Intention

Time to return to the things that matter. To wake up bumble-headed and still trialing the wild ponies of dreams, pour tea, and write. To show up, because this is what I want to do with my life. Even when showing up means having a staring contest with the page, while the birds sing jubulently outside; and dawn spreads across the gravel and the new buds and the eaves. I'm determined, because I have to be, because this is what I've chosen. Some days I come away with nothing. Other days, a few sentences, like a pocket full of sea glass shards. Or poems, that tumble from nowhere before I'm even awake.

Two versions of Worship:

I kneel down at the arbor of another day kissing the small pebbles of wonder that press into my knees, the palms of my hands, the soles of my feet I gather the petals that have drifted earthwards from the quivering globes of roses, and press them to my heart

April 24

**

my heart is like a music box; many pronged tin cylinder, twirling making steady, frail music rise joining the windstorm of my soul where the notes are torn and the song becomes wild and tumultuous and I feel very small.

April 25

"Look where I pooped," he said.

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?

Such goodness

The windows are still open at ten thirty, and the air is warm and soft. Finally the spring peepers have arrived, and on our way back from clay class tonight, DH brought the car to a slow crawl as we drove past the boggy swamp at the edge of our road, where their treble chorus was rising up—spelling out all verbs and adjectives of amphibian delight. I have vacation this week, and despite the fact that I have either the world’s most persistent head cold, or allergies, or both, my good mood cannot be dampened. First off, I just got back yesterday from seeing Blue Poppy and Lizardek for the weekend, which simply put was AMAZING. It felt nothing like driving off into the backwoods on narrow twisty roads to meet perfect strangers, though DH kinda thought that was exactly what I was doing. “Are you SURE you want to go hang out with people you met through BLOGGING?” He muttered before I left.

Going to meet these two incredible women for the first time in person, felt like going to see people I’d known forever. We slipped effortlessly into conversation over tea and wine and toasty sandwiches. We hiked tall mountains to take in the wind breathtaking expanse of mountains and lakes, and we lolled with BP’s butterscotch hounds in the sunlight.

They are brilliant, funny, exquisite, generous women. I totally heart both of them. I’ll stop now, since I’m sure you get the idea.

Driving home, I opened the sunroof and sang at the top of my lungs with the radio, singing in my own way, a million arpeggios of gratitude, and came home to an immaculately cleaned house, and my two favorite guys. Both were sporting wind-tousled hair and smudges on their pants. Doors were hung in my absence, puddles were stomped in. The perfect start to a week off.

Giddy

Soaking up sun. We walk, his little hand in my big one. A constant narrative tumbling off his tongue like the little stream we stop to wade through in the field. No clouds, all day. And I can't keep from smiling because I'm off to see Lizardek and Blue Poppy. Certain delight.

Soaking up sunshine

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

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.

Grin.

Mail.

The small envelope arrived. With it a thousand other possibilities, and certain (if not temporary) heartache.

Thinking Blogger Awards--Meme & Happy Easter

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.

Running Mix

Bette Davis Eyes-- Kim CarnesSuddenly I See---KT Tunstall Sexual--Amber Deeper And Deeper---Madonna Erotica Above The Clouds ---Amber Back In My Life--Alice DeeJay Around The World--ATC Don't Tell Me---Madonna What You Waiting For----Gwen Stefani Take On Me---a-Ha Better Off Alone ---Alice DeeJay My Heart Goes Bang---Dead Or Alive Danger Zone---Kenny Loggins Call Me---Blondie Missing---Everything But The Girl Eye of the Tiger ----Suvivor Move With Me---Neneh Cherry

Back to the gym this week, after a week off feeling sickish. It's still mud season here, and still cold, but my sister is luring me westward for a half marathon this summer... and some tiathlons closer to home are looking better and better, especially since the wicked spinning class I took last week that reminded me of how much I love to ride.

Enjoy the mix, and yes, I know, most of it is totally 80's throwback music. But listen to it while you're running a 5k. It works, trust me.

Now and again

On the windowsill in a tall glass vase, the leggy branches I cut from the forsythia and the lilac bushes a week ago have exploded into a riot of delicate yellow blossoms and green leaves; stamens licking the warm indoor air, waiting for kiss of the honey bee that won’t arrive. Instead, the cat rubs up against the branches, her coat dappled with evening sunlight.

DH is practicing guitar, and the melody circles me. It lilts and flutters, like birds lifting off high wires in unison to wing the peripheries of the field before alighting again. He’s gotten good, recently, under the instruction of a teacher for the first time in his life, and I like the way his practice has become the soundtrack for my thoughts; the way words weave gradually, to the rhythm of his song.

