Motherhood

Two and a half by Christina Rosalie

Dear Bean, I've missed five months of letters, and somehow you're two and a half and an utterly different little boy than you were. Here are the things I want you to know about yourself at two and a half:

You talk, all the time. You wake up in the morning, pressed into the nook of my neck after having pitter-pattered into our bed in the middle of the night, and you immediately start talking about diggers, or trains, or whatever fascinating thing it is you were dreaming about. After fetching your own underpants and t-shirt and shorts which I help you put on, you trundle downstairs, talking a blue streak. You help us make breakfast, talking. You know how daddy's espresso machine works, and you always want to press the buttons. We let you, most of the time, and I have no doubt that by the time you're tall enough to use it, you'll be making better espresso than I can.

Because you're always underfoot, always wanting to help, we regularly offer you the option of vacuuming the kitchen while we make buttered toast and porridge. You are an expert vacuumer. It was an early love. Remember?

You never miss a beat. You listen to us talk, and you pipe up with entirely relevant bits of information, often startling us, because we don't expect you to be paying any attention at all, fools that we are. You know when we're talking about something that might involve you getting a treat or a toy. You know when we're upset. You remember everything we promise.

You know every possible kind of construction vehicle, and have radar vision for spotting them blocks away, through thickets of trees, on side roads, wherever. You daydream incessantly about "getting in da digger and turning it on." And you tell me often, "Mama, I want a digger and a biiiiiiiig road to drive da digger on."

When we found a Mighty Motorized Tonka backhoe at the second hand shop for $8.50, your hands could not be pried from it. When we brought it home and as it moved slowly across the wide expanse of our living room floor, its little red light flashing, its engine whirring, your eyes grew wide and a slow, exquisite, mischievous grin spread from ear to ear. You played with it all night.

You love books. You sit for long stretches of time (long being an utterly relative term, especially when you are two; but twenty minutes is a fair stretch of time by anyone's clock) and 'read' books. You look through each one cover to cover, sometimes telling yourself the story, sometimes telling other stories to accompany the pictures on each page. You recognize many letters, and you know that the words are those black inky squiggles that move across the page. You point out the letters you know on shop windows and signs. You beg to be read to. When I say I'll read two, you say "Maybe three?" When I say, "Okay three," you say "Four?" When I cave, you get that sly look on your face and say, "Five books? You gonna read five books!"

Right now you really like Blueberries for Sal , and the other day when the two of us were furtively filching berries from the neighbor's raspberry patch, I realized you were sing-songing, "Kerplunk, kerplunk, kerplunk," as I dropped each berry into our little purple pail. You also like Hugs and Kisses, which has become a regular naptime read, and Dig, Dig, Digging.

You love to paint. A week ago you painted your first representational drawing: of mama. A wide sweeping round circle. Two red dots on either side for ears. A mess of blue for my eyes, and orange for my mouth. Wild bits of yellow and brown for my hair.

I love that you like painting. That you ask to sit in my studio with paper spread out about you, and you get quiet and thoughtful and have real ideas about which colors you want to use and which are your favorites (yellow and orange, currently.) You also try to pretend write. You tell me you are writing your name, and Mama and Daddy and Bandit. You draw perfect circles, straight lines and elaborate squiggles. Perspective in your drawings does not exist. The broad brustrokes of cat, a chair, and a face are piled atop one another.

You are a runner, a climber, and most recently a serious biker. A few months ago we picked up a two-wheel bike with training wheels. So tiny, it doesn't even have back breaks. It took you about a month to get the hang of steering AND pedaling, and then off you went in a whiz. Now you ride down our dirt road in a snap, and on tarmac, you're lightening. I have to jog to keep up.

When daddy and I are working you're always close by: climbing as high as we allow you on the ladder (to the third rung) and balancing on the newly nailed joists. You love the highest twisty slides at the playground. You dream of being able to hang from the monkey bars like a "big boy," and you have better balance than I do, when you fall. Especially when you tumble off your bike, you fall with grace, and rarely get hurt. This, my dear, is something you most definitely did not inherit from me. I was the kid who, if my small high school had had such pages in our yearbook, would half received the title "most likely to trip." Your daddy on the other hand, is the hottest thing in the world on ice skates.

You are potty trained. It's been almost a month of dry in the morning diapers (except for on the mornings when we keep you up late, and then you sleep in later than usual) and the rest of the day you wear underpants and tell us when you need to go. You went through this brilliant phase a while back where you were pretty into the whole idea of going outdoors. Often it was the only way to convince you to go, and sometimes you'd take it to the next level: leaving poop for daddy on some interesting locations (On top of the lawnmower in the garage. Yes you did.) But now, at two and a half, you're done with diapers and you know when you need to go, and you can hold it while we do the mad dash for the potty.

