The way I operate
Things on my mind lately:* My novel. I'm scared to go back. * Running, hard. * Feeling moody. Often. * Finding my stride again, maybe. * Indian summer. * Wishing things were easier. * Getting a glimpse of what a house with TWO boys in it will be like. * Learning to check pockets stain treat laundry.
You?
Certain things are never done. The wash for one; the spoons in the sink are always there again, and the bowls; the small hands that need scrubbing; the ripe things waiting for harvest in the garden, some silent and round under the dirt, or fat and humming with wasps, sides split open in the late summer sun.
These are days when the light is amber and still. The grasshoppers are huge, springing into the hedgerows as we run by. Their legs are always bent, poised again and again for the small prayer of almost-flight; temporary, dizzying, before they land again among brambles and gravel.
This. This life. It feels so small, so incredibly small and so enormous all at once.
Walking about the house gathering toys in the quiet that comes after small boys finally sleep and the dishwasher runs, I wonder if this can be enough for anyone? If anything is ever enough, if any heart beats regularly with contentment; or if to be alive always means to crave, to lunge, and long and push. We have our hearts after all, full of muscles that never sleep, and chambers secret even to us.
I put a wide mouthed jar of zinnias on the windowsill; follow the hawk with my eyes as I run. Its body is gold and white in the sun, circling against the blue. It is only there, present in the sky. Eyes like arrows, bones hollow, feathers tilting and lifting its small handful of life into the wind.
Zoom!That was just the entire month of August flying by. I cannot believe how quickly it has gone. One week until September. Already there are fallen leaves on the lawn.
I wanted to share a few things I have been crushing on today:
This darling little clock project.
This glorious sketchbook series and this lovely inspiration wall.
And this list of stories. Good to listen to while doing the dishes.
The past week has been a blur of copy-edit days. Every scrap of time spent close to the thesaurus and the delete key. I miss my book. I miss talking to my characters in my head in the shower. I hope they're waiting. It terrifies me that maybe they have slipped away. A page of events and scenes languishes in the top drawer of my desk. It cracks me up that I professed big plans for this story by the end of the month and here I am at end of the month. And I am not even close.
But there is something to this that I've been learning and learning again this summer. Things come and go---and really, you can't hold on to anything too tightly.
I'm starting to get that it's okay to just ride the waves. To be greedy with sleep and joy and creativity when they find you---and to sink into work and fast-paced days and tiredness on the days that those things hit hard. Each will return, and leave, and return again. There is something in this of faith, I think.
Whatever today is, tomorrow will be different. Yet there is a thread that loops through the fabric of both with its promise. Continuity somewhere. Balance, eventually.
It's scary though to feel a surge of creativity, only to have it plundered by more practical things. There are moments where it feels like having a blindfold yanked down over my eyes, and I'm just bumping into things, fingering the shape of each moment with hands as unknowing as the blind eyes of potatoes.
Are you doing the life you want daily?
Hmm.
Hi. It's about time for a new look around here.
In the process, I seem to have lost a post, but no big deal. It's Monday and its sunny which are two things I generally really love, except last night Sprout woke up at 4am and pretty much didn't go back to sleep the rest of the night/morning. And how I count on those two hours. Oh man. It will certainly be a two latte day.
Now that things are fresh and clean around here, I want to share some links I've found lately that I've been enjoying.
Firstly, Tait Simpsons's photographs. They are full of line and texture and mood. Also Sophik's dreamy summer photos. Especially this one. I've always had a soft spot for old trucks. These portraits by Mikael Kennedy also grabbed me. They are haunting and memorable and somehow almost secretive, like you're there in the room, but no one knows.
Also, a little music. I'm listening to this over and over again. It's in a story I'm working on, and the more I listen the more I love it. Gould was a fascinating, remarkable, devastating musician. Speaking of music, have you heard this? If not, you are in for a treat. It's the kind of mixed up soundtrack that makes sense to me. That music is like what stories do in my head: one talking to another until they become part of another story together.
So. Hi. What are your plans for August? I'll tell you mine, if you tell me yours. I want this month to be outstanding. It's the last month of summer. The month when all the insects start singing in the grass and the blackberries get ripe. Its the month for doing big things.
So I'll admit. I have an embarrassingly enormous writing goal for August. I had a story blindside me the other day, and it won't let go. It's as far away from anything I'm comfortable writing as I've ever been, and yet it's good and the exciting and the characters just keep whispering in my ears. It's all rather discombobulating, as I was right in the middle of my book project, and I have more than one short story on the stove too right now. But it wont leave and is demanding to be written, so I am.
I decided to do my own little August version of NaNoWriMo. Ha. Did I just say little? Not so much really. I am aiming to have about 80,000 words by the end of the month. I know, right? Crazy. I can't help it though. The story must. be. written. And I figure if I write about it here it will be just one more reason to do it.
Also, I am really interested to see how I respond to such concrete writing goals and completely new material. The stuff I've been working on for other book is so different. I have so much material already there that I am constantly tripping myself up with ambivalence and indecision. That story is close to my heart and I love it, but it is a pain in the ass. Kind of like another child.
The new story, though, this hit-me-upside-the-head story is more like someone I have a crush on. I am obsessed. I want to do nothing but sit down and listen to the characters as they chatter amongst themselves. My fingers ache at night from typing, and there is no way, no way at all I can type fast enough to get everything down it seems. And I like it like that. And I am interested to see what happens if I go for it, all out, no hold barred, no excuses.
