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Sometimes he still looks so small to me...
***
Holding my breath, watching the election results.
*** President Obmama = awesome.
Stubborn
What do you do when your almost four year old refuses to: A) EVER blow his nose under any circumstances, especially when he desperately needs to and is suffering from a head cold
B) Wear a sweatshirt/sweater even though it is already in the thirties here and COLD
C) Eat anything offered to him including any and all foods he used to willingly eat
Because right now Bean is doing all of the above, and it is making me crazy.
A week in the Life: Wednesday (on Friday)
In the morning, first thing, snow coated the ground like sugar. Then it melted, and a soft rain started to fal, rinsing the remaining orange and yellow leaves; making them fall in wet heaps to the dark ground.
Every day hinges around these simple things: dishes stacked in the cupboard, food prepared, then put away. Each day I try to succumb more gracefully to the essence of these tasks.
After work I put fresh paint in Bean's pallett and let him go to town. I love his abstract lines and the way color and shape become things after the fact, after the paint has been smeared across the page.
Bringing fresh water for paint, I have my camera with me and snap a photo. This is life documentary: catching the bubbles swirl in the glass and the water running down the drain.
Evening, before bed. A circle of lamplight in our blue bedroom.
A Week In The Life:: Monday
Morning blur. All of the pictures I took today have this blurry quality. Such an apt reflection of my Monday. Here, Bean giggles in the covers as I get dressed. He's such a big kid now--sleeping every night, all through the night, in his OWN bed. I still am marveling at this. It's such a big deal for him--the boy who is impervious to sleep.
A skeptical self portrait. From this angle I hardly look pregnant. Must take a side angle photo tomorrow so you can see how truly huge I am.
Work bag on the floor at the end of the day. The house is cold when I come home.
I curl up on the couch to check email and savor the quiet of ten minutes when no one needs me.
Dishes. Laundry. These small things. I try to give myself over to them, being wholly in them, letting all else but the moment slip away.
Bean lives his whole life in the moment...although he is beginning to get the concept of future. To him the future means one thing: toys he can ask for for Christmas this year. He's taken to marking with Xs all the toys he wants from every catalog that arrives at our door.
A Week In The Life:: Sunday
Drying my hair. Hating maternity clothes as much as I did last time. This is not a good start to the morning.
Breakfast = best part of the day. DH made biscuits (he makes the best.)
Yummy lemon curd to go with flakey, dreamy biscuits.
Then an insurmountable list of everything to do. I dropped the couch on my foot while moving it to vacuum. I started to sob. The rest of the day pretty much felt like a bruise. Thin skinned doesn't even describe it.
Everything feels on edge. Precarious. Fragile. Dramatic. Technicolor.
After Bean is asleep, I sit on the couch in the living room writing lesson plans and wondering where I'll find the energy and enthusiasm to face 22 second graders tomorrow. The house is quiet & clean. I lit a candle on the windowsill. The light falls in yellow flickering circles.
A Week In The Life:: Saturday
Morning light.
Shower.
Unmade bed.
Drying my hair.
Breakfast = broiled grapefruits w/brown sugar; croissants, soft boiled eggs; lattes.
Empty table.
Letting the geese out.
On the walk...
Inevitably the geese join us. Bean always bikes--in his bright yellow helmet with thunderbolts.
The frost has turned to dew.
Back inside, doing laundry I notice my mismatched polka dots.
Bean draws in the kitchen while us grownups whirl about the house tidying. Then we take a trip to town: lumber at Home Depot; lunch; a stop for bread; and a stop for some new sheets.
In the blink of an eye the light is already slanting towards twilight.
Bean twirls while I sit in the leaves soaking up the last rays of golden sun.
How I love weekends.
Am thinking of doing this all week. Inspired by Ali. All too often the fragments that make the mosaics of my days go unrecorded...
And then there are days that are perfect crap.
Like today. When all I feel like doing is crying for no reason. When I come home from work and feel like I can't give anything more to anyone but I have to, because DH has guitar lessons and it's the mama show for bedtime routine and dinner tonight. It rained all day. Maybe that was it. Or maybe hormones. Or maybe I'm lonely or tired or hungry or some stupid combination of those three. Some days just suck. Even with the perfect orange leaves, wet from the rain, and the sun falling in angles, and the sound of Bean's voice rising and falling in the living room where he excitedly narrates a story to himself.
It feels like I'm submerged, but unable to swim, like a rediculous dream. Does anyone else ever have days like this: where you see how irrationally moody you're being, but cannot stop, cannot shake it off, cannot break into a grin no matter how much you know that you should?
