Sometimes song...
A weekend in Quebec
Sinking into the plush down of a king sized bed. Chocolates on the pillow. Bright green apples in a black ceramic bowl on the end table. Lattes in the morning in white cups with saucers, firelight, flaky croissants and tall slender glasses of orange juice.
Walking cobblestone streets in the icy cold. Like a family of dragons, our breath clouding up around us every time we spoke or laughed. Quilted down jackets. Shearling gloves. Bean in a snowsuit with so many layers of wool and fleece beneath it, he could barely bend his knees.
Carnival horns, and ruckus cheering. An ice palace. Snow sculptures. Dog sled races, paws pounding down a snowy path through the turning streets of the old city. Hot mulled wine and French onion soup. Clouds of steam rising up from the hot chocolate gripped in Bean’s mittened hands.
Collapsing into bed with milk and PBJ sandwiches for lunch, wearing long johns and watching Inuit cartoons on TV. Bean sitting on the wide windowsill showing his monkey and cheetah the giddy five story view below.
Sipping dry red wine and eating warmed olives and toasted spicy almonds in the lounge, remembering what it feels like to be an adult with some place to be after 8pm. Shimmying close on the couch and kissing. Playing Gin. Winning. Laughing.
Stopping at a tiny bakery to buy delicate almond, orange & chocolate cookies, crispy and thin. Perfect discs of sweetness to melt in our mouths. Eating crepes hot of the griddle, chocolate everywhere.
Riding the plummeting drop in a little glass rail car, with the wide sweep of the St. Lawrence below us. Stopping in small shops to warm our fingers, Bean jumping from every stoop. Street musicians with cold fingers playing the fiddle, frozen snow breaking under foot.
Sandwiches on warm baguettes and then the long ride home, sun drenched across the wide flat expanse between here and there. Snow covered and wind swept fields, the sun sinking west. Full of joy to finally have had time to simply be: a family, a lover, a wanderer in a foreign city. So good. A perfect, perfect birthday weekend.
Photos here. I'll be putting more up, once I've found the other flash card in our luggage.
PS: thank you SO MUCH for all your awesome birthday wishes!
Tomorrow, my birthday
Tomorrow is my birthday. 29, and I think I look old this year.
You spend all your late teens and early twenties wishing you were older, and then suddenly, without realizing it you’ve slipped to the other side, where you consider getting carded a complement, and for some reason you can’t get the fact out of your head that some guy at work asked you if you were 36.
Our culture’s idealization of youth creeps in and airbrushes away all the brave, vibrant, sexy sides of aging. On a bad day I buy into that.
But the thing is, deeper down a big part of me that likes getting old. I like my crows feet and my perpetually furrowed brows, because they’re a testament to the life I’ve lived. It’s been wild, and sometimes heartbreaking, it’s also been passionate and full—and I’ve barely been alive three decades.
I’ve always thought Georgia OKeefe was one of the most gorgeous women in the world, especially in her later portraits. Something about the way she held her head---up, fiercely, with her chin forward, that spoke volumes about her courageous life and passionate arte. Also something about Tasha Tudor’s wild white hair and ruddy cheeks that spells out beauty to me: she’s a woman who does what she wants. In fact, when I think of women whose features I admire, most do not adhere to the modern, product enhanced perception of beauty. I want to look real still in thirty years, with some lines to show for it.
But tonight, on the eve of my birthday, I can’t help taking stock. Can’t help going back over a handful of self portraits I’ve taken over the past few months, looking for some outer clues about the woman I’m becoming. Maybe I do look older this year.
Driving to work by myself in the morning, as I pass the field where the frost has turned everything into a delicate filigree of white and the pale purple mountain is suddenly flooded with the first golden light of the sun, I’m utterly grateful. Grateful for these hands with wrinkles finely cross-hatching the backs. Grateful for soft expanse of my belly that gave birth. Grateful for my brilliance of my heart and mind that rush up inside my soul like the wild circling flight of the lone hawk I watched this morning, above the snow covered meadow, with the sun turning it’s wings to fire.
And if the consequence of this giddy passion for life is aging, I’ll take it, crows feet and all.
Small things I'm grateful for.
A flock of clouds, their underbellies pink and gold, just before sunset.