It is divine. The whole poop wiping thing is a zillion times easier. You do a lovely little yoga pose, presenting your bottom to be wiped, and I adore you because of this. I was never one for the whole poop-up-the back adventure that diapers were so fond of creating. And the best part? Now before naps or bedtime I tell you to go upstairs and go potty and climb into bed, and you do it, without help. You put your underpants back on and everything. Okay. I know. Not even you will be remotely interested in this by the time you can read about it, but wait. Someday. When you have a kid. You'll know why I've devoted a rather lengthy paragraph to this accomplishment. Basically, you totally rock, kiddo.

You, my sweet boy, are thoughtful, kind, and heartfelt. When daddy or I get hurt, you run to us with kisses. You tell us "I love you," us twenty times a day. You want a million hugs. You are a snuggle bug. You are still an awful sleeper, but it's significantly better than it was. Every night you wake up around midnight or a little after, and for a while it was really killing us: having to stagger into your room to comfort you and eventually haul you back to our bed. But then we put a little star light above your bed, with a switch that you can turn on yourself, and now at night when you wake up, we here you whimper and then sigh. And then click. Click. As you try to turn the switch on. And then a sudden pale glow coming from your room and a pitter-patter of feet, and then you're crawling into bed all sweet smelling and snuggly, and it's perfect. Also, you've been sleeping until 7:30 which is quite nice.

If I could, I'd keep you at two-and-a-half for another whole year. People warned about the terrible twos, but I love you this age, when a count to five ends most tantrums and the thing you want most in the world is to understand how everything works. Thank you for being who you are. Every day, you make me smile, you make my heart feel like it is made of helium, you make me grateful.

Love, Mama

A welcome by Christina Rosalie

The beautiful, talented, Sam just had her baby boy—on (I believe) Bean’s half birthday. He's still in the hospital (check her blog for the details) but doing well. If I could, I'd be there in a heartbeat. Instead, they're in my thoughts. A lot.

Welcome to mamahood, Sam! Welcome to the world, little one, you’ve got an amazing mama!

Spill it by Christina Rosalie

I was sitting in the car today, poking desperately through my bag to find something to entertain Bean with while waiting for DH to pick up some last-minute essentials at the General Store just down the road from our house (Yes, we really have one. It s fascinating. There is a stuffed bobcat that has seen better days atop the freezers, and the man behind the counter has a comb-over and lives with his mother in the house up the street. His dog's name is Jasper. And he carries a bit of everything: nails, tackle, popsicles, potato chips, tampons, lemons, matches, ice cream sandwiches, steaks) and concluded that the eighty-nine things I’m toting around are a dead give-away about who I am. Maybe.

First of all, I never used to even carry a bag. I was anti bag. I stuck my wallet in my butt-pocket and sometimes even skipped that, opting only for cash and my ID. But I've come around. I didn’t have much of a choice. Once you're somebody's mother, certain things become essential. Like bag-having. And extra arms.

Second of all, I'm not sure what I'm really supposed to call It. A bag or a purse or a pocket book or the ever chic sounding 'handbag?' My every day bag is a pale green Gucci knock-off (remember this?) made of beautiful soft leather that is big and floppy that swallows it's contents. Especially my car keys. Without fail, I'm stuck in the parking lot holding an umbrella, two bags and Bean who is determined to get down and drive away without me, trying to find them. I know. It should be simple. I should always put them in that tidy little front pocket. But that would be utterly out of character. And I never think of it until times like now.

These essentials that can always be found in my bag are as follows: 1. A Ziploc baggie of wipes. I remember shopping for a to-go wipes container while I was pregnant. I was very attached to the idea. Certain I'd need to whip out a perfect little compact case of wipes---as if the things have to stay serene and neatly folded or something. Now it's down to a Ziploc which fits beautifully in any bag, and can double as a trash-bag if necessary (I used mine today, when Bean decided he needed to poop in the woods while we were on a mini-hike.)

2. Random non-perishable snacks including Ziploc baggies of animal crackers and fruit-leather. I've always been awful about remembering to eat. Then I'm utterly famished and miserable. It seems I've passed this gene on to my kid, and though it took me about a year to get the hang of it, I now always carry something in my bag to proffer when the traffic gets heavy, when the lines get long, or when the playground was just so much fun

3. An extra pair of Bean underpants. Just in case. Have I mentioned Bean is totally potty trained (except for the occasional night accident, and the odd time when we don't make it to a bathroom fast enough)? It's lovely. Except for I think I was a little unprepared for the whole public bathroom with small child who wants to touch everything business. Is it wrong that I just let him stand ON the seat while peeing, so that he doesn't have to sit on it?

4. Lip gloss. My last minute instant pretty look. It's the only makeup I wear. Except for mascara sometimes. Because really, when is there time for more?

5. Cell phone. I hate it. Yeah, I'm one of those people. I never answer it. But I like knowing it's there, just in case. Also because it's a fabulous distraction for a two-year-old when all else fails.

6. And then the eighty-nine other random items, some of which I've sketched for your viewing pleasure. Others include: two cancelled tickets to a mini train ride. A very beaten bottle of Motrin. Hair ties. Crumpled receipts. An extra Bean t-shirt. The wheel of one toy tractor. And the plastic hat belonging to the man that goes in Bean's favorite digger.