See, the thing is, I respond well to goals and deadlines whether I want to admit it or not. And I also respond well to doing things in little bite sized manageable pieces. Like the 30 Day Shred, or running 3 miles, committing to 2500 words a night seems like a concrete and small enough goal that it will actually get me somewhere. Like in the neighborhood of an entire novel by the end of this month.
Right, so, off the deep end I go. Tra la la.
What are you up to this month? What thing do you really want to do in that quiet secret compartment in your heart? I dare you. I dare you to do it every day. For the whole month. (PS-Because I'm into doing things big this month, I am declaring it an unofficial delurking day. Please say hi. Your comments are one of my favorite things in the world.)
Later my mother sent me a link to this fascinating review of Winifred Gallagher's Rapt; a book I now very much want to read.
From there the day fragmented into lots of email, a little twitter, and thankfully a lot of writing. (Saw this post, via Twitter, and started wondering is conflict essential to all good fiction?
What do you think? I am very interested in hearing your ideas on this...
Also watched So You Think You Can Dance, which I adore, because as I've said here before: if I could have a talent bestowed upon me, it would be the ability to dance.
It was a roller coaster day though. Storm clouds, indecisive rain, sallow sun, moods getting tossed all around our house. One of those days where everything seemed annoying: Bean's loud sing song voice, the way he is inclined to DASH everywhere lately, Sprout's new inclination to spit up gallons of sour milk without any warning whatsoever, the never ending dampness that has become this summer, and one too many issues with the poultry (the chicks escaped again--and the same hoopla of chasing them around a very sharp pine tree in the rain, in the mud, that occurred two days ago, took place again today.)
It should also be noted, as somewhat of a highlight, that our goose hatched a baby chick today. Chick, as in chicken. Long story. I'm not sure if it will survive. Something in me isn't quite sure she'll know how to mama a baby that small and fluffy (I'll post pictures tomorrow!) but when I checked on her this evening the little chick was tucked in on her back, at the nape of her neck, peeping away. She's still sitting on two other eggs. Here's to seriously hoping she'll figure it out. I've kind of had enough poultry drama for a while.
Honestly it was one of those days where I kind of wished I lived somewhere utterly urban: full of angles and elbows, people wearing black, umbrellas, pointy shoes, bustling bodegas, sharp lines, bright lights. I'd happily settle willingly for anywhere sunny though. Then I could throw a garden party just like this (found via a friend on facebook.)
What were your media moments today?
Wednesday. When I type that word I think of fifth grade, of the yellow lined paper I used to practice spelling it on in loopy cursive, Wed-nes-day. I still say it that way in my head when I write it out.
Funny how certain things stick and others evaporate in a second. Just as I was writing this I thought of the premise for a perfect short story. By the time I’d pulled up a new sticky note on my desktop, it had slipped my mind and all I could remember was the fact that I need to email several friends and am very remiss in doing so. Maddening.
Memory. It’s such a loopy, lumpy thing, like an old floral couch with little spots burned in the fabric from where the sun struck it, shining through a vase on the windowsill just so.
I remember my childhood vividly and sporadically. From fifth grade I remember learning the entire Greek alphabet, all of the prepositions in alphabetical order, how to spell Wednesday, and how I kicked Zachary O’Day in the crotch with those slouchy pointy toed boots that were all the rage along with acid washed jeans in 1986.
I do not however, remember yesterday, unless I put some serious mental effort towards the task.
No. That isn’t true. I do remember the way last night we decided to go with a red metal bucket to pick raspberries down by the pond and a quarter of the way there ran into two stray dogs. One was a yellow lab with one of those pronged collars that look vaguely threatening, and the other was a black wisp of a dog with floppy ears and lanky legs and pale ghost blue eyes, part husky for sure. They weren’t from around here. Not any of the neighbor's dogs, and when we went towards them they ran, away from us, up our hill, towards our house and our free range chickens.
Incidentally, just yesterday DH decided that our two month old chicks were old enough to go free range, without the enclosure we normally put them into. And by decided, I mean he took the path of least resistance, as they had escaped him when he was trying to transfer them from the large wooden box where they spend the night in the coop, to the enclosure on the lawn. They escaped and he decided to hell with them. So they were out under the pine all day and just fine except that now of course two feral and rather hungry looking dogs were heading right towards them.
We ran back up our hill, pushing the stroller with Sprout who indignantly began to wail and Bean, who dropped his bike and skittered up after us, his yellow helmet bobbing, his eyes on the sky where thunder had begun to rumble. "I saw lightening," he said, his voice all quavery. "It might get us."
Seriously, when it rains it pours around here.
And so there we were, trying to deter the dogs by yelling and throwing rocks in their general direction, and then trying to catch and re-coop the not so big and definitely not so smart chicks who would make a mad dash for the coop door and then at the very last minute would scatter frantically in all directions.
I remember this. Yes I do. But what I don’t remember—unless I stop now and really think of it—is what I read yesterday, what I learned, what media I consumed. And I’ve been thinking about that since my last post: how I am maybe suffering from information/networking overload and what to do about it.
And I came up with this: For the rest of the week I am going to try to keep notes here about my media habits and see where this gets me. Likely, I'll be back with my first record this afternoon. You in?