A perfect afternoon.
Mellow autumn sunlight. A blanket. Orange leaves getting stuck in our hair. A pomogrante to share. Giggles. Juice on our fingers. Delight.
Small orbit
I want to write, but every time I sit down I feel my energy evaporate like moisture on hot pavement. Five months pregnant, and my orbit has grown small. Small so that it only encompasses my growing family. As small as the round circle of the milky white moon climbing rung by rung into to the heavens through the branches of the tree. As small as a dinner plate.
At the end of the day I curl up on the couch with a head full of daydreams. Suddenly I've been having images of paintings I want to create. The slightest whisps of glimmers for stories, like the first hint of smoke in the autumn air.
I am content to wait. Content to let making minestrone soup from scratch and cornbread muffins be enough accomplishment for the day.
I can't help wondering:
If we go into a depression, what will happen to artists--who base their incomes on the production of a commodity that doesn't fall into the category of "survival"? Would there still be literary magazines? Galleries? Etsy?
If we go into a depression, what will happen to private schools? Will parents still send their children—or will they opt out, out of necessity? And what will happen to public schools as a result? Will they become more overcrowded, further under-funded? Will the tax base stay the same?
If we go into a depression, will we be able walk the fine line between heart’s longing and daily need; between the unquenchable desire to create and the need for an income--the hard-scrabble talk of hungry bellies overriding the thirst for beauty, for words?
Suddenly I’m realizing that my understanding of the Great Depression is based on the vague memories of a high school reading of The Grapes of Wrath. I cannot picture life without the wanton consumerism that drives our culture.
On the radio, I hear newscasters warning that “the holiday season looks gloomy†not because people no longer love each other, or have lost their faith, but because consumers are spending less in stores. It gives me the shivers.
On one hand I think, damn right. We needed this. A shake down, a shift, a change. The bare bristling greed of Wall Street needed to be ripped open, the bandaid of oblivion and status quo ripped off abruptly, the blood loss inevitable. On one hand I think, would it really be so bad if people had to step back from the brink of unrequited want for material things? If they had to scale back, live closer to home, greener by necessity. If gardens, if local produce, if organic, if simple were a way of life necessitated by an unstable economic culture.
But on the other hand, my chest aches imagining. I’m having a baby. My son’s will grow up in this time, and whatever it holds. To be prudent, I’d keep my job, I’d focus on the paycheck, not the yearning. I’d let my view narrow so that my weekends burgeon and my week’s blur, so that need trumps the calling of my heart to write full time, to create. Because is it not unspeakably selfish in such a time for a mama to want this? To want to slip out of the workforce, into a world where word matter, where art matters, even as the world as I know it may be changing, ending, reshaping.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that I have always believed unwaveringly in the Grace that holds my life, and I have no reason to stop believing in it now.
Guess what?
It's a boy! I'm thrilled. I've always pictured myself being the mama of boys.
Exhibit A: Bean will clearly be the world's best brother.
Exhibit B: Indubitably boy. (His leg is tucked up under him. It's a direct crotch shot...which I thought twice about posting on the Internet, but then I thought about the 5 months of nausea and general malease he's caused and I felt perfectly fine with it.)
Gratuitous cute ultrasound pic: thumbs up!
Not long enough
The weekends are not long enough. The numbers fall off the clock, scattering onto the floor. The day melts into pale of twilight too soon. I've begun to realize that this will be what characterizes my thirties: this hunger for more time. This feeling of stretched-thin, this longing for leisure, for sinking teeth deep into the flesh of the day. It's gone in a blink. Four loads of laundry. Several photos snapped of Bean who caught a frog. Lessons planned. Groceries purchased. Dinner eaten. A book finished. Am I just greedy, thirsting for more time? Do other people feel like they ever have enough?
Fumbling
I’ve been fumbling my way along the frayed thread of balance lately. Trying to keep keel down in the turbulence of being a full time mama and a full time teacher and sometimes a writer too, although words are getting a fragment of my attention these days.
I’m not quite feeling better. Not worse, certainly, and much improved, but still not the hale and wholesome self I was before this small sprout took up residency in my uterus. It’s draining in this abstract way I can hardly pinpoint or explain. I’m making a baby. Even though I am not actually responsible for orchestrating any of it, thankfully.
Inside the growing curve of my belly I harbor a tiny vermillion fish of a being. One that flips and flutters and kicks at the least expensive time. Apparently, it’s the size of a tomato. Next week I find out what, so it can no longer be it.
