Pedaling

I have discovered that when you have children, life can be so busy, that you tend to settle into survival mode.  Whether you have one or five, I tend to see as shades of grey –– any number of children is challenging.  But when you have five, and some of them are very young, life is especially bare-bones.  As a mother, I have a finite amount of time and energy.  The longer I have been at this, the more impressed I have been with my own ability to frequently find more time and energy as needed, but ultimately, you hit the wall, you max out, you realize you have nothing left to give.

Just getting my family of seven through a day is a full-time job, and with an infant and a toddler, I found myself falling into bed each night, exhausted, simply having gotten through another day.  Nothing major had been crossed off the to-do list, and I couldn’t really quantify anything that I’d done.  I have thus long considered myself the busiest person I know who accomplishes absolutely nothing. 

But I have learned that parenting is perhaps the most extreme big-picture activity: it takes a really long time to see the results of anything that you do.  For me, it has taken years to catch a glimpse of how my daily investments are shaping five incredible children.  And to realize that in fact, when looking at the big picture, my accomplishments are already huge.

But it turns out that life happens in the small picture, and in that place, I have, for a very long time, seen myself as coasting.  You’re coasting when the bike is moving, you’re on a downhill, you have serious momentum and there’s not a whole lot to do except hang on and steer.  In my case, some of this is literal.  A substantial part of my day is spent driving my children to one place or another, or making sure they are going in the direction they need to go.  For me, my priorities as a mother have been to make sure my children are loved, fed, clothed, warm, busy and happy, not necessarily in that order.  Unfortunately, the little ones have needed more of my time and effort to get to those places, which has meant that the bigger ones have gotten a little less of my time and energy.  But now, the incredible thing is that all of a sudden I have time leftover after I do the bare minimum, and that I can begin to think about adding other priorities to my mothering.  And –– it’s amazing to discover –– to my life beyond mothering.

And so, I can hardly believe it, but I am ready to start pedaling again.  I can’t tell you how great that feels.

So far, in the past month, we have added three soccer teams and two gymnastics classes to our agenda.  We are painting and decorating parts of our house that we hadn’t yet had the time or energy to tackle.  And probably, most amazingly, I have taken a trip alone, by myself to visit my brother and his family –– something I haven’t done since long before I met my media naranja.  I have had three whole days here, where I have only had to worry about what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go.  And that has given me the time to finally start this blog and to write a bit about the stuff that’s been in my head for years.

Tomorrow I will go back home, and I will jump right back in, going pretty much straight from the airport to Ethan’s soccer game.  Anthony will stay on to watch AJ’s game, while I take the other kids and head over to celebrate the first birthday of our littlest boy –– our godson, Owen.  And by night time, I will probably feel as if I never left.  But I will know that I did.  And I will remember how great it was.  And I will start to think about what other new things my family and I are ready to do. 

It feels kind of awesome to pedal.

And away we go!

These days, it seems like everyone has her own blog, and those of us who don’t have one think about what we’d write about if we did.  After years of thinking about blogging, I think it’s finally time to move into the “has one” category.

Why now, you may wonder?  I am a mostly stay-at-home mother of five –– the smallest of whom just turned two.  Five years ago, I married my media naranja (a Mexican saying for the other half of my orange, something that sounds less starry-eyed than my soulmate) and became a stepmother to his three small children.  We hit the ground running with this new family of ours, and a year after we got married, I got pregnant. A baby brought a new level of exhaustion and chaos to our already busy home, and when she turned one, we found out we had another on the way.  So you can see how it’s taken every ounce of energy I had, just to keep my head above water, with everyone healthy and pretty much happy.

But a funny thing happened a few months ago.  All of a sudden, it seemed, our babies were turning into children, getting more independent and needing less of my time and my energy.  As Biba turned two, I realized, “Holy cow.  I actually have spare time, and I even have some extra energy, since they’re sleeping a little better.  What does all of this mean?”

And so, five years after I first thought about blogging, it seems that I may finally have a chance to write.  What am I going to write about?  My family –– the good, the bad and the completely normal.  I have learned a lot as the mama of this big, blended family, and I hope that my experience can help someone find answers more easily than I did.

I imagine this blog will frequently go back in time, as I share stories of things that happened in the past, when I was just too tired to write.  But often, I’m sure I’ll just blog about things that are going on in our present –– there’s always something going on in a family of seven.

It seems that this would be a good time to make a quick introduction to our cast of characters. Anthony is my aforementioned media naranja.  A dedicated father and endlessly loving husband, Anthony is kind and charismatic, always up for a party.  No surprise, he has earned the nickname of Good Times Tony.  Our oldest, AJ, just turned 14 and is the compassionate leader of our close-knit bunch of children.  Eleven-year-old Katye is our mature, helpful daughter, who relishes having two little sisters and enjoys bossing around all four of her siblings whenever possible.  Ethan just turned nine and is our youngest son.  I have long thought he is a mini-Anthony, so it’s no surprise that he is happiest with in a crowd of people.  Our first joint production, Delilah is our family’s three-year-old dictator.  She is feisty and strong-willed and madly in love with all four of her siblings.  And then there’s Biba.  Officially named Camila, shortened to Mila, turned into Biba when the Dictator couldn’t pronounce her name, our baby is our most mellow child.  As Delilah’s loyal sidekick, she let’s Delilah have whatever she wants, and genuinely seems happy with the seconds. 

And then there’s me.  I’ve spent so long knee-deep in mothering that I’m not quite sure who I am anymore, beyond a wife and a mother.  Perhaps that’s another purpose for this blog, though, to help me figure out who I am, and to share what I find as I go along.  I can’t wait!!