What do you keep in your bag? Go ahead. Play along. Post about it, and leave a link to your post, or spill right here in the comments.

Napless by Christina Rosalie

Bean has been resisting naps. Yesterday, he was so exhausted after r.e.f.u.s.i.n.g to take a nap that he fell asleep at dinner. He managed to nibble most of a hot dog and then zonked out my arm. Zonked. We carried him to bed and shimmied on some PJs without him even waking up. Cute. But seriously, any nap-wrangling tips? We've tried: lying down with him, rocking, singing, putting him in his room and telling him he can't come out until he takes a nap, putting him the running stroller for an hour, and nothing worked. So. Um. Yeah. Any ideas?

These are the days by Christina Rosalie

We ate dinner outdoors, breaded chicken, fresh snap peas, homemade French fries; and then walked up the road to the neighbor's pond, the three of us and a red wagon. Sitting out on the slender plank dock, frogs began to call back and forth across the still water. Above us, swallows swooped low for insects.

We kept Bean up late, with a cup of frothed milk and a pillow in his wagon, because a neighbor puts on a grand firework display every year, and tonight was the night! As good, or better than the ones in town. Dozens upon dozens of sparkling, fill-the-whole-sky-with-brilliance, fireworks. Sipping cold beer. Fresh chocolate chip cookies. Plenty of dogs. Bean curled in my lap, his wide grin lit again and again by each new display.

Have I mentioned we have lovely neighbors? We really do. DH and I keep feeling like we walked into a storybook—at the end of our long dirt road. I am beyond grateful that we found this place: this land, these people. Last Friday we went to another neighborhood shindig: a strawberry festival. Everyone brought deserts featuring local strawberries. The counter top was a mosaic of berries and cream and cake. Bean was the only kid in a forest of adults and everyone indulged him: pouring more lemonade, adding extra chocolate dipped strawberries to his plate, and cooing when he flashed them a smile and bated his lovely eyelashes.

He's at such a cool age right now: he says thank you and please without prompting (mostly,) and can tag along to such gatherings without certain disaster ensuing. Tonight he was a love. Wide-eyed and eager, he totally dug the whole firework thing. And then rode home watching stars and fireflies, and crawled willingly into bed. These are the days I want to remember when I'm eighty.

Tangible moments by Christina Rosalie

We are wrapped in summer now; heat pressing in at 9 a.m., the mountains obscured by a soft haze, and the woods verdant with foliage. Along the mown paths that we’ve cut through the meadows, black-eyed-Susans and daises flutter like prayer flags. Tiny wild strawberries hide under delicate serrated trios of leaves, and we squat to gather them at the edges of the path, the juice staining our fingers red. We watch the clouds gathering on horizon listlessly from the shade, wearing hardly anything at all, waiting for it to pour. Then we stand our faces upturned, fat raindrops speckling our cheeks.

Bean seeks out the hose, splashing cold water across my knees as I lounge in a lawn chair reading a novel. Heat stupored and languorous, I am trying to adjust to the pace of summer, recalling what life is like without urgency.

We make frosty smoothies from fresh peaches and frozen raspberries, eating them with long handled spoons from tall glasses in the shade. Mostly, we loll, Bean running naked in bright yellow Crocs and a sunhat; me in a chocolate colored bikini, wondering what sun will do the silver rivulets of stretch marks that have shimmered on my belly since his birth.

I catch myself staring. He’s so lithe and muscled, with the perfect little gibbous of a frog belly floating out in front of him. He moves with the ease of a yogi, squatting to inspect an iridescent June bug, spontaneously somersaulting down the easy slope of lawn, or racing pell-mell, with arms akimbo towards the garden where dirt and worms keep him occupied for over an hour. When he lies back on the grass, eyelids closed, I know he’s feeling the earth spin. His skin is still translucent, and I can see his veins running in intricate patterns across his ribs.

He’s my kid, and sometimes still I’m struck with disbelief. It was strange to be away for a week and then back—to watch how the warp and weft of my life separate and then entwined again. Strange to feel the familiarity of just myself: moments long on thought, late nights sipping wine and eating oysters, my pulse quickening to the tempo of the tenor sax. And then to feel the sticky sweet headlong passion of two-year old ardor, my heart thudding like a jungle drum.

Lately DH and I have been stopping each other in the midst of things to point out moments we could never have expected when we first found out we'd be parents. Like last night, the three of us in the back yard after dinner, the long rays of the evening sun falling just-so to make everything tinted with gold, DH playing guitar and Bean twirling around him in lopsided arcs. Or when all three of us were sitting on the grass, each one with a gawky chick in our lap, our uncontested favorite named “Mrs. T” for the way her orange feathers make a mohawk at the nape of her neck. Or lying naked on the bed our bodies slick in the evening heat, the fan oscillating and the moment ripe with longing, and then Bean clambering up to toss pillows on our heads, declaring, “I’m making a fort!”