And there is something about this process that is draining, or, well, more like an alien invasion. A part of me has been taken over, my energy diverted.
Bean senses this increasingly now, I think. In the past two weeks he’s suddenly gotten more needy, more vehement in his tantrums, more urgent in his desire to cover me with butterfly kisses and snuggle on the couch.
Or maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the baby and everything to do with the fact that two days a week he’s a school kid now, and he’s never been one. Two days a week he’s one of many, not the only one; and while he’s there away from me and from DH he’s also discovering that if he can leave us, we can leave him.
It’s a fluttery, unsure time for the both of us. And as a result, there are days where every single thing is messy and tangled and unpleasant. Where tears spring when the wrong spoon is offered, when a sweatshirt is suggested, when snack has to be one of the two choices offered and not cookies or Bunny Grahams or any of the other delicacies he’s requesting.
But there are also days where he wraps me in gorilla hugs. Where he sees that I’m tired and that guests are coming and the house needs cleaning and he quietly goes to his toys and starts putting them away without being asked, and then follows me around closely doing whatever I ask him to do. Every single moment of parenting is like this, isn’t it? On the one hand utter sweetness; on the other anguish.
Things I want to know:
... If every 3 ½ year old goes through a phase of DISAGREABLE that involves rejecting every choice and every option presented to him, and also often involves throwing himself to the floor in sobbing dramatics when told that those are his only choices, or even, at his very worst, saying, No Mommy! You listen to me! when told to listen. And also…
If the rest of the world really thinks Palin is a charming and gorgeous as Pakistan’s president does (ick.)
Why anyone in the world really thinks Palin would make a good VP, or, god forbid, the president.
Why McCain thought smirking endlessly during the debates would make him come off as anything other than an ass.
Why anyone really would vote for someone who has voted for 90% of the things Bush has voted for. Seriously.
Why I am still feeling indigestion/nausea/ridiculous unpleasantries when I am 18 weeks pregnant.
cool kid
Tonight we went on a run. As a family. All three of us. Granted, my current version of running is more of a run-walk-galumpf than a real run... Still, Bean was thrilled. He put on sports socks and sneakers and kept up a good pace for almost a half mile before he needed a rest in the running stroller. DH went on ahead of us for a while, but I was content to slow-jog with Bean as he spent the next mile and a half periodically resting and clambering out to run along side me.
Once while he was sitting in the stroller slurping water he said, "Mommy, did you know that tummies make water into blood for our bodies?"
"Really?" I asked. "Who told you that?"
"No one," he said confidently. "I just figured it out."
Pretty cool thinking for being three, huh? And so fun to run with him. So fun.
Surly.
I have been in a catastrophically bad mood. All day. I have tried, desperately to shake it, but it seems to still have the better of me. I convinced DH to haul Bean on a hike up the mountain through the first fallen red leaves. I took note of the bright blue sky. Munched a fresh-picked apple and ate potato chips on the bank of an old beaver pond. Watched the light angle through the quivering leaves. And still, I felt like crying. Everything makes me cry. Everything makes me surly. Every word angled carelessly in my direction. Everything, including the bin of maternity clothes DH fished out of the basement for me, and all I could think as I looked through them was, "dear lord, these are all hideous fat clothes." Even though they're not. Even though there are some pants in there I entirely forgot about that are not half bad at all.
To make matters worse, Bean has been a monster today. There have been maybe five days in his entire life where I didn't like him very much, even as I love him desperately to bits, and today was one of them. Everything I asked him to do was met with tantrums. Sweatshirts have become a heated issue. He hates them. Yet he must wear them. It makes going out of the house a royal pain.
The only redeeming thing about Bean's mood (which matched mine, I know, this fact is not lost on me) was that he drew a picture of a monster today on his easel, and the picture could just as well have been a self portrait with three googly eyes, a whole mess of teeth, a big slobbery tongue and four ears. Oy.
I have resorted to ice cream. I have not yet eaten said ice cream, but it is my only hope that any small shred of the day might be salvaged.
Tuesday, Tuesday
I come home with a sore throat. Tuesday. Every week Tuesday seems to day that kicks my butt the most. I feel like a rug worn to the weft. Like the delicate filigree of a leaf’s veinwork—all that’s left after a season of snow. Or like the gray goose feathers scattered about the yard, down torn along the quill. My small boy is waiting for me, playing in the backyard in the slanting sunshine, his hair lit gold, his face smudged with a mustache of dirt. He burrows into me, a full body hug. He hands me a bottle of bubbles slick with soap, “Blow bubbles for me mommy!†he instructs, then waits until I fill the air with transparent rainbow spheres that float up towards the blue sky, cloudless and bright.
