Topographs::8
How to hold these moments
I know that nothing lasts. I know that spring in this place, northward where the light is lingering now and the first dandelions fleck the lawn, will become summer before I blink. I know these days will pass, and I will look back, suddenly much older than I am, with a heart full of longing for the sweet scent of my son’s head after playing in his sandbox until noon and for the way each year we celebrate the first trillium, purple and secretive by the tumbling stone wall, with our own little giddy dance.
I will likely not remember this season’s heart full of ambiguity and ache. I will probably entirely forget how Bean has entered a new SUPER BOSSY exceptionally annoying phase this past week where he’s trying on YELLING and DEMANDING just to see how far he gets with that. (Not far, little man. Not far at all.)
I know this, and yet I’m still struggling with being right here in these moments, because damn, right here in these moments is an uncomfortable place to be sometimes.
I know they are not unique, these moments of stress and financial strain and oh damn, I’ll just say it, it’s spring and I’m feeling a little tethered by these two boys. I still don’t know how to take on the playground, or any trip for that matter that involves just me and my boys. I don’t know how she does it with her girl tribe and her positive attitude all the time, because right now nothing terrifies me quite as much as the prospect of being out somewhere when they launch into their perfectly synchronized meltdowns.
I need to know how you do this with two. How do you get two into the car and then back out of it—without a double stroller. How do you make sure the big one doesn’t fall off the swing at the playground or get run over in the parking lot while toting the enormous weight a car seat carrier or a baby strapped to your person? What do you do with the big one while the little one needs a diaper change at the bookstore, and the situation demands an entire change of clothing due to an apparent explosion up the back? Or, how do you possibly navigate something as civilized and pleasant as a story hour for the bigger one, if the littler one is present and possibly grumpy? Not to mention—shopping for a new pair of jeans? (He’s here, he’s there, he’s under every freaking clothes rack in the store, and oh joy, he’s managed to unhang eighty nine dresses, even though of course, he didn’t mean to.)
My solution thus far has been to stay home. Which is decidedly not a good solution. It is spring after all. Picnic baskets seem in order, and swinging at the playground and trips to the bakery for croissants. There is a consignment store for fabulous vintage jeans I’ve been dying to poke around in, and there are errands of the more mundane sort (the post office for more stamps, we’re out of Vitamin C, the chickens need more hay) that seem to pile up, never getting done. I’m floundering a bit. This two thing is hard. Not loving them, just having them. Together. Logistically speaking.
I know it will all pass, and I’ll be grinning like a cat after a bowl of cream in four or five years when I can use both hands for carrying things like lattes and shopping bags, and my boys will be SO BIG. I know it will get easier, and I’ll take a not-so-secret glee in watching my currently childless friends whose lives seem divinely effortless right now, navigate these same first years with their own little ones. Because it just is the way it is. Littleness demands patience and selflessness and satisfaction in small things.
Guess what I'm figuring out?
Having little ones means showing up for parenting even when you don’t feel like it. It's not Bean’s fault or Sprout’s that I’m worried about money, or that DH and I sometimes climb a proverbial tower of Babel and are unable to say anything the other one understands, or that my pants are tight, or I miss my girlfriends. Because these days that are passing? These hours of bright sunlight and stormy afternoons; these rain puddles and duck feathers and muddy garden beds; these moments? These are their childhood.
Theirs. Short, fleeting, glorious.
So even though DH and I were both tired and preoccupied after going for a run yesterday (with both boys in the jogger and the sun warm on our backs) I went and got the little plastic terrarium and hiked down to the neighbor’s pond because I promised I would.
I promised Bean I’d help him catch a tadpole, and he held me to my promise, big-eyed, curious, eager. We went before dinner, and I tried very hard to just sink into our time together. The grass was scandalously green. There were soft catkins from the birches under foot, and mud, and sparkly rocks. We went barefoot, and in the pond the silt was soft. The reeds from last year's cattails were limp and brown and lumpy with gelatinous bobbing egg sacks.
I waded out, sun-warmed water up to my knees and scooped the jellied eggs. Polliwogs soon, we think. We also caught a newt. Still with gills. Its belly jewel like, spotted, yellow and green.
“I love you, Newty†Bean kept whispering later, as he sat at the kitchen table in glorious evening sunlight, drawing what he saw.
These moments, how to hold them? How do you hold them and let them be enough?
Oh restless heart, be still, be still.
Weekend Topographs::7
Too many favorites from the weekend to just post one pair of topograph photos. Since I've been doing these I've become so much more aware of my environment. Of textures, light, sound, color. How one experience influences another, how one image brings something to the next. Delight is effortless when I take notice.
White wine & stake frites, just him & holding hands, window shopping & pretty dresses, ice creams, 85 degrees, sunset on the lake.
Spring finally, catching tadpoles, rubber boots, woodpeckers, small boy wipe-outs on the bike, Neosporin, compost, more seed starts, the first sunburn of the season.
An impromptu Sunday road trip, the best BLT ever, old train stations, collard greens & trout, cupcakes, piano jazz, picking daffodils, and remembering that sometimes making memories and being present is enough. More than enough.
*** What was your weekend like?
Topographs::6
Topographs::5
***
Also listening to this. Have you seen/heard it? Bean and I couldn't get enough this morning over breakfast. We're both jazz lovers. The boy falls asleep to Miles' Kind of Blue album every night. I have always secretly wished I could play the sax. He wants to be on drums.
I'm working on a long post for tomorrow. Aperture. View. The way we look at this right now. This life. Is you expected it to be ten years ago the life you are living now? How is it different?
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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!