Topographs::3
A hot shower, sun, an iced latte, David Sedaris in the New Yorker, laughing, glasses made in Italy, wind in spirals, new-to-me terra cotta bread pans, my mother's smiles, newly baked bread & butter, another latte, stacking fire wood, rain against the evening windows, bare feet.
Topographs::2
A new sandbox.
Straight-up sunshine.
Dessert to remember (lemon meringue with a flaky pate brisee.)
On our walk: splashy puddles, new lilac buds, red barns.
2 months old
Things I want to remember about you this month: Your curly eyelashes. The way you thump your feet. How you put yourself to sleep for naps almost anywhere: on the floor on a quilt, on the couch, in bed. Your coos, your grunts like a freight train arriving at a station. The way you suck down milk, gulping noisily. Your smile like a the fluttering of a hundred humming birds among the summer hibiscus. Hiccups. The intensity of your gaze. Today your blue eyes look more hazel when the light shines through your iris. The way your head smells like milk and honey and vanilla.
You are patient and peaceful and I am grateful every day for this. It was so hard to have you in my belly, but now you are a dream. I relish every day. Even the tired ones. I am smitten. Head over heels.
You only cry when you need something and then only until you are sure we get the message (the minute we start removing your pants, you stop fussing, knowing a diaper change is on it’s way.) In the night you only fuss if you are hungry, and even then you mustly grunt and wave your arms about: hey mama, some milk would be great. We both fall back to sleep as you nurse.
In the past few weeks we’ve fallen into a pretty nice rhythm at night—you sometimes even sleep for five hours in a row, which compared to how little your brother slept, feels like a blessed eternity of sleep.
Milestones: You discovered your hands this week. You stare at your balled up fists, almost going cross-eyed. You suck on them like they are some kind of delicious treat. You use them to pull your pacifier to you; to bat at toys; to grab as much of my long hair as you can hold. You cling to it like a monkey.
You also roll over tummy to back, beautifully, like a pro. You were born with this talent, and showed it to us first at two weeks old. Already you hold your head up high and steady. You prop yourself up on elbows and look around the room.
Sometimes I lie with you belly down and look too. I see shoes, legos, cookie crumbs, hair barrettes. I see people’s feet, polka-dot rainboots, the edge of the blanket, logs by the wood stove, the Persian carpet fringe. Your
Little one, right now as I type you are lying beside me on the couch on a sheepskin. You are staring up at me and waving your arms and legs about, thumping your foot down with determination, trying to get me to look at you. When I do you reward me with these otherworldly grins. Pure, pure delight. Your entire face beams, and it makes me feel like helium, like swooping barn swallows, or fireflies flitting in the tall grass at dusk.
I am so in love with you tears sometimes spring to my eyes. I love to nap with you, to hold you close, to sing you silly songs. I love how you smile at your big brother, how you seem to get that he still wants my whole lap sometimes. You wait patiently in the wings, waving your arms, chortling, cooing. I cannot believe I ever doubted loving you. I cannot imagine my days without you in them. My favorite thing is quiet mornings when you are napping on my chest and I am writing. Together we have watched spring slowly arrive outside the windows, going out cautiously under parkas to cut forsythia or collect eggs from the coop. Together we have watched the days grow longer, your first days, gradually filling with light. How I love you.
Topographs*::1
*top'o·graph' (tÅp'É™-grÄf') n. The surveying of the features of a place or region. The study or description of a region or part of something.
I am planning to share a photo or two at the end of every day for a while. To remember the shape of things. The texture of moments. And to practice honing my eye with the camera.
Also, this bread turned out brilliantly today. My favorite so far (I plan to start regularly blogging about my bread adventures.) Perfect for sopping up fresh olive oil with mozzarella and a little basil and tomato. It was also yummy fresh, with raspberry jam.
Ingredients: 2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast 7/8 cup warm water (I approximated this. Who has a 1/8 measuring cup?) 2 1/2 cups unbleached bread flour (I used this kind.) 1 1/2 teaspoons sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons salt cornmeal to sprinkle on baking sheet
Proof yeast and 1/2 tsp sugar in 7/8 cup warm water for 10 minutes in a warm place. I put mine near our wood stove.
In processor, mix flour, remaining 1 teaspoon sugar and salt. With processor running, (Bean was TOTALLY into being in charge of this!) pour in the yeast mixture in a continuous stream.
The dough should combine and come clean from the sides of the bowl within a few seconds. After dough combines, let processor run for a little bit more until the dough forms a ball.
Roll the dough with your hands to about 18 inches long. It was sticky at first, but then became pleasantly soft and dry. Place on sheet that has been sprinkled with corn meal (to prevent dough from sticking). Cover loosely with oiled plastic wrap. (The oil is essential!)
Allow to rise in warm place for about 45 minutes. I put mine by the stove again, on the floor, the plastic wrap covered with a tea towel. When I went back to check, the cat had found it and was contentedly kneading it and purring. No harm done. Thank god for the plastic wrap though!
Preheat oven 375. Remove plastic and diagonally slash loaf with a sharp knife at about 3-inch intervals.
Spray dough with water & bake for 20 minutes or until lightly browned. Mine needed more time. I also sprayed it a 2 more times.
pancakes & dumplings
Right now: At the kitchen counter after breakfast. He's eaten four pancakes after helping DH make them. Martha's recipe, which is the best. Fresh blueberries. On the windowsill the first spring peaches, from Mexico, but still. Out in the back yard robins are gathering dried grass for nests. The sky is overcast, rain threatening.