It can’t really be reconciled, the way these moments merge together to make my life. Sometimes I think what would have been, might have, had June not brought the two blue lines in 2004. I wonder if I would have arrived at this point, with my writing, with my love, with all the corrosive stress that has worn thin the membrane of my heart, or if I would have veered off: painted big canvasses perhaps, or gotten a PhD in marriage and family therapy, as I once thought I wanted to do.

Listening to the stories of the people I spent a week writing with, I realized how absolutely not alone I am in the experience of my life. The odds tumble against everyone, and then turn. Life has a way of bringing us what we need, though not always when we imagine we need it. I was struck by how everyone held longing close to their hearts; how each had made major life decisions that painted the canvass of their life with bold strokes, yet every picture was as flawed as the next. No situation has it all—life with kids, or without them; partnered or flying solo; degree program or grass roots experience. Each of us had trepidation that first day; each harbored the same isolated terror before reading his or her work aloud in front of an audience (which we confided to each other later over Malbec and warm buttered bred.) Life simply is.

So here I am, somebody’s mother. Thigh deep in the decadence of summer: strawberries by the pint full; vanilla ice cream staining our lips with milky mustaches at midday. I took Bean to the lake for his first swim of the season yesterday, and like a little waterbug, he plunged right in, head high, legs churning out a steady stream of bubbles. At night I dream of four leaf clovers, which I then find when I wake up, and stories keep raining down now, like marbles spilling from a jar.

Day by day by Christina Rosalie

Saturday: It hit me in the middle of the night, up again, one more time, because of the small inconsolable wailing and flailing of a sharp elbow having, night terror dreaming, teething Bean, that I was officially one step away from going insane.

I told DH as much, in a whimpering whisper, having already burst into tears at least once between the time I got home and the time I went to bed, and the next morning he let me sleep in. Until 10:40. When I woke up on my own accord, stretched a leisurely stretch, and basked in a hot shower.

At 7:30 he took Bean and went to breakfast and Home Depot and to the coffee shop for freshly roasted beans and the market for a list items we’d run out of, and he left me with the entire bed to myself, with all the covers and the pillows are fluffed just so and the slatted shades drawn so the room stayed wrapped in yummy semi dark but the window was open to let the sweet fragrance of spring waft in.

I was beaming all day.

Sunday: Some people probably (no, definitely) will think I am strange because I derive a great amount of joy from doing yardwork… But I really do. I’m always happy when I have the weedwacker in my hand, it’s loud whine drowning out any stray thoughts, so that I am simply there in the moment, watching the grass and leaves fall in swathes. I spent the morning doing this in the lower meadow, cutting a huge square where we plan to till for a garden, while above me, on the lawn, DH circled back and forth with the mower, Bean perched on his shoulders. Watching them together like that always makes me burst into smiles. Bean clutching two handfuls of DH’s summer-curly hair, both of them grinning wide as they make the turn nearest me, waving.

Then we started on the chicken coop, which, after several debates (not all were pretty, either) we concluded would best be made not in a new structure, but in our existing “barn” shed that once housed a horse before we came to own it. The floor is entirely being reclaimed by nature, but the walls are stick-built and sturdy (ha! knock on wood!) and the roof seems to still work in spite of the moss growing there (or perhaps because of it.) We spent several hours cleaning out all the left-over planks of flooring we’d tossed there hurriedly last spring around this time, when we were frantic to be finished with flooring and could not yet fathom living here.

It seems like it’s been such a long, long time since that time of nailing floor boards and longing, our days painted with worry and exhaustion. Here we are, a year later, and I’ve planted rose bushes along the front of the house and scattered native wildflower seeds down the bank and found purple trillium growing along the old stone wall at the edge of our land. A year, and everything is different.

Bean spent the evening zipping around the wide expanse of our kitchen and livingroom floor on his bike. A few weeks after we bought it, he can now steer and pedal like nobody’s business. He’s getting reckless in that little boy way: looking over at us and grinning while he steers in entirely the opposite direction. He rarely falls. It will be a different story on the packed dirt of our road, but inside, where the floor is smooth and the way unobstructed, there’s no stopping him.

Monday: Before 7 and the sky is gray and I’m huddled in my bathrobe smelling the heady scent of lilacs that my sister picked and brought to me before she left (I miss you!) and listening to the birds calling back and forth. We have a pair of Orioles. Bright orange and black brushstrokes fluttering across the canvass of green woods. The first time I saw them, I held my breath.

Wishing on dandilions by Christina Rosalie

Sometimes, blowing on a dandelion gone to seed, I wish for superhuman capabilities. Then I count my wishes as the tiny seed umbrellas lift on the wind and scatter, and my popsicle juice-faced boy laughs wildly in delight.

I wish I could be okay with just four hours of sleep, instead of the seven I must have to function. I wish I could whirl through household tasks, setting things right, watering plants, doing laundry, and still have time to sink into a corner and read chapter after chapter in a good book.