Last night we lay, chest to belly on the couch and talked about my worries and our dreams. I say my worries, because they are mine mostly. I’m somehow prone to lurching into worry anytime there isn’t an enchanting or certain goal in front of me. I’m the kind of girl who needs to be able to lie on the top of a grassy knoll, arms akimbo, looking up at the dark bowl of twirling stars, and have the flashlight and the star charts and the information guides about every single constellation.

I’m the girl who disembarked from the airplane at the tiny Puerto Rico airport without any plans for lodging, or transportation, or even a destination in mind. But I was also the one who had read Lonely Planet cover to cover, and dog-eared every back-door eatery and local beach and the place to get the best chorros. I wandered for days, no—weeks---through Florence, Italy, without any plans or specific sightseeing goals, and yet, I had the background info on every statue, fountain, cathedral, piece of art and small gelato joint I encountered. I can’t help it.

So when it comes to our life: mine and his and ours together with our two-year-old gorgeous little tow-headed Beansprout, I get listless and unmoored when we don’t talk about plans or have any long range goals on the table. I need things like rosebushes, which have always spoken the eloquent language of staying put to me, and I need things like raised garden beds, and bonfires, and dinner parties and blueprints for building a barn and a studio. So when we don’t talk about these things enough, or when we don’t talk about them at all for months on end, I become frantic and anxious and uncertain. Then I start inadvertently unraveling all the exquisitely beautiful bits of fabric that make up the patchwork quilt of the life we have together.

Wanderlust bites me, and spreads across the map of my body like a blueblack bruise of longing. I quaver, reading paragraphs about Trinidad or the Solomon Islands or Morocco, and want suddenly and fiercely to upend everything and just be off. I feel shaky in the everyday bushel basket of my life, as though with the least little jostle I’m apt to send all the fruit tumbling out, comparing myself first to one single friend and then to another set of friends, new lovebirds, who are still starry eyed virgins when it comes to living in the thick of love and family. I start checking the emergency exits and scribbling escape plans on bakery napkins while eating bagels with the two amazing guys who fill my days with their huge long-lashed eyes and easy grins.

I forget that right here, where we are, is a hard-won sweetness. I forget how much we have here : this house, with its hundred-year-old barn timbers and it’s expanse of soapstone counters and farmers sink and honey colored floors, is something we’ve only just acquired, with our bare hands and much love, and ounce after ounce of determination. I forget that this boy of ours, who stopped me the other day as I knelt in front of him on the kitchen floor, and said, “I like your earrings mama, they’re pretty,” as he fingered each abalone disk, is someone we’ve known for just two short years. I forget how when we’re right, we’re right like the taste of a ripe summer peach.

I forget how our love stretches out on either side of us like the guy-wires that keep bridges and steeples and trapeze artist’s hoops aloft. I forget how it has lasted, and I forget how it keeps guiding our lives back to safety and solace, or at least back to our bedroom where we make love in a hot furry of kisses. I forget that it’s been almost eight years of knowing this man, of loving him, of laughing with him, and sometimes because I forget, I toss myself at odds against what we have made together. Then I fleck the pages of my days with tears and worry; I lie restless at night, I overanalyze and over-calculate and grow easily fragile and frantic like a bevy of startled quail.

So last night, belly to chest, listening to the sound of his heart beating and feeling the warmth of his skin rising up through the cotton of his shirt, we talked about our plans and our love. How for once, for the love of god, will I just settle down for a while and quit inadvertently sabotaging the entire thing because I need everything mapped out and planned to the nth degree before I can just let go and wing it?

He laughed when I kept telling him how I need him to remind me over and over again of what it is we want, here, now.

“Because I forget,” I said.

It’s true, I really do.

So he looked at me with his languid topaz colored eyes and told me again: We want to settle here for a few years, make a garden, keep chickens, gather a big circle of friends close, and become a small but certain cog in the wheel of our community.

Every fiber in my being hums in resonance. Yes, I want this. But also this: that after giving it a fighting chance, we can up and off into the wild blue yonder if that’s still what our fancy craves.

He’s game for that too, my big muscled Italian with his espresso habit and his guitar melodies. Game for living in Italy for a year, or exploring the beach towns of California or Hawaii. But for now, here, it’s almost spring and we have a garden to plan.

rollercoaster

Feels like I was on a rollercoaster all weekend. Hanging out with a sick Bean, soaking up sun, spending time with really good friends, feeling moody and then, logically coming down with a fever tonight. I'm trying to get my bearings now, and feeling dizzy both literally and figuratively.

Sickie nuggles

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.

Seeking

Trying to find beauty tonight, and striving to ask the right questions of the universe, but feeling shaky about it all. Trying to put the right words out there, the right prayers, the right hopes, so that joy floods into my life and makes me full. Some days this is easier to do than others. Sometimes its hard to even be right here, in this moment, even for a moment without fragmenting into worry and what-ifs.

