Perfect

A sublime autumn day. Blue skies without any clouds, and the leaves all gold and red and brown glowing as though they were illuminated from within. After last week of never feeling caught up, this was what I needed: time with Bean outdoors, clambering over fallen logs, collecting bright red leaves, picking apples.

Time to really watch this little boy of mine who is growing so fast—who is talking now in two word sentences. Under his Gran’s tutelage he has become an aficionado of all things nature: he eats wild apple after wild apple, puckering up his face at their tangy, bitter sweet. He gathers acorns, and picks dandelions, and climbs rocks with ease. Today he followed our cat into the woods, farther than he’s ever gone before—a good acre away from the house. He climbed over the old stone wall that zig-zags in and out of the trees and found a woodchuck’s burrow which he promptly filled with leaves. Then he straddled a fallen birch, and sat there contended for a while, as the cat slipped off into the dappled sunlight further up the hill. Here are more pictures from our day.

Last week I didn’t have any of these moments of simple pleasure. Without my weekend (we were in NJ) everything collided every day, leaving me exhausted—unable to climb out of the stress and into the beauty of now. But with today, I feel efuled, and, after spending the past two hours writing lesson plans for the week, feel excited to jump in again. I just wish, somehow, that I could get a thirteenth hour every day. Wouldn’t that be great?

What would you do with a thirteenth hour?

5 good things

A recent painting (that I made for DH’s birthday). What do you think?

A three mile run tonight with DH along the muddy road. Rain falling softly. Leaves the color of ocher and rose drifting earthward. Cattle, with their ruddy brown fur and white bellies all facing the same way, grazing in knee high grass. The creek, a ribbon of indigo with cattails up to my waist.

Thai food, the three of us out on an impromptu date, at a tiny restaurant near here. The chalky sweetness of traditional Thai iced tea. Moo Ping. Tom Kha. Bean using a grown up fork to shovel fried rice into his mouth (his overall bib pocket was full too!) The leisure of sitting back, aimless conversation, and no clean up.

Ben & Jerry’s and a the latest Project Runway on Tivo.

And rocking Bean to sleep in the dark, his heart against mine. There is nothing sweeter in the whole world.

What are yours?

Riding the waves

It’s so funny hanging out with six year olds all day. We read a book about spiders and learn that the babies fly away on silken threads soon after they are hatched.

“Cool,” one little boy says. “It would be SO FUN to fly away and not have any parents. We could do ANYTHING.”

“Like what?” I want to know. Watching a grin spread wide across his freckled face.

“Like STAY UP ALL NIGHT!” he says emphatically, waving his arms about at the possibility.

The magic of that idealized independence hovers in the air.

“Yeah, and we could eat candy for every single meal,” another boy chimes in.

I remember that time, before grown up. That time when days sometimes felt like years. When yesterday was so far off it hardly mattered. Now grown-upness saturates the air around me like a heady perfume: replacing the oxygyn of whimsy with the dioxide of worry.

Maybe I’ve been feeling this now more than ever because death has pressed close up against the periphery of my life, or maybe it is simply because I’m in my late twenties—and this is the time when most young people invariably start feeling old.

Talking with my sister on the phone the other night, we agreed, when we were eighteen we knew it all. At least that’s how it felt for me. I was at the top of my game at eighteen: ballsy, headstrong, self confidant, and completely invincible. I wrote reams of poetry, jotted pensive philosophical notes in the margins of my books, read Shakespeare and Whitman, and regularly skinny dipped in the ocean. I knew everything then. I’d take up conversation with anyone. No argument was too complex, no social challenge too awkward. I attempted almost anything: rock climbing 1000 feet above the Mediterranean, sleeping with men I barely knew, volunteering in an HIV positive community in Harlem, jumping from fifty feet into an abandoned marble quarry filled with still green water. I had nothing to loose.

Now, ten years later, I am humbled. My heart each day feels the breathless immense weight of Love. Now there is everything to loose.

It seems like instead of seeking challenge like I did then, challenge finds me. The sum of my experiences, like a few small crusts of bread in my pockets, do nothing to feed the hunger of the beasts I now face. Over and over I find my words come up short; my hands empty. Then it was all about pushing the envelope: how wild could I be?

Now it is about other, fiercer, more tender things.

Navigating the terrain of love, seven years in (this month, our anniversary); making new meaning in the context of near death; finding words to express even a small sliver of the immense protective love that comes with motherhood.