Bean climbs up into my lap and we snap pictures. A silly face, now a pouty one. We giggle in between. Both of us look rediculous. I am addicted to the sound of his laughter. I can't help it. I tickle him just to get a fix. I am so happy this kid is feeling better. The past two mornings he's woken up declaring "I'm HUNGRY." Love it.
Apparently he's playing catch-up. Today pancakes, last night two orders of dumplings at our local pacific islands restaurant. He loves brightly colored wooden masks they have hanging on the walls. I love the paper parasols hanging from the ceiling, twirling in the breeze of the ceiling fan. Outside people walked by in droves. He wants new flip flops. I'm already wearing mine. We're both bare feet people.
Right now: the dryer is on and Bean has obviously left quarters in his pockets. They clank about but we don't do anything about it. DH and Bean are making plans to go to the dump, then to rent a rototiller. Time to turn over the soil in the garden; though it's cold today and spitting. Likely we'll go out with gloves and rain boots anyway. Get really dirty. Bean will collect earthworms. Then we'll make hot chocolate and eat fresh bread.
Later, I'll share the recipe, and some photos of my beautiful two month old Sprout.
What are your Saturday plans?
Not catching any breaks
So, Bean seemed to doing better-ish. No fever, and a happy grin on his face. Then this morning he came into our room and was busy building a fort on our bed with his trains while DH showered and Sprout and I dozed nose to nose, and then suddenly he threw up. All. Over. Everything. And, um? I am so not okay with vomit. I know many mothers who say that it's different when it's their kid. But it isn't different for me. Vomit is vomit and it makes me want to vomit. Profound, right?
The only good thing to come from this morning was watching DH gently scoop Bean, shower him, and wrap him in towels. Thank god there are two of us, because the vomit doesn't make him queasy the way it does me, and he was a rock all morning. Gentle, funny, and comforting.
But really? When will the plague pass us by? Enough already.
***
On a completely different note, I have begun to bake bread and I am wondering if you have a favorite tried and true bread recipe to share?
The anatomy of worry
I have been silent the past few days because worry has crept up like fig roots in a well or vermin in the coop. It has been eating my quiet morning hours, and instead of writing I pace the house folding laundry and watch the rain turn to sleet. Fat wet flakes arrow to the ground. The sky is white. Tree branches glisten. The road is slick with mud eight inches deep. Cars get caught in the grooves and the only way forward is to cling to the wheel and not press too hard on the gas pedal. The mud pulls the car where it will. Oncoming traffic is a hazard. You just have to keep going. I remember when I thought worry was something you could avoid, like the flu, or falling off of rooftops, and the answers were easy and obvious, A or B. I remember a time before having this baby, or the other one, now a coltish four-year-old whose skin has become translucent with winter and illness.
It makes me quivery, watching him. His eyes are dark, and the glands in his neck swollen, just slightly. Fluid in his ears has become a perfect haven for repeated infection. He’s been sick for months, but last week was the worst. Recurrent fevers. Antibiotics are bullshit for this. Worry. We’re all doing the best we can; just trying to keep going.
“What?†He asks after everything, his eyes watching my lips move. “What?â€
The world sounds like it is under water to him, and feels like it is under water to me.
This is what it is like: your heart out there beyond you, beyond your control, caught in the nook of a small boy’s fleeting smile.
I want him to be okay. I know he will be, eventually, and I could kneel and kiss the ground in gratitude for that. But still, it has been a long time. Long enough for his hearing to have temporarily diminished by almost twenty decibels. Long enough for winter with its carpetbag of ailments to have gotten under my skin.
Other people live temperate places where winter and summer are not equal, fifty-fifty, half the year. They live among trees that are not bare sticks until the end of May. They do not know how the summer sun feels like an addiction when it finally arrives with a frantic ruckus bursting of bloom and bush, blurring the memory of snow. But here, winter stretches out until it feels like forever. Until it is impossible to remember the color of new leaves, or sunburn, or a healthy boy with sun gold skin and bare feet, carefree, without congestion. Here, the light is weak and pale for so long the body hungers for it. The craving is vicious and intense.
I used to live in more temperate places, where the ocean wasn’t far and winter was more like a shrug than a death grip. I used to be single, then coupled, always self-reliant, defiant, determined. I used to imagine that the way you avoided regret was by plunging ahead; doing whatever it was that you thought you wanted without looking back.
I used to have a plan for everything. I remember, in fact, when plans seemed more real than the moment, and I harbored the idea of a self unaffected by the world. I remember really believing that if I played it cool, struck first, kept my bags packed, played hard, and kept my head up, I would always be ahead of the game and safe. I thought I could outwit the wolf, keep the poignancy of life biting me and leaving its mark.
I hadn’t dug in yet. DH and I hadn’t been together for all that long then. We lived in a small beach side bungalow with a yellow dog. The tides came in and left. Sometimes they came up high and an siren sounded and everyone would leave their houses and find their cars and drive them up to higher ground, to garages or further up side streets as the tide came licking up over the seawall, filling the streets with salt water and debris.
When we came back from a staying at lakeside cabin in the mountains where he proposed and I said yes, we found that fleas had infested our house. I remember unpacking bags in the laundry room; bending to pick up rumpled towels and bathing suits and finding that fleas had sprung onto my legs. We drove together to the store for those a couple of those toxic flea bomb canisters, set them off, and drove away again. Stayed somewhere else. Laughed.
Things could have fallen apart then and I would have shrugged. Picking up and moving on meant throwing my favorite pair of jeans into a bag with a couple of pens and a notebook. Sure, it meant heartbreak, I loved the man I’d just said yes to, but I could have gotten over it then.
It was all about staying in motion; keeping my open. I expected, maybe, to marry him, but I also expected that I might not. I expected the other shoe to drop. I never expected that my heart would know a love so fiercely beyond the tensile of that early affection that I would find myself here.
