borrowing faith

I've already covered to some extent my husband's rampant optimism in the face of the move. “We'll be together, and we'll be fine” was one of his mantras from the start. Apparently, he held the opinion that our little family could withstand realtors on illegal visits and a month of double rent and a 60-day termination of tenancy notice and all the rest. His faith worked me, eventually loosening a few of my anxieties, though I held fast to some of my favorites.

The place we've moved to is nice. Smaller, more expensive, and nice. One of the things that we like about it is that we sit tucked off the main street, behind a church parking lot. Maybe that's two things: the tucked away part, and the proximity to the church.

For the last six weeks the marquee out front of the church has said the same thing: “Sermon: God's Love.” I'm not a church person, but I can tell you that I love watching the women in their white square-heeled pumps and matching purses – full-hipped women shaking out the pleats of their flowered skirts as they walk. Flare right. Flare left. Boom, swing, boom, swing, as they traverse the hilly asphalted parking lot.

And there's the singing.

The day I met our current landlord, it was a Sunday afternoon. Standing out in the front yard of the house, my attention was divided between the details of a prospective rental and a congregation on fire. “Whoah!” I say indicating the raucous clapping and singing coming from under the steeple. “They mix it up, don't they?”

“Oh, don't worry,” my landlord said, worriedly waving his palms. “It's not like this all the time!”

“I love it!” I told him.

I met our neighbors, the Johnsons, while hauling boxes out of my trunk. “I'd love to have you over once we get settled,” I said to Mrs Johnson. “Whenever that is.”

“No one's going anywhere,” she said, with a hint of an accent I think is German. “No one goes anywhere so fast anymore. I'm 80 and my husband's 89.” A man in blue coveralls waves from the open garage door before continuing to hunt through a metal box for some kind of tool.

“It's quiet here,” she offers. “Very quiet, this neighborhood.” There's a small pause. “Except on Sundays. They get a little loud with their singing at the church.”

Three days after we've turned in the key to the old place, I turn my back on my living room piled in boxes and grab my gardening gloves. People are starting to arrive at the church. Boys in ties race each other to the door, girls play freeze tag around an SUV.

Then, from my squat beside the callas, I hear the sermon start – at first mostly muffled noise. I plant the snap dragons I bought – velvet red and lemon yellow stalks; I debate where to put the fig tree. The preacher is working himself into a fit of praise, washing over his congregation with waves of sound that appear to be questions. Mud cakes my jeans, and I unearth more earthworms. Slowly, the volume of the service rises until I can hear words and phrases clearly.

“The power,” he is saying. “The power! The power here...”

A woman's voice answers. “The power!”

Preacher: “The power here is love!”

Congregation: “The power!”

Preacher: “The power here is love!!”

Congregation: “The power here is love!!”

Preacher: “The power! The POWER!! The POWER here is LOVE!”

Then the singing starts.

Isaac is TWO

The birthday hike --> Crowned King Baby -->

Surfacing

That's the title of one of Margaret Atwood's early novels. I haven't even started yet, and I digress -- go figure. So, my son turned two just four days and one hellish move after the last post. Allow me to put up a couple pictures...

daffodils

Because of my son's fascination with the answering machine buttons, we get to hear the real estate agent's message over and over again. Her voice sounds almost bored -- “as convenient and painless as possible,” her dog barking in the background.

My buffer is gone, nothing between me and the outside world, which has apparently just become even more hostile. Where should I put the daffodil blossoms?

Holding Isaac in the rocking chair, he is long asleep, but I don't dare put him down. It's like the weight of him is rooting me, like without him I will just float away, or he will, or both of us, in separate directions.

Mike comes home; the house is dark. He finds me, finally, in Isaac's room. “What are you doing?” he asks. “Holding the baby,” I answer. “You have to put him down some time,” he says. But I shake my head and rock.

people

People are made of concrete and splinters. They are made of tear gas and florescent lighting. People are made of latex, and litter, broken brown beer bottles left in paper bags and spoiled seafood. People are made of Sweet n Low, cayenne and anything they can get their hands on. People are made of glossy pages and construction sites. People are made of red lights, asbestos, the smell of too many copy machines in one place with no ventilation, hang nails and road kill.

Our creeds read like deeds the devil owns. Our minds are lists of sweatshop toys

when people are made of lactic acid and vertigo, barbed wire, Taco Bell, and melanoma, when people are made of minor chords and smog.

renters’ haiku

My sister still talks about the haiku I wrote in the entry from over two years ago when I was a starving, raving preggo locked out of my car at the pool. So, in the whirlwind of stress that has been my last two weeks, as my landlord prepares to sell our house, prepares evil messages on lawyer letterhead, as my son recovers from a stomach flu that had me wondering if we would just run out of things to wear that weren’t already covered in vomit, as, as, as…I thought I’d offer just a couple renters’ haiku. Nothing like some 5-7-5 to still the mind:

Application hell
your references haven’t called
meanwhile homeless


the pet deposit
she’s a CAT, not a RHINO!
are you kidding me?


No one trusts the cat
maybe I’LL pee on your rug
or just get a fish


“Why don’t YOU buy it?”
realtor asks in a sweet tone
someone hold me back

moving and marriage

I knew what he was, but I married him anyway. My husband is a dedicated optimist. I think they even have their own clubs, these people. You don't hear about it, though; it's secret, like the masons.

When my favorite houseplant, the one with the hint of yellow-orange in the center of each leaf, began dropping those leaves one by one, Mike's take on it was “Maybe it's just part of its cycle.” I've heard the “cycle” line plenty – right before my rosemary bit the dust for good, and when the umbrella plant browned and withered to nothing.

This move has brought out the worst of his optimistic tendencies.

“What if the garbage man at whatever new house we find doesn't wave to Isaac?” I worry, the anxious knots in my stomach worthy of an Eagle Scout. “Maybe it'll be the same garbage man!” Mike pipes.

“Geezuz Christ!” I tell him. “You would think of something positive to say at a time like this!”

the blessings of renting (or, another house about to be sold out from under us)

I am writing this from where I'm holed up inside Isaac's bedroom waiting for the people who've come to look at the house to go away. Isaac is asleep. Has been for an hour. I told the landlady he would be and if they wanted to see the whole place and not tiptoe around, she should change the time. She didn't. It's her house, we just made a life here.

I am sitting on the floor with my back barring the door and feeling more than a little like a protective mother bear. I didn't want Isaac to wake up and find strangers wandering around his house, and, frankly, I didn't want to have to deal with them myself – didn't want to worry about how much to smile or smirk, or where to be while they peered into our closets and sniffed around our salad spinner. Okay, I'm lying – we don't have a salad spinner, but you get the idea. Mike's out there; and I'm in here.