Running hard at the gym, just over 8 minute miles.
Doing 25 push ups in a row.
Rearranging furniture in my classroom, so the sun slants just so in the morning and the picture books are easier to browse through.
Getting a note from a kid saying, "Thanks for being my teacher, I love you"
Passing the two shaggy horses on our road, and seeing their breath rise up in the cold air.
Bean saying yes now instead of just no.
Reading short stories (because when is there time for long ones, lately?)
Mysterious birthday plans for the weekend.
Painting small pictures every day.
Morning writing
(Maple syrup on snow.)
Golden light fills my studio, the first of the morning. The sun, just up, climbs the rungs of the trees. Its smooth white disc of light is etched with a crosshatching of twigs, snow dusted and dark. Last night I made plans to wake up and write for an hour while the newness of day still holds some secrets in. So I am here, wearing my husband’s burly wool sweater and socks pulled up to my calves. My hair is still rumpled from sleep. I haven’t brushed my teeth. But something feels alive in me that allows me to fling a few unguarded sentences at the page.
After forty minutes of revising, the light spreading across my room has turned pale and bright with day. The sun has climbed sky’s ladder now, its face well above the trees, and the mountains look like cardboard cut-outs along the horizon, painted dusty blue. I go down to the kitchen where DH is mopping spilled coffee from the soapstone counter, and Bean, wearing his blue striped train conductor hat, is twirling about the room. They’ve made a fire, but it’s still cold. I pour coffee and maple syrup and milk into a pan and reheat it until the steam rises, and then pour it into a white enamel mug. With a stack of buttered toast, I head back upstairs, back to this desk piled high with books and papers where I wait for words to fit the empty spaces on the page.
After revising the entire essay, reworking sections again and again until the words fit together into a mosaic that I can understand, and that, at least in part, take on the shape of what I’m trying to know, they bust into my studio grinning. It’s 10am now and my coffee is cold. DH is ready for a shower, but before he goes he pulls me close, his hands traveling up under my sweater touching my hot skin. Bean circles my studio, a wreck after preparing for my showing. Empty frames litter the floor. Scraps of paper, one shearling clog, a case of rubber alphabet stamps. He sings, tunelessly, sweetly, as he collects and reorganizes the loot this space provides: tabs of watercolor paint, the wingnuts on the easel, a drawer full of cards, a futon frame without the mattress. He lies on it, his legs and arms spread out to account for the gaps. Perfect balance.
I finish reading This Autumn Morning, by Gretel Ehrlich. It’s an essay in the 1991 collection of Best American Essays, and it speaks to me in a language I know: one of loss and natural wonder both. As I read I relearn something about this art form that I love. That words can travel around and around the heart of whatever it is you’re trying to say, like the circles spreading outward from a pebble tossed. They do not need to go straight like arrows.
23 Months
Dear Bean, The sentences have begun. Verbs strung together with prepositions and nouns; laughter punctuating the funny parts.
In the bath tonight, the water up past your frog belly, and your sandy hair flecked with droplets, you pulled a pair of your summer sunglasses connected by an elastic band up around your legs. “Like pulling underwear on,†you said, enunciating every syllable of underwear carefully, grinning from ear to ear. Indeed. Just like that.
Or earlier driving home, watching the dalmation dots of snow falling against the inky dark of night—and you said, “It’s snowing out there!â€
It’s amazing how tense has suddenly started to inhabit your language and your world. Present participles are flecked across the juicy terrain of your vocabulary like seeds in a wedge of watermelon. I love watching you unwrap language, making it yours. You’re so close to the dynamic, wild part of language that beats right at the heart of meaning and emotion, that you can still get away with making words when you can’t say the ones we use. I wish I could still do as much. Love seems like such a small word when I ask it to describe the endless scope of my feelings for you.
I picture you one day reading through this stack of letters, that I've typed and once posted on a long-defunct blog, and I wonder what you’ll be like then. Tall. Maybe with a kid of your own. I try to fathom you with chest hair, and my brain lurches to a full stop. Something about watching you grow has planted me unequivocally within the time-space continuum of now the way nothing else ever has. Before you, I lived with the delusion that I could imagine the future; that if I planned or tried, the outcome would be certain. Now I see how impossible this is, and how foolhardy. There is nothing but now, with your little off-tune songs, and your new big-boy underpants, and your glasses of milk.