Now I look at him scrubbing a pan in the sink and want to sob. His back is to me, and suddenly he so beautiful I hardly know what to do with the moment. His muscles ripple under his blue cotton shirt. He turns, dries the pan with a faded red and white towel, places it on the stove, drizzles olive oil into it, and turns the gas flame on.
I wonder if we could have become this without our boys, without this place here that we’re trying to make year by year into a home.
Worry tempers the heart. Worry is the murder of crows in the tall poplar shrieking at the lone hawk that swoops, alights, preens. Worry, because now there is so much to loose. Because their small hearts are my responsibility, and Bean is still sick, and because no one has the answers (and antibiotics and allergies and preschool ailments have created a wicked sucker punch.) It is an unfamiliar anatomy, this worry. Like someone come to visit me in the pitch black, and all I can do is reach out and hold on, and let my hands discover its shape in the dark.
Things to smile about
It was a better day. There was coffee and sunshine. Sprout's smiles & coos. Bean's fever was still there, but lower, and we hung out together and planted seeds and drew pictures and ate soup. Somehow we managed not to all cry at once, and we went for a run.
One day at a time, right?
Kneeling
I press my palms to my face. My heart feels like a small bird caught in the high wires. Tonight, optimism is ash. I am on my knees by the wood stove, adding logs watching the flames lick up the bark, and both boys are crying. Bean has a fever of 102.5 and another ear infection. Sprout is just his small sweet self, but babies cry, and dusk is his witching hour.
Bean is wailing because he wants to be touching me, next to me, snuggled on top of me. He wants tea, but it is too hot, then too cold. He wants honey in it, but not so much, but now maybe more. He is restless, edgy. There are circles under his eyes. His lashes are the color of charcoal. The circles are the color of a bruise, or a plum.
Outside it is raining. The sky is ashy and gray. Rain licks at the windows. Mud is thick on the road. The stock market is unpredictable and chaotic. The balance has become a negative number. The days are knit together with loops of worry.
Harder than parenting a newborn or a toddler, is this: being a mother to a child who has been perpetually sick all winter, in a place where winter lasts six months, relying on an income that fluctuates with the tides of an increasingly unpredictable market. Mostly, it’s his fragility that makes my heart feel flayed and anxious. His smile is lopsided and darling. His voice has become high-pitched, whiny, uncomfortable with the steady persistence of congestion, ear aches, coughs.
Even after the fire’s heat is evident and my face is flushed I linger, kneeling, whispering a silent prayer. The rain keeps falling. Night gathers in the wet branches of trees beyond the glass. Tonight there is no chin-up positive attitude. No sunny outlook. Just pure exhaustion and the simple slim hope that tomorrow will be better than today.
Words tomorrow. Tonight, simply this. These boys, they rock my world.Recuperating
Tonight I feel like lint flicked from a pocket on the breeze, or like a piece sky blue ribbon caught in a snarl of twigs, or like a small field mouse, ears transparent and patterned with intricate veins betraying a tiny fluttering pulse, curled into a nest of fuzz and scraps of cloth beneath the woodpile logs. Unraveled, scattered, tired. My heart beating in my temples. Trying to learn what recuperating means, as I realize that instead of rest I've been holding everyone else together these past few days. Doing too much. Hard not to. I haven't learned yet how to protect my energy without being selfish. How to take care of myself without hoarding my time. Is there a way to balance this, as a mother and as an artist? The filament feels so flimsy between me and the world tonight.
Things to Think
Think in ways you’ve never thought before. If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message Larger than anything you’ve ever heard, Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.
Think that someone may bring a bear to your door, Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.
When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven, Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
From Morning Poems by Robert Bly (© 1998 Robert Bly)
1 month old
Sprout is one month old and change today. I keep wishing I could go back to old posts and find out what Bean was like at 1 month, but alas, I didn't start blogging until he was more like 3 months old so I am forced to trawl my gmail archives for the laboriously detailed emails I exchanged with another mom from the birthing class DH & I took.
We've since lost touch, but going back to our emails I discovered that not only did we document every single little thing about our babies, but she also introduced me to blogging by sending me a link for dooce's site.
I remember having no idea what a blog was and finding out felt like a revelation. There were other women out there who were also feeling isolated by new parenthood... and the were writing about it! Astounding! Now of course dooce has gone on to become famous and our entire generation of mamas have been dubbed "digital moms."
How things have changed in four years.
***
I already feel rather guilty comparing Sprout and Bean because I grew up in a household where comparison was regular and toxic. My sisters and I were always in competition, always being compared, always coming up short...and it is my goal to never do this to my boys (overtly pigeon hole them into categories: you are the artist, you, the musician, you the flighty one, you the responsible one, etc.)
But there is something to be said for comparison now, in these early months when what Sprout is capable of is mostly limited to bodily functions and sucking on a pacifier.
It astounds me that I had so much to email about with Bean. My friend and I exchanged almost weekly emails going into extensive details about nursing and pumping and bathing and burping and whatever. Bean was apparently much fussier than Sprout at the same age. He also seemed to have his night and day mixed up, though now, four years later and equally sleep deprived I can hardly recall this.
I do vaguely remember being awake--as in AWAKE and doing things--in the middle of the night because Bean would be screaming...and thus far Sprout is mostly asleep at night, or eating, or performing another bodily function that often involves lots of grunting. In general he's a happy-go-lucky second kid, and is mostly content to snooze on my lap during the day as I sit on the couch and write.
In honor of Sprout's one month birthday and my original discovery of blogs this same time four years ago, I am sharing some links I've found lately that I just absolutely love. I realize I don't do enough of that any more, but Marta inspired me with her blog hunt a while ago.