Day after day the rain comes in the evening, the windowsills wet. I eat an extra cookie, the chocolate melting bitter and sweet and sticky on my tongue, crumbs on the couch for sure, and put Sprout to sleep in his bouncy seat in the laundry room.
Yes. There with the fans, and the rhythmic satisfaction of clothes being turned and turned again in sudsy water (a task my great grandmother maybe did by hand with a washboard in a basin, and before her women at the creek bed, knees pressed into the silty mud, pounding with stones) there is a snugness that lulls him. The fan drones and the wash whirls back and forth, and beautifully, without a fight, he's asleep.
So. I've been moody with this rain, the humidity making my hair curl and my skin stick. I have 10 tabs open in my internet browser and I’m on the verge of tears, right on the cusp of everything as usual. It's so terrifying to contemplate doing more than whatever it is I’m doing right now. As in: sending more work out, figuring more things out, putting my heart out there in thin lines of Times New Roman double spaced and waiting for whatever.
It's terrifying to sit here on our stained couch with sore boobs (Sprout nursed less than usual today, but he was just as chummy and darling as ever,) contemplating what else could be a reality soon, or never, or maybe. What if I make it?
Sometimes that question is almost as confounding and daunting as What if I don't?
Here are the things I suck at: organizing, networking, time lines, deadlines, and synthesis. Here are the things I am good at: sentences, earnestness, heart, metaphors, and dreaming.
Between those to columns are the three words that Nike made so very famous: just do it. Sometimes that feels impossibly hard.
Sometimes I don't even know what that looks like, doing it, going for it: where to begin?
Breath. I come back to that. And then I go back to my browser with it's ten open tabs and try to make sense of my life.
You? What are you good at? What are you utterly miserable less good at?
And: Which is more terrifying: attempting success and failing, or failing to attempt success? Ha!
It's the orioles that save me. The way they have come this year, more than any other year, to these lush woods, swooping across the stormy June skies, saffron and vermilion, like promises.
It's the hawks circling above, reminding me that I am human and very small; that I am a creature of gravity and bones, soft bellied, begging with gratitude at the dawn of each new day. Let there be a tomorrow, and a tomorrow after that.
It is the swallowtails that float up like yellow gifts on the fragrant air. I think of my father when I see them. I wish sometimes that he were here to see my life now, to witness my boys and my words; to see that my hands still remember the art of work. He was the first to teach me this: that tools and soil and tasks can be solace, can be grace.
In the garden, weeding between the first delicate chartreuse shoots of corn, it is the red efts that save me. They come from the dark, dark earth, burrowing towards the sun, carrying small secrets about the way time really goes. Slowly. Slower still.
Here I am in this life. I wake up to the sound of boys, to the rooster crowing, to the sky full of torn clouds and sun, to the poplars bending in the wind. This is new, this gratitude, this ability to say I am here and look! Look at this wondrous life! It used to terrify me, the idea of settling someplace with someone and making a go of it, but now I cannot think of anything more real, more full than this work.
For a long, long time, for all of my twenties (which felt long to me then) I was too impatient to feel this, to know the secret wealth contained in slow moments. Like the spiraling interior of a nautilus, the tasks of now continue to teach me how to be.
There are days when I still hate them. Days when it seems impossible to be okay with doing one more dish, with vacuuming again, with folding one more little shirt, but I am beginning to understand that it is the utter banality of the tasks that also makes them profound.
Many people don't use their hands any more, not the way they did when most of the day was occupied with the tasks of living. I've been thinking of this as DH and I have moved huge flat rocks from the old shambled stone walls on our land to make new front steps. We used the scoop bucket of a tractor, but when they were made into crude walls dividing fields long ago, it was with more brute strength: horses and sweat. A whole day's work to drag and place a few large stones.
We have machines now, and to them we are grateful: I cannot imagine the enormous labor of washing clothes by hand; email gets there so much faster than a letter sent with paper and a stamp in the post. Because of machines we have more time in the day, free from tasks with our hands we're able to do other things.
Still. I can feel how my body is meant to move, and how my hands are meant as tools, nimble on the keyboard remembering the sequence of keystrokes to make every word appear on the screen in quick succession. Awareness in these tasks becomes a way of saying grace.
It is the tasks that save me, even as my impatient mind lurches forwards, consumed with worry and with goals. I can do nothing really, except whatever it is I am doing right now. Here: afternoon, stormy skies, my knees pulled up to my chest the way I often sit when I write, the soles of my bare feet on the seat of the chair. Here, with a jar of irises and buttercups and a dirty milk glass left from lunch. Here with the sweet fruity scent of freshly made apricot-strawberry jam (I've been loving making quick jam lately, to eat with homemade bread. The perfect snack.)
Here at the table with the windows open, with my heart open, with the chickens pecking at the grass out the back door. So. This is my life today.
Stop. What are the moments happening right here for you? What is today in your life?
Sprout is teething. Definitively. Soaked through several shirts. Chomping on everything, and he’s miserable. Utterly. Hence we are miserable utterly. Didn’t I just say it’s had been easy? What was I thinking? I was asking for it, that’s what. Don’t you ever wonder about those apparent universal laws? When it rains, it pours… you know, that stuff. The way certain things seem jinxed, fortuitous, inevitable. What’s up with that? And also, why is it that negative energy attracts negative energy so much more powerfully than positive energy seems to attract the positive?
