You know how before you have kids, before you even get married, you do that thing where you vaguely think about what might vaguely happen if you produce vague offspring in some comfortably vague future? Ed and I talked about having two children as the eco-responsible thing to do. Someday. We thought we might name them This and That. Someday. We thought these thoughts in the warm, safe glow of being twenty and then twenty-five and even twenty-nine and having no intention of sprogging up within the immediate future. And we talked about having two children so much that it seemed impossible we would have just one. Thus, when writing this list, I clearly wrote down a version of “Reproduce” and had to correct it lest the future get the wrong idea that I would have one and be done.

Then I had one. And I was done. More than done. I was baked, fried, roasted, grilled and burnt. I had been skinned, held over the fire and chewed until I was nothing but bones and gristle. It had been the single hardest thing I had ever done, and I nearly hadn’t made it. I did not understand how the human race had survived if this was what having babies was like. I loved my baby, sure, but it was with the sort of deep, dark determined love that is dragged from the primordial swamp of the soul and psyche and was in no way pink, fluffy, warm or cozy. I gritted my teeth and I loved that baby with every ounce of strength I had because that baby needed so much more love than I thought it was possible to wring from a human heart. Slowly, I adjusted, I coped, I changed. The baby grew a bit, calmed a bit, cried a bit less and I thought it might be safe to breathe.

Then, about 20 months after the first arrived, Ed suggested it was time to think about Number Two.

Don’t make me, I whispered. Don’t make me go back there.

But when we decided to have one, he pointed out, we decided to have two. He could have held up my list as proof. We had decided to have two. One baby was always going to arrive as the first of two.

Fine, get it over with then, I said, before I get any more sane and refuse to go back to Babyland, a jungle so dark and hideous that the very thought of returning made me shiver and sweat. It would be awful. I would go back to surviving on two hours of sleep in every twenty-four. I would go back to the helpless horror of knowing that I could not comfort my baby any better than anyone else in the world, but that it was, as the mother, my job to hold the crying baby and do my best to make things better. I would go back to sitting immobilized on the couch while a baby demanded that I grow a third and fourth breast because he was not done feeding, dammit. I would go back to clinging to the rudder, and hoping that the storm would clear.

I was completely wrong. I have never been so glad to be so wrong about anything in my whole life.

Having the second baby made having the first one make sense. She was round, warm and reasonably cheerful. She slept occasionally. She made little cooing noises. I understood why people liked babies (even if I still semi-secretly thought they were sort of larval). I saw glimpses of the pink, fluffy and warm that had been rumored to hover around these tiny humans. I picked up my crying infant and calmed it, just by being its mother, just by smelling right or having the right voice. The intense miasma that had surrounded me and the first child opened and we both could breathe more easily.

It is somewhat astonishing to me that the woman writing the list knew that she must have two babies. Not even that she’d quite like to have two babies, or that she planned to have two babies but that she MUST. That was right. Had I stopped at one, as I would have given an ounce of leeway, the world would be a less wonderful, more inexplicable place.

Of course, this all makes ten times more sense when I look back and know that the first child was autistic and the second child was not. Babies with autism, even the very high-functioning brand my son has, are not rewarding in the way that a neurotypical child is. They don’t coo and babble; they don’t particularly like faces; they hate even minor shifts of routine; they are rotten self-soothers; they find the world oppressive and overwhelming; they take a long time to bond; they learn to be loyal before they learn to love. It’s not a recipe to make a first-time parent feel confident or even competent, and I’m convinced the baby is not thrilled about its lot in life either. It’s just something to survive, for all of you, not something to revel in. Yet this baby taught me more about love than anything else — or anyone else — had ever done, or will ever do. I am grateful not just for having the second child, but for having both babies.

3. Have a baby two babies.

Check.

This is the third of a series of posts provoked by finding a fifteen year old list of 20 things to do before death. You can read about it here.

2. Live in Italy

Growing up in New York City, when people asked me what I was, I told them I was half-Italian and half-Irish. No one assumed that my mother spoke with a brogue or that my father rode a moped shouting “Ciao!” It was just a way of identifying your heritage in a huge melting pot place.

