Dear Reese,
Tonight I make the mistake of checking if your upper front teeth have come in with my finger and your bottom teeth bite down and leave indents on my pinky. My mistake. But I read that on average the top front teeth come in 4 to 8 weeks after your bottom front teeth. It’s been over 10 weeks. All the wasted excuses that you were teething in December and nothing.
I cough through your lullabies tonight but Cappi got me Robitussin while we were out today and I down it the minute you’re asleep. I don’t remember the last time I took liquid medicine; the bitter fruit flavor makes me feel like a kid again. Your cough, at least, seems to be far and in between now. It gives me hope for my own recovery this weekend. After watching you for a couple of days this week, MorMor catches her own fever and cough today. A month of illness all around in the Morgan family — we are all glad January is over.
There was a lunch & learn at work today around self-compassion. I listen to the speaker, Cory Allen, talk about recognizing the stories we tell ourselves for what they are: stories. When we spiral, focus on what’s really happening: I’m lying in my bed, safe, worrying about something that hasn’t happened and might not happen. I fold laundry off-camera while I listen and think: I know this, this isn’t my first therapy lesson, so why does my mind stick to that inner critic in the middle of the night like gum on a shoe?
My strategy has always been to interrupt nighttime anxieties with stories, fictional ones this time. I send my mind to a scene from a book I haven’t written and toss it around, playing out the different angles. Or I slip into my own mental fanfiction of a show I love. If I must think, I reason, let me think of something comforting and good and not real.
I’ve done this since I was a little girl on long car rides, bored and dreaming up stories to pass the time. In the first long-running daydream, I was a princess whose younger brother (your Uncle Wes) had been captured by the enemy after our kingdom had been destroyed and I needed to stage a rescue. There’s probably still a story to be mined there.
This all calls for a deeper meditation practice than I’ve had for a while. Gone are the years of meditating for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes a day. I pull up the Headspace app before bed and we get in a minute, maybe five, and try to relax my body: breathe in, breathe out. There is healing in stillness; strength in learning to watch the worst thoughts from above and recognize them for what they are: impermanent.
Just like this cough. May the Robitussin guide me through the night.
Love,
Mama