Here is my version. Will you play along? {Five new links you love.}
1. Loving: Color Me Katie--She makes me want to skip and twirl & wear polka dots and eat lolly pops and do things just for fun, just because. Love her sense of wonder and whimsy and delight. And also, her photographs.
2. Looking : The Blue Hour and Grass Doe--A writer friend sent the link for Grass Doe. The pictures inspire words. All the more alluring since there are no words anywhere on the site...the photos are breathtaking, and tell such a story. The Blue Hour I found while googling for info on Grass Doe. I love going back through Blue Hour archives to see how much he's grown & changed as a photographer. Just goes to show--if you are committed, you can hone your art.
3. Listening: 8 Tracks--Found this via Brian's blog & am experimenting with making tracks & listening to other people's tracks. Extra credit if you make your own track and share it here. Here is one for you, from me.
4. Watching: Improv Everywhere--How can you not smile watching these? I adore the fact that there are people out there who are not nearly as shy as I am who have the courage and the whimsy to make life become art everywhere.
5: Inspiring: i [love life]--She has such an awesome attitude towards life~ and I am totally on board with the whole Niki + iPod + RUN. Can't wait to go buy new shoes!
Windows
I have been noticing windows this week. Squares and rectangles with light pouring in, raw and bright, the way that new spring light does.
I’ve been noticing the way windows frame a view, just so: six small squares of pine and red maple sprouting tiny buds through the glass in the solid cherry wood of the front door; a triptych of blue mountains and bluer sky where my four orchids sit in clay pots on the sill, some blossoms dry now, like ghosts still clinging to sapling slender stems.
Today the afternoon light splashes through glass. It makes the walls yellower and my mood softer, even without enough sleep. Where I am sitting I can see the mountains from the window, but not the meadow where surly, possibly, a white-tailed doe is standing on slight legs, her warm nostrils flaring, among a mess of winter-dead grass.
We are always looking through windows, always seeing a view.
Two days ago, DH had a down day. He read the charts and made the wrong call and all afternoon he was tossed upside down in a bucket of hope, and I could hear him thudding his fist with frustration into his glass-topped desk, expletives filtering through the wall like parentheses, and I watched a squirrel scrabbling uselessly at the dining room window. The squirrel was trying to climb the slick glass to reach the bird feeder where fat sunflower seeds tempt nuthatches and grosbeaks. Eventually, after much commotion, it fell to the ground; forced to nibble at the fallen shells and millet seeds the birds had scattered and pecked.
Two days ago I spent the day indoors, looking out of windows and feeling listless and limited by the smallness of Sprout and the amount of effort it takes to bundle him into tiny warm things: woolen socks and a hand knit blue hat, and a fleece jumpsuit into which I must stuff his arms and legs like small sausages. I’d spent the day inadvertently waiting for something to happen, waiting for the view to change, for something sweet, for delight to find me here in this house were the walls sometimes feel very close and the rooms very small. And when DH came out of his office I turned to him like a little girl, my face wide-open, grinning like he was maybe holding a billowing cloud of cotton candy on a stick. And he just looked at me.
He looked at me in a distressed, tight-jawed way, and said “Right.†And “Mmm†absently to whatever I said and I knew he had every intention of spending the rest of the afternoon pacing in the dark rooms of his mind analyzing whatever it was he had missed or done wrong at work, curtains drawn. And I bit my quivering lip and rinsed the dish I was holding.
Disappointment, if it could have a taste, would be the taste you get at the back of your throat when you jump into a pool, expecting the splash and the plunge, but forgetting to hold your nose. Or it would taste like burnt toast; or getting the popcorn flavored jellybean instead of the lemon one when you pick a yellow one out of the bag. Whatever its taste, disappointment was there on my tongue with the many bitter words I didn’t say and swallowed instead.
It was arranged civilly: he would work out while I would continue to watch the boys; then I would be free to go on a run, solo. We used the fewest words possible, as if they were heavy things we did not have the strength to hoist about. We looked in opposite directions, my ponytail to his cheek; the back of his muscled calves running up the stairs as I turned to face him.
Under the imaginary table in my head I was kicking myself for doing it again: for expecting something, unnamed and remarkable from him at the end of a day.
Do you ever do this? Expect the world from the one you love, when the world is already right here, and you are already in it?
I could feel tears at the back of my eyes. They spring up now, often and unbidden, a symptom of the tiredness that has begun to inhabit my body, making the skin under my eyes transparent and dark, and my heart quick to ache.
But, after much clattering of plates and flatware I realized that the only thing I could change was my view. I desperately needed to get out of the house. Right then. Right that minute when the sun was still high and the breeze would bring the scent of warm mud and possibly skunk cabbages in thawing boggy places.
So I sent the little guy down to the basement gym with a collection of Matchbox cars to hang with his Daddy, and I patiently nursed Sprout and then burped him and dressed him in the multiple small layers of fleece and bootie and hat, and then pulled on rubber boots and a jacket and strapped the baby to my chest.
Of course he cried. Of course there were those two minutes that felt like a hundred hours when I tried to get him into his fleece jumpsuit and all of his limbs were like rubber and his face was squished into a wail of discontent, and my body was suddenly awash with heat. But we both survived and I made it out the door, suddenly furious at everyone and everything and muttering under my breath. But then, looking down at my shadow, backlit by bright sun, I could see heat waves rising up around my shoulders and head, and I had to throw my head back and laugh. This is the crazy I am right now. Heatwaves. Out loud muttering. Mud boots. Mood swings.