I last night I dreamed that I was teaching figure drawing. This morning I woke up smiling, regardless of the world (another day of rain; uncertainty still.) Then there were chocolate croissants. The most perfectly ripe strawberries. Bean's last day of school. A new friend.
And this. She's right, of course.
Tell me: What did you dream last night? What is the greatest thing that stresses you out? What are three things that made you happy today?
My hair is falling out, the last telltale effects of hormones snapping back to a baseline after pregnancy, and I find it everywhere: on my clothes, in Sprout's clenched fists, in the bristles of my purple handled brush. Outside it is gray and cold and raining, the second day in a row. On the windowsill the seedlings are turning yellow, needing to get in the ground, but it’s been so wet, our boots sink up to our ankles. The roosters crow over and over. There is dirt on the floor. Around the lip of the blue enamel pot that holds the rubber tree with its shiny dark green leaves, dust, thick enough to write my name.
Last night Sprout was up, squirming around, uncomfortable most of the night. This morning it’s me that is uncomfortable, here in this thin skin, ready to cry.
Everything is always a risk. Loving. Trying to put down roots. Giving birth. Going out the front door. Getting on a plane to somewhere, and having it crash out in the ocean. Can you imagine? Waiting out there, with your terror, for death?
Of course I know nothing of terror, and yet. It’s scary here too some days. Here has its own kind of heartbreak: our financial situation sucks and it’s quite possible we could mess things up, have nothing, throw in the towel, go. To where? To what? Even when there are cyclamens, and stretching, and good poems there is always this. A shake up, a heartache, a fight, an empty bank account, a splinter under your fingernail, a bitten tongue.
And some days its hard to see that there is anything more than this: hormones and exhaustion and possible loss. Ostrich days, where all I want is to burry my head in deep and wait for moments that are better, sweeter, less filled with tears.
June is one of my favorite months: cloud-torn skies, hail, thunderstorms, and sudden rainbows above the wet curled ferns and the newly shorn woolly backs of sheep, their noses black and soft like crumpled velvet, let out to graze in pastures of suddenly tall grass.
Its easy to be grateful in June, to watch the poplars bend and bend and bend in the wind without breaking, and to feel glad. It’s easy to want to be something in June, to want to be alive, and to be living also: to want to push past whatever was holding things back. Tiredness matters less when the clear air is full of swallowtails and the scent of hyacinth.
June, and there are deadlines. Lots of them, for writing, for making ever minute I have with the quiet clicking of the keyboard count. Dare I whisper the word chapter? Dare I say book?
June, and the baby chicks arrived. We pulled on our rainboots Friday morning and went out to the truck across the muddy gravel drive to fetch them from the hardware store. Bean carried them home in a small cardboard box on his lap, peering in, grinning at their soft fuzzy little bodies bumping up against each other and peeping. Now they’re in the garage in a big wooden box under the red warm circle of the heat lamp. Bean pulls up a step ladder and sits on his feet peering over the edge, naming them, and then naming them again, Betsy, Jemima, Ornament, Daffodil, Sugar.
June, and the mercury is still playing shy, the temperature flirting with warm, barely. At the pond, we’re finding frogs now. They plop into the water when we wade through the tall reeds. Above us, flying in wide swooping arcs that make my heart ache with pleasure, bluebirds, streaks of summer sky.
When we eat cold watermelon on a quilt in the back yard, Bean says, “When you eat watermelon it feels like a refrigerator in your mouth.â€
Later, looking at the mountains he tells me, “Mommy, don’t you think a monster's teeth look just like the mountains? They’re all jaggedy like that.â€
***
June: reading more short stories, getting more words on the page. On the treadmill and the road, running faster, harder, farther. My body is feeling stronger (it’s the first time in my life I’ve done any kind of weights or jump training. Thank you 30 Day Shred.)
Sprout is trying to sit up. Trying to roll from his back to his stomach. This month will be all about documenting those changes (and about getting my camera fixed!) He is such a smiley little dude. Full of patience and grins and squeals. He is the perfect sidekick, grinning at me from the grocery cart or the Ergo. LOVE. What does June look like for you? What are you planning? Doing? Reading? Watching? Eating?
In the pale crook of a birch a robin threading its song through the fluttering green of newly furled leaves makes my heart tremble.
Things are up in the air, and I’m holding my breath waiting for unrecognized brilliance. It’s like I’m occupying the thin space between air and water in a drinking glass, where the whole world is reflected in a line.
I spend whole days skimming, flitting, careening. In my molskine I’ve started writing again, finger bones gripping in quiet concert, the lead becoming a rush of loopy js and ys, answering the same questions each morning: what do I feel? What do I want?
Today I don’t know how to get myself started with the rest of my life. Today I am trying to catch up with myself. Trying to be something.
Across the sky clouds the color of cinnamon remember the fiery circle of the sun, then draw together close like stitches over a wound; gathering indigo, gathering twilight, gathering the night.
*** What do you feel? What do you want? Right now. Today. Right this moment.
I know that nothing lasts. I know that spring in this place, northward where the light is lingering now and the first dandelions fleck the lawn, will become summer before I blink. I know these days will pass, and I will look back, suddenly much older than I am, with a heart full of longing for the sweet scent of my son’s head after playing in his sandbox until noon and for the way each year we celebrate the first trillium, purple and secretive by the tumbling stone wall, with our own little giddy dance.