Isaac hasn't moved from the position I put him down in. He's tired. Been out with his dad playing in the dirt all morning. But all these new energies in the house must be reaching him, at least you'd think. Aha, he's starting to stir. I just want him to hold on until all this is over.

It must be a blessing. This shuffling, this moving against our will. Four rented houses in three years' time. How grateful I am as a writer to be given this opportunity over and over again to reinvent, live in turmoil, flare with anger at realtors and property managers, the former arriving in canary yellow Porsches and standing in the driveway discussing my family's fate with the landlady. Thank goodness I am forced to review my years one by one, or by season, (“Hmm, that was spring, we must have been living on 10th Street.”), forced to look hard around me at what would soon be taken away.

Why just the other morning I swelled with joy and nostalgia on seeing that man in the black knit cap walk past the white for sale sign in the front yard. He walks past every day. Every single day, talking to himself. I sometimes hear him shouting at invisible people as he approaches from farther up the hill. Whenever I back the car out, I look for him first. You never know when he'll just appear, one shoulder sagging, always dressed too warmly for the weather, muttering crossly and staring at the ground. He waved at me once. In a couple months, I'll never see him again.

He'll be banished into history like the man who used to wander around the Forest Avenue apartment – that was four moves ago already – his big belly never quite willing to remain under his striped teeshirt, his beard wild. He came to our garage sale, bought my Matisse prints for 50 cents each.

What would I rail against? What would I worry about? If landlords kept promises and leases were more than leashes? How would I be able to write so carefully and with quite as much ardor about the sunflowers in the small square of dirt the gophers tilled for me, their rust and gold plumage blooming nearly to the size of hubcaps a foot from the ground, and when they're through, bowing their starry heads.

the essential nature of context

Isaac: “Dai?”

Me: “We can't go outside until you put on clothes, Isaac.”


Isaac: “Dai?”

Me: “Okay, you're ready to go inside?”


Isaac: “Dai?”

Me: “Yeah, if you hang it there, it'll dry.”


Isaac: “Dai?”

Me: “Well, penguins don't really fly, Iz; they like to swim.”

the color of justice

It was Mike's idea to go fancy.

I was in Goodwill looking for an old, ornate frame for one of Isaac's paintings. He's an interesting toddler artist, my guy. Gets in close with his markers, concentrating on the lines he's about to make. Chooses each new color with fanfare. His favorite new sign, by the way is 'rainbow.'

With a paintbrush the other day, he watched the thick strokes carefully. One pass with red. A second pass. Orange next, coming in curving complements. As if he were raised crawling around studios and galleries, he steps back, stares at his work, tilts his head, replaces the brush, pronounces it done, and walks away.

My friend, whose son is busy slathering layer number six of red on red, his canvas a solid block of goo, looks over at us, stunned. “That's a framer!” she comments.

It was a Saturday, and Goodwill was busy. Everything with a black tag was half price. The wide gold frame had potential but wasn't quite right. And the popularity of metal, mauve numbers was simply not acceptable. I had already determined this lack of cool, old frames in the right size, but lingered, checking out the burnt orange sectionals and rows of identical flower vases. There were two boys playing nearby in the toy section. Well, really only one was playing – he looked about nine, his brother was about two, not much bigger than Isaac.

The two-year-old was trying to play, but his older brother kept thrusting a giant stuffed green snake in his face, pushing him over with it, half frightening, half annoying the tyke. Again and again it happened, until the snake was abandoned for a yellow truck and then a large white bear – the little one squealing in protest, moving away, begin pursued, crying, the cycle repeating itself.

Their mother appeared not to be fully tuned in to the scene, busily choosing among sleeveless turtlenecks in shades of blue and grey from a rack of knit tops.

It bothered me more than I would've imagined, this teasing, this sibling rough housing, maybe because only one side was being rough, or even had the ability to be. This was a classic case, and I routed for the underdog with more emotion than I had at any other time I could remember. I was incensed, but seemingly helpless.

We drifted apart, me and the victim/victimizer. Then, just as I decided I was done and began a brisk stride for the door from the back of the store, I saw him again – the nine-year-old. He was walking in my direction holding the snake, looking a confident master of his world.

Damn me if you must. Put me down as perpetuating the violence. I am guilty of a lack of compassion for the aggressor. Mea culpa. Mea culpa.

Ever so subtly, I edged over as we passed each other, crowding the boy in next to a rack of pink and purple plus-sized women's blazers. Just a toe, only that, turned out just enough.

I kept my eyes focused ahead of me, but I felt the bump of his sneaker hitting into mine, heard the muffled thud of a small frame meeting thin, brown, industrial carpet.

the truth about trucks

Once we made it to the board book section of the bookstore, all hell broke loose.

Apparently, Isaac's truck obsession is shared by one or two other little kids, since on the shelf were parked about two dozen books on various trucks, these books taking the shape of the truck they starred, wheels afixed to the bottom.

Isaac arranged all 24 on the floor like some emergency scene/late night truck stop, while I perused the other books, humble though they were without the benefit of parts to make them ambulatory.

“There are trucks for all kinds of jobs,” I read aloud while Isaac crashed a cherry picker into a gift collection of Harry Potters in Spanish. “This dump truck is hauling coal from a mine.”

“Oh,” I continued, still speaking aloud, “I wonder what kind of health insurance the miners have, Isaac. Mmmm, yummy. Burning coal,” I added sniffing the air. My son ignored me, a tractor book in one hand, fire engine in the other.

Isaac's fascination with trucks knows no bounds. It is his sole purpose for getting in the car – to look for big trucks (“dig ducks”). He has had a personal relationship with the garbage man since he was 16 months old. Construction sites send him into peals of joyous laughter. He can hear a truck that's thinking about turning up our street from blocks away. “Vrrrrrooooom!” he narrates gleefully and races to the window. His little feet stomp and dance when he catches sight of the phone book in anticipation of the towing section. But both of us tired of the same old flatbeds in the yellow pages, we had headed to the bookstore.

In the middle of the store, before we had journeyed as far as the children's section with its fleet of mobile literature, Isaac suddenly and uncharacteristically broke free of my hand and ran pell nell toward a display just ahead. “Dig duck! Dig duck!” he squealed, clutching a jigsaw puzzle box to his chest. When I could finally pry it from his arms, I discovered the picture on the box showed dump trucks and backhoes positioned about in some sort of quarry setting – clearly a fantasy destination for my boy.