I wouldn’t go back. I love the challenge of now: the tender grace of meeting someone’s needs unconditionally, the fierce affection that comes with having woken up day after day after day next to the same man, or the ease that comes with starting out again, for the fifth year, with a class of children. But some days, especially the long ones, when my heart feels worn and scattered like a handful of sea glass, I get nostalgic for that time before DH, before Bean, before a career. It would be nice now and again to feel that rock-solid certainty that comes with inexperience.

Wednesday Notebook

Have you ever felt like your heart is outside you, irretrievably scattered like the thousand small pieces in some jigsaw puzzle without a box?

Was it like this? Coming home after hours (like decades) away, and your little one doesn't want to accept your hug, and then calls for Daddy when you're putting him to bed.

Tell me, have you ever felt this fragility, this quaking tenderness, this dislocation?

Splash

I'm feeling a lot better today and so is mr. grumpy Bean. A lot of routines to get used to around here right now; a lot of splashing (or mucking) about as the case may be, until things smooth out & we all get used to me working again.

Capturing a childhood moment (throwing rocks)

We take Bean to a small stream burbling under the shade of pine trees. The pebbles are smooth and round, bits of fossilized choral, quartz, granite sparkling in the sunlight. All three of us are barefoot at the water’s edge, mud pressing between our toes. We show Bean how to toss in rocks; this primal thing that everyone seems compelled to do near water. All three of us grin as each one breaks the surface with a splash.

Up the trail teenage boys are jumping into a swimming hole, their muscled backs slick and tawny in the afternoon light. On the rock above them, a girl sits, laughing, her toes dangling in the current.

I watch Bean go for the big rocks. Rocks the size of my fists and heavy. He carries them with both hands and hurls them inches from his tiny toes. Each time a grin spreads out across his face like sunshine; he is completely enthralled, so sure of himself. He’s grown so nimble running barefoot on our land, and here, in the dappled shade, he seems suddenly so big to me, as though it were only moments between this moment now, and when he’ll be that big---jumping off rocks into too-shallow water to impress a girl.

After an hour of navigating stumps and uneven stones, we come home, heading to the soft green slope of the back lawn, each with an apple in hand. DH and I play Frisbee, tracing long thermal -arcs between us in the air, while Bean climbs the wood pile, and then his tricycle, always craving the thrill of being someplace where high above the ground.

As the sun sets, I rock Bean to sleep. The warm sounds of the summer evening drift up: crickets, tree frogs, and the whirring of the fan. It is one of those days where I feel my breath catch in my throat: he’s growing so fast.

Too two.

The house is dubiously full of snoring. In the past hour and a half I somehow managed to put three humans of the male sex to sleep. Well, two, technically. The third one happened to just come into the bedroom where I was hunched over my laptop in the semi dark rocking our friend’s baby in his carseat while reading blogs, and the next thing I knew it he was on our bed and snoring. If only the other two were that easy! But Bean, in a fit of what can only be called jealousy, needed an extra-strength session of cuddling, pressing his small face against mine to be kissed over and over again while I rocked to him and sang. And the little baby, well, he did his little baby thing: squirming about a bit, and in general just living up to the proverbial witching hour. It’s been one of those nights that feels like some sort of sci-fi time travel film: “A glimpse of what your life would be like if you had two under two.” We’re babysitting our friend’s gorgeous little three month old pip, while they attend a wedding reception, and it’s been quite the head trip spend an evening with someone so small. DH and I kept sort of marveling to each other at all his tinyness. His feet! His hands! SO SMALL! And also, he just eats and sleeps!

It is also fascinating for us to watch Bean, who is now almost 1.5 years old, and 100% true toddler, around the baby. At first he sort of treated the little guy like maybe he was a new cat, interested, but not entirely. But when I took over a bottle feeding, Bean was no longer amused. He was sure he was being replaced, and he flung himself on my legs. He tried to take the baby’s burp cloth, threw his dish on the floor, and when DH tried to carry him off for a nap, he wailed in the most pathetic way possible, “Mamamamamamama!” Poor guy.

It has occurred to us that there is no way we’re having another baby for at least a couple of years—if not a handful. Somehow, though we both see the logic of having little ones close together, neither of us can quite wrap our heads around the idea of no down time, double the diapers, and bedtime routines that involve juggling small humans. We’re just not superhuman enough.

We’re the kind of parents who had to figure out that our kid might actually appreciate it if we BRING SNACKS with us when we go on errands. We routinely forget the diaper bag. We loose his shoes. (Really. I currently know where one of each of three pairs of shoes are, but haven’t the foggiest where their mates might be.) Sippy cups accumulate in the sink.