Nothing but right now:
You take my face in your hands after I pick you up from daycare at the gym and pull me close. Then you kiss me, a smile beaming across your face.
On your yellow plastic sled, you are a red sausage of snowsuit and rosy cheeks. You zip by in a blur, with perfect balance, leaning from one side to the other like you’ve been sledding for years. And you’re grin at the bottom of the hill? Nothing could be more beautiful.
You’re eating vanilla ice cream with warm cherries. You stir the cream in the bowl as it melts, your face covered with purple syrup. Then you pick the bowl up and your face disappears behind it’s dome. You drink, then smack your lips, then lick the edges of the bowl.
I come home after work, and you’re there, eating snack with daddy. Your face is covered with peanut butter, and your hair tousled. You run to me, arms perpendicular to your body, a jet plane of affection zeroing in on me.
I love you,
Mama
Unrelated bits & pieces
* I’ve been enjoying creating small pieces of art nearly every day. I’m going with the idea of altering a book. This particular book was found in the basement at my inlaws house, and is called The Love Affair, which offers bits of advice such as the following:
The average man decidedly shrinks from what he calls a ‘brainy’ or ‘highbrow’ woman, and if she is in the unfortunate position of having to secure his attention, no man of her own type being available, she must conceal her intellectuality instead of trying to use it as a blandishment, which is a mistake very frequently made.
Better off as an altered book, don’t you think? Or perhaps this is my problem. I use both my brainy and highbrowness as blandishment. Don’t you? It’s fun to paint blithely over the text, watching how certain words or bits of text come to the fore while others become completely submerged.
* I’ve decided that I’m going to spend several months taking a picture of DH every day. A sort of practice in observation. I want to see what I notice. I’ve never made him the focus of any creative/artistic endeavor and want to spend some time with the images I take and see where it goes. See what I learn, about him. So much of him I don’t really know. Isn’t this almost always the way it is with the people you love? You think you know them, but really, you only know these small slivers, like looking up at a new moon and thinking that tiny sickle is all of it.
* The cold snap that has swept across the country and left orange groves in California frozen, and people without power in Oklahoma has hit here with a vengeance. -15 degrees out, and our pipes in the upstairs bathroom froze. Huh? Yeah, you read that right. Tomorrow will be day three without a shower. Really. Whimper.
Wanting to dream
We went rock climbing. I haven’t climbed since before I was pregnant, and my mind and body marveled at the sudden feeling vertical; instinct sending rapid telegraphs along tendons, muscles quivering. My heart thrumming in my chest, chalk on my palms, and then swinging out into open space at the top of the wall before the belay down. It felt good to simply say, I don’t know. And also to say my heart is breaking, but that I’m hopeful. Very hopeful.
Because this is true. I am. And I have reason to be. We’re talking now, daily, and part of what we’re talking about is what really matters. Sometimes it feels a bit like walking through the odds and ends of furniture and relics in an antique store looking for a particular set of silver spoons, but we’re finding things we didn’t know we wanted or cared about at all.
And it’s hard to say what it is we really want. We thought this was it: on this land, in this house, but somehow we’re drowning here. Debt swallowing up our love, and our freedom both. And also, because though we dreamed of this: mossy wooded trails and apple trees and kind neighbors, we never thought to ask ourselves when we wanted this, and what else we really wanted in our lives.
So we’re starting over, and asking this: what really matters? And our answers shock us both. To see the night sky in Australia. To bike together across Europe. To travel through the west with Bean and hike the mountains there. To shout out into the vast space of the Grand Canyon. To work on a coffee plantation in Central America. To spend a month on a sailboat. To teach in a foreign country. To have another child. To write. To publish. To live a life rich with experience.
Startled, we look at each other from opposite ends of the couch. Maybe we want more than this, here, right now. Maybe we need more, to keep us whole.
And also, when I came back after a night away, hugging him, pressing my head into his chest in that place right under the curve of his chin, I felt like I was home.
Hi. Already.
Hello, Internets !