Once I got to England and then onto wherever else, I had to start saying I was American and I felt like I’d lost a little bit of my identity. What does that mean, American? At the time it was completely meaningless to me (and still is, some days). What it did mean was that I got into a lot of arguments about how we could elect so-and-so president and what did I think I was doing invading Granada?

But I starting thinking more about what it meant to be Irish and Italian. Was it about potatoes, Guinness, storytelling and stone walls? Pasta, Vespas, arguing and the Pope? I wanted to know more, see it all up close, smell it, live it, be it.

Why Italy though, and not Ireland?

Well, Italy is a lot warmer. Espresso, vino, pasta and cannolli. You do get to say “Ciao, bella” an awful lot. Then there’s my name: Francesca Maria Amendolia does not exactly blend in the Emerald Isle. So that’s where I would go. I’d gaze at art, grow tomatoes, write thoughtful letters with a fountain pen and figure out what the Italian was for stamps.

Actually, I already know that because it’s such a great, ridiculous word: francobollo. I’d learn the Italian for lobster.

And let’s be frank. Who wouldn’t want to live in Italy?

Does knowing where we come from tell us where we’re going? The more I work through this list, the more I think it was about identity. Who am I? Who do I want to be? Who do other people believe me to be? Can I be someone who eats a lot of lasagne in Italy with a big jug of Chianti? Please? Can I have that life?

Like the girl in The Fantasticks said: Please God, please! Don’t let me be normal!

So maybe 2 could now read something like this:

2. Live a not-entirely-normal life.

This is the second of a series of posts provoked by finding a fifteen year old list of 20 things to do before death. You can read about it here.

1. Speak French fluently.

Mais bien sur! Naturellement! Encore du vin, Madame, et je suis desolée que votre grandmere est flambée.

I speak French less well than Eddie Izzard, which is saying something, although if you ever have the chance to watch him do his stand-up in France – en français - you should. It’s super.

I have a smattering of the language, enough to get me a glass of wine and maybe a bit of cheese. It is possible, had I been willing to try, that I knew a lot more than that, but I would have stuttered and halted and made glaring mistakes. I didn’t want that. What I wanted was to speak French casually, easily, as if it were nothing particularly remarkable. I could see myself, slinky dress, cigarette in holder, cocktail in hand, perhaps discussing Sartre . So really, it was not about the language, but about who I would be, were I able to switch into that language at will.

Part of who we are is set. Having children cured me of that whole ridiculous tabula rasa thing. They popped out into the world already themselves. So did we all. But another part of who we are is down to our choices: not Who am I? but rather Who do I want to be? It’s one reason why being a teenager is so exciting and terrifying and exhausting. Am I a jock? Am I emo? Am I punk? Am I a nerd? Am I a rebel? Trying things on, one after another, seeing how they fit, feeling our way towards being the person we want to be.

There’s a bit in The Saturdays, the first book about the Melendys, when Mona has decided to have her braids cut off. As she heads to the hairdresser, she imagines that the people she passes have noticed her, and that now they are wondering about the beautiful girl and her mysterious smile. Then she catches sight of herself in a shop window, and instead of a glamorous young woman, she sees a girl with a wide, young face and a sappy smile that is about as far from mysterious as it is possible to be.

Part of the gift of growing up — and growing old — is that those two images, the one you carry in your head and the one you see in the shop window, begin to resemble each other. The dissonance is not so great. We grow into ourselves, merging who we are with who we want to be, letting go of somethings, embracing others.

I still don’t speak French very well, but I reckon I’d be more willing, should the opportunity arise, to try, which in turn would make it more likely that I would learn to speak it better. So perhaps the new number 1 on my list would be this:

1. Remain willing to make mistakes, and never mind if you feel silly.

This is the first of a series of posts provoked by finding a fifteen year old list of 20 things to do before death. You can read about it here.

Francesca's List of Twenty Things to Do Before I Die

I am somewhat amused (or even bemused), from my vantage point of more than a decade later, by its randomness and scope — “Speak French fluently” vs. “Take a pottery course.” Really? I mean, I’m glad some of my life goals simply a matter of signing up at the local art center as opposed to having to be reborn as a 5 foot 8 ectomorph with really bendy feet (because then I could have been a ballet dancer). Although now that I think about it, perhaps that was on purpose, to create a list that mixed concrete, achievable goals with more ambitious ones.