I will likely not remember this season’s heart full of ambiguity and ache. I will probably entirely forget how Bean has entered a new SUPER BOSSY exceptionally annoying phase this past week where he’s trying on YELLING and DEMANDING just to see how far he gets with that. (Not far, little man. Not far at all.)
I know this, and yet I’m still struggling with being right here in these moments, because damn, right here in these moments is an uncomfortable place to be sometimes.
I know they are not unique, these moments of stress and financial strain and oh damn, I’ll just say it, it’s spring and I’m feeling a little tethered by these two boys. I still don’t know how to take on the playground, or any trip for that matter that involves just me and my boys. I don’t know how she does it with her girl tribe and her positive attitude all the time, because right now nothing terrifies me quite as much as the prospect of being out somewhere when they launch into their perfectly synchronized meltdowns.
I need to know how you do this with two. How do you get two into the car and then back out of it—without a double stroller. How do you make sure the big one doesn’t fall off the swing at the playground or get run over in the parking lot while toting the enormous weight a car seat carrier or a baby strapped to your person? What do you do with the big one while the little one needs a diaper change at the bookstore, and the situation demands an entire change of clothing due to an apparent explosion up the back? Or, how do you possibly navigate something as civilized and pleasant as a story hour for the bigger one, if the littler one is present and possibly grumpy? Not to mention—shopping for a new pair of jeans? (He’s here, he’s there, he’s under every freaking clothes rack in the store, and oh joy, he’s managed to unhang eighty nine dresses, even though of course, he didn’t mean to.)
My solution thus far has been to stay home. Which is decidedly not a good solution. It is spring after all. Picnic baskets seem in order, and swinging at the playground and trips to the bakery for croissants. There is a consignment store for fabulous vintage jeans I’ve been dying to poke around in, and there are errands of the more mundane sort (the post office for more stamps, we’re out of Vitamin C, the chickens need more hay) that seem to pile up, never getting done. I’m floundering a bit. This two thing is hard. Not loving them, just having them. Together. Logistically speaking.
I know it will all pass, and I’ll be grinning like a cat after a bowl of cream in four or five years when I can use both hands for carrying things like lattes and shopping bags, and my boys will be SO BIG. I know it will get easier, and I’ll take a not-so-secret glee in watching my currently childless friends whose lives seem divinely effortless right now, navigate these same first years with their own little ones. Because it just is the way it is. Littleness demands patience and selflessness and satisfaction in small things.
Guess what I'm figuring out?
Having little ones means showing up for parenting even when you don’t feel like it. It's not Bean’s fault or Sprout’s that I’m worried about money, or that DH and I sometimes climb a proverbial tower of Babel and are unable to say anything the other one understands, or that my pants are tight, or I miss my girlfriends. Because these days that are passing? These hours of bright sunlight and stormy afternoons; these rain puddles and duck feathers and muddy garden beds; these moments? These are their childhood.
Theirs. Short, fleeting, glorious.
So even though DH and I were both tired and preoccupied after going for a run yesterday (with both boys in the jogger and the sun warm on our backs) I went and got the little plastic terrarium and hiked down to the neighbor’s pond because I promised I would.
I promised Bean I’d help him catch a tadpole, and he held me to my promise, big-eyed, curious, eager. We went before dinner, and I tried very hard to just sink into our time together. The grass was scandalously green. There were soft catkins from the birches under foot, and mud, and sparkly rocks. We went barefoot, and in the pond the silt was soft. The reeds from last year's cattails were limp and brown and lumpy with gelatinous bobbing egg sacks.
I waded out, sun-warmed water up to my knees and scooped the jellied eggs. Polliwogs soon, we think. We also caught a newt. Still with gills. Its belly jewel like, spotted, yellow and green.
“I love you, Newty†Bean kept whispering later, as he sat at the kitchen table in glorious evening sunlight, drawing what he saw.
These moments, how to hold them? How do you hold them and let them be enough?
Oh restless heart, be still, be still.
I have been silent the past few days because worry has crept up like fig roots in a well or vermin in the coop. It has been eating my quiet morning hours, and instead of writing I pace the house folding laundry and watch the rain turn to sleet. Fat wet flakes arrow to the ground. The sky is white. Tree branches glisten. The road is slick with mud eight inches deep. Cars get caught in the grooves and the only way forward is to cling to the wheel and not press too hard on the gas pedal. The mud pulls the car where it will. Oncoming traffic is a hazard. You just have to keep going. I remember when I thought worry was something you could avoid, like the flu, or falling off of rooftops, and the answers were easy and obvious, A or B. I remember a time before having this baby, or the other one, now a coltish four-year-old whose skin has become translucent with winter and illness.
It makes me quivery, watching him. His eyes are dark, and the glands in his neck swollen, just slightly. Fluid in his ears has become a perfect haven for repeated infection. He’s been sick for months, but last week was the worst. Recurrent fevers. Antibiotics are bullshit for this. Worry. We’re all doing the best we can; just trying to keep going.
“What?†He asks after everything, his eyes watching my lips move. “What?â€
The world sounds like it is under water to him, and feels like it is under water to me.
This is what it is like: your heart out there beyond you, beyond your control, caught in the nook of a small boy’s fleeting smile.
I want him to be okay. I know he will be, eventually, and I could kneel and kiss the ground in gratitude for that. But still, it has been a long time. Long enough for his hearing to have temporarily diminished by almost twenty decibels. Long enough for winter with its carpetbag of ailments to have gotten under my skin.
