive Reframing

I am, by no means, saying that tomorrow will be easy or that I’m glad to leave my baby and my toddler.

But. In my mom’s group, we’ve learned to cognitively reframe things to help process them with less angst.

So instead of thinking about how it won’t be me who feeds Maverick all of his bottles any longer, I’m going to remind myself that my children are fortunate enough to be loved by a woman named Suzi who God himself put in our lives.

Suzi sings a welcome song for each child she cares for and plays a lullaby cd at naptime and holds my children against her chest like a family member.

Suzi says things like, “Maeve, let’s make a better choice.”

I say, “Jesus, Maeve. If you slip on the ice again, it’s your own fault.”

I will acknowledge that I have to wake my babies up in the dark and cold and drive them 35 minutes across town each way, but I will remind myself that they are watching their mom hold down the job she’s had for 17 years, provide health insurance for her own family, and help families less fortunate than our own.

It will be difficult. I want to be the person to lay them down for naps and make them lunch and take them to daytime library story times.

But. I will remind myself that I am not the first or last mother to make this transition.

My support system is supportive enough to achieve world peace.

My teaching partner, Sarah, knows that it will be eating me alive to sit at a table and grade papers on my first day away from my babies. So she told me not to worry about my return, that she’s buying us Panera lunch, that she planned what we’re doing for the rest of the week.

Sarah is more than a teaching partner. Sarah knows me so well that we don’t even use language to have conversations sometimes. Sometimes, just the way we exhale confirms what the other Sarah is thinking. Sarah had to leave a baby boy at home nearly fourteen years ago to return to work and she knows what it feels like.

My friend, Kristen Black, will look at me tomorrow and just the way that she acknowledges me when I walk in the room will confirm that she is helping me hold my swollen heart. She will hug me and we will giggle about all the things I’ve missed since I’ve been gone—the recent snow day, her new haircut, Santa Shop signup.

And the school day will end and we will do this over and over and over again until June, when, once again, I will get to be the person to feed the bottles and lay them down for naps, and attend the library story times.

I emptied out the contents of my hospital bag today.

There’s snow on the ground.

My son was born in early July.

I pulled out the giant maxi pads they sent home with me and threw them in my bedroom garbage can. I folded floral nursing nightgowns and placed them gently in a donation bag on the floor. I took the dry shampoo I never even used and set it in the medicine cabinet in our upstairs bathroom.

Then, I picked up my son, pressed him tightly against the spot in between my chin and my belly button where he perfectly fits, and cried until my tears fell on the soft spot on his little head.

A season in my life has ended and it is equally beautiful and breathtaking. It literally has taken my breath, much like a solemn goodbye to a lifelong friend.

I don’t have a newborn anymore.

Because my children have a mother of “advanced maternal age” and because daycare for two babies costs more than a mortgage, we will most likely be a family of four.

And the thought that I’ll never have another baby gently placed on top of my heart in that space between my chin and my belly button makes me breathless.

My tears continue to fall as I recall those two hospital stays in July where God made me a mother and realize that two of the very best days of my life have already happened.

When Mark Meyer brushed my teeth for me after I vomited from exhaustion and epidural.

When the nurses wrapped my babies so tightly in their little swaddle blankets and delivered them to me in my hospital bed like I knew what to do with them.

When a CRNA stood beside me during my c-section with Maverick and softly narrated each step, giving me the security I longed for.

When Mark and our baby and I began our lives as a family in a secluded little room with a whiteboard that read, “Mom: Sarah Baby: Maeve,” and a mini-fridge from which Mark delivered me Diet Pepsi and tuna salad sandwiches.

I waited my whole life to have that damn white board say “Mom: Sarah.”

On my college graduation, Mr. Goodman, my best friend’s father, interviewed each of the roommates and asked us where we saw ourselves at 25.

My roommates were on their way to becoming doctors and lawyers and were talking about med school and law school plans.

I know exactly what I said. And I’ve never even seen the actual tape. In cap and gown, standing on the lawn of a slummy Ann Arbor college house, I replied, “By the time I’m 25, I’ll have found my soulmate and I’ll have kids.”

I was 21.

And clearly didn’t own a crystal ball. Lord knows I hadn’t the slightest idea that it would take me ten more years and match.com to enter the next season.

God had other plans for me. It wasn’t my season then.

I realized today as I emptied the contents of my hospital bag that my life seasons are reminiscent of traditional ones.