And instead of just going to collect the mail as I had intended, I kept walking. I climbed the neighbor’s stile and jumped down onto the springy earth on the other side, and then walked down the trail through muddy places and over a small stream and then up, up into the woods along a creek bed where the snowmelt babbles and sings. Along the trail coyotes had gone before me, leaving their unmistakable canine prints in the mud, and a piece of sheepskin snagged on the bark of a hickory. The neighbor’s lambs are born every February, and one or two almost always end up being carried off despite the barbed wire and the barn doors and the three fierce lamas who stare anyone down and chomp impatiently at the air with their buckteeth.
Further up the hill, I saw the rest of the sheep’s wool, along side the stream: a soft blanket of death and feasting. No lamb after all. This was a full-sized sheep, carried here on one of those full moon nights when I woke to hear the yapping and felt the familiar prickle of goosebumps on my arms.
As I hiked I found the answers, scattered like last year’s fallen beech leaves on the snow. I realized that what happens with us is something that must happen to many people who fall in love first, then become parents, preoccupied with the sudden demands of need and responsibility.
It’s easy to forget that once we were each other’s only only, and while we are not now, our hearts still long for this.
Once we gave each other full attention, French kisses, boxes with small gifts and colored ribbon, handfuls of wildflowers, photographs, mixed tapes, late night movies at the theater, sandwiches, new books, back rubs, curiosity. Now, the hours in the day are not enough and like the coyotes, we’re both hungry for our share of time. Without intending, it’s easy to become absent, distracted, distant, disheartened. And so there we are. There I am.
I realized I was not mad at him for his dark mood or his down day or for having to watch the baby after I had already done that all day long, or for the dishes in the sink. I was not mad at all, I found, when I opened and closed the many crammed drawers of my heart.
Instead all I found was a kind of loneliness. A hunger. Not for just anyone. For him. For us the way we were, before this. Shit. It’s so easy to let it slip. You blink, you have a baby, you dig into the present of your life, the clock’s hands go round and round, and zip, it’s gone.
An hour later I was back. The rhythm of my body had long ago lulled Sprout into a deep grunting sleep, and the rhythm of climbing and stumbling through almost knee-deep snow on the North-West side of the mountain left me newly bright eyed. But they were gone.
I could see his blue truck was missing from the drive as I crested the hill above our house and for a minute I felt the disappointment flip flop about in my ribcage the way a stunned bird does when you scoop it in your palms and hold it, after it has flown unexpectedly into a windowpane.
“You deserved it,†I whispered. “You were the one who left without saying where you were going.†And it was true, I had, and I did. And it wasn’t really his fault I expected him to be my moon and stars that afternoon. It was mine.
But then there he was in the driveway—the boys had been driving up and down the road looking for me. On both of their faces smiles bloomed like sunflowers when they saw me at the door.
“Let’s go into town and get dinner,†he said.
Time spent moving, sweating, had had the same affect on him.
So we went for pizza at a little hole in the wall place where kids in hugely baggy pants were playing pool and a juke-box was mounted on the wall and the pizza crust was thin and crispy. I had root beer, and we sat by the windows, and Bean was preoccupied with watching the fire trucks and hatchbacks and delivery trucks that passed by on the street. And so, unexpectedly, DH and I had time to talk.
“A friend of mine at work is getting a divorce,†he said, holding the pizza like a taco, folded, pepperoni and cheese dripping out the side.
“He said it’s partly the job, and partly they’ve just grown apart. They’re taking a week apart to think it over, but I told him he should really taking the week with her, without the kids, to remember what they had in the first place.â€
Next to us a family of four had almost finished dinner. The father got up and left the restaurant at a run. His family waved to him as he ran by the glass, on a mission to get something. Grinning.
When the mother and two girls finished eating they cleared their paper plates and walked out into the night.
I could see them through my reflection in the glass, lit by the yellow streetlamps, looking in the direction the man went. Then after some deliberation they walked the other way.
DH said, “It’s so damn easy to forget, to get distracted. Like you said the other day, you really can loose it all like that, without really noticing.â€
The man came back. He burst into the restaurant panting, expectant. Saw the empty table where they had sat, then turned slowly to leave. Outside on the corner he stood for a moment, looking up and down the street. Then walked off.
“It really is,†I nodded.
We kept talking. The baby slept in the crook of my knee. I licked cheese from my fingers and shared sips of root beer with Bean who found a new love: calzones. He was busy dipping pieces of cheesy dough into marinara, a saucy smile spreading ear to ear.
The lady and the girls came back to the corner outside the restaurant. They looked up the street again, then stood there, shifting in their jackets, saying words I couldn’t hear through the glass. Finally they turned and walked in the same direction the man had gone, and I caught myself hoping desperately that they would find each other and laugh instead of being bitter or snapping at one another in the dark beside their parked car.
“Oh! They missed each other twice,†I said.
DH turned to look, then smiled and reached across the table for my hand. "You're always noticing that stuff," he said.
And I couldn’t help but grin. Because somehow, right then, we had exactly the same view.
Learning Curve.
Learning Curve. There are days when I feel like cloudy water in a glass. Days when I feel spilled and lonely, and the color of the sky and the color of the melting snow is like cement, perpetual and repeated as far as the eye can see and all I want to do is crawl into bed and sleep.
There are days now, when I feel utterly incapable as a mother of two. There is certainly a learning curve to it, and the curve is steep and scrabbling.
Today is one of those days. Stir crazy. An open jar of nutella. Going to pick up and Bean up at preschool with Sprout in tow. Thus far all efforts to take both boys anyplace by myself have gone disastrously. Sigh.
Finding my way to here
Photo by M.Brott
The days soften. The scent of mud reaches our nostrils thawing beneath lacy layers of dirty snow. Icicles fall. My body is adjusting to eating scraps of sleep. In the middle of the night a headache fills the space between my temples, thrumming and groaning like some hungry wild beast, but in the morning there is just the window, the pale light, the rumpled sheets.