Thank you for writing all your little rituals--the things you do to find solace and serentity and balance every day. I loved reading them.

I still haven't made it back onto Dh's computer to get the song title print-out for that running mix (which is totally embarrasingly 80's, but definitely rockin'!)...but in the meantime, anyone who hasn't checked out Pandora should, immediately. I'm so undaring when it comes to buying CDs, and I almost never hear new music on the radio (I listen to NPR on the way to work.) This has become my way to venture into new uncharted music territory.. I'd love to know: who are your top five favorite musicians right now?

Finding the beat

Last week I was like a satellite thrown out of orbit, twirling in crazy loops from all the scrambled sleep, and the on-edge waiting. I let myself slip haphazardly out of my routine of writing mornings, first thing while the house is still sighing in its sleep.

I’d hear the alarm, and peer at it through mostly closed lashes and then hit the snooze button with vigor, before turning to inhale the sweet sleeping scent of my boys, pressed at odd angles to each other. Light would slip softly through the wooden slats of the window shades, zebra-striping the sienna paint on our wall with gold, and mourning doves would gather below the feeder outside and coo like a clutch of kerchief clad old biddies waiting for a bakery to open.

I’d get up, staggering. If I was lucky they’d both stay asleep while I showered and made coffee, and I’d pocket those moments of silence like a thief. But I found myself missing the routine; the rhythm of bowing down first at the page, each new day.

Instead of writing, I carved some time out on the treadmill at the gym everyday last week (the weather too cold until today to be outdoors.) In doing so I began to remember this about myself: moving, running, doing, is anther way to bow down at the door of all that is good in my life.

Moving, one foot and then the other, in a steady rhythm, feeling my lungs and heart send bright red blood circling through capillaries makes me feel immediately at right with my life, with the twirling stars, with the sap running, with my all my hopes. Now, to do both: to run and to write. This is my goal this week.

** I’ll totally post the running mix! Just have to get back on DH’s computer—tomorrow, maybe?

In the meantime, tell me, what few things do you find you really need to do every day to feel whole (even if you don’t always get to do them.)

Saturday list

* Croissants, fresh strawberries, vanilla yogurt, lattes. * A trip to the store for rain boots.

* Grocery shopping ("Bean drive OWN CAR," he says, earnestly. And so we push around those awful, cumbersome, rediculous plastic car/carts. He loves every minute.)

* Teething, and a struggle to go to sleep at nap time. Finally we went for a walk with Bean in the running stroller (think MUD on the roads) and he was asleep in less than a minute.

* A teeny-tiny circus, just down the road. (Such a long post coming on that tomorrow!)

* Lasange, garlic bread, wine and chocolate cake with friends while the kids chased the cats, and shared sippy cups.

* Making the perfect running mix. (Leave a comment if you want the titles! I'm into goofy, fast paced, 80s inspired stuff when I run. Anything to keep my feet moving!)

* And delight, of all delights: my iPod and book were found and returned! Thanks for all the positive comments on that one. I seriously think you helped balance the universe in my favor. Now, just keep your good thoughts dancing my way re: grad school. They say I won't necessarily be notivied until mid April.

More up down

So I'm going with the co-sleeping-ish arrangement for now. Which is what we've been doing, and it works fine except for when he's ansy and can't lie still and insists on holding my cheek pressed against his cheek, and howling "Mama TURN OVER" when I roll the other way. But. So. Well. We'll keep trying because it seems that's the only thing we can do, seeing as we adore the pants of him as it is. Other things:

I had a great hair day today. I never have good hair days, and today, all sorts of perfect luscious shine and bounce and complements.

It's 40 degrees out right now, at night, which is almost unbelievable, as it hasn't been this warm (yes, WARM) in oh, five months.

We had tacos for dinner. I love tacos. I grew up in California. Mexican food always makes me smile.

And... PLUMS are back in stores around here, which means somewhere, they're in season right now.

But:

I left my ipod and my beloved Eat Love Pray book at the gym tonight, parked on top of one of the lockers, and when I called a few hours later, they didn't find it. I'm going to assume the positive--that it was placed somewhere for safekeeping and that I'll get it back tomorrow. But if not, who would steal a book? An ipod, well, at least it has value. But my book? All underlined and happily dog-eared, and not half read?

The good & the not so much

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?

Waiting

Feeling the tight stomached ache of waiting, now. For spring, for the fat envelope, for several nights of sleep stacked up against each other like a solid cord of wood.

I finished The Year Of Magical Thinking yesterday, and all day today I keep going back to it in my mind. So many of her sentences are like the unusual pebbles we scoop up at the beach and then finger softly in the white cotton interiors of our pockets all afternoon.

This one, particularly:

"Marriage is memory, marriage is time."