I wish I could come home after a day of teaching, when I’ve felt every fiber in my being be endlessly tugged and frayed, as though my heart were a rope toy and the children a pack of eager pups, and still have something rich to give. I wish, after a day of reading, reacting, redirecting, reconciling, and reconstructing all the little important fragments that are meaningful to the children I teach, I could regularly have energy left for here: in my studio, after daylight has ebbed away from the walls, and lamplight pools at my desk. Energy to write two thousand words instead of two hundred.

I wish I could feel patience overflowing the bowl of my soul every night when I’m snuggling in the dark with my boy. Patience, as he reaches out his thin soft arms in the dark and wraps them around my neck, fiercely, in a lock hold. Patience as he begs again for one more snuggle, one more hug, one more kiss. Patience as time slips by and I become languorous, my eyes aching, my body sinking into the spinning dark as I sing tuneless melodies into the curve of his small ear. Patience, as I want to be right there and anywhere except there in the same breath.

I wish for more times when, tumbling into the sweet curve of my husband’s body, the prospect of following my tongue and my red-hot whimsy isn’t in a dead heat with every cell in my body screaming or one more hour of sleep.

Becoming a parent brings your life abruptly to full capacity—or full catastrophe—and sometimes both, at the same time. You don’t really get this before becoming a parent, though everyone tries to tell you.

There is no way to understand before you’re in the thick of it, how you’ll simultaneously feel like a circus act and a soothsayer, mumbling, “Isn’t that what mommy said would happen?” when the lightening fast extension of your heart falls headlong over the handlebar of his wagon after he's pushed it full-tilt into the couch, and then comes to you wailing, his perfect cheek already swelling.

The acrobatics of this kind of love leaves me breathless and aching. Also, often, it leaves me entirely blindsided. My compass spins wildly, truing to an imaginary north. I want so much, yet feel so small and brittle and insufficient as each day splatters at my feet overripe and bruised with too many demands for my time.

Maybe it doesn’t hit everyone this hard.

I wasn’t ready for it, the day the two blue lines showed up, and most days I still feel like an interloper. Arms akimbo, trying to balance my enormous ambition, my longing, my wanderlust, and my fierce sense of self preservation with the endless needs of my sweet boy.

At the playground with Bean, on a day off over my vacation, I can’t shake the feeling that I don’t belong at the green metal picnic table, discussing toddler clothing labels and snack foods. I feel the prickly heat of guilt rising up as I notice a thousand thoughts that have nothing to do with the fact that I’m somebody’s mom, crowding my mind. Pushing him on the swing, my heart swells with complete pride. He’s so adorable, tilting his head back and smearing a perfect grin across the sky---and then seconds later I’m somewhere else entirely: lost in thought.

A part of me understands that this intensity will ebb, or at least alter somewhat, as he grows more independent, but this fact seems so abstract right now when all I long for are six days back to back to sink up to my ankles in fiction.

Each time I pick a dandelion going to seed, I hold my breath, examining the fuzz, planning just how I’ll release my breath so that every seed will detach and float away. I’m good at this, and also good at finding four leaf clovers. I know how lucky I am in my life. I know how good it is, how blessed I am to be a mother. But I also know that most times, when I exhale in a quick burst of air, a few fluffy seed heads will linger like tiny javelins, right close to the stem.

Urnalizing by Christina Rosalie

Alas. One day he will be big enough to use a urnal. In preparation for this event, I've done extensive research on the subject. What follows are a few directions to hopefully help him navigate that complex, highly technical piece of machinery. 1. Aim. 2. Go where you aim. Do NOT go on the floor or the surrounding walls. 3. Do not shake dry on the floor or surrounding walls. 4. Flush. 5. Please for the love of god, wash your hands. 6. Zip up before exiting .

I know, sounds easy, right? I think so too.

Except every time I use a unisex bathroom (or slip into the mens room because the line for the lady's is immeasurably longer than my blader's capacity is big,) the floor invariably has a sticky yellow trail edging downhill from the general direction of the urnal. What is up with that? Do you guys LIKE that sticky feeling on the soles of your shoes, and that horseflies-in-summer stench? Or is it really more complicated than I imagine?

Moving on.

Except really, we're not. Because all things potty have become central to our daily lives here at casa mytopography. On good days this involves much cheering and hoopla for a job well done on: prior notifcation, proper underware removal, etc. However, there are the other days when Bean thinks it's particularly intreguing to hide, in say, the central island cupboard, while pooping in his underpants. And then there is still his all consuming affection of going outdoors, which he does on his own, whenever he can--except that he can't quite tilt his hips in the right direction so it likely goes all over the bib of his overalls or the waist of his jeans. Clearly there is more to this than meets the eye, people. But I can't quite figure out what I'm missing here. Alas.

When being Mommy will no longer be enough to keep him safe by Christina Rosalie

He sat up tonight in bed, after I'd tucked him in and he was breathing steadily and I'd gone next door to my studio, and yelled, "Mommy, mommy, come in here!" And when I did, he said, "An alligator is trying to come in here."

His eyes were wide in the dark.

Now comes the hard part, doesn't it? Now begin those moments of helplessness that unravel in every direction: nothing I can do to stop the ugly parts of the world from rising up to meet him. Nothing to stop the fear he'll know, or the anger, the assaults, the guilt, the loneliness, the anxiety that invariably tattoos the skin of our existence as human beings.