My mind is far, so far from what you could ID as simple or innocent, far from this pureness of fascination. Sometimes I worry that I am the wolf put in charge of the sheep, raising this child. Whose version of the world will win out? Will his, in its enthusiasm, lurch forward ahead of mine, its darker sister? Will it have to be me who tells him, “Isaac, those trucks bulldoze the trees you love, and those over there pollute the air so that we sometimes get sick.” Or will he pull me over to his side in one clean burst of ferocious, simple love?

two kinds

There are people, like us, who arrive at the playground early and wipe the bird shit off the slides. And then, there are the other people who get there later - after someone else has already done the dirty work.

the phone: an evolution

A baby is born. You call everyone you know to tell them.

The first week goes by. Everyone you know calls you to congratulate you.

The first months go by. Your baby reaches curiously for the phone when you are talking on it; you are easily able to distract him.

A few more months. Your baby figures out what you never could - how to change the ringer on the phone. It is now a high pitched ding-a-ling piercing through the scene of your every day.

You survive the first year. Your baby becomes wildly jealous of the phone, howling like an abandoned pup whenever you touch the receiver.

Toddlerhood full-blown. Bedtime routines are revamped and fortified. You turn off the ringer so the phone doesn't wake up the baby while you're putting him down. You often forget to turn it back on.

More time passes. More friends recede from you. You no longer have to turn the ringer off; no one calls anymore.

fantasy future

Sometimes I think about all the trials Isaac could be subjected to growing up– the stupid pranks, the name-calling, the peer pressure to do any number of things, the just-plain cruelty that kids can dish out onto one another, that leave us doubting ourselves, or doing things we don’t want to, or believing that someone else knows more about us than we do, that, in turn, leave us wounded, even as adults, of course as adults, that make us questioning, and vulnerable, and writers.

I can’t bear to think of Isaac going through these things, and I told Mike recently that I often catch myself imagining just the right thing to say, the right way to go about it, so that Isaac won’t have to suffer the indignities of childhood. I told him, laughing at myself, that I just need to believe for a while longer I have the power to protect him. I told him, I am just not ready to accept that he will have to go through some form of nonsense no matter what, or that (god forbid) he may not listen to his mother and therefore find himself trying to juggle his doubts in the aftermath of some less than positive incident. I have decided to hold onto the notion, for now, that I will find a loophole through which I will pull my son to safety.

To my surprise and relief, my husband shares my fantasy.

“But what if we can?” he said.

And that was all it took. I was right back up on the rocks with him, standing, waiting to swing out over the creek at a moment’s notice, the rope secured to the tallest tree, one foot coiled around it and resting on the knot at the bottom. Parents at the ready, and all possibilities open, as we gaze out ahead of us at the smooth, calm waters of our boy’s future.

signs of the times

Today was exciting. I received two DVDs in the mail that I'd ordered on sign language for babies/kids thanks to a friend's recommendation.

We've watched one and a half so far, which is amazing considering Isaac wanted me to replay the section on "train" 150 million times (approximately). They didn't teach "truck," so I guess it was the next best thing. Having the train sign will be good, since he's had the misfortune of acquiring the word "choo-choo" for train and in most words Isaac says he tends to replace the first consonant sound with a "d."

Whenever I tell people that I'm teaching my son sign, they say things like "Oh! Great! ...(extended pause)... Is he...?" "No, he hears perfectly well," I manage.

I know I should be educating, telling them about the advantages both socially and intellectually for the child who learns to communicate with his or her hands, regardless of hearing ability, and I do, usually, though it's rare they are truly interested. What I really want to do when faced with these people is hang myself boneless across an armchair like my friend's 10-year-old at Christmas brunch, look up at them with a mix of disbelief and disdain and then say things like "Can we go ice skating? SOMETHING? Anything is better than THIS! I'm so BORED!" Because really, that's how they make me feel. Bored with their tiny little narrow vision of the world.

I'm left with a question: With a fondness for such small boxes to stuff all they know in, why do they need such big SUVs and McMansions?

PS - there is a great online dictionary of American Sign Language with video demos.

the wisdom of youth

I remember how excited I was when Isaac learned to shake his head “no” and nod “yes.” What a world of difference it made in our communication possibilities. He has a new, similar tool at this stage of the game – his own version of “little” and “big.”

To say “little,” once must hold one’s thumb and pointer finger as close together as possible; also, squinting one’s eyes closed while doing so adds emphasis. To say “big,” one raises a slightly cupped palm over one’s head – such that it resembles someone about to attack someone else, and utter the word “Bo” (pronounced something like the beginning of the word “ball”).

With little and big, Isaac describes just about his entire world. I know which truck he’s looking for, I know his perception of the dog we just passed. He knows which pot to hand his dad to make the oatmeal, and how to tell us how much oatmeal he’ll be eating.

Today, while cutting open (at Isaac’s request) one of the three pomegranates left in our kitchen from the by-now defunct season, and already covered in bloody juice, my knife slipped. Normally, this would call for much shaking and sucking of the effected area of the hand, cursing, pronouncing my impending death, and repeatedly whining about my discomfort. Since becoming the parent of a sensitive toddler, however, my days of melodrama are over. Any cry of pain from Mama is very distressing to my boy. (This is the same child who sobbed uncontrollably when the floating Christmas candles singed a leaf on the plant next to them.)

Naturally, upon the knife making contact with my left ring finger, I did make one of those sounds, the kind that mean “Ouch.” plus a touch of “How stupid could I have been?!”

Isaac grows solemn. Then, frowning, pronounces “Mama,” accompanied by the sign for “pain.”

“Yes, Mama has a boo boo. Let’s just go take of care it,” I tell him, all the while aching to throw my maimed body on the couch and wail.

I get out the box of bandaids, my babe watching me closely. The first one I pull out seems good enough. It’s one of those H shaped things that I think are for fingers but I’ve honestly never been able to use. I quickly decide this would be the day to start taking advantage of first aid engineering.

“This one’ll work,” I tell Isaac.

“No,” he says seriously. “Nooooo, Mama. Bo!” he explains, his attack hand in the air.

“Yeah, this one,” I tell him. “It’s not too big; look.”

At first, application goes well, but the upper half of the H won’t cooperate. The cut is too far up on my finger.

“Bo, Mama” Isaac keeps repeating. “Bo.”

“We’ll just wrap this part around…”

“No.”

“See? It’s perfect.”

“No. Bo, Mama.”

For the next hour, any time Iz catches sight of my wrapped finger, he shakes his head. “No. Bo.”

It might have been less than an ideal fit, but I wasn’t giving in. “Mama likes it big. Look, it covers my whole finger. It feels better this way.”

“No, Mama.”