The more I reread this list, the more I feel a sense of kinship with the much younger me who wrote it. Clearly, I was not in my first bloom of optimism. Dancer (for example) is not on the list. Neither is member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Bond girl or international woman of mystery. I had clearly given up on marrying a royal or a Kennedy, and had no intention of running for president. Of anything.

Yet  there was a sense I would still do things both small and big. I like that I didn’t put an expiry date on the list. Not “20 Things to Do Before I’m 30″ or even 40 (thank goodness, because that would have depressed me mightily). Just “Before I Die” which is, pretty much, when I’m going to stop achieving things except possibly polluting a small bit of ocean with ash.

I’ve never been all that Type A about things. Really, I’ve just gone places and done stuff. Yet, lurking in the back of my psyche, trying not to be noticed, is a desire to truly DO things. Achieve things. Cross things off a list. In most bits of my life, I feel like Sisyphus, rolling a rock uphill only to have it roll back down. Yet, as Camus pointed out, we must assume that Sisyphus was happy and I get that. I am happy. The struggle is the point.

Still, I recently realized that I am ambitious and it was no good letting that ambition sit gnawing at me, like a rat in a silo. Surface looks okay, but don’t dig down. So I thought it might be interesting to look at each of these goals in turn. So that’s what I’m going to do.

Actually, I’m referring to sleep, which is a like a little death and boy do I adore it — more so during the night than during the day. I’m not really all that keen on naps. One, they take up time that I could profitably be using to DO something in, even if that something is reading, thinking or eating bagels. Two, I always wake up disoriented and crabby as all heck.

But I positively love getting into bed at night, pulling up the covers and knowing that soon I will sink into that lovely sea of sleep, warm as toast, soft as butter.  In fact, I often try NOT to fall asleep right away so that I can wallow in the awareness that sleep is pulling me down. I used to think everyone slept like this — I now know it’s a bit of a gift, one I’m very grateful for. I’m not looking forward to the apparent wakefulness of menopause. What DO people do when they can’t sleep? I have no idea. It was one of the single most disturbing things about having a newborn — that I simply forgot how people go to sleep. Clearly, this baby had no idea and wasn’t taking any hints. How is it that people sleep?

I recovered from that lapse in my love-affair with sleep. Now my problem is that I simply do not have enough time during the hours that I am voluntarily awake to get everything done. I thought maybe I would try getting up earlier (since staying up later just means I watch more Doctor Who and don’t get anything done). But oh my sainted aunt Penelope and her little dog Foofoo, it’s hard hard hard.

Then I read this article from Discovery and realized that it’s not my fault at all. It’s my darn genes. I don’t have the Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill gene that allows me to get five hours of sleep and still be all right. I need something closer to nine. Eight, I can cope with, but seven? Six and a half?

Bring on gene replacement therapy. I’m going to be first in line for the I-need-less-sleep gene as well as the grow-taller-than-a-measly-fivetwo gene and perhaps the when-stressed-refuse-to-eat-and-thus-lose-weight-rather-than-gorge-on-chocolate gene.  Failing that, I’m going to have to start going to bed before nine just so I can get up early enough to exercise, write, complain, meditate, work, parent, eat, worry, call my sisters and blog before tumbling back into bed at nine with a little shawl and a cup of herbal tea.

It was a palace of consumption. D. was awed and amazed. “They have everything,” he breathed. “How would we ever find anything?” He wanted to spend hours in the store, finding out just how much of everything they had.

I always feel a bit like I’ve taken soma when I succumb to the bright, easy, clean cathedrals of spending. It really did have everything. We could have shopped for food, clothes, toys, electron– wait, you probably know all this because you’ve been in one.

Sometimes hard is better. Sometimes I’d rather not have my desires gratified so simply and easily — the ease is like water on a weed and my desires grow and suddenly I want more and more and that want is like bindweed, choking back better thoughts, making them fight for space to grow.

I’m not really in a rush to go back.

Of course, all of that is here, in me. My road stretches back and is paved with those memories, those feelings, those behaviors, those choices. But the wonderful thing about roads is that as long as you do put one foot in front of the other, you get places. The scenery changes. You wake up and it’s warmer or colder or  greener or grayer. This too shall pass.