I haven't checked my stats in so long, I believe I've forgotten my passwords. But I know that there are many cool people out there who come here, and some of you write me absolutely awesome emails, or send me lovely chocolate covered figs, or gorgeous photos, or cds with amazing girly housewarming tunes (thank you, thank you, a zillion times, thank you!)
But others of you I'm sure, lurk your way through my posts each day, never toching your keyboard. And in your honor, it's that week again. That's right. NATIONAL DELURKING WEEK. Go ahead, say hi. Every single one of you. You will make my day. My week, even. Really. And just for you, I painted this picture (in keeping with my January art every day resolution.)
Little things
Celebrating little things: potty training (thank you for all the tips!), my first art show (it's up, and my pieces look beautiful!), finally finding a baby sitter, starting a clay class with DH (the past two weeks have been so hopeful, so tenuously joyous, so tender), and really pretty underwear.
Also this: planning to do a little piece of art every single day for a month. It's my uberlist this year: starting small, each month, with something that reminds me to be, to breathe, to grow. Care to join me? Come on, even if you've never made art in your life. I dare you.
Underpants!
His first pair! He ran around the kitchen wildly, high stepping, stomping, grinning. He asked to inspect Mama's underpants and Daddy's underpants. He pulled his up, and pulled them down. We took a special trip to the mall tonight to purchase them, as it seems, Bean is ready for potty training.
Gasp. How did we possibly get here, from here? All the cliche's collide in my mind. How quickly they grow, really. I'm still having trouble picturing what diaperless is like. And of course I need advice. Spill please.
The details: after the gym two nights ago, waiting for DH I gave Bean a cup and showed him how to work the drinking fountain. He was in heaven, and six cups of water and a wet shirt later, DH showed up, we drove home, and I striped the little guy down to his birthday suit. But then, being the utterly lazy mama I am, I decided that the forty five minutes of dinner and and playtime before bed were not enough to warrent the hassel of daipering, so I put him in longjohns and showed him the potty. Causually, I mentioned, "If you need to go potty, you can sit on this one like a big boy." Then I went about cleaning up the living room, and holy crap, the kid was sitting on the potty and GOING.
He was wildly excited. I was wildly excited. He proceeded to go like six or seven times (all the water!) and each time was delighted to show me his production, and to flush with abandon.
Since then, both nights we've had successes--and an amazing poop on the potty! Really. And he wiped. (Apparently all of the times he's made himself at home in the bathroom while we're occupied on the white thrown have paid off...worth it, but still. Just once it'd be nice to do my business without having someone try to shove toilet paper down behind me before I'm through.)
Of course, there were a few accidents, but what a way to start, right? What should I do next? For car travel? Night time? Trips out?
You web mamas rock my world.
Here’s the thing
My mother in law may have, most likely, found my blog. This blog. This place where I write obstinately and openly and whole-heartedly. This place where one minute I’m cold and the next I’m hot, where I fling wildly from one end of the spectrum of emotions to the other, and where I delve, deeply into whatever the present moment means. The thing is, plenty of people from my ‘real life’ read this blog. Some have obsessively googled their way here against my better wishes, and others have been invited because they get me, and they get that this place provides me with a kind of outlet and solace that my life otherwise doesn’t provide, and they give me space to allow this to happen.
But here’s the thing. My mother in law, though I dearly love her, isn’t someone who knows me deeply enough to create a frame of reference for what I write here. She doesn’t know how to locate the ore in what I write to true the compass needle north; to make what I write a part of a larger topography of meaning for my life. And also, I write here in a way I do not want to share with her, because inevitably, invariably, what I write here will then wend its way back into my life, misconstrued and out of place, in the form of worried queries, small questions, anxious phone messages.
So much spans the gap between us—faith, age, perspective—we couldn’t be farther apart in how we live and think and grow. Which isn’t to say that we’re not close, for we are, when we’re together, in a particular way. We hug and laugh, and she makes the world’s best coffee, and we talk about the latest Tom Cruise scandal, and rehash to it’s minutia every last adorable thing Bean did. And I love having this kind of relationship in my life. I love her easy generosity, her obsession with shopping, and the way that anything my kid does makes her entire day. But the thing is, there is still that vast uncharted territory between us, and it’s there because I need it to be there. It’s there because I am a deeply private person.