Finally, I couldn’t ignore the flapping bits of bandaid impeding my work and play.

“Well, looks like I’ll throw this away, Iz. It’s not working anymore,” I admit to Isaac, extracting my wounded digit and discarding the bandaid.

He makes the motion again, fingers splayed, back of the hand arched, then shakes his head for the last time and lets out a heavy sigh. “Bo,” he says, and shuffles off, leaving me alone in the kitchen.

Dammit. I hate it when they’re right.

Isaac, Christmas 2005 (p.s. Nice hair.)

What a difference a year makes!

coming home

It's like entering a crime scene.

The Three Little Pigs are in the hallway. Dr. Seuss sits open on the couch. The sweetly embroidered sweater I bribed him into that morning lies wet and muddy on the floor next to the hamper. The cat's bowl overflows with kibble; the cat herself slithers out from underneath the love seat to complain about it.

I start to deduce things: They ate cereal. I step gingerly around the books, the cat, the fire engine, the scattered blocks, one shoe.

I can hear the bath water running. Isaac is talking a steady stream – his language, not ours – although every day we win him over just a little more with our strange dialect.

The faucet sound halts and I hear Mike's voice say “Let's see what's in those pants.”

“Nothing!” he exclaims a second later. “No more poopies. You had a lot of poopies today. Three poopies.”

Despite the fact that I may have been out in the larger world, flung into whatever paltry respite it can provide under its broken wings, in general, once I step back over that threshold, I'm home instantly. As if I'd never left, the chaos envelopes me again, and I can't remember the adult conversations or the way I sashayed down the block alone, savoring freedom.

This night also I am nonplussed by what I'm overhearing, and I might have missed it altogether, the chance to step away from my life and see it, really look at it from an outsider's viewpoint. But then my husband begins to sing.

“Once. Twice. Three times a poopie.”

"Happy New Year!"

...that's just what two guys walking down the street said as I frantically tried to dig the cell phone out of my bag, my husband's 1993 Honda del Sol stranded in the middle of the intersection beside us, its clutch history.

"Thanks," I said. "Thanks a lot."

Last day of the year. Don't tell me cars aren't sentient beings. It's just like with babies - you have no way of knowing just how much they understand.

My angel this time came in the form of Sandy - the random woman who pulled over and helped me push/pop start the sucker get it into the hotel parking lot and then drove me home.

I didn't have Isaac with me this time - what with the del Sol being a two-seater n all. I can be grateful for these details.

I went searching for my last car-broke-down blog entry from 2005 so I could link it and had the hardest time finding it in the archives, until I realized I wasn't going back far enough. The Jetta screwed us in August, we didn't get the new car until November! Nuts. Anyway. So much to write, but had to get this out of the way first.

Thanks again, Sandy. And Happy New Year. For real.

Isaac and his clothes, another installment

There are moments when you learn, in a deeper way, what it is to be a parent.

Take for example, one evening recently, when I found myself tucking a pair of shoes into bed. No child attached mind you; the child was standing next to me watching me do it. In case I need to say it, it was his idea. It was the only way I was getting those shoes off of said child and the path of least resistance in this house is quite definitely cleared of brush and well-trodden.

The tucking in of the shoes went on for maybe a week or so. And while that's past, Isaac's attachment to his clothes is only just beginning. Like many toddlers, he enjoys helping to pick out the clothes he will wear for the day. However, just because he's picked them out, don't expect him to put them on.

Isaac is always most attached to whatever he is currently wearing.

“But if you take off the hippo pajamas, you get to put on the froggie shirt.”

Isaac stares at me dubiously and jabs a tiny finger fiercely into his chest where two smiling hippos loll in the grass.

“Let's put on froggies and look in the mirror!” I suggest brightly.

The gods are merciful on this particular morning, and he nods.

Without further ado, I whip the hippos off, snaps unsnapping all in a burst, before he can change his mind. The key now will be to hide all the books referencing hippos for the morning. If he discovers a hippo in the pages of his reading material and is made aware again that his counter hippos have been taken away, it's mutiny.

I place Jump, Frog, Jump in clear view and head to the laundry hamper.

warm wishes

The Mexican women at the bus stop across the street huddle and bounce in the chill, hands tossing long black braids over their shoulders then returning to the pockets of their fleece jackets.

It’s cold here.

Okay, okay. It’s not THAT cold. It’s not igloo, Denver airport, fjords cold. But for the central coast of California, it’s cold. We all make choices. If you’ve been shoveling your driveway this morning, don’t blame me. I chose to live here amongst the cypress and abalone. For this privilege, I pay exorbitant rents and wallow in the knowledge that I will likely never be able to buy my own home.

We had frost the other morning; show me some sympathy here.

Despite the fact that his mother has been wearing the same two pairs of jeans since he was born, Isaac is a clothes horse. When I held up the jacket he loves as we headed for the door yesterday, he shook his head vehemently. “No!” he told me. And, because my child believes in clarity if not a bit of drama, this familiar mantra was followed by “No, Mama!!!” with hand held out in a stop sign.

“Okay, not this jacket. How about your orange vest jacket, Isaac?”

“No,” he says simply and quietly now, reengaging in his previous game of building block towers and losing forever the initial momentum we had worked so hard to muster in order to get out of the house and to the grocery store.

“Okay, Isaac,” I try again, returning from his closet. “We’ve got blue hoody sweatshirt,” I hold it out in my right hand. “And we’ve got red sweater with balloon buttons. Ooh! Red sweater with balloon buttons!” I add with enthusiasm, lifting the hand-knit cardigan up for him to see.

“No,” he says without looking up from his precarious pile of wooden cubes.

“You have to wear a jacket, Isaac. What do you want to wear?”

He makes the sign that often means ‘fish’ for him – as in “Please, mother, I’d like to visit the aquarium today, or at least the pet store.” His hand wiggles rather high above his head, however, and I soon realize he means ‘airplane.’

“Plane, Iz?” I’m lost.

He points up at something that I’ve long since stopped taking notice of. It’s his Halloween costume hanging for the past two months from the handle of a cabinet over the closet, a hooded baseball sweatshirt Mike covered in silver material, a propeller beanie attached to the hood, pieces of shiny insulation sewn onto the sleeves for wings. Isaac wore the costume for about a total of two minutes before a kid in a scary mask left him screaming, face hidden in my neck and he was officially done with the holiday. Now, however, he’s determinedly pointing at the symbol of his young pain.

I’ve been waiting for this moment, the one when I join the ranks of other parents I’ve been watching all my life, the ones towing around kids wearing big pink rain galoshes on a bright, sunny July day, or reading solemnly as their kid flies about the dentist’s waiting room in superman pajamas.