Until now, he's been so small and so close to me, the world could barely wedge itself between us. I was his world. There were no alligators. But now, suddenly he's twenty six months old and listening to everything that's said around him, taking it in, digesting it, and the shield I make around him with my fierce she-wolf love, is permeable. His dreams are colored now with language. Words paint the landscape of every waking moment. Everywhere, he follows me about, almost breathless, with a question, an observation, some piece of whimsy. He copies everything. He says everything.

I kissed him a hundred times, pressing my face against his warm cheek. Then sang the tumbling notes of a lullaby I made up recently, to which he seems to know all the words, and requests nightly. But after I'd left the room, left the hallway, left the house with an armload of books to trade for store credit at Barnes & Noble, he woke up. As if he knew I'd left.

He pattered from his big-boy-bed to the doorway of my studio, where yellow lamp light exchanged space with the darkness pressing close, and called for Mommy.

After DH called me, saying he'd been waking up every ten minutes, troubled, calling out for me (which he has never, ever done before), I drove home anxiously. Skimming through blinking yellow lights, listening to haunting jazz tunes from faraway places. Saxophone, played well, always breaks my heart.

I came upstairs as soon as I got home, and found the two of them lying in the dark of our bedroom. DH was awake. Bean was asleep, spread horizontally across my pillows. I bent near his cheek and whispered, "I'm here now, baby. I'll watch over you. You're safe."

But how long will I even be able to say those words?

"Look where I pooped," he said. by Christina Rosalie

So, apparently, while I was away on my glorious weekend adventure, Bean and DH had a great deal of fun wielding hammers, hauling measuring tapes, and in general, doing boy things. DH reports that at one point he was doing something in another room and he heard the back screen door open and shortly there after Bean yelled, "Daddy I pooped on da step!" As proud as could be. And indeed. He had.

About a week ago, when the weather had just turned from miserable to tolerable, Bean and I were outside cavorting about in the meadow. Since we’ve been potty training, and since he had not gone in over an hour, I decided it was time to show him one of the most fabulous things about being a BOY. That he’s entirely equipped to drop trou and pee anywhere he so should choose. Without the mess of squatting, and quite possibly peeing on one’s shoes, which, being a girl who has climbed my share of mountains, and hiked my share of back woods trails, and taken endless road trips where there are no bathrooms between point X and point Y and the distance between the two is at least two hundred miles, I know all about.

The sheer glee of that yellow arc.

He was hooked.

He started making a getaway to the back door whenever the urge to pee struck. “Mama, I peed on the step!” he’d yell, until I explained that I’d prefer if he’d pee, NOT ON THE STEP, and that any old bush or grass patch is far more acceptable.

But the poop thing. Totally unprecedented. And miracle of miracles: he didn’t step in it.

Are all little boys this enamored with this going outdoors business?

Soaking up sunshine by Christina Rosalie

It felt like spring today, for the first time. The mercury climbed to the upper fifties, and the sky, this afternoon, looked like heaven’s housewife had hung all her downy comforters out to be tossed by a mischievous wind. The sun shone down with real heat.

I came home from work, threw on my black rubber boots, grabbed a yogurt and fled into the sunshine with Bean at my heels. DH followed suit soon after, carrying his signature pint glass of iced espresso, his muscles rippling divinely under the blue cotton of his t-shirt. Barely t-shirt weather, but I’m all for it.

We rambled haphazardly, following our marmalade streak of a cat, Bandit, down into the lower meadow where the apple trees grow, and where, in summer, the grass is waist high. Now it’s trampled and brown, and the apple trees have the tiniest of budlets just beginning to push from the ashy maroon bark. I ran back to get the pruning shears and with a sudden zest, we initiated the immense task of taming the mess of wild grape vines growing like kudzu between knobby, overgrown and half-dead branches of our many apple trees.

It was pure delight to be there with my two guys, cutting back dead wood, with apple sap on my fingers, while Bean chased the cat in widening orbits around us. DH pulled out the chain saw, and we made an afternoon of clearing fallen branches and logs from the edge of the woods—piling them in a bonfire heap. Then we lay down in the grass and watched the sky spin. Like looking up into the deep blue curvature of an enamel bowl, flecked with milk.

The robins are back, and their warbling became a forte trilling as the sun neared the edge of the woods. Bean couldn’t get enough of playing outdoors. All he wanted to do was run, twirl, climb, muck about, and I can’t blame him. The slow start to spring has had me antsy. I can barley imagine foliage. It feels like snowflakes have been permanently imprinted on my inner eye.

When it was dinner time we sat at the table bathed in sunlight, with the windows open, and ate an artichoke together, Bean on my lap. Our fingers were a mess of lemon-butter for dipping the tender parts. Bean shares my affection for this oddly sweet flower, and together we nibbled the heart right to the pithy thistle down, and then reluctantly sat back, licking our fingers.

A good day.

