Snapshot

Two years ago today I was watching gold finches and feeling rain. I was moving from rumpled sheets to shower, feeling my body linger on the cusp of sleep deprivation in the midst of Bean’s early toddlerhood. One year ago I was eating peaches and watching finches and feeling ready for anything. It’s funny, having a blog. It makes you return to your former selves, finding where you were at on this day or that, a year ago or two. It snares small moments in the weft of life; keeps them there even after memory grows fickle and occupied with greater things than the small fragments of a day.

I’m in such a different place this year, my body doing this crazy and miraculous thing. I’m sensitive and distracted and sporadic. Everyday is like the twirling flight of the bats I watch every evening. They come from within the eaves, darting about in the melon colored light of after sunset.

I’m unsettled, even as I’m content. I have this ridiculous urge to nest, to dig in, to just be in this small corner of land, and it feels so out of character to just want to be here. But the thought of traveling makes me want to tuck my knees to my chest and move closer to the softest pillows on the couch.

Here is all I want, with my cat curled next to me, her gentle purr making the air vibrate along my thigh. Yet I am hungry—for more than just this: curling towards myself, protective and quiet.

Hungry for art. I’ve spent so long without it, I feel an unfamiliar resistance at the thought of gathering up glue and scissors and paint. Hungry for running, and while I’ve gone for several runs recently, the days are too unpredictable and filled with nausea to make any of it a routine. Hungry for good food.

Inexplicably, I feel like I’m in a state of limbo now, a nine month limbo waiting for this little one.

Will it always feel this way? Like I’m holding my breath, like the two small lines of the pause icon have been stamped across my days? I am holding my breath, waiting, at the very least for this nausea to stop. It makes me a husk of myself. I linger in bed mornings without the gusto to rise.

It has also been a summer of rain which has left us always on tiptoe expecting summer to start. The grass is verdant and waist high in the meadows, but the air is always damp. Every day thunder. Every day out the window I watch the rain come up the valley towards us: a steel gray cloud against the paler blue of the summer sky. It arrives quickly, thrashing the leaves and pelting the windows.

And the garden, well, it’s rampant and wild. Tomato plants as high has my shoulders; little orange cherry tomatoes as sweet as sugar; beef steaks still green, and five other kinds, all in various stages of ripening. Beans by the colander full (should I blanch and freeze them?) Basil to be made into pesto; empty beds waiting where the peas and broccoli were—waiting for late summer seeds and early autumn crops, while I stay indoors writing, a deadline and a trip to Colorado for more writing with Pam before the month is out.

In late June the sky was light at nine. Now at quarter-to the sky is already indigo and the insects rattle their warning: summer is ending. Already, passing over the bridge at the end of the road, I saw the first red leaves on a maple. My heart flutters at this so soon turning. The ache of last season’s winter still clings close.

What were you doing last year, or the year before? How have you changed?

lame excuse

Hi. I miss you. Yesterday was the worst day ever. I officially hate being pregnant. Here's to hoping today will be better. And that I'll put up a real post.

a bumpy start

I woke up with a crazy tension headache: the kind that makes everything seem like it the world should be painted in shades of pale blue. Made mint tea and sugar toast, and still I felt like crying. The sun is out this morning though the ground is soft from too much rain. I am trying, trying so hard to will myself up off the couch and head outdoors with Bean to plant things in the garden, or take a walk with the camera, or even go upstairs and paint something, but so far all I can do is sit here feeling like a collection of glass shards in a paper sack

Bean is playing ‘hospital’ by himself in a nook across the living room. “I have to see if your heart is bumping mama,” he says with a pretend stethoscope in hand.

I turn away so he cannot see my eyes, suddenly hot with tears.

For the love of food

I spent the day in the garden: discovering what weeks of rain and heat and neglect can do to leggy tomatoes and lettuces. Do you know that when a lettuce bolts, it shoots up four feet tall? I’ve learned so much from my garden this year—my first in this state, in this rocky soil and micro growing season. I planted too many lettuces at the same time, and now I’m stuck waiting for new seedlings to take hold and grow into big fat heads, while all the ones I previously planted were ready at exactly the same time and have now all grown bitter and bolted. I also planted far too many radishes and mustard greens, which grow wildly and rapidly bolted within a month. I left them in for a while, an invitation to the honey bees. What I’ve loved and will repeat are the beautiful artichokes, the watermelons and pumpkins, the bush beans, tomatoes, and sweet peas. I used sticks from the woods to prop the peas up, and today harvested a colander full, which I shucked and had a lovely bowl full of jewel-green peas. Now the only question is how should I cook them?