Even though part of me has been waiting for it, maybe forever, I’m taken by surprise when it happens; and I throw back my head and laugh, loud and open-mouthed.

Happy holidays and stay warm, any way you can.

dr. duck

Besides his sign language, real and invented, Isaac now says a bunch of words, most of which sound exactly alike, making context and the generosity of a mother’s ear crucial. There is for example, Hot, which comes out kind of like “Dot” as does Cut, Stop, Drop, and Pop. Then there’s the proverbial “Duck,” meaning Sock, Stuck, Truck, and, in fact, Duck.

Birds were Isaac’s first love, and though at this point his obsession with trucks rules large, his obsession with ducks falls not far behind.

Due not to any example or encouragement from me, Isaac constantly wants to see ducks and feed ducks. Duck books that have gone missing in the house have been known to cause inordinate amounts of trauma, and anything in a book even slightly resembling a duck, must, by the laws of Mr Baby, be a duck. A chicken or an ostrich, for example. “That’s an ostrich. An ostrich bird, Isaac,” I tell him staring at the same damn page of that First Words book for the umpteenth time. (God knows why ostrich needs to be one of his first words.) “Duck,” he assures me. “Duck.”

Many children have negative associations with the doctor’s office. Isaac does not. Besides the fact that our pediatrician is incredibly personable for someone with a medical degree, he keeps a drawer full of little plastic animals that he gives out to the kids after visits. There are starfish, frogs, bunnies, lots of stuff. There are probably no longer any ducks, however, because I’m pretty sure we’ve wiped him out. I counted at least seven bobbing along next to Iz during his last bath.

Here’s an example of a conversation I’ve had with my son more than once:

Me: “We’re going to go see Dr H today, Isaac!”

Isaac: “Duck!”

Me: “You’re going to get a shot! Cool, huh?”

Isaac: “Duck!”

(Later than same day…)
Me: “Here we are at the doctor’s, Izzy!”

Isaac: “Duck!”

(In the examining room…)
Dr: “How are we today?”

Isaac: “Duck!”

Once, when Isaac went to get a vaccination (a whole separate and contentious topic worthy of much blogging), the nurse made him cry, not with the needle, mind you. He got upset when she wanted him to sit naked on the cold scale and went about calming him in oh-so the wrong way. Trying to tempt him with an early toy, she waggled the bit of orange plastic in front of him saying “Look at the octopus! Look at the octopus!” Nevermind that it was really a hippo, which was where she lost credibility with me, it was certainly not a duck. After the dumb, mean lady was gone, Isaac reached into the drawer two-fisted and pulled a pair of little red ducks, wiping his eyes on his sleeve.

Ernie’s got nothing on my boy.

another metaphor for which i will be condemned

Having a child is a little like having PMS.

It’s not that the feelings you have aren’t true and real, it’s just that the intensity with which you feel them is on a much greater level. At the beginning of course, the reasons behind this are the same as the reasons behind PMS – hormones, hormones, hormones. See, and you thought I was just being flip.

As things go on, however, the worry and exhaustion of parenting takes over as the driving force behind emotional magnification. Like, you know already that we live isolated, work-driven lives, but having a child throws that into high relief. You know that you’d like to end homelessness, that you can’t get back to sleep if woken up after 3 am, that you hate the way your husband eats a bagel, but thanks to the miracle of that little angel in your life, you can see all these things that much more clearly.

It was a typical morning.

The plastic penguin was drinking out of the cat bowl, my coffee table was covered in trucks of various size and ability, the CDs – well, most of the CDs from the bottom rack were missing completely. When I’d asked Isaac where he might have left them, he just shrugged his shoulders, palms upturned. “Uh-oh! Uh-oh! Where?” was all he offered as a clue.

Currently, that same petty thief I call my son is planted on the floor in front of the bookcase speedreading through my Russian literature collection. One after another he absorbs and discards the classics, pulling a book off the shelf, flipping through it, then tossing it over his shoulder with a cry of “All done!” The Complete Works of Nikolai Gogol. “All done!” Doctor Zhivago. “All Done!” Pushkin, Lermentov, Tolstoy. “All done!”

Shh! We have to be very quiet. Penguin is taking a nap. He is swaddled in a blanket that covers him completely and is snoozing soundly in the colander on the kitchen floor – an improvement over his other common nap space, the refrigerator, which is where he spent the better part of yesterday.

In the outside world, I imagine people purchasing new bed clothes, bunches of bananas, talking amiably with store clerks, listening to the news, showering. Sometimes I wonder what the mailman thinks glancing into the window – sill lined with boxes of baby wipes, cheerios and mis-matched socks. But most days, I’d much rather be completely ignorant of his thoughts.

Isaac escapes a diaper change, sliding expertly off the bed and racing through the house barebottomed calling “Nun! Nun!”

Penguin has awoken from his nap and is being alternately cradled and bitten by my son, who finally throws him passionately onto the floor. Penguin rocks briefly on the spot where he’s landed, then stills and remains there, facing the wall.

betrayal

"Look, Isaac! The moon! It's beautiful!"

He points at it, his face beaming.

"Ball," he says.

The next morning, he looks again for it and, not finding it in the sky, turns to me, silent and alarmed.

To know betrayal before the age of two.

happy endings

When people tell you “I was up half the night last night!” or “It's crazy with two!” or “It's so difficult managing Jacob's allergies.” Why do they always have to ruin it by adding “But things are fine.” and “Mostly we're having a great time with the kids!”

Why can't people let it be? Why can't things just suck?

dream states

I am awoken from a dream by the baby dreaming.

"No! No! ...Mama!" he's calling.

I am at a cafe, somewhere in Europe. There are flowers. I have just shared a joke with the tall man in brown when I hear the baby cry out.

"Mama's here," I comfort. "Mama's here."

On such lies we raise our children.

Wednesday mornings

It's something about the consistency and enthusiasm with which he greets my son each Wednesday morning when he doesn't really have to, in the middle of his busy day. And then there's Isaac at the window - waiting, waiting, waving, waving. Cupping his hand and lifting his arm, making the grumbling mechanical noise.

They understand each other these two, a mutual respect that makes my mother's heart yawn wide and scoop them both in together: my toddler son and the garbage man.

And the Zap/Iz roll, which has appeared on this blog previously

My babies

Izzy learned to play with Zap before he could crawl

I found more! Zap and Iz together

Zap Mama (April 30, 2000 - August 26, 2006)

Buds.

grumpy cat

beautiful girl

tolerating my hugs

the joys of the holidays

Zap and Em unmoved by Isaac's antics

Isaac and his girls

Hmm. Someone's been sleeping on my changing table.