I randomly opened an old issue of Vanity Fair today, looking for inspiration, and landed on a page with her bird like portrait: frail after so much loss, but fierce. I clipped it to the wire running along the low wall near my desk, with other glossy pages ripped from other sources, each image causing amazement to quicken in my soul.

Waiting always feels like this. I heard from one school, yes. But the other, the one I dearly want, most, utmost, not yet. There are more birds now: doves, grackles, starlings, chickadees and a whole bevy of chatty bluejays at the feeder; but not yet robins from the tree tops, and not yet buds swelling large enough to force in jars along the windowsills. Though surely soon.

25 months

Snow is falling again, though last week the grass started to show, barely green, in muddy patches in the yard. The temperatures were in the fifties and the creek running through the meadow down our road, was swollen with snowmelt, its blue-black water spreading out across the snowy expanse of buried grass like a bruise. Now, they’re calling for three feet of snow—tonight—and the mud on the driveway is frozen in stiff tracks.

More snow means more days spent clambering into boots and mittens in our slate-floored entryway, which is interminably heaped with outer things, jackets hanging three deep on every hook. It means more fights with you about wearing your fire-engine-red snowsuit; more pell-mell chases around the living room to capture you, half squealing with delight, half wailing in frustration. It means the mourning doves and starlings and jays and chickadees that you delight to watch gathering at our feeder by the dozens, will huddle tonight in the pines, heads tucked deep into the downy warmth of their bodies. It means that spring, certain in it’s coming, is still not here.

Do you remember spring, little one? Do you remember how the dandelions plunge up from the verdant green, like a thousand bright yellow suns across our lawn? How suddenly in the span of a month buds are everywhere, and throngs of insects, and the shrill, vibrant chorusing of peepers in the swamps?

We bought you a new pair of red rubber ladybug boots today, because mud season is just around the corner, and though you haven’t truly experienced it yet, mud is certain to become one of your favorite things.

Tonight the wind whips around the north corner of the house, howling, low and soft. Upon hearing it earlier, you looked up with wide eyes, and said, “Daddy, what dat?” Now you’re snug in your crib, curled on your sheepskin wearing red stripped pajamas, and we’re hoping you’ll sleep till morning, but the past few weeks have been iffy in this department.

Sleep deprivation is by far the worst part of being a parent. It feels a little being pushed up against the chain-link fence by the bully at school; the lunch-money quarters smooth and round in your closed fist, unwillingly and suddenly exposed. You have no choice. You give them up because that’s what being asked of you; because if you give in quickly, the way your hair is being pulled and the way the back of your neck is being pinched by the silver chinks of fence will likely ease. For now.

When you cry at night there is nothing we can do except reply; go, be there with you as you squirm about, sleepy and disoriented, calling, “Mama, Daddy, where are you?”

Then you say, your nose snuffly because you’re sick, “Need a hug. NEED A HUG.” So we go. We hug you. We take turns, feeling the cold creep up our legs, and a splintering ache begin at the backs of our eyes. We take turns rocking and singing, coaxing you to sleep. Begging you. Or sometimes, when we’re so sleep-stupored and staggering, we carry you to our bed, where inevitably you sleep perpendicular to both of us, thrashing, your feet in my jugular, your head pressed firmly into the crook of Daddy’s neck.

The past few months you’ve woken up more often at night, and I think it’s because you have energy left to burn. Your wiry little body was made to run. Some days, when the thermometer doesn’t pass zero, you don’t get outside at all, and running around the house leaves something to be desired and many things out of place.

This month of winter after your birthday, has also brought delight by the spoonfuls. The world of imaginative play has suddenly opened wide for you, and you play with blocks and cars, building houses and navigating to stores that sell only chocolate and ice cream for breakfast (you little scamp.)

And we read.

We sit snug on the tan couch in the living room, your body pressed against mine. It is the same tan couch I lay on in Connecticut when the midwife first pressed her Doppler stethoscope to my belly and we heard your heartbeat fast and strong like a rushing flurry of wings. Now we sit on it together and read, book after book, you pointing everything out in the pictures and turning the pages, me reading aloud the same stories again and again until I’ve nearly committed to memory every line of your favorites. You love stories now, not just identification books, or books with simple verses. You attend to the characters, and get anxious when they are trouble and laugh with glee when something silly or funny happens. You count, you sing, you talk. All the time.

I can’t wait to spend spring with you. To hear what you have to say about taking hikes in our woods and digging with wooden spoons in the mud. I can’t wait plant a garden with you and to order baby chicks in the mail. You’re such a cool kid now, talking in complete sentences; talking a blue streak. You ask why and what and when a zillion times.

Even when I’m exhausted, I can’t wait to spend every single day with you.

Love, Mama