During the solar eclipse, our house was not in the path of totality, so I didn’t expect that it would still be so striking to experience the partial eclipse. My kids were with my mom and I was trying to finish our taxes, so I was home alone when the sky grew noticeably dark, like it was about to storm. I didn’t have the special eclipse glasses, and don’t live in the sort of place where there were neighbors out I could ask to borrow them from for just a second to take a look, so I just stood outside with my back to the sun and looked the other way — at my house, the trees, the rest of the sky. Eerily normal, but completely not. The slight but noticeable drop in temperature, my son’s pinwheel spinning furiously under our big tree. Yes, the sensation was thunderstorm, the sensation was go inside. Looking at my hands with the strange moony sunlight shining on them, weakly. I felt powerful just standing there with my back to the event. I grabbed a colander to make a hundred little pinholes, watched the crescent grow littler and littler that way. How terrifying. What if the moon just stayed there? It wouldn’t — but what if it did?
I remember watching the 2017 eclipse in Chicago in the little shared back garden behind our basement apartment. I remember it being afternoon, after a coffeeshop shift probably. I had the glasses. My husband and I were just hanging out watching it together. I was so different then, seven years ago. My mid-twenties, living in a city with my new husband, near friends, working weird jobs. Miserable, but not. I didn’t know what I was looking at! I couldn’t feel how it related to me at all. It felt like a fun and novel afternoon. We probably walked down the street for dinner. Or wandered the plant store and then the grocery store hand in hand. Or maybe just fell asleep watching tv. Nothing mattered too much, nothing was tethering us too tightly to anything except each other, and our life felt infinite. I remember that.
Different now. I stood in front of our house, our life, and couldn’t miss my relationship to the sky. The obvious metaphor was pulling my hair, tapping on my head like little child fingers. Oh, to be eclipsed by one’s children, by motherhood. Oh to see one’s life covered over by something big enough to swallow much, maybe all, of the light. After the birth of my second child, I’ve existed in a state of prolonged baby blues — not quite postpartum depression, at least in my opinion, but a sort of settled and lived-in resignation. This is where I am now. This is what it is. It has been my great joy to give birth to and care for my children, but I can see how much of my own light is obscured. That’s what gets me down. Not them — me. The moon of my children, my responsibility toward them, their immensity, is passing just in front of me, at or near totality. I know it will change. The sky does not stand still. But in this cool stormy darkness, it feels like it could stay this way forever. And I don’t even have the glasses to see it by. What does it mean to turn my back and let it hit me, unseen?
I’m not unhappy, but I’m very much eclipsed. I’m only nine months postpartum, still breastfeeding, it’s all still so fresh. They like to say “nine months in, nine months out,” another milestone. How am I doing? My mental state is capricous, my sanity is always teetering on the edge of loss. I keep telling my husband, “I’m not doing great!” But I don’t need to tell him, he is well aware. I am not “feeling like myself” again, whatever that means. Taking care of our two little kids much of the time and also trying (and mostly failing) to run two small businesses is taking its toll. Any time I get the chance to spend a few hours alone, to return to myself, I remember. I wish I could shine through my children, and maybe I do more than I can tell, a diamond, an orange halo of strange light around a black hole, but in so many ways these are the years of totality. We hope we will have one more baby, and I want that baby. But I also want to allow myself something different than how things are right now, the sheer survival-mode intensity is wearing me too thin. I can see it in my body, my diet, my home, my skin, my mind, my use of time, my wardrobe, my feelings. Every part of me is less clear, deliberate, spacious than it used to be.
I wish I could thrive in this season, but I’m just not. Some women do, or appear to, would say that they are. I envy them. But that’s not me. I think I’m just the sort of malleable, sensitive person who needs a lot of recovery time, who absorbs so much of the energy around her, who can run herself ragged to meet every demand and then never find the energy to scoop herself up too. It’s not martyrdom, it’s something different. Like trying to swim forward and getting pulled backward by a current. Like the tide being governed by the moon. This life with my family is all I want, but it’s more total than I imagined. The strange silver light. The cool air. The breeze. Who am I here?
I feel a little self-conscious but I don’t feel sad writing about these feelings. I feel honest, and like I can see clearly the way the stars are aligned on this day of the universe. The sky is always changing. It will change. And when it does, I will remember this time with such rose-tinted memory, wishing to cuddle my little kids, feeling happy to have made it through somehow. I was alone during the eclipse, feeling strangely lifted. The little crescents of light through the colander like an upturned mouth. Maybe the sun felt surprised, or even delighted, by the moon, by its sudden hugeness just in front of her. And it didn’t last forever. Later, I borrowed my mom’s glasses and looked directly at the sun — a full golden circle, no part of it obscured.
First time mom with a 5 month old and I feel completely eclipsed by my baby and I only have one! Thank you for taking the time to write exactly what I am feeling, especially because I don't have time to write anymore. I love spending time with my baby but I am exhausted by nights and the fact that she doesn't sleep alone in her crib yet and am exhausted by work and pumping three times a day at work while also trying to keep up with everyone else and having to meet quota on such little sleep. Your writing captures so well. One day I will process all of this but right now I am just in the middle of it. Never thought to compare myself to the image I saw yesterday during the eclipse but man that's exactly how it feels now.
This is exactly how I felt. Wrangling my 3 yo who could care less, screaming and refusing to stop staring at the sun we had to go inside and I missed the whole thing while it was 98% totality. I vividly remember 2017, i was at work and we all just hung out outside with my coworkers looking at the sun through pinholes cut in white office paper. It was chill, calm and felt like a shared experience. At a stark contrast to yesterday where I felt alone, isolated and frustrated while everyone else seemed to get to enjoy the magical-ness. I miss the way I had such peaceful silence of enjoying something, i don't have access to the person that gets that anymore. My kids don't give a shit about what I care about, which is normal, and expected. But it hit me suddenly how much you give up as a parent, how much you set yourself aside. This piece feels like a smarter more organized version of me wrote this. Thank you for that.