Two cats, a baby, and Elmo

Checking on her baby

Boxes, they're not just for shipping anymore

And then she had to share us - the addition of Emily, the indignity

One of my favorite shots of Zappy

After we first brought home the cat that "would never bond with a human"

She knows where my heart lies: Zap and the bookcase.

Tiny little Zap when she came to us as "Mama Cat" with 4 little ones

animal ER

Zap and I arrived at the specialist via emergency admittance since otherwise they wouldn’t have had an appointment for us until Wednesday. She hadn’t responded to the fluids. After two days at our regular vet, her blood work was the same as when she arrived, i.e., she had sky high levels of bilirubin (the stuff that makes you jaundice). Things on the ultrasound looked abnormal but inconclusive.

I drove her 45 minutes north to more tests, to more unknowns, with a catheter in her back leg and a knot in my throat. They took Zappy back to hook her up and I waited around until the doctor had time to examine her and talk to me, though her “real” doctor would be in until the morning.

What I didn’t realize was that the specialists that were seeing us on an emergency admittance were THE emergency animal care facility for the area. I was in animal ER.

When I first took a seat in the waiting room, there was just one other woman there waiting for her dog to be released. My fellow waiter assured me unsolicited that they were “really good here.” Her dog had been hit by a car the night before. The nurse brought out a tiny little sedated thing with one of its legs wrapped, and the woman tucked her in a laundry basket and nodded nervously at the instructions on meds and hindquarter support.

Before she had the chance to leave, the room had begun to fill and the night swung into high gear.

A man rushed in carrying a beautiful white and carmel long hair dog about the size of a lab, tongue lolling. Ginger had gotten into some poison and arrived with 109 degree fever.

While Ginger headed for ICU, the receptionist hung up the phone and announced “We have a lethargic Rott coming in from Corralitos.” Next, Crinkle showed up – a terrier who had apparently rubbed a lab the wrong way and ended up with a bite out of his curly little ass. It looked painful to me, but Crinkle never made a word of complaint. The woman with the dog who was going home hugged Ginger’s dad and told him she’d put Ginger “in her prayer box.”

A black pick up stopped in front of the doors and a man attempted to lift what looked to be about 120+ pounds of Rottweiler out of the bed of the truck. Ginger’s dad offered to help. Even as sick as he was, Zeuss was imposing for the 30 seconds he stood in the lobby. That was all the time he could stand before he had to lie down again – a position his people said he’d been in for days – his massive head making a loud clunking sound as it met with the door jam.

Finally after about two hours, I spoke to a vet, got a quickie goodbye with Zap and drove home alone.

I don’t know why I’m writing all this. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to face what I now know. I could go on about the odd lighthouse theme in the waiting room, how the place you’d think would be covered in pictures of lizards cuddling with kittens was filled with paintings of craggy coastlines and red and white striped beacons. I could tell you how I really like Zappy’s “real” doctor that took care of her the next morning, or that Ginger’s fever had dropped to 103 by the time I left (though her bill was ever climbing). It was a tenser place than any medical office I’d ever been in. Emotions flowed freely and people were unafraid to reach out to one another. Animals bring us who we could be.

My Zap, my precious five-year-old little girl, has a terminal cancer.

She’s home with us now. And we’re so thrilled that she is. Maybe she’ll be here for a long time more, but things aren’t really in our favor. I want Isaac to remember her. I’ve asked her to please stay a while. Maybe if you know what a prayer box is, you could put her in it.

my babies

It was a Sunday and we’d made arrangements to visit. A woman walked in just after I did. I couldn’t see her from the room where I was, but I heard her announce quite unselfconsciously to the lab tech that she was here to see her daughter. I listened to her in the next room cooing and coddling her daughter, a cat named Spitfire, who was apparently pretty sick.

My Zap is at the kitty hospital. She’s lost weight, is really jaundiced and is on an IV to flush out her blood. We don’t know yet what else is wrong. This is awful.

They took her off the IV and brought her to us in one of the exam rooms, so I let Isaac come in and see her too. He was just happy to see his buddy, doesn’t really understand where she is. Although, when I told him we had to bring her to the doctor, he did bring her a blanket and try to take her temperature with the ear thermometer.

After about an hour with her, she ate a little. Then we had to leave.

The vet people kept saying the oddest things to me like, “She hasn’t shown any signs of distress,” and “She’s so well behaved!” Huh? Distress isn’t always the one who yowls and tries to scratch your eyes out. Well-behaved?? This is my concern? This will make me feel better?

We are so completely fucked up. This is exactly why I’ve wished for years that I would just collapse in the street when I felt the depression gripping my internal organs, shaking my rib cage like prison bars. The squeaky wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round, and the rest of us suffer in silence. Tell ourselves it couldn’t be “that bad” or someone else would surely notice.

My Zappy gets heart palpitations going to the vet on a well-check (literally). I don’t want her in there another night! She curls in on herself and stays like that. How can that kind of stress be good for recovery?

Well-behaved. I could have easily been at some back to school night somewhere = someday, some asshole teacher telling me my boy is “well-behaved” when no one has bothered to check in on what’s going on inside his precious little head, what triggers current trauma may be setting off, what he needs, whether or not he’s crying out.

In my dreams, Zap and Isaac are often interchangeable. At first, I will have to take Zap to school, then it is Isaac. Then, he is sick, but when I open the blanket it is my cat.

Later:
I’m just back from transferring Zap to a specialty clinic that is 45 minutes away. She wasn’t responding to the fluids. An ultrasound in the morning. More to come. I have to go to bed.

my swingin babe

I’m Baaaaach!

It’s that time of year again.

One of the local communities hosts a Bach Festival every summer, and it’s just around the corner. I don’t look forward to this event. In fact, I cringe just thinking about it. Don’t get me wrong; I mean I relish my fugues as much as the next person, but I just can’t tolerate the fervor surrounding the Bach Festival. And this year promises to take me even closer to what I dread, since I now work in newspaper.

Every year, the festival brings with it the most horrendous puns. There’s stuff like “Bach to the Future,” “I’ve Got Your Bach,” “It’s Bach On,” and, of course, “Bach and Roll.” Frankly, the puns are endless, simply endless. Have these journalists no shame??

As a poet, I run screaming away from cliché and the too-cutesy play with words that is the trademark of newspaper headlines. Once again, I find myself straddling worlds. I’ll admit it: I’ve used phrases like “pull out all the stops” in my articles. But I have my limits. My editor still makes fun of me because I insist on calling my proposed headlines “titles.” Tomato. Tomahto.