We walk down the driveway, the geese following us, a rumpus of flapping and honks, they think we’re Mama. Anyone with two legs. Mama. The leaves have started to turn, though for the most part everything’s still lush and green and the air, until today was warm like summer. But today we can feel a crispness.
Suddenly I’m craving grapefruit and apples. Peaches and watermelon seem like afterthoughts. In the garden, potatoes wait to be dug, and pumpkins have grown fat.
It’s Tuesday and my throat hurts and I want to curl up and make time stand still so that I can catch up with myself. I lie in the grass after Bean goes indoors with DH. The evening sun is falling towards me. The grass is cold. I can here an owl, the baaing of sheep, the twitter of birds. The geese settle in next to me, preening. They nibble at my hair. I try to let myself sink down into the moment, noticing. Noticing layer upon layer of sound, of smell, of light, of hue.
Then they’re at the doorway wanting me for dinner, and I go.
For the record
I’m not sure why I feel compelled to write about the messy sharp-edged rawness; skies the color of cement, thunder storms, evening clouds ripped to shreds and stained vermillion with the setting sun. Except to say that I write because these things matter, and my words are like the layers of snow buried within a glacier of all the winters that have come before. Maybe it’s because I want to know that I was here, that we were, again and again. I want others to know this too; perhaps to offset the Hollywood happily ever after we’re all fed as teenagers.
As a culture we spin so many myths and prick ourselves in the process like the princess in Sleeping Beauty. We easily fall into a slumber of illusion, the roses growing thick around us, all those velvet petals and sweet fragrance blurring our view of the thorns that grow there too. We lie about our happiness, over and over again. Perhaps we cannot help ourselves.
Flip through any magazine, and without fail there are the glossy images of women defying death: skin taught and unwrinkled, eyes bright as they stare dreamily into the eyes of some muscular man poised to sweep them off their feet (or at an equally dreamy handbag.) The illusion is complete: beauty, possessions, money—these things make you happy.
I remember when my husband and I were camping in Puerto Rico long before we were married. We were both in college still. It was spring break. The sand was like sugar and flecked with shells. The water bluer than blue. Every evening postcard perfect clouds in rose and choral decorated the sky just for us. We were in love. Naturally we decided to spend a night sleeping under the stars right there on the beach, without a tent, just us, and our sleeping bags zipped together and partly open to the warm night air, our naked bodies tangled and salty from playing all day in the waves.
How many times have you seen the image of lovers sleeping on the beach—or making love for that matter, hip deep in salt water, her shirt white and wet hugging the alluring curves of her firm round breasts? Enough times to believe it, right? Well it fucking sucks in actuality. Sleeping on the beach feels like being rubbed down with sandpaper. Sand in every crevice: eyelids, nostrils, ears, unmentionable places. There are also sandf flies and the endless worry of an unusually high tide.
Sometime after midnight when the full moon was directly above us and we both finally stopped pretending to be blissfully asleep, DH turned to me, “Wanna go back to the tent?†he asked. Hell yes. Still we kind of felt like romantic failures--until we burst into uncontrollable laughter, and rolled together into a heaving heap in our tent.
But isn’t that what we learn? That true love, true happiness, and a real romantic marriage is always happy and glamorous and exquisite. The beach is never really sandy. There are never any sand flies, or sunburn or yeast infections or heartache or ego.
So I write about the days when things are tense and the friction feels like the sand felt on my sunburned skin.
Maybe by circling back to these moments I create a different illusion—that my marriage is fraught with conflict, which is hardly the case. There is so much sweetness between us, so many moments jam-packed with goodness like this morning, when we went to the farmers market and wandered around grinning at each other licking cinnamon and sugar from our fingers. So many hours, days, weeks even, when we fit together like seals basking on salty rocks: effortless in our play and our contentment.
But I want to record the other times too, because they are hard. Because growth never comes from the moments of easy pleasure. Growth comes when the ache is greatest, when wanderlust and terror swell equally in my chest and I choose instead to stay, to say I’m sorry, and to grow with this man at my side. Again and again and again.
One of those days
This morning, racing to the toilet in an attempt to avoid vomiting all over the floor, I ended up smacking myself in the face with the toilet seat cover. Hard enough to bruise myself.
Crying + vomit. What could be better? Sigh.