Other people live temperate places where winter and summer are not equal, fifty-fifty, half the year. They live among trees that are not bare sticks until the end of May. They do not know how the summer sun feels like an addiction when it finally arrives with a frantic ruckus bursting of bloom and bush, blurring the memory of snow. But here, winter stretches out until it feels like forever. Until it is impossible to remember the color of new leaves, or sunburn, or a healthy boy with sun gold skin and bare feet, carefree, without congestion. Here, the light is weak and pale for so long the body hungers for it. The craving is vicious and intense.
I used to live in more temperate places, where the ocean wasn’t far and winter was more like a shrug than a death grip. I used to be single, then coupled, always self-reliant, defiant, determined. I used to imagine that the way you avoided regret was by plunging ahead; doing whatever it was that you thought you wanted without looking back.
I used to have a plan for everything. I remember, in fact, when plans seemed more real than the moment, and I harbored the idea of a self unaffected by the world. I remember really believing that if I played it cool, struck first, kept my bags packed, played hard, and kept my head up, I would always be ahead of the game and safe. I thought I could outwit the wolf, keep the poignancy of life biting me and leaving its mark.
I hadn’t dug in yet. DH and I hadn’t been together for all that long then. We lived in a small beach side bungalow with a yellow dog. The tides came in and left. Sometimes they came up high and an siren sounded and everyone would leave their houses and find their cars and drive them up to higher ground, to garages or further up side streets as the tide came licking up over the seawall, filling the streets with salt water and debris.
When we came back from a staying at lakeside cabin in the mountains where he proposed and I said yes, we found that fleas had infested our house. I remember unpacking bags in the laundry room; bending to pick up rumpled towels and bathing suits and finding that fleas had sprung onto my legs. We drove together to the store for those a couple of those toxic flea bomb canisters, set them off, and drove away again. Stayed somewhere else. Laughed.
Things could have fallen apart then and I would have shrugged. Picking up and moving on meant throwing my favorite pair of jeans into a bag with a couple of pens and a notebook. Sure, it meant heartbreak, I loved the man I’d just said yes to, but I could have gotten over it then.
It was all about staying in motion; keeping my open. I expected, maybe, to marry him, but I also expected that I might not. I expected the other shoe to drop. I never expected that my heart would know a love so fiercely beyond the tensile of that early affection that I would find myself here.
Now I look at him scrubbing a pan in the sink and want to sob. His back is to me, and suddenly he so beautiful I hardly know what to do with the moment. His muscles ripple under his blue cotton shirt. He turns, dries the pan with a faded red and white towel, places it on the stove, drizzles olive oil into it, and turns the gas flame on.
I wonder if we could have become this without our boys, without this place here that we’re trying to make year by year into a home.
Worry tempers the heart. Worry is the murder of crows in the tall poplar shrieking at the lone hawk that swoops, alights, preens. Worry, because now there is so much to loose. Because their small hearts are my responsibility, and Bean is still sick, and because no one has the answers (and antibiotics and allergies and preschool ailments have created a wicked sucker punch.) It is an unfamiliar anatomy, this worry. Like someone come to visit me in the pitch black, and all I can do is reach out and hold on, and let my hands discover its shape in the dark.
Tonight I feel like lint flicked from a pocket on the breeze, or like a piece sky blue ribbon caught in a snarl of twigs, or like a small field mouse, ears transparent and patterned with intricate veins betraying a tiny fluttering pulse, curled into a nest of fuzz and scraps of cloth beneath the woodpile logs. Unraveled, scattered, tired. My heart beating in my temples. Trying to learn what recuperating means, as I realize that instead of rest I've been holding everyone else together these past few days. Doing too much. Hard not to. I haven't learned yet how to protect my energy without being selfish. How to take care of myself without hoarding my time. Is there a way to balance this, as a mother and as an artist? The filament feels so flimsy between me and the world tonight.
Things to Think
Think in ways you’ve never thought before. If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message Larger than anything you’ve ever heard, Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.
Think that someone may bring a bear to your door, Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.
When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven, Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
From Morning Poems by Robert Bly (© 1998 Robert Bly)
I have been noticing windows this week. Squares and rectangles with light pouring in, raw and bright, the way that new spring light does.
I’ve been noticing the way windows frame a view, just so: six small squares of pine and red maple sprouting tiny buds through the glass in the solid cherry wood of the front door; a triptych of blue mountains and bluer sky where my four orchids sit in clay pots on the sill, some blossoms dry now, like ghosts still clinging to sapling slender stems.
Today the afternoon light splashes through glass. It makes the walls yellower and my mood softer, even without enough sleep. Where I am sitting I can see the mountains from the window, but not the meadow where surly, possibly, a white-tailed doe is standing on slight legs, her warm nostrils flaring, among a mess of winter-dead grass.
We are always looking through windows, always seeing a view.
Two days ago, DH had a down day. He read the charts and made the wrong call and all afternoon he was tossed upside down in a bucket of hope, and I could hear him thudding his fist with frustration into his glass-topped desk, expletives filtering through the wall like parentheses, and I watched a squirrel scrabbling uselessly at the dining room window. The squirrel was trying to climb the slick glass to reach the bird feeder where fat sunflower seeds tempt nuthatches and grosbeaks. Eventually, after much commotion, it fell to the ground; forced to nibble at the fallen shells and millet seeds the birds had scattered and pecked.