There is an hour then, between five and six when the light is changing from gray to yellow and the tall birch outside the glass is filled with birds, that I curl my body around Sprout, milk drunk after nursing. His head smells like honey; like rain on a summer afternoon; like something that is mine.
We lie like otters and dream. DH’s breath is warm on my neck. My feet press against his shins, heat traveling between us under the tangle of covers. I will forget so soon how this heat takes me by storm in the middle of the night; how I am suddenly drenched with sweat, thrash at the sheets, shove my ankles akimbo over the edge of the mattress. I will forget how my fingers blunder with snaps, milk soaking through my shirt; and how, sitting cross legged on the bed changing Sprout’s diaper in the mostly dark, my core muscles feel non-existent like my middle is composed of anemones winnowing in the gap between my ribs and pelvis.
Then, invariably Bean comes in just as morning is unclenching its late winter fists and the cardinals are marking their territory in scarlet song. Bean is a long-legged colt all of a sudden. He is full of giggles and kisses and knees. He comes in dragging his raggedy blanket and shimmies under the covers. Then the bed is a boat, a space ship, a racecar. We stagger to catch up: hot water, espresso, fried eggs.
***
In the late morning I pull on my chocolate polka-dotted rain boots and go outdoors with Sprout strapped to my chest. The snow is melting. Bean is carrying his hammer. DH has an armload of freshly cut two-by-four planks. We’re heading up the hill, our little family of four, through the woods where the ground is spongy and the snow is sometimes deep.
At the top of the hill, as far back in the woods as our land goes is an old tree. A sugar maple, struck by lightening, hollowed first by fire, then by termites. It is the perfect tree to hide in for a small boy. Bean calls it his “fort.†Last summer I would hike up with him and hoist him into the cool dark of the hollow trunk where leaves made a soft resting place and light filtered down in long dusty motes from above his head. Now, newly independent, he wants to be able to climb in himself so we bring wood and nails to hammer a rudimentary latter to the trunk.
Our pet goose follows us up the hill, and Sprout, tucked into the Bjorn on my chest makes whispering coos as he sleeps. He wears a blue and green hat like a little gnome’s.
The nails sing as they are driven into the wood. Ping, ping, pang, pong, pong. Some bend, encountering knots. The trunk is old. Only a few limbs will have bright green buds and leaves this year.
Later we cut across the snowy meadow past the sleeping garden, following the melting tacks of deer to our neighbor’s house. They are running sugaring lines today, drilling holes for spouts. The sap is running. We cup our hand under the spiles and taste the liquid. It is clear and cold and faintly sweet.
*** I go back to my notebooks from this same time during the early weeks after Bean was born and before, and am struck by how I’ve changed.
I was just twenty-seven. Living in the suburbs. Commuting. Newly married. Every day l imagined a parallel life. Me in a little bohemian flat somewhere above a grocery on the Upper West Side. Thrift store teacups and lampshades, a futon mattress on the floor, nights spent in smoky cafes, up headache late by choice. I was always hankering for a life I believed was more exotic than my own. There was always escape route folded in my back pocket; the bags of my heart always packed and waiting at the door.
This should come as no surprise.
I come from restless women. My grandmother fell in love with her cousin, and, forbidden to marry him, left England on a steamer, broken hearted. She met her husband on that voyage: a German farmer from a good family, and though they traveled around the world together on a honeymoon that lasted fourteen months, sipping tea from brass bowls in Tibet, and drinking camel’s milk in the Egyptian desert, she never really allowed him, or the life he had to offer, to measured up.
I can picture her at the kitchen window looking out at the red dairy barns tucked into the softly rolling Appalachian hills, rinsing plates and resenting every one. She wore stockings and pea coats, when neither was practical; drank afternoon tea from china cups; wrote hundreds of sonnets. Hers was a life of sighs. Before she died she burned most of the poems she had written.
Before Bean, before here, before this, I could never picture myself settled. Houses terrified me. Staying put terrified me. And it was a terror I had learned by heart, handed to me in the blueprints of how to be inked by my mother and her mother before her.
My mother, never quite content, always moved where my father asked her. First to a cabin high in a bowl of the Rocky Mountains where she hung my diapers to dry in subzero temperatures, then carried them indoors, flat as boards to thaw before the woodstove. Then to a house on the hill among dangerously flammable eucalyptus in the Los Angeles suburbs where the Santa Anna winds would make the carpets ripple, and smoke from wild fires obscured the San Adres Mountains. And finally to a low ranch with metallic floral wall paper on a winding macadam road in California wine country where the grass was green in January and dead by April. The seasons were Rainy or Dry, and in spring tractors would spray yellow clouds of pesticides onto the grapes.
Somehow deep within my bones I memorized this message: houses were discontent. Settling meant just that: settling for something, for something less. I distrusted the process of committing to growing a life and growing a family because I assumed it would make me like my mother: restless with regret for a life she had never had and could never quite imagine.
But somehow I managed to say yes to it, despite the bucking of my heart. I have a good man, and maybe this is partly why the terror has gradually been dissolved by joy. Knowing I was like a spring-broke filly always threatening to run, DH promised, and promised again: we can go anywhere, and will if we need to. This place is just for now, for the time being.
But in the time being, I have begun to spend the time, being.
*** It is early evening and upstairs DH and Bean are napping. Everyone is trying to catch up on sleep whenever they can around here. Bean spent the night at his grandparents and didn’t go to bed until nine. When he came home today his huge eyes were glassy and the skin below his eyes was pale and almost purple. When he looks tired like this I want to scoop him up and tuck him into the pocket of my heart. My little boy.
