All day I felt tender, my heart prone to easy bruising. I awoke after too few hours of sleep to little Bean pressing the buttons on the clock radio, causing some sort of very lively Indian music to spew forth LOUDLY. It was kind of funny, in that other-worldly, ‘this isn’t really happening to me’ kind of way.
From there the moments just continued to fracture. Everything today felt out of synch, like I was always playing catch-up with each moment. Sadness kept staining the space around me as though it were the pigment seeping from crushed petals. So much is undecided. (I got an interview on Monday, and I’m terrified; we’re going out of town for the weekend---our first overnight hotel trip with Bean; there are only three weeks are left before we have to move; I think I have a stress fracture in my right shin, but I have to wait until Tuesday to see my very busy doctor.)
Guilt always crowds in at times like these. Bean didn’t really get any sit-down meals today except lunch, and his nap times were totally off. And, though I’m already sick of writing about the disappointment of my mother’s visit, she keeps creeping back in: hers is the voice that narrates guilt for me, and today I heard “I would never do that,†a hundred times as I fed Bean organic alphabet soup from a can, and let him bang wildly on a plastic piano in a toy store when he should have been napping.
But there was also this: the rainbow tonight driving home. And before it, a wash of gold over the distant mountains. The sky was filled with storm clouds as DH and I ate calzones for dinner on the lawn at our new house. Bean napped in the car. From below us, the sonic trilling of peepers drifted up. And when Bean woke, we took a walk, just the two of us, hand in hand. Through tall grasses, and then under the low-hanging cloud of apple blossoms, almost blooming. Five gnarled apple trees, their branches leaning earthward, make up a perfect hideaway.