My winter was long and barren. It was the death of a parent and the hibernation of self and the search for my partner.

My spring was so lovely and quick. It was falling in love and bringing my babies Earthside and finding my voice.

Now, while I press my Maverick against my chest, wishing time would stand still as Michigan winter approaches, my personal summer is here.

I am a mother now and I will remind myself to bask in the sunlight which these babies have brought to my life.

I was listening to a well-known motherhood podcast the other day while driving and one celebrity mom said to the celebrity guest whom she was interviewing, “Tell them about the first time we met! It was at The Seinfelds’ house (Yes. Jerry.) and…”

I got distracted and thought to myself, “The Seinfelds are probably lovely people. But I have a feeling Jessica isn’t in the Similac Formula Coupon Swap group on Facebook and Jerry doesn’t cut his own hair in his half-bath like Mark Meyer.”

Folks, you’ve got to keep it relate-able here. Recapping weeknight dinner parties in NYC hosted by the Seinfelds doesn’t make me feel like we’re in the same game together. I work in a school where I regularly have to beg Mr. Lu, the custodian, to please refill the toilet paper in the classroom bathroom. Walking tacos are still being served at my place of employment. I do not attend weeknight dinner parties.

One of the celebrity hosts then went on to discuss how important she believes it is to take date weekends with her husband away from their four children. Right. Me too. Except we’re paying $2,000 a month in daycare costs for two children, so there aren’t too many extra cash bags laying around for Mark and I to lay poolside somewhere to reconnect on the weekends. I’m laughing just thinking about it. On the weekends, I’m inside making chili with as few ingredients as possible, directing Mark to rake the leaves so our neighbors don’t think we’re losers.

I’m not by any means trying to say that these mothers are less than.

I’m saying my experience is different.

And the people experiencing motherhood the way I am need a voice, too.

There is a tie in our drying rack. It’s Tuesday night. Mark wore the tie to a wedding on Saturday night. Full disclosure, I have no immediate plans to move it and I truly don’t care.

A few weeks ago, I attended an electric event where powerhouse mothers from all across the country came together to listen to powerful females speak of their experiences and advice for navigating the entrepreneurial and corporate worlds. One of the speakers, an entrepreneur and mother, advised the audience to pay for really great daycare. She spoke of an au pair who lives with her family and helps make everything work. I appreciated her transparency. But.

This isn’t feasible for most.

And it changes the way the game is played.

Today, we had a 5:00 meeting with our financial planner in Troy. We take an elevator in a marble-floored lobby to get to his office. His secretary buzzes us in each time and asks us if we’d like her to brew us some coffee. Yes. Brew everything you have, please, Amanda.

I know the game I’m playing here. I know Maeve Meyer does not belong in a building which has its own jewelry store on the first floor. So, I asked Miss Danielle, an employee at Maeve’s daycare, if she’d be available to babysit for an hour or two whilst Mark and I play “Student Loan Balance Bingo” and “How Old Do We Have To Be to Quit Our Jobs? Roulette.”

I asked her to show up at 4:15. At 4:30, when I sent her a text to ask her if she was close and she responded, “Yes,” I gave her a few minutes. And then, I did what everyone playing the game the way I am would have done.

I told Maeve to get her boots on.

I threw a processed cheese and pretzels snack in my purse as bait, packed Maverick in his carrier, and texted Miss Danielle that I had to be on time for our appointment and I had to leave. I took my tiny pals with me because, again, my reality is a tie in a drying rack.

I’m getting better at these situations.

The first time a sitter didn’t show up, I got flustered. My hands nervously shook as I tried to figure out what to do and cursed her generation for not caring and not having a work ethic.

But today, I’m fresh off a week of checking my own boxes and Mama isn’t letting anything get in the way of continuing to secure a healthy financial future.

Called Mark Meyer on our way, told him he’d be firing up his phone pre-meeting to let Maeve watch Blippi while she ate garbage snacks, and sent a silent apology to all the mamas I used to judge for handing their kid their cell phone and allowing them to eat canned cheese.

It worked. Our financial planner is a compassionate human being and congratulated us on having a new baby.

I fed Maverick while discussing my student loan balance.

Mark held Maeve on his lap while simultaneously reviewing our retirement accounts.

We made it work. He and I are slowly learning how to be Mom and Dad at the same time as Sarah and Mark.

Now. Any guesses as to who will move the tie out of the drying rack first?