The sad fact of the matter is that in addition to being a complete amateur gardener, I am even more of an amateur cook. I lack any and all ability to improvise in the kitchen, throwing a few ingredients together in a way that makes the flavors jostle and dance. And it’s something I’m not proud about at all. In fact, it makes me feel somehow very, oh, I don’t know, like a bad mother, to be honest.

DH cooks almost all of our food—he wooed me with oysters in white wine, polenta with chevre and sundried tomatoes, fried ravioli with sage, ridiculously tender steaks and new potatoes. But when push comes to shove his default foods tend to fall into two categories: meat and pasta, and after a while I feel like I should somehow be summoning the rich culinary tradition of my mother. She makes exquisite food using multiple grains and veggies and everything she makes is always exploding with flavor.

Her good food nourished me growing up, and gave me something I treasure: a truly healthy attitude towards food. I don’t eat for comfort; I can leave a half a cookie on my plate if I feel full; and I crave salad and fresh fruit over anything processed. But damn, for all that, I can’t cook anything. And it’s something that I want to change. I want to give Bean, and this new little Sprout the same kind of soul nourishment my mother’s food gave me.

Okay, so I can make practically anything if I follow a recipe, but I get daunted easily and NEVER know what to buy at the grocery store. Our refrigerator and pantry are always full and yet we never seem to have any ingredients to make anything. It’s a dire and sad state of affairs. How do I change this?

I’ve been thinking about food because my attitude towards it has been severely altered by this pregnancy: now everything is mostly unappealing. I have no cravings, and in fact have an aversion to almost every single food product you can think of. Truly, it feels like being cursed. I have perhaps never fully considered just how much I enjoy food. It’s both the ritual of eating together and the nourishment that I love about it, and I miss both with a vengeance. Bread products are the only non offenders.

So I have questions: how shall I cook my sweet peas? And also, how can I possibly go about learning to cook? Not crazy fancy stuff. Just simple wholesome meals using the foods I love: fresh local veggies and fruits, grains, nuts, etc.

If you love to cook, I want to know how you make meals? How do you plan? How do you purchase food for the week? How do you decide what to make for dinner—and make it without it taking two hours and using every pot in the kitchen?

roots

Yesterday the moon looked like a copper penny in the sky, red and low against the dark mountains, clouds clinging to its craters. Today it rained. All day; the kind of steady rain that makes you think Biblically, the Ark suddenly making sense.

It was the kind of rain that made me loose all resolve to do anything worthwhile. The sky smudged gray, the ground already full to saturation, streambeds overflowing everywhere, the brown water spilling out into fields where last week new hay was cut. It was a day of naps and feeling sorry for myself.

I’ve been noticing how my moods fluctuate lately. One day, I’m feeling like this kid is going to be the best thing ever, and the next, while I’m staring at the contours of the toilet bowl, I’m wondering how overpopulation is possibly a problem. People do this? Multiple times?

When the nausea slips away from the foreground though, lingering only like a dull haze between here and the mountains, I feel content with the way things have turned out. A year ago might have been different, but now, DH and I are closer than we’ve ever been. In the three years since Bean, since moving to the end of this long dirt road, we’ve grown up a great deal. Having Bean felt like a gamble, and even after, there were long dark months of winter where things were uncertain and fragile between us. Maybe it’s just the summer sun that’s made the difference, but I feel like we’ve worked hard to reach this new place of camaraderie and passion. For us, growing up and growing a family have happened like dominoes: the one and then the other a tipping point.

But then there are days where all I know is that winter will be back, and with it the new baby and sleep deprivation. These are the days when every single food tastes offensive, and if DH tousles my hair I get hot flashes and feel annoyed.

The thing is, I’m trying to learn how to ride the waves. It’s something I think I’ve always struggled against. I’ve always been a planner, a long-term-goal-keeper, a girl with a map and an escape route tucked into the back pocket of her paint stained jeans. But lately I’ve started to feel like these things might not serve me any more. Fleeing no longer seems like an option, sensible or not, simply because the desire is no longer there. Is this what becoming rooted to a place means?

I’ve planted roses this year. For the longest time I’ve always thought that planting roses was a signal of something, because roses with their exquisite blooms and sharp thorns are things you can’t take with you. They don’t like to be transplanted, and here, at the front of the house, along the narrow walk by the door they’re thriving: bursts of canary and crimson that make me smile every single time I walk by.