I know nothing about journalism. That is to say, I feel that my approach to my stories, most of which are previews of theater productions, is one that keeps me safely out of the hands of excessively formulaic writing. And I strive for accuracy at all costs. There was that little slip regarding “cannon” (as in “1812 Overture,” boom boom stuff), and “canon” (as in from the theatrical tradition), but once the initial mortification wore off, I was fine.

As time goes on, however, I’m concerned they’ll get to me. What if some day I’m assigned to cover an annual musical festival? What if the deadline is tight and I’m just strapped for ideas, all my creativity having drained away between the time the oatmeal hit the floor and the CDs were found in the bathtub? What if I cave? Who will be there to bring me Bach?

genes, pools, and other accidents

“Guess who I heard on NPR today,” Mike says with a funny lilt in his voice.

“Who?” I ask, obediently playing the game.

“Your boyfriend!”

“Huh?”

He proceeds to name this person. At first, no bells go off. Then –

“Ohhhhh! Him!”

The night I met Mike this guy was among the big group of people my work colleague was dragging me to meet at a lounge bar in Washington, D.C., as was Mike. As the night progressed through restaurants and dance clubs, fewer and fewer people remained of the original group until there were only four of us left: me, my work friend, Mike, and this one other guy. I’ll call him “Andy.”

The four of us hung out until 3 a.m. or so and somewhere along the way Andy asked me to go salsa dancing with him for one of the Monday night lessons held at another local bar. I wasn’t exactly falling head over heels for Mike at this point, but Andy did overlook certain details – like how well Mike and I worked as a Pictionary team (Grass? Um…Wait! Barbed wire! Yes!). I was relatively non-committal on the salsa, but probably said something like “I suppose so” mixed with “um” and “I guess, maybe.” Then there was the roof incident.

The last event of the night for our foursome was to go swimming in the roof top pool of Mike’s ugly pink condo building and afterwards to look out at the less ugly skyline. When we were heading back down into the building, my friend and Andy start down the stairs first while I stop short to ask Mike about what one of the buildings was. The door to the stairs locks leaving Andy and my friend inside sans key. And there we are, me and Mr Future Husband-Guy, in an unplanned pseudo-romantic moment, staring out at the lights of DC, my question already asked, his answer already given, and the silence now around us. The other two, wondering where we are, attempt to come back up, try the door, but can’t get back onto the roof. We listen to them rattling the knob for a few seconds.

When we open it, Andy is visibly grumpy (who knows what was going on in those 90 seconds I was alone with Mike!)

No salsa dancing ever happened and I think I have the roof to thank for it.

Yes, folks, there may never have been an Isaac if the roof door didn’t lock, if salsa had had its way.

It’s a bit of a kick in the pants though – you know, I want to be on NPR, the guy who I never dated but could have is. Missed associations? And my mom should have married that guy who owned his own plane too, but that’s another story, another lifetime, another mingling of genes.

PEI encounter

I am where I feel most uncomfortable, where I feel the most bile rise in my throat and surge and gurgle like a dammed river. I am at a Mommy n Me class.

It’s one of the more harmless ones. It’s a “drop-in” style class. One where mats and tunnels and balls and rocking wooden boats are arranged about the room and one- and two-year-olds run around exploring and crashing into each other. Isaac loves it. And I love it for him. Especially since he spends so much time figuring things out, fiddling, finessing fine motor skills, slipping the string through the slots in the chair over and over again, starring at cat hairs he’s plucked from the carpet.

I love that he does these things – bypassing the high-five offered by the grocery clerk to stare quizzically at this cash register – my little engineer. But this is a chance to release and do something different.

He has so taken to the opportunity to crawl through padded labyrinths that he will even sit happily in his detested car seat nodding his head and pointing forward as I strap him in – “Onward, Driver!” I imagine him thinking.

Today, I have the misfortune of being one of only five or so parents to show up – a small group and easy prey for the dreaded Parent Education Instructor – the PEI.

A cheery blonde with a clip board sits in a rocking chair half-blocking the entrance and applying lipstick. “Did you sign in?” she spouts.

I imagine the tryouts for these parent ed performers: A dark theatre. One bright spot light shining a circle of light on the stage. A woman walks nervously into it holding one hand over her eyes like a visor, her shiny Mary Janes clicking on the floor and echoing around the room. She clears her throat and tries out her line: “Did, um, you sign in?” “Great. Thank you. Next!” calls a rough voice from somewhere among the dark seats. The woman swallows audibly and shuffles off to the wings where identical women hug her, tell her she was great, and reapply her lipstick.

Some time goes by in the class when I’m able to play with Isaac or stand around idly unhindered. And then… “Have you heard about our garden party?” Christ. She’s looking right at me. What could possibly be the right answer to this question? “No,” I strangle out. “Oh! Well, it’s this Friday in the meadow. There’ll be music. And it’s a potluck, so bring a dish…” I don’t hear more of what she’s saying. My mind has wandered off to a list of things I’d rather do than attend a Mommy n Me garden party. Items appearing on the list include things like having my entire body waxed with duct tape.

More time goes by, and then…”You know,” Cheery Blonde is addressing all of the parents at once. “I heard on TV that a couple guys have started putting oil in their cars instead of gas!” She titters like it’s the silliest thing she’s ever heard.

I’m thinking about how people should be given a set number of exclamation points at birth and when they use them up, that’s it. Try to be nice, Kitty, says the voice in my head. She’s attempting adult conversation.

“Don’t they have to do something first before that works?” I ask in a plain tone.

Cheery stops, tilts her head thoughtfully, her eyes, the exact green of her sweater, drifting up and over her left shoulder. “Yes,” she says at last. “They do. That’s right. They have to do. something. to. their. cars.” She nods exaggerated nods including all the other parents in her confession. Perhaps she’s worries they’ll start pouring Wessen in her Lexus SUV if she doesn’t. I can’t imagine it though – I can’t imagine them doing anything that wasn’t printed on a handout and certified by the Academy of American Pediatrics.

“Somebody needs to do something to help us use the cars we have for less!” the instructor goes on.

“How about we just grass over the highways?” I suggest.

Cheery nods slowly, her mouth neither open nor closed, her expression blank. Isaac runs to me to deliver a purple ball, then dashes off collect the red one, too. I have enough time to forget the conversation. And then…

“Did you say ‘grass over the highways’?” she asks.

“Yes.”

Again a slow nod, her mind searching for something familiar to hold onto. And then…

“There’s a lot more traffic in my neighborhood lately!”

