The Most Exhausting Thing I've Ever Done

Wondering why I look so damn tired.

I live in squalor. I don't bathe a lot. Kelly has to tell me when I smell bad enough to shower. I miss meals. I forget whole hours. I wear the same clothes day in and day out until such time as they are puked on, pissed on, or shit on. I no longer glance in the mirror to check the state of my hair and whether or not a hat would be appropriate when leaving the house. And even if I wanted to care about these things, I would not have the energy to care about these things. It is way more helpful and economical at this point to spend my energy doing other things, like sizing up when would be a good time to try and take a shit. I also spend a fair amount of the day getting really excited about flatulence. I also laugh at flatulence, like a two-year-old would laugh at flatulence. Also burps. While burps are not as funny as farts, they are equally praiseworthy. I've basically defaulted to throwing a goddamn party anytime Munch farts, burps, or poops. I do not throw a party for pissing and puking, both of which are done frequently on me and neither of which are appreciated. He does, however, get bonus points for surprisingly loud adult-like farts.

Life, in many ways, has become an experiment in energy conservation and efficiency. However, and here's the thing, and why being a stay-at-home parent is so exhausting, nothing ever goes to plan. And so, all of the planning to conserve energy and be efficient is thrown out the window when Munch spends the first hour and a half of our time alone alternating between puking all over himself and me and producing impossibly large amounts of poop that end up on the outside of his diaper and all over his clothes.You cannot win these battles, these things aren't even battles. It's just you, trying to keep the sinking ship afloat and hoping that your partner arrives home a bit early so you can have 10 minutes of precious silence...on the toilet...or somewhere else in the house that is quiet.

But magical things are happening too. I would have never imagined that Adryn would have wired into his DNA the exact same sneeze as his mother. It's a sneeze, they just happen, there's no genetic coding for this stuff, right? But apparently there's something because they both have the same oddly stifled sounding sneeze. I've tried to tell Kelly for years that sneezing would be so much more satisfying if she just let it all out, convinced that she was stifling her sneezes on purpose. Apparently she wasn't lying when she said that's just how she sneezes because he sneezes the exact same way. They wake up the same way too: slow, methodical, sloth-like. Sudden movement is abhorred and bright lights are anathema.

Wonderfully crooked smile.

And he smiles crooked, like me. That something I've spent twenty-some years noticing and sometimes hating about myself is now reflected back at me in his gloriously unfettered reaction to a raspberry I'm blowing in front of his face makes that crooked smile a wonderfully beautiful thing. I hope he hears me one day when I tell him that.

There's this inexorable march of change taking place that I'm fortunate enough to be witnessing and can appreciate when not knee deep in the blur of a long day. Slowly but surely there's a personality emerging, one that seems intent on being deliberate with everything that he does. And as all of this happens there are still moments when I can't help but wonder what this would have been like with Rhys. What little bits of Kelly and me he would have carried. There is, at times, this odd tension between enjoying and loving and caring for Adryn and still having to fight for the memory of Rhys that people often overlook or dismiss. 12 hours of life is still life. And while Adryn can certainly pass a lot of life in the form of gas, feces, and urine in 12 hours, Rhys did some living too.

So there's this physical exhaustion, for sure. But I guess I didn't anticipate the added emotional exhaustion as we continue to get further from Rhys' birth and death and the intervening time begins to fill more and more with Adryn's wonderful little life. It's funny because, in our little household, Rhys is a daily fixture of our conversations and life together. He's never not there. He's a part of the fabric that makes us a family. And while the majority of my memories of him are painful and full of bitter sadness there's never a moment I've wanted to give them up or put them away only to be taken out once a year on his birthday. Because he has a birthday. He breathed. He held my finger. He lived. Just like Adryn; just like his brother.

The days can be long, but they're still days. And even though I've never felt more like someone was sucking the marrow out of my bones, it's something special. Because that crooked smile. Because those sneezes. Because I'm acutely aware that each day he gets closer to finally figuring out how to functionally put his fingers in his mouth and not his eyes. He's growing and I'm feeling a little less exhausted everyday.