Okay, so maybe I’m an idiot to come here at all, having just made that claim. I can see how ludicrous it is to say that I come here to find solace and privacy—because, duh, the Internet is the antithesis of that. Right? I get that it is ridiculous for me to harbor the belief that a public blog is place where I can write and not have to watch my step, or watch my back, or create in endless detail the specific context for everything I write. But truthfully, that is exactly why I come here.
Since I started blogging, I’ve had visitors from Saudi Arabia and Hawaii, from Istanbul and Seoul. Complete strangers send me gifts. People I would never have the opportunity of knowing have become amazing friends, half the world away. I get nearly all my parenting advice from people I’ve never met in person. And yet, almost everyone who comes here, comes here with the knowledge that this small window looks in on the shape of my life, right now, today, and respects that. Most people seem to get that what I write will be as fickle as the tide. Up one day, down the next. That I’ll toss caution to the wind and say what’s on my mind, walking the thin ledge of risk, because I’m trying to reach out and touch the heart of something that is a little bigger than me; because I am hoping that some shred of what I write matters in a new way to someone else. Or so I’d like to hope. This is, after all, why I write here. Because the thirsting part of my writer’s soul wants to grab hold of even the smallest thread dangling from the tapestry of human existence, and make something with it.
So I’m not sure what to do exactly. Not sure where to go with this or how to proceed. The idea of giving up this blog is worse right now than the thought of being plagued by misinterpretation. And perhaps this is all good training wheels. Hell, if I write a book (and I will!) you can bet I’ll be running pell mell across the tight rope of risk, wearing nothing but pair of flimsy paper wings and the wildest grin you’ve ever seen, so I might as well get used to the feeling of being gawked at by the people I love. But I wish, for now anyway, that things could go back to the way they were. That I could write—without feeling like I have to answer for what I write, or explain it; and that the good news and the bad, is taken with a grain of salt, or several, and doesn’t immediately come back to me, via a voicemail. Alas, bridges always seem to be burning while the artist howls at the moon.
masthead
Time for a new masthead. I have no clue what I'm doing, but sometimes it is utterly satisfying to spend several late-night hours playing with photoshop. If I knew what half the tools did, just think how smokin' I'd be! Here are a couple of older mastheads that I've had up. Today: breakfast out, somewhere, because there is neither milk nor bread in our empty, empty fridge. Then to the craft store to buy frames for the last of my paintings to go up in the show, if I'm still allowed to hang them--tardy as I am with the whole thing. Somehow, I really did manage to forget all about it. Oh, and before I forget, check out the new gallery format I'm trying. Better. Not great, but better, right? Anyone want to design me a real one? Pretty please?
One more thing, Bean's second birthday is coming up in a month. I want to have a fun little shindig for some of his little toddler friends, and their parents, but I'm worthless at envisioning such events. Help. What are some good, low-stress, fun things to do at a two-year old's birthday? (There may not be snow...there should be snow, but the weather has been wacky this year!)
A new start
Before it melted, the snow was boot deep and crystalline. Now unseasonably warm rains have returned and the ground is slick with black ice at night. Above the bald mountains that rise up from the lake, the full moon was setting just as the sun was rising this morning, white and round like a plate against the pale tablecloth of pink and blue.
I’m busy again, but the past two days have been deeply satisfying. DH and I keep talking, and each time it’s getting easier and richer. We’re moving, not stagnant, and also we’re starting to train for a half marathon. Five miles at the gym yesterday, and then dinner all together. Ice cream with cherries for dessert, and Bean licking his bowl. We’re trying to be gentler with each other than before, and this is good.
I’m also back in the thick of creative work, which I love. Somehow I managed to forget I’m doing an art showing in a café and am supposed to hang my work this weekend, so now my studio is spread with frames and canvasses, as I scurry to prepare for the show. I like it this way, a patchwork of rectangles and brushstrokes.
A good way to start the new year.
Happy new year!
I cannot think of a better way to toast in the new year than to hurtle downhill on a sled. Wild, silly fun. Bean’s grin spreading like sunshine across his face. DH laughing, truly in the moment and content, just before he bites snow for the hundredth time. The heat of our breath rising up against the cold air, and in between our giggling, how quite the landscape is covered in snow.