So I’ve planted roses, and maybe I’m starting to put down roots. Together, we’ve worked to mediate the ache and wanderlust; finding find a balance we can both live with of a life that fills us up with adventure while still holding us snug in the palm of this moment here, on this land, where the wild grasses and black-eyed-Susan’s flatten in the wind. It’s taken years to reach this point, longer than the time we’ve spent living here for sure.

When we moved here I was still grieving the death of my father. I felt him everywhere: in the boards and the hammer; in my son’s middle name. Now, time has softened the sharpness of that loss, and home has started to mean something different than what it was growing up among grape-stake fences and dry summer grass on my parent’s land.

So I’m feeling like I’m ready for this. Like we are. Except for the damn nausea and stomach pain that lingers perpetual and invasive. Sometimes that makes me just want to curl up in a ball and cry.

You know you're pregnant when...

Your three year old gently pats your chest and asks, "Are dees bigger mama?" True story.

nonsense

I've been truly miserable the past few days. Drowsy and doubled over with stomach pain. It's not just the nausea, it's the discomfort, the indigestion that is always and forever there. Everything disagrees. And, I'm hormonal.

Proof?

I watched Dirty Dancing last night. It is quite possibly one of my favorite movies, although I couldn't tell you when I ever watched the entire movie in one sitting. This became evident last night when I broke down into vast hormonal sobs at the scene where Johnny leaves Baby and that song "She's Like the Wind" is playing. Yes, I sobbed.

DH thought I had lost my mind.

BUT. I discovered something then, that was rather momentous. The movie continues! That's NOT THE END. For my entire adult life I somehow have managed to never see the end of Dirty Dancy. Ever.

And so I thought it was a sad movie, and Johnny leaves and Baby is heartbroken...

It's only the beginning

I’ve grown accustomed to being hunched over. Hunched, as in, knees up, back rounded, almost fetal. This is the way I spend my day, curled on the couch, attached at the hip to my laptop, mostly, between tentative forays into the kitchen, and occasional attempts to be useful in any way. It isn’t pretty. Remember when I used to be a runner? When I wake up, for a split second as I’m lying there in bed, I think I’ve maybe just been having an unpleasant dream (one that involves lots of dry heaving and vomit.) I lie perfectly still on the apricot colored sheets and feel the wind blow through the open window above the bed, cool on my cheeks, and my body feels simply there. Toes, knees, arms heavy from sleep. Usually, DH has already gone to shower, but Bean, who crawls into our bed at sun up, is snuggled next to me, and I still like the smell of his hair, so I curl towards him and nuzzle in.

Eventually though, I must stand, shower, and begin the ridiculous process of trying to put food in my stomach while my stomach furiously tries to expel it. Banana didn’t go over so well this morning. Peanut butter, which I can barely stand in ‘real life’ is one of the few things that sticks without complete offense. If I eat every two hours, I seem to be able to avoid vomiting. Sort of. According to the doctor, this is all good news. She told me this with a grin, while she measured the blur of black and white with a fluttering heart rate on the ultrasound monitor. Due date, February 24.

Yesterday was miserably hot, which only increased my discomfort. Over night though, the humidity was squandered in big fat raindrops. Now, the grass is dew-dimpled and silvery. Everything is a tangle of green, the meadows are waist high with grass. The goslings have tripled in size. In the garden, the cabbages like fat purple jewels are tucked between pewter leaves. The tomatoes are ramshackle, taking over an entire bed. The radishes have gone wildly to seed, but I leave them in place, their tiny white flowers calling for honey bees.

Last night, in a rare moment of inspiration devoid of nausea, I made peach grunt with a pile of almost spoiled peaches. Easy peasy. Cut up peaches and place them in the bottom of a pie pan with a few dabs of butter and a sprinkle of sugar. Mix 1 cup flour, 1/3 cup sugar, and 1-1 ½ cups whipped cream together until it becomes a sticky dough. Place dough in mounded spoonfuls on top of peaches and bake at 375 degrees for about 40 minutes until the top is golden brown and the peaches are bubbly.

We ate it with whipped cream. The dough bakes into this lovely scone-like confection. Really quite delicious, even while nauseous.

Now I am hunched on the floor beside Bean who is drawing with scented markers. Of course, he thinks they are the coolest things in the entire world. I think they were invented to torture women afflicted with the all day version of morning sickness.

While I’m genuinely excited about the idea—the idea, mind you and not necessarily the actuality—of two kids, the fact that I now must be pregnant for the next eight months is painful to me. And depressing. I hated being pregnant the first time around, and I hate it no less this time. I also hate all those women who virtually sparkle the entire time they are pregnant. Who act as if it is the best thing in the universe. Halley Berry types who say they wish they could be pregnant forever.