Two days ago I spent the day indoors, looking out of windows and feeling listless and limited by the smallness of Sprout and the amount of effort it takes to bundle him into tiny warm things: woolen socks and a hand knit blue hat, and a fleece jumpsuit into which I must stuff his arms and legs like small sausages. I’d spent the day inadvertently waiting for something to happen, waiting for the view to change, for something sweet, for delight to find me here in this house were the walls sometimes feel very close and the rooms very small. And when DH came out of his office I turned to him like a little girl, my face wide-open, grinning like he was maybe holding a billowing cloud of cotton candy on a stick. And he just looked at me.
He looked at me in a distressed, tight-jawed way, and said “Right.†And “Mmm†absently to whatever I said and I knew he had every intention of spending the rest of the afternoon pacing in the dark rooms of his mind analyzing whatever it was he had missed or done wrong at work, curtains drawn. And I bit my quivering lip and rinsed the dish I was holding.
Disappointment, if it could have a taste, would be the taste you get at the back of your throat when you jump into a pool, expecting the splash and the plunge, but forgetting to hold your nose. Or it would taste like burnt toast; or getting the popcorn flavored jellybean instead of the lemon one when you pick a yellow one out of the bag. Whatever its taste, disappointment was there on my tongue with the many bitter words I didn’t say and swallowed instead.
It was arranged civilly: he would work out while I would continue to watch the boys; then I would be free to go on a run, solo. We used the fewest words possible, as if they were heavy things we did not have the strength to hoist about. We looked in opposite directions, my ponytail to his cheek; the back of his muscled calves running up the stairs as I turned to face him.
Under the imaginary table in my head I was kicking myself for doing it again: for expecting something, unnamed and remarkable from him at the end of a day.
Do you ever do this? Expect the world from the one you love, when the world is already right here, and you are already in it?
I could feel tears at the back of my eyes. They spring up now, often and unbidden, a symptom of the tiredness that has begun to inhabit my body, making the skin under my eyes transparent and dark, and my heart quick to ache.
But, after much clattering of plates and flatware I realized that the only thing I could change was my view. I desperately needed to get out of the house. Right then. Right that minute when the sun was still high and the breeze would bring the scent of warm mud and possibly skunk cabbages in thawing boggy places.
So I sent the little guy down to the basement gym with a collection of Matchbox cars to hang with his Daddy, and I patiently nursed Sprout and then burped him and dressed him in the multiple small layers of fleece and bootie and hat, and then pulled on rubber boots and a jacket and strapped the baby to my chest.
Of course he cried. Of course there were those two minutes that felt like a hundred hours when I tried to get him into his fleece jumpsuit and all of his limbs were like rubber and his face was squished into a wail of discontent, and my body was suddenly awash with heat. But we both survived and I made it out the door, suddenly furious at everyone and everything and muttering under my breath. But then, looking down at my shadow, backlit by bright sun, I could see heat waves rising up around my shoulders and head, and I had to throw my head back and laugh. This is the crazy I am right now. Heatwaves. Out loud muttering. Mud boots. Mood swings.
And instead of just going to collect the mail as I had intended, I kept walking. I climbed the neighbor’s stile and jumped down onto the springy earth on the other side, and then walked down the trail through muddy places and over a small stream and then up, up into the woods along a creek bed where the snowmelt babbles and sings. Along the trail coyotes had gone before me, leaving their unmistakable canine prints in the mud, and a piece of sheepskin snagged on the bark of a hickory. The neighbor’s lambs are born every February, and one or two almost always end up being carried off despite the barbed wire and the barn doors and the three fierce lamas who stare anyone down and chomp impatiently at the air with their buckteeth.
Further up the hill, I saw the rest of the sheep’s wool, along side the stream: a soft blanket of death and feasting. No lamb after all. This was a full-sized sheep, carried here on one of those full moon nights when I woke to hear the yapping and felt the familiar prickle of goosebumps on my arms.
As I hiked I found the answers, scattered like last year’s fallen beech leaves on the snow. I realized that what happens with us is something that must happen to many people who fall in love first, then become parents, preoccupied with the sudden demands of need and responsibility.
It’s easy to forget that once we were each other’s only only, and while we are not now, our hearts still long for this.
Once we gave each other full attention, French kisses, boxes with small gifts and colored ribbon, handfuls of wildflowers, photographs, mixed tapes, late night movies at the theater, sandwiches, new books, back rubs, curiosity. Now, the hours in the day are not enough and like the coyotes, we’re both hungry for our share of time. Without intending, it’s easy to become absent, distracted, distant, disheartened. And so there we are. There I am.
I realized I was not mad at him for his dark mood or his down day or for having to watch the baby after I had already done that all day long, or for the dishes in the sink. I was not mad at all, I found, when I opened and closed the many crammed drawers of my heart.
Instead all I found was a kind of loneliness. A hunger. Not for just anyone. For him. For us the way we were, before this. Shit. It’s so easy to let it slip. You blink, you have a baby, you dig into the present of your life, the clock’s hands go round and round, and zip, it’s gone.
An hour later I was back. The rhythm of my body had long ago lulled Sprout into a deep grunting sleep, and the rhythm of climbing and stumbling through almost knee-deep snow on the North-West side of the mountain left me newly bright eyed. But they were gone.