And we’re always late.

Therefore it occurred to me tonight that if YOU are a mom and you have two little rascals under two, I hereby bow down at your feet in complete awe.

Sunday antics

"The moon, Mama!"

The smell of chocolate cake baking makes me heady. My friend’s birthday is this weekend, and I’ve spent the evening whipping frothy egg whites, melting dark chocolate and licking my fingers.

The house is quiet, in that way houses get at the end of the day when everything is put in it’s place and children are asleep. Outside an orchestra of insects trill, and across the room The Piano soundtrack plays. I haven’t heard it since high school, when I loved it with a sort of moody passion. Finding it again, the same feeling rises up. The drama and cinematic artistry of the movie moved me to tears, and the music still manages to slip into the small open places in my soul, in a way that begs for solitude and intimacy both.

The past few days have been filled with sun drinking and wave kicking; long enough away from home to miss it. And it has also been one of those milestone weeks for Bean, who has taken to everything here with wide-eyed wonder: the lizards with their bright red throats, the delicate hibiscus, the sleek bellied otter, the ocean’s waves, the shells, the snakes, the endless sand.

I find myself staring at him (like I always seem to,) trying to mark in my head exact moments: the way he knelt on a big chair at the table, and ate couscous all by himself with a spoon last night; how he ran wildly, willfully, eagerly down the shore towards a flock of rosy-legged ibis today, carefree and confident that we would follow; or how tonight, getting ready for bed, he kept pressing his small palms to my lips for kisses, and then turned them so I could kiss the backs of his hands, and then his wrists and elbows. Over and over again he wanted this ceremony of affection, and over and over again I complied, my heart filling with a feeling beyond sweetness, beyond sorrow, beyond joy, but made up of all three.

I used to feel entirely one with him---the border between his self and mine, a mere distinction of skin. But now he has started to really become his own self---choosing to ignore me when I call him, fighting to do things without help, or asking for things with specificity and intention.

Each week, each month as a mother, it is necessary to learn a new choreography of love. And now in this dance there is a delicate space between us; space that he fills with his giddy twirling, his wild happy limbs, his smile, his troubled pensive frowns, and his many new words.

“Moon, mama!” he says now, pointing up at the sky. And there it is, the moon bright and clear, against the evening blue. I feel my heart skip a momentary beat in wonderment: he has just claimed the moon for his own, for the very first time.

The pictures I promised

Go here for the up-close versions & lots of notes. I had maybe a little too much fun with the writing the notes.

And thank you for the suggestions. I currently smell a tad like sauteed cabbage, but my boobs don't hurt as much... (Bean was down to one nursing a day--before bed, so it was a very gradual thing. Still. DH made some comment about bra/boobs being a "garden of eatin' " tonight. Let's just say I'm eager for this particular phase to be over. HOWEVER, Bean has been remarkable--sleeping--for the first time ever--all the way through the night, in his crib, willingly... they say when they're ready, they're ready. I guess he was ready.)

Also, we're going to Florida next week to hang out with my best friend. It will be Bean's first time on a plane. DH & I are virgins in the air travel with a small child department. More help please. What should I bring/do/be prepared for?

And now a quick recap of house progress: Every single room is full of boxes. My god, where did we manage to accumulate so much stuff? But the kitchen, oh it's so lovely. It begs to be used. So I have been. Grilled tuna stakes with couscous salad, banana muffins, soup... And I've been slowly, so very slowly, unpacking all the rest of the house too. Rediscovering artwork that's been packed for over a year, and precious vases, soft velvet pillows, and letters from old friends. But in between there is still the stress of feeling constantly addled: I cannot find anything, ever, when I need it. It's kindof making me nuts.

But then I go outside and sit in the sunshine and take pictures of bugs and play peekaboo with Bean, or walk in late evening with DH hand in hand through waist high grass watching the bats swoop over head, and it's all worth it. All of it.

Mamas, your expertise, please

So, I'm totally working on the picture laden post (I'm not just lolling about in the sunshine, picking armfuls of black-eyed susans and daisies, reading a really a really good book, and eating organic cantelope, I swear!) But in the meantime I have two pressing issues. Boobs & poop.

I need to know two things.

A) When you're weaning, how do you reduce breastmilk production? Bean spent his first night in his own room EVER last night. He woke up once, but went to sleep without crying, all by himself... and so we're down to the before-bedtime nursing and I'm thinking of cutting that out tonight. But I'm not sure how my boobs have gotten the whole weaning memo. Advice?

and...