Am I the only person in the world who hates being pregnant?

hormone insanity

In the restaurant the other night, this is what transpired: Me: I’ll have a Tom Ka soup and an order of spring rolls. DH: I’ll have---(some weird unpronounced-able pork thing) Me: He’ll have (pointing to Bean) one spring roll, please. Waitress: So you want two springrolls? Me: No, an order of springrolls for me and one for him. DH: Wait, HOW MANY spring rolls do you want? Me: (Getting anxious) Um. Waitress: So you want three springrolls? Me: Yes

Waitress leaves. DH: You know you’re going to be getting THREE ORDERS of springrolls right? Me: What? I said I wanted three springrolls. DH: No. You said you wanted three orders. She asked you how many orders you wanted. You said three. Me: I said… (suddenly feel hot tears at the back of my eyes. Cover my face with my hands.) DH: You are going to be getting SIX springrolls (laughing.) Me: (pathetic and teary eyed) Let’s not talk about the spring rolls any more.

Waitress arrives with three plates of springrolls, six in total and gives me a weird look.

Hormones. What the ef? Seriously, they are rocking my world. Also, it should be noted that I suddenly didn't even LIKE the damn spring rolls.

What were/are your favorite foods while pregnant? And by "while pregnant" I mean early pregnant when your entire central nervous system is being drenched in HCG, thereby making almost all foods intolorable.

flitter

I spend much of the day curled like a cat, now, dozing. My dreams are surreal and technicolored and sexy. My stomach is in a constant state of upheaval, the word nausea hardly encompasses the scope of queasy that I feel. It is a perpetual all day thing, indigestion, bloating, every single food suspect.

I turn my nose up at foods I have always loved; I become obsessed with certain food and then suddenly, irrationally, cannot stand them. The refrigerator is a dangerous place. I can hardly stand to open the door. My sense of smell has gone from acute, which it has always been, to hyper sensitive. I can smell peanut butter across the room. Garlic makes me dry heave.

It’s a weird state to have suddenly slipped into. Early pregnancy has forced rest upon me. It’s been a long time since I sat in a lawn chair on the grass and did nothing. I sit and watch clouds get tangled at the horizon; swallowtails land on the yellow roses by the door; my small boy rides his bike pell-mell up and down the driveway, skidding to a stop on purpose. He has attached a pinwheel to his handle bars, and it spins brilliantly. His face is a smudge of wild strawberries and dirt: a recipe for little boy glee. Next week he’s going to summer camp at his preschool for four half days and I’m holding my breath, wondering what it will be like.

Of course, I start to think about him there, away from me, and my heart feels like a bungee jumper, mid air before the cord catches at the bottom of the fall.

He is at this lovely stage right now where, on a good day, he’s the sweetest most sensitive little guy in the world. He picks me flowers. Sometimes when we’re walking he’ll stop dead in his tracks and gasp, “Oh look at that flower, its just so beautiful!” He notices sunsets, and birds darting though the sky like bright flecks of paint.

In the book Lyle Lyle Crocodile, he gets genuine big tears in his eyes when we get to the page where Lyle gets locked in the zoo. And at the playground when a smaller boy was crying, he stood near by, a worried look on his face, until the boy was comforted.

I so hope that this tenderness doesn’t get wiped away by the big-boyness he’s sure to acquire in the first few days of spending so much time with other, older kids. Around big boys he walks taller, his little shoulders thrown back, and laughs at jokes he doesn’t understand. He’s growing up, and it makes me feel dizzy.

The other day he asked, “Who will snuggle me at preschool?”

“Your teacher will,” I said hopefully, and he smiled, convinced.

But will they?

And what about me, when this second little one enters the world? Will my heart really expand to love the both of them? Somehow I can hardly believe it, even as I feel fiercely protective of my tender belly, where this unexpected miraculous handful of cells is multiplying and growing: tiny arm buds, eyelids, it’s heartbeat like the fluttering wings of birds.

The unexpected

The unexpected is what happens when you’re looking up at the sky and thinking about glazed doughnuts and life is generally good. The unexpected is a little tear in the fabric of the way things are, so small at first you hardly notice, and then you’ve got a run the size of the Nile going up your thigh. The unexpected is all about the tipping point. Reading runes before I left for Spain, looking for clarity in other things entirely, I received this message: “The outcome is assured, though unexpected.” Three weeks later, and it suddenly makes sense.

I’m pregnant.