On the couch, I sit with my legs up, Sprout on my chest, his fuzzy head pressed to my chin. I am smitten. Even in the moments when his crying makes me crazy I am smitten. I had no idea this would happen. This love. This wild contentment.
5 days:: due date
The late winter sun shines through the windows with tangible heat. It makes geometric patterns on the floor, shining through the slats of chairs and the mullions on the windows; it refracts through the glass jar on the table filled with fragrant eucalyptus and tiny purple flowers; it dapples the rumpled sheets where Sprout lies in the buff, his feet curled up behind him the way he was for so long in the womb.
On the couch, three loads of laundry, fresh from the dryer, a snarl of unfolded cotton. On the floor, the riff raff that has fallen off the logs stacked by the woodstove. People’s boots leave wet tracks by the door. This is a life. This is my life, now, these moments like light shining through a jar of amber syrup.
I try to let everything be. I try to let it all be despite the fact that it creates a turbulence in me: a voice whispering your life is out of control. Whose voice is this, yammering softly at the back of my head?
The morning is quiet, even with both boys at home today—a first. Bean goes out to play in the snow. I watch him from the window—lanky, even in his blue snowsuit. He carves a tunnel in a mound of icy snow, then drives a digger through. When he comes in, I foam milk and drizzle molasses over the top. He gulps it, all grins, his bare feet tucked up under him on the stool.
When I look in the mirror my eyes are pale blue. They get this way when I am tired. They are the color of the sky outside: a milky late winter sky awash with sun, snow thick on the ground but melting steadily in a staccato of drips from the eaves. Below the bird feeders this morning I encountered another set of eyes: a doe’s with soft brown fur. She stood, lured by the black sunflower seeds fallen to the ground. For her, the winter is long. For me, the nights are. Sprout nursed for an hour in the early morning, then fussed while the sun rose. Sleep became a fracture in the dawn. A hairline figment of what I'm used to, but here I am.
I watch her swivel her ears, then dart away, startled to see me behind the glass. In the mirror I startle too, getting used to a new silhouette, my stomach returning to its former shape, softness bulging where the firm hard curve of my belly was, swollen with Sprout. I hold him to my chest and already my mind can hardly slip backwards to the hours of his birth. How is it possible that this babe, this bundle of tiny limbs and sweet breath and little hiccuped sighs and porpoise whispers was in my belly just five short days ago.
Every night is still different, sleep sewn together in fragments, but it is peaceful. This baby boy is calmer than Bean, and I am calmer too. We navigate the nighttime softly, and in the morning I awaken feeling like a thousand piece puzzle shaken in a box, but I am somehow still contained. The nights don’t terrify me like they did in the early days with Bean.
It’s the small things that make the days whole. The extra effort to be tender towards each other even when we’re feeling fragmented and sharp. I reach for him in the dark; he pulls me to him at the bottom of the stairs, kisses me full on the mouth hard, and with unexpected passion, the baby between us. I come up behind him when he’s rinsing plates at the sink, press my belly into his back, wrap my arms around his muscles.
Now it is night. The house windows show us ourselves. The firelight is orange. Sprout fusses intermittently as DH walks him around the living room humming. Bean and I sit at the dining room table. He is drawing fireboats, talking as he does so, around him a sea of markers and snippeted papers.
A day. A life. This is us, right now.
3 days
Sprout is three days old. It is snowing outside, and has been all night long, and our house is tucked into a snug blanket of silence and whiteness.
He is beautiful, and when he smiles in his sleep his dimpled grin makes this tiny world of mine explode with sparklers.
I am delirious. The second night with him was rocky.
He cried for the first several hours of the night, uncomfortable, gassy, something—a squeal uniquely his own, like a baby dragon. There is a learning curve to all of this for both of us, even if it is the second time around, and it took half the night to figure out what he needed.
The tiredness didn’t hit until yesterday morning. Then it was massive. Tiredness in my bones, my muscles, my ligaments.
I have always wished that people would write about their first week home with a new babe, because it is such a fragile, isolating time. You wonder, invariably if anyone else goes through the same things: the stupendous heights of new baby love, and the rocky catapults to below low . I’ve always wondered what it is like for other people. I imagine, now that I am in the thick if it, it is not because they don’t intend to write, but because the tiredness takes hold of their fingers, and the moments become wrapped in a protective bubble of forgetfulness.
I don’t want to forget.
I want to write even though the tiredness feels like an animal in the room with me: large and soft and voracious. I want to write so that I can remember what these moments are like: new, and precarious, with snow falling in huge fat flakes outside.
I go to do something, the intention in my brain firing at normal speed; and then I arrive at the place where I intended to be and have no idea for a moment why I am there. I nearly put the half & half into the freezer this morning, having randomly picked it up while trying to get ice. It made me laugh out loud into the quiet of the house. This is the silly crazy of sleep deprivation that so up-ended me with Bean.
Sprout is asleep on the couch, tucked into a corner, dreaming, wearing a hat his big brother wore, and in it, the two look so the same.
I am sitting in my favorite place: the dining room, where windows go on three sides. It is here, in front of the windows, that I have hung bird feeders, and during snowstorms especially, the birds come steadily to peck and flutter, and for some reason this makes me unspeakably glad. The blue of the jay’s feathers is cobalt bright against the snow. The cardinal, so red. The finches, small flecks of yellow and brown, that arrive by the twos and threes to split sunflower seeds.
Birds in the snow, like the orchids blooming on the living room windowsill, fill me, even when I ache and am beyond tired.