I could see his blue truck was missing from the drive as I crested the hill above our house and for a minute I felt the disappointment flip flop about in my ribcage the way a stunned bird does when you scoop it in your palms and hold it, after it has flown unexpectedly into a windowpane.
“You deserved it,†I whispered. “You were the one who left without saying where you were going.†And it was true, I had, and I did. And it wasn’t really his fault I expected him to be my moon and stars that afternoon. It was mine.
But then there he was in the driveway—the boys had been driving up and down the road looking for me. On both of their faces smiles bloomed like sunflowers when they saw me at the door.
“Let’s go into town and get dinner,†he said.
Time spent moving, sweating, had had the same affect on him.
So we went for pizza at a little hole in the wall place where kids in hugely baggy pants were playing pool and a juke-box was mounted on the wall and the pizza crust was thin and crispy. I had root beer, and we sat by the windows, and Bean was preoccupied with watching the fire trucks and hatchbacks and delivery trucks that passed by on the street. And so, unexpectedly, DH and I had time to talk.
“A friend of mine at work is getting a divorce,†he said, holding the pizza like a taco, folded, pepperoni and cheese dripping out the side.
“He said it’s partly the job, and partly they’ve just grown apart. They’re taking a week apart to think it over, but I told him he should really taking the week with her, without the kids, to remember what they had in the first place.â€
Next to us a family of four had almost finished dinner. The father got up and left the restaurant at a run. His family waved to him as he ran by the glass, on a mission to get something. Grinning.
When the mother and two girls finished eating they cleared their paper plates and walked out into the night.
I could see them through my reflection in the glass, lit by the yellow streetlamps, looking in the direction the man went. Then after some deliberation they walked the other way.
DH said, “It’s so damn easy to forget, to get distracted. Like you said the other day, you really can loose it all like that, without really noticing.â€
The man came back. He burst into the restaurant panting, expectant. Saw the empty table where they had sat, then turned slowly to leave. Outside on the corner he stood for a moment, looking up and down the street. Then walked off.
“It really is,†I nodded.
We kept talking. The baby slept in the crook of my knee. I licked cheese from my fingers and shared sips of root beer with Bean who found a new love: calzones. He was busy dipping pieces of cheesy dough into marinara, a saucy smile spreading ear to ear.
The lady and the girls came back to the corner outside the restaurant. They looked up the street again, then stood there, shifting in their jackets, saying words I couldn’t hear through the glass. Finally they turned and walked in the same direction the man had gone, and I caught myself hoping desperately that they would find each other and laugh instead of being bitter or snapping at one another in the dark beside their parked car.
“Oh! They missed each other twice,†I said.
DH turned to look, then smiled and reached across the table for my hand. "You're always noticing that stuff," he said.
And I couldn’t help but grin. Because somehow, right then, we had exactly the same view.
So you guessed anywhere from next Wednesday to the following Friday, huh? I'm totally for the 20th. I also kind of hate anyone who even dared mention a date beyond the 25th, because seriously, if I have to wait until the 27th or 28th, I will gradually begin banging my head on the wall and forget my name. I am so ready. Bags packed. House cleaned. Baby clothes washed. Oh, and have I mentioned? Really ready to have my body belong to just me again.
Tonight it dawned on me that holy shit, there's an entire body in my belly. A baby. Okay, 'dawned on me' might be a titch dramatic. But really, something about being pregnant has never quite fully saturated my brain. It is such a bizarre state of being.
Some people take to it, I imagine, like platypuses to water. Or whatever. But I just don't.
There's a bit of that surreal-ness that has lingered too in becoming somebody's mama. It's not an identity that I've just slipped into. I still never have the coolest snacks at the playground, or know what to say to Bean's teachers when I pick him up at preschool. I love him beyond the stars and moon, of course. I love hanging out with him, listening to the way he puts ideas together, to the way he giggles. I love everything about having this kid in my life--and can imagine how amazed and thrilled I will be to get to know this second little person who has so determinedly picked me, now. But still. Sometimes it just feels so utterly weird that he's totally dependent on me. That he's my kid. Mine.
Sometimes when this feeling strikes it's like I'm watching myself from somewhere else.
Me. 38 weeks pregnant. Waiting.
***
On a completely unrelated topic I've begun to notice that I expend a lot of useless energy doing things twice--rather than just following through on the first go round. I take the laundry out of the dryer and leave it sitting on the couch instead of folding it right then and there. I bring in the to-go cup from the car, but skip putting it in the dish washer. Little stuff. But then later I'm playing catch up, putting stuff away where it should be. Do you ever find yourself doing this? It's some sort of weird head game I play with myself. But it's got to change.
There is no way I'm going to survive having two if I don't become more efficient.
So. What I want to know from you is: how are you efficient? What are your top 2-3 time and effort saving daily tactics? How do you get your life done without feeling like your life is doing you? And especially, how do you do this with more than one kid?
Done with work. Done. Soo happy.
Last night, beautiful dark snow squalls. Leaving work, it looked like a rainbow rinsed of color in the sky above the door. An arch of gray and white, the first fat flakes hitting my tear stained cheeks.
This morning, blue skies, blue jays plump against the cold in the lilac tree by the feeder, golden light on the bar branches.
Eating Irish oatmeal, cream and strawberries & making lists in this notebook.