I am ready for a new year. And if I had to distill my resolutions for this year into one pure wish, it would be this: to bring loving devotion to every single moment.
I'll probably write an uberlist over here, tomorrow. In the meantime, if you had to pick one thing for this year--one theme, one goal, what would it be?
Also, happy new year to all of you!
Merry & bright
A perfect sourcream apple cake, bright blue skies, an orange tractor with doors that really open, lick-your-fingers good sticky cinnamon buns, sleeping in so late, singing to the tree with real candels lit, Bean's face on at 6am on Christmas morning, tossled hair, kissing, watching Holiday at the movie theater, snuggled up with my guy, and wishing for snow. It was a lovely holiday. I hope yours was too!
Today I'm slated to clean my studio which is a ferocious mess of slick papers, gel medium, glue and stamps; and to wander downtown taking advantage of half-off sales, and hot chocolate.
Things that are good:
* Sucking on a maple lollypop while doing secretive artsy things. * Watching the neighbor kids put on a Christmas play in the barn with sheep and donkeys, and all the grown ups singing carols.
* Sipping hot cider and talking to neighbors while Bean raced around with a delicate waffle cookie clenched tightly in both hands.
* The row of metal snowflake lights hanging in our kitchen.
* The fact that today was the last day of school, and that tomorrow I will get to sleep in tomorrow with DH under the luxury of a double down comforter (so snug!)
*Plans for delivering cookies to our neighbors with Bean in the red wagon, tomorrow.
The view (and the most random, grumpy post ever)
Here are a bunch of photos I took the other night when the light was doing the most incredible things. On my way home the stormy sky was suddenly ripped open and sun burst through, right in front of the rain—creating the most remarkable and vibrant rainbow I have ever seen. Of course, I didn’t get the camera until after it had faded (rainbows never look as beautiful as they do in real life anyway), but I did walk out onto the cold damp grass to see raindrops hanging like bright jewels from every twig and branch.
I can make no guarantees about where this post will go because I’m sick with an awful stomach bug—the second time this year, and I’m hating every minute of it. My head feels like it’s in a vice, and I feel utter anguish that I’ve left my class to some poor substitute the week before vacation. The kids are so excitable right now; we’ve discussed where Santa lives about a hundred times, and still, the conversation seems to wend its way there. As they terrorize the sub, I’ll spend tomorrow on the couch with Bean patting my cheek and saying, Mama, sick, or more urgently, Mama, get up!
I got whatever I have from DH who woke up yesterday morning feeling sick. To make matters worse, the garbage disposal chose yesterday to jam, which in turn caused the dishwasher to spew its backwash into the sink drain and the sink to start filling. Lovely, no? In a moment of flawless teamwork, a very feverish DH and I worked together to find and remove the pieces of broken plate that had fallen into it, and then, as he retired to the couch threatening to faint, I had to wrestle the darn thing back into place. Sort of like wrestling a greased pig made out of metal. I reinstalled it, to my credit (all kudos are welcome—it was the most disgusting, awkward, frustrating thing I’ve done in a long while!)
This is possibly the least festive I’ve felt at the approach of the holidays, EVER. We bought wreathes the other day, but besides that and baking cookies, our house is decidedly un-holiday like. Oh dear, I’ll stop moping when my stomach stops feeling like someone is excavating it with a child’s sized plastic bulldozer.
22 months
Dear Bean, As though your heartbeat were the metronome of my time passing, your growing marks my aging. You’re so big now, tousle headed and bright eyed. You stand mid-thigh to me. Two months shy of two years old, you carry rocks and cookies and other small treasures in your pockets. You are passionate about tractors and backhoes and mud and books. You take long walks with us along the muddy dirt road, stomping in puddles and pointing at birds. Recently you began speaking in sentences, stringing syllables together, like so many bright beads on the sea glass necklace of language, and it’s a wonder to hear what you have to say.
In the past two months, the trees have turned into skeletons of bark and twigs and on cold mornings you put your own boots on. You have learned to climb up onto the stools in the kitchen, and we spend many family meals there, the three of us in a circle of yellow light around the butcher block island, passing forks and trying to carry on conversations. With words, you now have the ability to express that you want specific things, right this second. Mama, more milk please. Mama, mama, mama, milk!
