The sunlight in the morning has made all the difference lately, and this morning you could see new grass on the lawn, bright green, almost transparent in the light. I made a double shot of espresso for an iced latte to-go, and thought about how my life is different now than one year ago, or two. This blog has become a record for me, of small things. I go back and look at what the weather was like two seasons ago. My mind, full with the present, is fickle in the light of the past.
When I started to write, I was a new mama and every single aspect of parenting felt like fraud to me. It took me more than a year to wrap my head around the idea of being someone’s mother. My heart on the other hand, only required a nanosecond of adjustment: when he was first there in my arms, warm and wet and wide-eyed, he was instantly mine.
Still, I started this blog because I felt some urgency to document the affect becoming a mother had on my life, as though it had been tucked precariously into the nook of a slingshot and then launched, suddenly, all of a stumbled moment. For the first year I diligently wrote letters to my small boy, a baby yet, whose miraculous feats of sitting up, crawling, and walking became also benchmarks for my own life.
Then gradually I stopped feeling that raw ‘new mama’ status. I went from being a ‘first time mom’ to just a mother. My baby was suddenly a kid who could talk and was potty trained and climbed trees. I stopped recording the little things. Each day, exponentially, the things he says astounds me: so much so that at the end I can hardly remember all the delight of talking to him about the way he sees his world. He has become someone that I want to know; someone I love to lie with in the newly growing grass on the back lawn drinking fizzy grapefruit soda and eating blue corn chips.
Now when I write it’s hardly ever about Bean, not really intentionally, but just because my focus has shifted: towards writing and work and the multifaceted inner topography of emotion I’ve been exploring this year.
But oh, he’s a love. He’s SO BIG now, you would hardly believe it. So articulate and observing and funny. It’s like his personality can no longer be contained on the page: I sit down to try to capture a few phrases that he’s said to me, and my mind is instantly crowded like a sky full fluttering parrots. One thing I do know: he still sucks at sleeping through the night.