Yesterday I was so tired I couldn’t sleep. The difference between doing this the first time around and doing it a second is that there is a resident four year old in the house who sounds like a herd of energetic hippos as he moves from room to room following his Daddy about as they do “projects.†Even when he is being quiet, he stirs the air around him like an oar dipped into the smooth surface of a pond. His little self eddies out and fills the space: exuberance, thundering feet, the sweet high music of his voice.
Yesterday all this noise made me startle over and over again so that I was neither awake nor deeply asleep, as I tried to nap in the morning. Some internal tuning shifts with giving birth, so that every noise filters into my brain differently. I am always on the alert for Sprout’s breathing, his slightest whimper, his smallest sigh. When I sleep next to him, I breathe in synch with his breath, and the rhythm of us breathing together is like the complex jazz score and anything else, any other sound, disrupts this and makes it harder to sleep.
It isn’t like I am just tired. Not like the tired you feel at two months or three months when the babe stubbornly won’t sleep and you wake up feeling like a hologram of yourself but you can still laugh. This is a different kind of tired that originates in my organs, my muscle tissue, my sore, sore body. Everything hurts. And where adrenaline made the first day and the second a soporific rush of moments; the trauma of labor catches up. My body is stunned.
Finally I asked DH to rally the in-laws to take Bean on an excursion yesterday, then handed him Sprout and toppled into a torpor-like sleep, my head buried under pillows to block any noise from filtering into my jagged-edged brain.
This is something we’re doing better: communicating what we both need. Making it about the needs, not about the emotions that bubble up, misguided and inaccurate.
It’s so easy to fall into a place of reaction when you’re this tired. When your mind rolls around like a marble in a jar it’s easy to misconstrue and point fingers and generally become a monster. I remember this from Bean. I remember how DH and I would crash into each other’s emotions in the night, become frustrated, snap, and it would leave us feeling both fragile and alarmed.
This time both of us expected the inevitable tears, the inability to make a decision, the tenderness, the enormous, fragile need for sleep. This time we talked about it ahead of time, earmarking patience for when the riptide of hormones began to yank me under.
And he has been amazing. Steadfast, tender. Sometimes he is distant, matter of fact, all muscle and action and I want to suck him in close as though I am a starfish extending the membrane of my heart around his heart.
But I also know that he is riding his own rollercoaster. The provider instinct in him is in overdrive now.
Today as he gets back from dropping off Bean off at his grandparents, the house is suddenly full with his noises: doors opening and shutting as he fetches an armload of wood; the clunk of his boots as he knocks snow off; the sound of metal on metal as he lifts the stove lid and adds wood; espresso being ground. His jaw is set. In his office, the charts are up on his monitors, graphing the volatility that is the stock market of late.
Outside the chimes that we hung on the lilac tree in summer make their metal music in the wind. Juncos and chickadees and nuthatches gather in its branches. I nurse Sprout, then bring him to the table and nestle him in a laundry basket next to me where he sleeps, his arms above his head.
I love him. I love him unimaginably, and feel almost surprised by this sweetness especially when Bean climbs into bed beside us and my love for him makes my heart flutter. Next to Sprout, his legs and arms seem remarkably large. He nuzzles in, nudging next to Sprout and me, our cheeks together in the first light of morning.
Bean already loves his brother. He has yet to show any jealousy, and instead has been full of tenderness and sweetness—running to get us diapers, asking a thousand questions, trying to memorize every contour of his brother’s face, every function of his small body. “I love you,†he said softly last night at dinner, perched on a chair next to me, looking down into his brother’s briefly open eyes.
Every day is different. A wonderment, a thousand sighs and tears and laughs.
He's here...
The little Sprout is here. Born at 10am on Friday. 7lbs 14oz, 20 inches.
I am currently attempting to remember the fine art of one-handed typing.
It makes everything so much easier to have already done this once. People probably told me this, but I somehow I didn't hear them. Things are so much easier this time.
DH and I both get all the little signals and whimpers and coos. Together, we're a rockstar baby-caring team this time around. We're not shattered by the urgent sound of newborn crying or the gas or the poop. We know things will be okay, and because we know this, everything seems so much more enjoyable. This is not to say I wasn't entirely shocked (and had forgotten completely) by the vast number of diapers a newborn produces in a day. Holy poop.
But also, the little guy seems to be remarkably mellow; perhaps because he got to hang out on my chest wrapped in warm towels for nearly an hour after he was born--before he was even weighed. Maybe all that snuggle time with mama made him a chill babe. That, and the fact that he weighed a good pound more than his brother at birth.
Labor itself was so much shorter--7 hours all told (compared with Bean's 24.) And even though the actual giving birth portion of the program hurt like hell (Worlds Greatest Understatement. No drugs.) I felt much less traumatized afterward, and we went home the same evening after being given the green light from the doctors.
(Perhaps more on that in a separate post. I am a little peeved at doctors right now. And I am totally convinced they are out convince women into thinking they are going to be incapable as mothers. The attending pediatrician asked, after conceding (unwillingly) that there was no reason we needed to stay at the hospital, if I had had any trouble breastfeeding last time because really, I should consider either spending the night at the hospital or picking up formula to supplement with on the way home, just in case I didn't produce enough milk. Um. Right.
With Bean I was scared shitless by all of this, and it totally made me doubt my instincts. With Sprout, I just shrugged. Tried hard not to roll my eyes. And of course he's been a champion nurser and the sweetest little peach. My boobs are the only ones who have forgotten what it was like to have a full time job. Ouch.
All in all I am smitten. He has a dimple when he sleep smiles in his right cheek, and eyelashes as long as Bean's were--but totally different eyes and nose. He smells yummy. And I'm not pregnant. And suddenly, food tastes divine. And Bean is the best big brother ever.