B) When your 16 month old comes to you, pulling on his diaper and grunting after he's taken a poop, and when you say, "Did you poop?" he says, "Uh-huh" and points to the clean diapers, is it time to think about buying one of those little potties? And if it is, which? And then how to proceed from there?

I'll be eagerly awaiting your responses.

Summer

We blow a hundred bubbles one by one. Our breath caught up in the glycerin spheres that float up above the trees. Bean watches each faint rainbow circle as it drifts away against the backdrop of pale blue. It is the beginning of summer. Lazy afternoons in a plastic wading pool with a red rubber ball, with the smell of sunscreen slick on our skin. Days of short attention, and grilled corn; afternoon naps and magazines piled high on the coffee table. Popsicle days. Late evening ice cream stops in town. Firefly nights, lying on the lawn and kissing after dark.

Apparently I've been asking the wrong question...

Over the past two weeks, before I got here, I definitely whimpered once or twice, "Can it get any worse?" The answer is YES, you idiot. I have mastitis again. For a third time. The worst I've had it. Fever, soreness, the whole works. I'm ready to fully wean, but Bean has been more needy than usual, tossed about in the recent turbulance of our lives, and then there are those four pesky molars. So things have dragged on longer, and this is apparently how my body processes stress.

So much for long luxurious posts while I'm here (I have yet to write about what didn't happen with the marathon) and book reviews (I just read the Mermaid's Chair by Sue Monk Kidd--in a day. I devoured it.) Instead I'll be in bed. Hopefully I'll kick this by tomorrow & I can post some pics of Bean on his tricycle (he can't quite reach the pendals, it's a hoot!)

So while I'm curled up on the couch, I won't dare ask if it can get worse, because I'm starting to understand that it can, and probably will. But don't begin to think I'm depressing, because if you were here in person, you'd know an odd piece of trivia about me: I at a humor high point when I'm sick and/or miserable. Like after being in labor for 18 hours--the nurses were in awe. They kept saying, "We've NEVER seen anyone in such good spirits at this stage." I was cracking jokes left and right--and lord, I had an audiance (I think there may have been 14 people in the room when Bean finally showed his little self to the world). When things are clearly getting worse, I get funny. It's my survival mechanism. Which is actully pretty funny, because I'm generally not that funny at all. Oh dear. You see the state of my brain.

Sweetness

Respit

Bean’s bare feet fwap across the living room floor, zig zagging at random, humming a little tune as he goes. Outside the birds call and the sun has broken through the cloud cover, spilling light across the pine trees and wild grasses growing at the edge of the lawn. Bean and I are in New Jersey, three hundred miles from home. We slept together like foxes last night, his small body tucked into the curve of mine, our breath inscribing the turbulence of our dreams onto the air around us. When we woke, it felt hollow not to have DH’s warm and muscled back beside us, to rub up against, the fragrance of his skin enveloping us in early morning sweetness. But it was good to wake in a house with all the accoutrements of home: the coffee pot percolating, muffins on the counter, a washing machine and dryer, enough knives and spoons.

All day I allowed myself to linger, not quite ready to plunge into the business of doing anything. I felt like some mossy creature come out to sun, after such intense rain. Days of steady downpour left all my sneakers wet and my hair frizzy. Now in the sun, I am content to sit at the edge of the lawn watching Bean as he pokes a stick into a vernal pool full of dark slimy leaves and tadpoles. Then we find wild strawberries, plump and round as dimes, a freckling of red in a field of green. When I offer, Bean readily accepts, popping them into his mouth, then points to where they are growing, saying, “More!” “More!” in a lovely, soft, rounded ‘r’ way.

More than a handful of teeth are bursting through his gums: molars cresting like the tips of icebergs, incisors filling out a newly boyish grin. Not interested in eating anything today, his hands are in his mouth, or occupied with one or the other of his two handled sippy cups. He has been amazing through all these transitions—learning the lay of each new temporary home with only a minimum of fussing. Lately, he’s been coming to me wanting to be picked up. He throws his arms around my legs and holds on tight until I scoop him up and devour each of his round cheeks, whole, much to his squealing delight.

He’s such a different boy than two months ago. I missed his fifteen month letter, and here he is sixteen months next week, the days like a smudge across the page. Everything that was May is a blur of color and exhaustion in my head. The sudden lush emerald of the fields, the brown gulping of the stream high above its banks, the day in, day out toil at our house. Most different has been the way he’s suddenly grabbed hold of words. He names so many things now, earnestly, in his toddler shorthand, picking up the first syllable and vowel and repeating it, zealously pointing first at the thing he’s naming, then broadly around the room at anything that might add grandeur to his new found word. He’s so funny and expressive, it has been bittersweet to watch him grow and not be able to fully sink into every delicious moment with him, like I could today—poking sticks into a watery muck, and staining our fingers red from berry juice.