I had an IUD (the Paraguard) which is 99.4% effective, making my odds a slim .6%. A slender needle in a hundred haystacks. But pregnant none the nonetheless.

You always read that shit about percentages on the packaging and you kind of think, somewhere in the back of your head, “poor bastard, whoever gets stuck being that statistic.” You never think it will be you.

It was a handful of days after being back from Spain when the nausea and the indigestion was kicking my butt so hard I was sure I had some sort of parasitic ailment I’d picked up somewhere abroad. Parasitic, for sure, just not what I was expecting. My doctor listed all sorts of unpleasant ailments that I might have. “The stress,” she said, “of travel and not sleeping.” I nodded, then asked, “Is there any way I could be pregnant? My period is late.” She shook her head. “Nope.”

A day later and my boobs were telling a different story. Overly sensitive when the colt-legged catapult of Bean hurtled into my lap. The nausea suddenly making sense.

I went to the store toting Bean, determined. DH was three hours away learning to bake bread with a friend. “Why are we going to the store, Mommy?” Bean kept wondering on our unprecedented middle of the day trip. My mind was suddenly unable to bear another moment of limbo.

We bought yellow pears, a couple fragrant peaches, and the kind of test that spells it out for you PREGNANT, or NOT PREGNANT, right there in bold print. I’ve messed with the ambiguity of the little pink lines before. You can always trick your head into thinking one is lighter, or darker, there or not there, depending on what you’re hoping. I wanted no bullshit, just a straight up answer. I had a hunch I wanted confirmed.

Still. I was totally, utterly, surprised when just that single word popped up. “Why are you taking so long, Mommy?” Bean whimpered at the door. “Play with me.”

It was a Sunday. I called my OBGYN. The doctor on call said, “Oh honey, if you’re in trouble, we all are here. Everyone has one at the office.”

But the trouble didn’t really start until Monday when I went in for an ultrasound, and to get the little piece of plastic and copper removed, and well, it wouldn’t come out. Apparently it was stuck in my cervix and in that moment I went from being somewhat of a rarity with remarkable odds and an unexpected pregnancy to someone with a high risk medical condition.

The possible outcomes looked gloomy: heavy bleeding if a second attempt at removing it went awry. Worst case: a possible loss of my uterus. (Really, that’s what they said. Imagine the sudden gloom that I was immersed in.) Or if it stayed, because if its location, I had high odds of a septic miscarriage. Unpleasant, to say the least.

Enough with the too much information. I can’t help it somehow, because suddenly it became everything for a few days. In the end, I went to the hospital and they used really high tech ultrasound stuff to do an ultrasound assisted removal that went okay—and now, well, we wait and hope there’s no miscarriage, because there could be. The odds are higher now.

And I know there’s that rule about waiting three months before saying anything, but I think it’s bullshit, because if I go through a miscarriage I want to be able to talk about that too.

So it seems that oddly our kids seem to have planned themselves. Four years apart, and a handful of days—this one is due at the end of February too. In retrospect, DH and I both admitted that really, we’d probably never get down to the business of planning a second one. And, while my summer is turning out nothing like I planned, I’m digging it. The same kind of thing happened when I got pregnant with Bean. It’s like a light has been switched on somewhere in the murk of my life, and in seeing, I’m compelled to do only those things that are most vital and important to my heart.

All year, and through the start of grad school I was near panicked with stress. Too much on my plate, but somehow, I lacked the ability to say no, or stop, or simply do what my heart wanted instead of what my head kept telling me I should do. I quit grad school for now—though they’ll leave my enrollment open for next year, or the year after, and I’m focusing full time on my writing.

I’m also picking wildflowers and spending mornings napping and playing with Bean. And despite the nausea which completely kicks my ass most of the day, I am happier and less stressed right now than I have been in almost a year.

“The outcome is assured, though unexpected.” Damn.

Back home. And the universe is colliding.

A whirlwind trip. Cafe con leche, late nights with friends, dancing, a fairy tale wedding, and a really long trip home. And then... everything else. Too much to tell here, yet. Suffice to say, changes are afoot.

Enjoy the pics. I will hereby commence regular posting. Missed you all.

Unexpected

Shit. It was way harder than I thought to say goodbye to Bean. Damn. That kid has my heart.

hi-tech

This is a test from a fancy-schmancy i-Pod Touch Dh just got for our trip. Clearly we are tech obsessed. UPDATED: Oh yeah, and I'm officially done with school today. So thrilled. My toes are pretty. My bags are packed. We leave tomorrow.