The past two months have been difficult though. Not because of you exactly—your beautiful smiles fill up our hearts with heady glee and wonderment—but because your presence makes our lives full to saturation. Since you, there have been few moments for downtime, and fewer moments when your Daddy and I have a chance to gather each other up in our arms and really look at each other.
Parenthood took us like a storm at sea. Together our small red boat of tenderness , we threw ourselves into the process of staying afloat, and have somehow lost track of who we are for each other. The compass of our life trued towards you; your needs so primal and huge pulled our hearts with fierce gravitational tug. But gradually over the past two months, as you’ve become less needy and more independent, we find ourselves trying to redirect the vessel of our love. Often, we find ourselves flailing about, clutching at the driftwood of who we were. So much has changed. The raw fibers of our selves have been stretched and pummeled utterly.
So the past few months have been drenched with moments where we face each other on the shore of our love and find ourselves unbalanced and hesitant at the edge of the rubble-strewn tide line that stretches out between us. Invariably, you are right there, asking for more noodles, or “Mama, read book, now†and we only manage jagged interjected sentences. Or it’s late at night, and you’re finally asleep, and we’re so exhausted that everything we say comes out slanted and biting.
It’s hard to be in this place. Here, where we can see how the routines that have grown up out of necessity, have made deep grooves across the surface of our lives and love. More than either of us would like to admit, things have become for granted. We spend days hip deep in the mud of surviving; arguing again and again about the things of daily life that accumulate with great banality and abundance day after day. The dishes, the bills, dinner, laundry.
I’m writing about this because someday you’ll be tall and you’ll be shaving, and also, because someday you’ll be in love and you’ll be trying to figure all this out for yourself. I’m also writing about this because I want you to understand how loving travels the full arc between passion and deep despair, and how a lot of the time you’ll find yourself somewhere in the middle of it, flailing like a fish, one moment in the sweetest water, and the next on the harshest sand.
Just now, as I was writing you and Daddy burst into my studio, full of morning excitement, ready to do things with the day. It’s 10:30 am, the weekend before Christmas, and there are cookies to be made, and shopping to be done, and decorations to be hung. Daddy wraps his arms around me, and right away you climb onto my lap, grabbing first at the pencils on my desk, then going for my keyboard. In the three minutes you are in my studio, you scribble in my notebook, collapse my easel, and climb onto the futon, wanting to be read Good Night Moon. You are like a sudden rip tide; when you’re present, you fill the room up and make it impossible for me to do anything but swim with the current, keeping track of the horizon in the distance.
But I’m grateful for this. For the struggle of it. I realize how easy it would be for me to succumb to simply letting life change me gradually and unintentionally, were it not for the latent urgency you bring to my life. When you woke up two mornings ago, I carried you into our room and tucked you into bed between Daddy and I. There in the dark, while both of us were trying for a few more minutes of sleep you began to sing, ever so softly. Suddenly I realized you were singing all the words to the lullaby I sing you every night. Go to sleep, you sang and stroked my face, and goodnight, and tomorrow will come soon. You sang so sweetly and off key, but you had every word right, and I could feel my heart start thudding with sudden awe. You learned to sing over night, and here I am barely able to get around the width of my ego to say I’m sorry when I’ve hurt your daddy unintentionally, or when I’m so tired that I have nothing to say beyond the superficial.
I opened my eyes and realized you were watching me as you sang. This is what I mean about urgency. You’re watching me. Being your mama I am reminded daily, again and again, of our need and our capacity to grow, to learn, and to become.
I love you, Mama
Mama, get out
Bean spent the weekend with his Daddy in NJ, leaving me to a blissful empty house to finally get some serious writing done. Six hours at a stretch, uniterrupted. Going to bed in the wee hours of morning and sleeping in. Time to actually revise what I write. Oh lordy, it was good. But man, I missed those two! On the way home tonight, DH called and then put me on speaker phone so I could talk to the little guy. I told him how excited I was to see him and how much I loved him, and DH said he started grinning, and then looked at the phone and in a plaintive voice said, "Mama, get out."
Needless to say, I kissed every square inch of his face when I got to finally pick him up and snuggle with him tonight.