And so it is, that children grow and PhDs are finished, jobs are found, moves are moved and the road wends on. Today I am forty and some weeks old, physically somewhat fitter and lighter, remarkably lighter of heart and mind. After about a million years of good intentions and a lot of avoidance, I finished writing a book. I’ve even started the next (although I am firmly in the phase of loathing it and thinking I am a terrible writer). I am looking forward and believing that good things are not only coming, but here. And that I have within me a fresh and renewed sense that I can make it so, that I am not simply the prop on which other lives rest but the prop of my own life. That there is room in these daily hours for me and for them, that I can choose to go forward, whatever the road behind me is, and plant flowers along the way (a la Miss Rumphius, who made the world a better place).

I’m still making it up as I go along, but it doesn’t seem quite so foggy. See, somehow in the last few months, I suddenly stood up to myself and said, if you want to do something, start now. Your time here is not infinite and you are wasting it. And so almost three years after I wrote this post, I am doing it. I call myself a writer. I write. This is what I do. My book is being read by a decent editor. I am done avoiding what I want because I’m scared to want it, fail at it, whatever. I am way, way more scared of spending my whole life being scared.

I am building my own website right now (despite my stunning ignorance of all things html-ish). It will — I hope — be a sort of professional home, but I will blog there and post bits of writing and stuff of that sort. I think I’m not only shutting down these other blogs, but (after copying the contents) deleting them. Although don’t hold your breath because it’ll take me a while to do all the cutting and pasting necessary. It’s time for me to move on, not in baby steps, but in huge great flying leaps. Come visit me at my new home here: francescaamendolia.com. Give me a shout out and let me know you’re still out there. And thanks for being with me all these years, on and off, along this road.

But not here. This year, my word (finally!) is forward, despite what Ed said of the word making him think of fascist youth marches. Forward. Not looking back, not trying to be what I was, not trying to get back all the things I felt I was losing in the move, but going onwards, moving forwards and up and away. I might be about ready to do that.

And I’m going to do blog forward on a new and shiny blog I’m calling Making It Up and it’s here, at WordPress: http://extemporize.wordpress.com.

Please come over. It’s probably going to be almost exactly the same as it was. After all, it’s still me.

But not Stuntmother any more. She’s lovely and I adore her, that cupcake making, baby-rocking, play-dough rolling, half-smiling, half-screaming diaper juggling piece of me. But she belongs to something that’s receding into the past. And I’m going forward. Making it up as I go along.

The leaves are falling. And Ed is leaving. He’s on his way to Montreal for a conference. When he returns, he will have his parents with him. There’s some grand plan of meeting them at the airport when he flies in and they fly in so that they can come here together.

I’m planning menus and yawning. I’m not really a plan ahead kinda gal, on the whole. As I said once to a friend, I do not read ahead in the knitting pattern of life. Which sometimes throws a large wrench into the works. But this time, there will be five adults all over 65 in the house as of Wednesday (my parents, arriving Sunday; Ed’s parents, arriving Tuesday; my aunt, arriving Wednesday lunchtime) all of whom need to be fed. And who will not be happy if I offer them cold cereal and beer. And Ed’s going away. So tomorrow constitutes the last few free hours I have. I’m thinking I have to go to the supermarket and make it count! Thus menus. I’m thinking of making lots of soup and freezing it.

I also think I’m planning because I’m scared. These visits are hard, and I’m not really that robust. There is only a thin crust over the seething lava of my upheaval. It’s getting thicker, but it’s not there yet. Ah, well. It will all be fine, no doubt. Mostly because no matter what days are like, they end. And then there are new days.

Still, time to get in more wine.

Last year, oddly enough, I was also thinking about wine. Mulled wine.

Yoga is telling me that I have never before had a grippably wobbly belly and that it gets in the damn way.

Yoga is telling me that I have seized up in all sorts of uncomfortable ways.

Yoga is telling me that growing that enormous second child really did do weird things to my hips.

Yoga is telling me that I rarely draw a full breath.

Yoga is telling me that I almost never stand straight up.

Yoga is telling me that knitting (typing, driving, sleeping) screws with my shoulders.

Yoga is telling me that I had better go easy on myself.

Yoga is telling me to push just a little harder.

Yoga is telling me to take it slow, but go deep.

I should probably keep going.