I'm pretty much just muttering now

Am packing for our trip to Spain. In the process I've discovered: dear god in a housedress, I live under a rock. I haven't gone "out" in oh, over a year I imagine. I no longer know how to wear lipstick. My feet, my barefoot garden loving feet, are in desperate need of a pedicure. And I threw a load of whites in the wash with a delicate, silky PINK wrap. And now everything is pink. Everything. I have never, ever done that before. Love how I saved that up for right now. So I'm a bit muddled. Thank you all for your love from my last post. Some days parenting just knocks my socks off. Today, Bean was still sleeping when I was getting ready to leave--so I smooched him and sort of nudged him awake and he opened his eyes, reached out and climbed into my arms for the world's most perfect snuggle ever. I'm gonna miss him like crazy. Even though we'll be soaking in Old World charm, and having drinks with some of our best friends ever, and generally having a blast.

I'll try to update when I'm there, but I can't be sure of the Internet connection I will have. Don't think I've forgotten you. I'll be taking lots and lots of pictures.

growing pains

One Scooby Doo bandaid and a glass of wine later, this is what heartache feels like. He comes home from the day with his Gram and Gramps who indulge his every wish: playground visits, popsicles, escaping from naps, trips to the hardware store, the library, the moon… When he gets here, he’s asleep and the rain has rinsed the heat out of the day. He’s in his car seat when they bring him, in his underpants, hair curling with sweat.

We carry him inside where he sleeps on DH the way he used to before his legs were long and his knees were scraped and his heart belonged only to us. Then he wakes, and all he wants is her, his Gram, who smells like sweet perfume and has soft hugs and buys him cookies whenever they go out.

He starts to cry for her. His eyes get red and puffy and he runs away and hides in corners, sobbing. Inconsolable, he doesn’t want either one of us, only her. Snot runs from his nose in a trail, and we offer peanut butter cookies and milk and he eats them and then starts to cry again; his smile as temporary as the thunderstorm earlier today that brought nickel-sized hail and a tornado warning while I was at school.

DH and I go outside onto the lawn. We check on the baby chicks, their beaks and yellow and sharp and their eyes round and dark. The grass is wet from the rain. We hold hands. Neither of us has any fucking idea what to do with our small boy who is standing in the doorway sobbing, not wanting to be with us but not wanting to be left alone either.

My heart feels like the tangled strings of a marionette; like prongs in a splintered music box; like the quarters that fall under couch cushions and are forgotten. We go back inside, agreeing to ignore him for a while. Surely this has gone on long enough, this wailing, this utter ridiculousness. He’s clutching the phone. “I want to call Gram,” he says each word punctuated with a gasping sob.

I put on Jack Johnson. DH grills chicken. I make potato salad. Bean sobs, clutching the phone.

Finally we cave, after forty five minutes of sobbing. When she answers, her first words are stupid and they make my heart feel like bits of broken glass. “I’ll be right over,” she says. DH intervenes. She’s his mom, so he can say it like it is. Not what we’re looking for here. Just say hi to him, calm him down. So she starts in, planning tomorrow with him: a trip to the café for milk and cookies, returning library books, a bike ride, a trip to the playground.

Smiles flutter on his face like the little blue moths that kept landing on the kids hands and arms at school while we were walking in the tall grass. They’d alight, then stick their tongues out, licking the salt from the kid’s sweaty palms, everyone watching in wonderment. My little boy didn’t want anything to do with me, and now he’s sitting there at the counter, elbows up, talking on the phone like a teenager, his face wide with grins. I can only listen for a while, before I feel like I can’t breathe.

I go to the wine rack, reach for the first bottle, grapple with the cork screw. Except for with dinner sometimes I never drink, but it seems like the only thing that makes any sense: in that it doesn’t at all. The cork breaks, and the sharp tip of the corkscrew gashes across my index finger. When I hold my finger up to my mouth and my blood tastes coppery. I pour a glass and take a sip. He’s still talking to her and her voice is a cloying sing-song of sweetness.. My heart feels like a bit of clay, drying in the sun, a hundred little fissures forming on the surface. Damn. No one told me told me about this. No one warned me that they stop loving only you. That you stop being everything, that a day comes when your kiss no longer makes it better.

I take the red metal colander to the garden with a sharp knife and cut the outer leaves of lettuce heads, all curly and green. Walking across the wet grass to the garden I cry. Then while I’m cutting the salad greens he calls for me, “Mommy, where are you?” and my heart is a trout flip flopping about with a wild helpless kind of love. He’s standing at the top of the garden path waiting for me, and I pick him a wild daisy from among the tall grasses and he grins when I hand it to him. “I love you, Mommy,” he says.