I miss DH in a panging kind of way, longing already for his hugs, his tender lips, his laughter. But for the both of us it is a relief to be this way: our little family spread over several states while our house progresses closer and closer towards completion. The kitchen is in and looks divine. So funny to have something that actually is human sized, rather than just bare walls and floors. The whole space seems different---less like a construction zone and more like a home.

Night gathers in the yard, bringing with it small rabbits eating clover in the twilight and a smattering of fireflies like small satellites zooming around the yard. Bean goes to bed without a hitch for the first time in over a week: a real bedroom with curtains and a bath with mama helps. Now I sit cross legged on the couch relishing the absolute laziness of my evening’s agenda: to write and ponder, sip tea, and maybe take a trip to the book store to browse the new nonfiction out this month.

1st time in the pool

A smattering of days, and he’s suddenly different all over again. My heart sometimes aches with the velocity of his changing, like Penelope’s tapestry, each day it must be unraveled and made anew to accommodate the greater love and wonder that I feel.

We went swimming tonight. His first time in a pool. His body abruptly feather light, his pale skin nearly transparent and beautiful. Eyes big, and lashes wet. But seeing is Daddy at the edge produced a thousand grins. Laughing as I blew bubbles near his cheek, he wanted to hold on to the tiled cusp of the pool. Even there, especially there, with the feeling of weightlessness, he wanted to climb.

In the locker room afterwards, sitting on the low blue bench by the wall in his new monogrammed terry robe from his grandma, he watched a three year old boy closely, transfixed. When the boy left, Bean went to each place he had been—touching the bright yellow metal locker, and then the mirror where the boy had stood, pulling on his swimming trunks. This is why I keep coming to the page: the fragility of memory will not hold this sweetness.

The way his hair still smelled faintly of chorine tonight, even after his bath; or the way he now reaches for his stuffed monkey, cupping his face into its fur to go to sleep. I want to capture everything, and startle to realize how I’ve already lost the urgent memory of when he was newborn, or how he used to push up before he could crawl, like some funny seal pup.

There must be some secret in this: that memory only holds so much. Perhaps we would not move with agility into the future of each moment, if we could fully contain the memory of each passing day. But days like today beg for more. More noticing, more attention. I want to saturate myself with this moment: the way the three of us, walking to our car after dinner, were an orb of family. Bean’s tiny legs wrapped round my waist, his arm touching his Daddy’s chest, and around us both, DH’s muscled arms.

Self Portrait Challenge #1: An introduction

Kath created a brilliant new Self Portrait Challenge Site, and in honor of it's creation she has challenged us to 'introduce ourselves.' Before I knew you...

there were several ill advised months as a red-head, an adolescence in love with the surf; whole days spent in the my bike saddle following the black ribbon of road up to Canada, or later, along the crumbling edge of northern California, with the pacific right below us.

we stayed out late, and sleep late; could make love any time; skip breakfast entirely, do nothing all day Saturday.

and later, there was the everyday collision of wonderment and exhaustion, my love spread out across the need of so many hungry little hearts with not enough attention at home, teaching words, and poems, and numbers and kindness.

and there were afternoons tossing a frisbee, or playing chess, or walking with our lanky English Shepherd who’d roll on command and was afraid of the water.

then you, making a space in my belly and then in my heart

and now I know you and I am different in a hundred ways.

I maybe shouldn't have run to get the camera first...

...But I couldn't help it. It was just too funny: the sound of catfood falling, and then his immediate wail of utter woe. Catfood. Everywhere. He could not be consoled until I got the dustpan and brush and showed him how to sweep it up. Such a sweetie, he is.

Delightful

The theme at Mama Says Om this week is delight. Such perfect timing for today, when the weather is pure sun, the air mild and warm, and our feet bare. Bean helped me add some color to this little list of springtime goodness. He sat on the table, bare legged and chubby thighed, and pressed his fingers into round coins of water color pigment and then swirled them onto my page. He had his own page of course, but mine was more fun, so we made it a project with as many brushes and water and glue as possible. Pure delight.

The taste of dirt.

Spring is all about mud in these parts. The roads are thick with it, and around the edges of the lawn are patches of soaked ground, perfect for poking sticks into or finding pebbles, and Bean has fallen in love with DIRT.