Also, I couldn’t resist snagging this little personality exercise from Le Petit Hiboux. I’m curious. What’s your take?

Life is happening right now by Christina Rosalie

He told me he loved me, for the first time, yesterday. Driving home on our washboard bumpy dirt road, spread thick with mud like peanut butter on an open faced sandwich, he said, “I yuv you mommy.”

I said, “What?” Not really listening, caught up in the replay of a Teri Gross interview with the late Kurt Vonnegut on NPR.

“I yuv you,” he said with a rosy, jelly-smudged grin.

It felt, then, like summer sunlight. Like lightening bugs flitting about the lawn on a late August evening; like standing at the top of a very tall mountain, above the clouds and suddenly breathless; like finding ten perfect unbroken sand dollars in a row at the beach;

“I love you too,” I said. “So much.”

In my chest, I suddenly felt the fluttering of a thousand mariposas.

It’s bizarre sometimes, how things you were sure you were set on, when they don’t come to fruition, make room for other things to come into focus, unfurl, blossom. Every so often I feel like I get the chance to pan out and see the full three-ring-circus that is my life. The rest of the time, I’m there in the midst of it, too close to the action for perspective, twirling with the raspberry stain of my love smudged across my sleeve, and a thousand fragile things gathered up in my arms: my child, my work, my many foibles and distractions.

Finding the small envelope in my mailbox gave me this unexpected opportunity for perspective. It made me step back and really admit for the first time, how utterly overwhelming the past year of my life has been. I’m a chin-up kind of girl, and I’ve been trying to tell myself a hundred happy-ending stories, but painted over the stress of raising a toddler and renovating our own home, has been the pale hue of trauma after the shooting that took place at the school where I work in the beginning of the year. Terror pressed into the supple limbic portion of my brain that cannot speak and only feels, with sudden abrupt urgency, and altered the certain fundamental aspects of the way I live and trust and respond in the world.

I’ve been navigating my way out of that maze of reactions the entire year, and somewhere in the process, when I applied to grad schools, I entirely forgot about the school I’d researched last year that really belonged at the top of my list. Forgot, entirely.I was so shocked to realize this, it made me no longer sad about the small envelope bearing the word regret. Instead I finally gave myself permission to slow down a bit. Permission to have the summer here, with my family and a box of mail-order chicks, and watermelon seed spitting contests and writing workshops, and to take out West to run a half marathon with my sister.

Permission to not compete with the peers in my life who are at different places in their lives, because in the end, our lives are tangled up with entirely different sets of stars. Can’t you picture that? All of us, like marionettes with fragile golden strings stretching up into the dark indigo bowl of heaven. Have you ever looked up and tried to count all those stars?

Like dislocated limb, I’ve been dangling on the peripheries of my life all year. I’ve spent many months trying to find that groove where the cartilage of necessity and the bone of loving and dreaming meet. It has been painful. My senses of safety and inner equilibrium have been precariously balanced amidst a heap of responsibility and guilt and worry. My days are scribbled with the irrational ink of worry. I’ve burst into sudden shocked tears when a glass breaks. I’ve had entire fights, painful and raw and startling, that midway through, I can no longer recall the initial provocation.

Somehow, receiving that letter didn’t shake my belief in my writing at all—the way I imagined it would, before it came. Now, from this vantage point I don’t think my writing was the reason I was rejected at all. I think instead it was because my readiness to be there wasn’t self-evident in my application, or in my hurried recommendations from professors I hadn’t worked with in years.

I don’t know if I would have been ready, honestly. It would be a little like jumping off a bus moving at full speed, and because I’m that chin-up kid with a big ego, I’m sure I’d make it work somehow, despite the inevitable scraped knees and broken arm. But this way I’ll have some time to really find my footing, rather than plunging blindly into a new stream with flooding banks, which graduate work in writing invariably is.

So I’m looking forward to summer now, more than I was. (Also because eight inches of sleety frozen crap is in the forecast for tomorrow night. Somewhere, some very drunk weather gods are having a hell of a good time at our expense.) Some part of me feels like hugging this other part of me that has reached out and offered permission to just be here right now; at the beginning, instead of rushing pell-mell ahead. I know how that sounds, but I can’t think of any other way of describing how my drive to accomplish things can a perilous and ruthless taskmaster, who crowds my days with post-it notes and plans, and forgets life is happening right now, and how relieved I am to have to slow down.

Life is happening right now.

He said “I yuv you mommy,” and he was beaming.

That’s enough.

Thinking Blogger Awards--Meme & Happy Easter by Christina Rosalie

Blue folds quietly around the house, like dye adhering gradually to the fragile white shells of eggs. Snow is falling, still, again, and it makes me sad. I’m longing for spring, longing for raw green, for delicate petals, for grass. I’m moody tonight, tired after a day of dying easter eggs, making tiki masala with friends for dinner, and finding out that my best friend is moving to freaking Sacramento. One of those all-out weekends, of laughter and over-extending. Hunting for brightly colored plastic ovals in the stubble of grass and snow in a friend's back yard; fighting with Bean about naps after too many jelly beans and too much excitement; and feeling out of synch with the calendar this year. Now I’m curled into the rumpled cushions of the couch, with the symphony of the dishwasher whirring up around me, and the cats pacing across warm floors.