We eat dinner and finally, he’s all mine again. I feed him buttered noodles with peas and carrots and then we sit on stools by the window watching the storm move towards us across the mountain. We count bolts of lightening and he grins, eyes still red, eyelashes tangled. Then the sky changes fast from light to metallic gray. The leaves on the trees are tossed belly side up, like a thousand darting minnows caught between here and the storm tossed sky. Rain chases the wind, and DH goes about shutting windows and nursing his own form of heartache.

Bean wanted neither of us; and while he’s climbing back and forth now between our laps sharing an ice cream sandwich and watching the storm dwindle, his small betrayal still stings like salt in a cut.

So this is watching your kid grow up; becoming someone separate, like one Jupiter’s moons. We fall into each other in a tight embrace and I feel the muscles in DH’s chest bunch against my cheek. He’s holding me the way we used to, like it’s just us again, before Bean, though it’s different of course. Three years, and suddenly he’s clamoring for independence at the threshold of our hearts. All we can do is stand in the doorway watching the storm approach. Then suddenly, rain is pelting our skin.

Heat dumb

So my sister has shamed me into blogging, telling me I suck at updating and that I'm basically a miserable failure in the regular posting department. Yeah. Well. Not much to update about due to the fact that I'm MELTING. It's suddenly summer here. The grass is knee high and I seem to have allergies. It is 90 degrees and humid and my brain feels too large for my skull. See aren't you glad I'm updating?

At night when Bean invariably crawls into bed he very much resembles a cross between a hot water bottle and a colt: all legs and heat. Typically I take a knee or a foot to the eye at least once a night. He seems to think sleeping perpendicular to me is fun.

Other than heat and sleep deprivation, I'm limping my way through my last full week of school. We're doing everything we can to keep cool, but thanks to 1970s inspired public school architecture, my classroom is south facing and flat roofed. By mid-afternoon the classroom thermomiter read 92 degrees. Yeah. So. Where was I? Melting brain? How can anyone possibly expect anyone to accomplish anything in such conditions? Much less seven year olds who are hankering to be outdoors. They look at me with hot cheeks and sweat on their upper lips, and I can tell that all the words I'm saying about place value are just floating somewhere between us in litte clouds of moisture and heat. They nod, but they don't hear me.

I'm still crossing my fingers; trying to remember that everything is good right now. Spain in a week. A gorgeous dress. Pretty shoes. Friends I haven't seen in so long. INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL. Then graduate school. Life is good. But still, I can't help wanting what I don't have. More on that when I'm feeling like being less mysterious. And less melty-brain like.

Oh, and does anyone have any recommendations for making sleep more tolorable in the heat? We have a fan, but being all prissy and noise sensitive, it basically is sound torture all night long for me to listen to it whirr back and forth. I try sleeping with a pillow over my head, but then the heat, well. You get the idea. Anyone know some really good earplugs?

Enough. Hope everyone is happy and well and lovely and possibly less heat-stupored than I.

glimmer

In the cool dark of the bedroom, afternoon, after work, after many hours awake and fragmented by the needs of the day, push-pull, ache in the throat, thirsty for quiet, and now I’m face down among the bedclothes and the cat comes up and brushes against my foot. Just this. Fur on skin. I take a breath.

Right now, right here

At school, the days are spiraling down. We make space mud and go outside for extra recess where I sit on the grass and they crowd around me, suddenly towering tall, every single one yelling for my attention. “Teacher! Teacher! Look at this!” “Teacher can we race?” “Teacher! Watch me!” I close my eyes and feel the sun on my eyelids and my pulse in my chest. The backs of my eyelids are sunbursts of red and shade. The world is simpler this way, eyes closed. Immediately I turn inward, feel my breath, remember to breathe. Eventually they stop yelling. One persistent voice keeps at it, softer now, “Teacher, teacher!”

Above us there is a sun dog in the sky. I tell them the weather will change. I tell them rain is coming, and later it does.

At home the road is slick with mud. The chickens come out from the coop and ruffle their feathers. The sky is the color of paper. Lilacs lean towards the ground, heavy with rain. Bean wakes up from his late nap grouchy, and grouchy by three year old standards seems to mean nonstop howling in indignation for a half an hour. No he doesn’t want a snack, or a snuggle, or a walk, or some milk. But then two seconds later he’ll maybe change his mind.

When he’s asleep, he looks little to me still. I see in his face the tiny baby’s face I stared at for hours, when he still made dolphin noises and his whole body could rest snuggly against my torso. But then he awakens and the turbulence childhood is there like a weather map, hovering. He looks boyish, lanky, bright-eyed, determined.

When he was two, I could distract him. “Look at the moon!” I’d say eagerly, or “Let’s go get some mango for snack,” and any consternation would melt like a popsicle on a warm day. “Okay,” he’d nod agreeably, smudging tears with the back of his hand. But three? Three is entirely different. He holds on to things. Dwells on them. And his emotions sweep over him like waves.

I remember going to the beach when I was a kid, growing up in Los Angeles. The sand was often oil specked, and the waves hit hard. If you turned your back when you were building sand castles, you’d get smacked down, spun under, your t-shirt or bathing suit twisted and wrung out. Bean’s moods hit him like that now. Everything is full throttle. Urgent delight. Intense frustration. Utter grief.

On walks I’ve started sharing my big Cannon EOS 20-D with him. It’s probably not advisable. I’m likely courting disaster, a broken lens, worse. But he has an eye for framing the most beautiful shots. He takes the camera so earnestly, the strap slung over his shoulder. And I love the way his pictures are—kid level, slightly askew.

It is hard to resist the urge to tell him how to do things. “Take a picture of this, point the lens this way, no that’s too dark,” and just see what he comes up with. But I realize right away that I’m pushing the river when I do. The kid’s got his own eye.

On a different note: I’m on the brink of something. Tilting. Can’t say yet what, but things are afoot. Possibly. Maybe. Good things. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Hating the way I feel right now

It’s completely kicking my butt, this parenting thing. Right now, I feel like a crappy mom. I wonder how on earth I could ever, really, be the parent to two kids when this one is driving me bananas. He’s three, and that has made everything more complicated. And tonight bedtime was a crappy overblown push-pull of him wanting more of me, and me wanting to give less. One of those nights where I’m beyond tired and the laundry is everywhere (in the drier, in the washing machine, on the chair in the bedroom in heaps, in the hallway in heaps) and my last nerve has already been used up. And then he starts.

“I need milk, mommy!” he starts to whine. We’ve already done stories and we’re past the step where warm milk was an option, but it’s only been recently that he’s been forgoing it at bedtime, and really, I should have offered it to him at the appropriate time. And I didn’t. So here we are.

I’m lying on his bed with him watching how the shadows make the yellow of his walls almost gray. The light out the window is dusk. The last of the robins are singing from the tops of the trees, but the sun has already sunk below the horizon and the sky is the pale afterthought pink of post-sunset. I want to cry.

I’m not sure why I want to cry except I feel like I’ve been giving everything all day long to other people’s kids and now here I am with my own, the kid I love more than anything, and I don’t have an ounce of wiggle room left to give him.

“Fine,” I say. “But if I get you milk then I am not going to lie here and snuggle with you. You can have the milk but then it’s a hug and a kiss and we’re done tonight. Got it.”

“Noo!” He whimpers indignantly. His lower lip is protruding and he sounds particularly pathetic because he’s just getting over a cold. This makes matters worse. The fact that I know he’s been sick. That his behavior has always been worse when he’s sick: more erratic with bouts of energy and lulls.

But damn, I just want to be sitting on the couch with the cat wedged up against me, without anyone needing anything for eight point five seconds. That would be really great.

But somehow there is never enough time, at the end of the day. I crave energy and time and have neither by 8 p.m. So I go downstairs and get milk and bring it up to him and he’s already bawling.

“I want snuggles Mommy, I just want you to snuggle with me.”

I hand him the milk. I sit in the rocking chair near his bed. In my head I can see myself and I can see that I'm being stubborn and unreasonable and in general totally suck as a mom. I even think to myself why the hell can’t you just go cuddle with him, what’s the big deal? But the big deal is that since he’s turned three he has started to make bedtime into something momentous again, every night more negotiations, more extra steps and little details as he tries to control more and more of his world. And I picked tonight of all effing nights to curtail this trend.

What was I thinking?

So now he’s balling into his milk and snuffeling and needs a tissue. “I just love you Mommy. I love you Mommy. I love you Mommy. Are you happy Mommy?”

Damn it. Is parenting this hard for anyone else?

We somehow muddled through. I explained that I wasn’t happy with his behavior but that I loved him and loved him some more. And now he’s tucked into his beanbag ‘nest’ in our room where he has very contentedly slept for the past few weeks. And the cat is by my shoulder, and outside the trees look like the outlines of giants huddled together having tea, and the house is quiet.

But I hate not having patience. I hate feeling like I’m totally not cut out for this. ARGH.