But, instead of moping, I’ve been tagged (twice) with a cool meme. The Thinking Blogger Awards. My votes go to:

Sunday School Rebel--because her poems are THAT good, because she talks to god, and because I wish we lived next door.

Le Petit Hiboux--because she's written 20,000 words for a novel, and is pursuing the wild, illusive profession I'm terrified to take up: full time writer.

Rosa Murillo--because her found art pies are relics of pure inspiration, and the universe must be smiling because of all her beautiful gifts.

La Vie En Rose--because her contemplative poems and her exquisite photos and her generous spirit are always make me pause.

Sickie nuggles by Christina Rosalie

I took a wicked spinning class last night. My first, ever. It was fun, and invigorating (if an hour of standing while sprinting while gasping for air can be called invigorating.) But it was totally the wrong thing to have done yesterday in particular because I felt kind of off and didn’t listen to myself and as a result woke up this morning with a terrible sore throat. Bean also seems to have woke up sick—running a low fever and a juicy cough that seems to have showed up out of nowhere (though in a likelihood it is probably from the doctor’s office, when we brought him for his ‘well baby’ visit a few days ago!) So I stayed home today, and we made French toast and lay around on the couch in the sunshine doing interactive games on PBS Kids and feeling generally miserable and snug at the same time. DH left last night for a weekend trip to help his parents get their house ready for sale, so it’s a single-parenting gig for me for the next few days. I’m feeling less thrilled about this now that I feel exactly like I swallowed a golf ball and my voice is sounds like sandpaper. But I’m determined to have a good weekend. Lay low, nap, buy some rain boots, play with trains at Barnes & Noble, and maybe make a trip to Starbucks for a cookie later on.

It isn’t all bad though, being home sick with a sickie. He climbs into my lap and says “Wanna nuggle” meaning “snuggle” and then he nuzzles into a nook and his hair smells like vanilla and fresh bread.

The good & the not so much by Christina Rosalie

Feeling tiredness crowd me like breathy people on a commuter train, I write a few scattered sentences and prepare for bed. The house is humming: the heat turning on, DH playing guitar, the low moan of the wind pulling around the northern corner. I feel snug tonight. Impatient still, with no answer yet, but content because I ran four miles today, watching my lanky legs in the mirror to work on form. God, I look like a gorilla on stilts. I throw my left foot out at a funny angle, it seems; which explains why I always have a splotch of mud on my right calf after every run. I kick myself. What’s left to write after writing that? But the running felt good. I kept a nice 9:30 mile pace and felt my lungs expanding easily. At the end I was grinning, inadvertently. Other things I’m thrilled about tonight:

* The gorgeous Sam of Sunday School Rebel is having a BOY! Clearly, I’m partial here.

* I’ve started reading Eat, Pray, Love and was pulled right in. I love books that do that to you. Her writing has a conversational tone, tender and honest, like she’s talking to you over tea.

* DH gave me a new laptop yesterday. There it was on the counter when I came home, in it’s snug little box. It’s so pretty and sleek and utterly functional that I can hardly contain my glee. And it doesn’t have a fubar every five seconds like my old one was apt to do (the fan sounded like a jet plane, and the power adapter port only worked every OTHER second. GAH!)

Things I am not thrilled about:

* The fact that still, every night, Bean has been waking up and wailing and insisting on going to bed in “mommy and daddy’s bed” or being rocked for eons. It’s wearing me thin. I want him to sleep through the night, happily, in his own room. Here are the things I know: he’s definitely cutting his last incisor right now, and his nose is all stuffed up. But really—does that warrant this? I’d love advice… (Know, we can’t for various reasons bring ourselves to be of the “cry it out” camp, including among other more important reasons, that his cries make it impossible to sleep. And also, how can you NOT go, when he calls, “Mama, Daddy, where ARE you? Need HELP. Need a HUG.”)

Do I just ride this out and tell everyone that raccoon eyes are the new thing? Or is there some strategy I’m overlooking?

Morning blur by Christina Rosalie

The morning is smudged with rainy dark. Gradually the snow melts, an the temperatures climb. Along the roads, silver buckets hang from maple trees now. My fingers move slowly this morning, making up sleep debt always takes a few nights. My body still feels somehow separate, as though I’m above it slightly, directing it as I would a marionette. Bean is sick with a cold—the first time he’s been sick all winter. I wish I could wrap him up and snuggle him all day, but he’d protest. So instead I taught him how to play patty cake and he loved it. He went around the house singing “Paddy cake paddy cake baker man,” over and over again and grinning. Anyone know any other fun hand games for small kiddos?

Oh and also, the potted palm in my bedroom isn’t happy. It has big elephant-ear fronds, and is in a smallish bowl. Anyone out there with a green thumb? Do palms like water, or do they like to be dry? Sun or less so?