I turn from the non-sequitur like one turns from a private argument in a public place, out of politeness. Isaac leaves me the red ball and reclaims the purple. We read a few books, balance on the spongy bulging mats, and then…

“Would you like a handout on the Top 12 Foods?”

I make no move toward the Xeroxed pages. “Top 12 Foods for what?” I ask.

“The Top 12 Foods,” she repeats, unwilling to relinquish ground on this one.

I grab up Isaac and hold him upside down, causing him to giggle uncontrollably.

When Isaac starts rubbing his eyes, I pack up our things. I’m almost out the door and then…

A gasp. Cheery smacks her open palm flat against her left breast. “I’m not wearing my nametag today! I’m Charlene.” She sticks out her hand. “I’m Kitty,” I say, taking her hand and somehow forgiving her her cardinal sin.

“See you next time!” she sings. The notes catch in my ears as I step out the door and noisily onto the gravel parking lot.

Fame!

“So Mike tells us you got yourself a little job,” my mother-in-law says.

I fight back the impulse to answer through gritted teeth.

I have in fact reinstalled myself as a freelance writer for one of the local papers, a different one than I used to write for. A person gets preggers, and consequently sick as a dog, drops out of the loop for a few months, eventually tries to get back in but finds the editors have changed and wrangles unsuccessfully to pitch her once-embraced stories, has a babykins, drops out of the loop for a few more months, and then rises again, reincarnated with the competing print media. “Little job,” indeed.

So anyway, I had gotten my first assignment (the luxury of pitching not mine at this stage) which was a write-up of a dance performance. I read the press release and literally yawned. Dance-shmance. I couldn’t quite figure out what was meant to happen and I wasn’t all that interested in trying. Headline: New girl gets bum story!

As I left to do the interview, I regaled Mike with lines from themes songs past. Singing out my mockery: I’m gonna live forever! (I danced down the hall kicking my leg up behind me as I disappeared from his view into the living room.) I’m gonna learn how to fly! (High!) (I reappeared around the corner swirling my head and thrusting out my arms to dramatic effect.) … I'm gonna live forever. Baby, remember my name. (Rememba, rememba, rememba, rememba…)

But I’m a sucker. Always have been. I fell for her. The choreographer I was interviewing. She was nice. She was interesting. But most of all, I was reminded of living the life creative. Of what it looks like when someone has not just said she wanted to do more of her art, or imagines that when she retires, she’ll spend her days painting or writing or making films. She lives as an artist, 105% of the time. It’s different, so different, than talking to a 9-5er. I’ve hovered between the two worlds so long, I don’t know if I really understand how to live in either.

But what I realized mostly after my conversation was that I want Isaac to have these people in his life. I want him to have writers and dancers as “aunties” and “uncles.” Not famous people, just dedicated artists. I want to make poker games out of my theatre friends, so that the virtual smoke from our virtual cigars floats down to my son and fills his lungs with scripts and stage directions. I want the people that come to dinner at our house while he’s growing up to be the kind who have studios in their garage and poetry websites. Who knows, maybe someday his mommy might even be one of those people.

meta-mom

I miss my husband terribly.

But I’m sure I don’t know the half of it – about the fog we’re in. It’s like when a window is so dirty you can’t see how dirty until you clean it and the sun shines through the glass directly, without first passing through layers of dust. Or there’s that needling feeling I get – a sort of claustrophobia – with my constantly half-moved-in house, the framed photographs that are meant to hang in the bathroom still piled on the toilet tank.

Having a baby has put this distance between us.

I adore watching Mike with Isaac, his genuine laughter over his antics, Izzy carrying his blocks one by one to the kitchen cabinet and shutting them inside. Mike’s shoulders bounce up and down like a turn on a pogo stick; and I feel joy for his joy – a kind of metajoy. Sometimes I worry that my love for Izzy is a metalove, that I love him from up on my writer’s cloud, from my bird’s eye view.

In college, I had a sociology professor I respected a great deal. During the semester, he and his wife adopted a little girl from Korea. He was constantly arriving to class with stories of his daughter’s reactions to various cartoons or social situations. Eventually, I felt sorry for this little girl, like she was somehow being experimented on, exploited.

Mike once told me, in what seems a lifetime ago, that he is with me because I keep him alive. He can drift away sometimes, hum into a rutted routine and not notice the seasons changing, not really feel. “Like 1994,” he told me near tears. “What happened to 1994? I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I was there I guess, but what? A whole year.”

But now I need him to rally. Most days I don’t have it in me to be the engine in this relationship. 2005. I was there I guess, but what? I want to tell him. A whole year.

six…no, seven

I counted. Apparently, I counted a little too soon. By June, six friends will have moved out of the area within a year’s time. Or so I thought. But that was yesterday. In the time it took me to conceive of posting a blog on this subject and actually posting one, one more friend has informed me she will be leaving. Seven. Frankly, I don’t have tons more left. I’m reeling. I have no words, no blog for this.

notes from the day the living room was covered in salad greens

Mike goes to work every day – talks to adults, moves in the professional world, receives accolades for his achievements. But that is not why I’m jealous and resentful. I’m jealous and resentful because he gets to eat lunch every day. Sometimes by himself, sometimes with colleagues, sometimes leftovers, sometimes treating himself to a grilled veggie burrito from the groovy Cal-Mex place nearby. No one to strap into a plastic seat with tray, no one casting applesauce hither and thither, no little hands to keep out of his own food, and there is always his own food not just when it’s a “good” day. He can set his glass of water down as close or as far from his lunchmates as he likes. His lunch is not interrupted by diaper changes or tantrums over who gets to pick up the phone when it rings…

Please go to sleep, Isaac. Please. Please go to sleep. Go to sleep!..

When I was in middle school, my friends and I would play “Name That Tune” with the popular songs of the day. One of us would put on a record (yes, a record!) and the others would race to be the first to name the song and band correctly. I sucked at this game. I’d have to put up the best front I could – “ooh-oohing” and bouncing up and down in my seat, wait-a-minute-wait-a-minute kind of stuff like the answer was on the tip of my tongue, but I never knew. In a funny way, I’m making up for that now. I can name any of Isaac’s books by the first line, sometimes the first word or two. And I’ve taken to hiding some of Isaac’s books. Just the ones he asks to read 400 times a day and that I find particularly annoying after the 2nd or 3rd go – the Elmo book, those fucking dolphins, and the duck book, which doesn’t tell you much since they are all (besides Elmo and the fucking dolphins) duck books...

Please go to sleep, Izzy. Baby, it’s nap time. Night-night. It’s mommy’s nap time. Go to sleep, Isaac. Please. please.

Every time I open the refrigerator Isaac grabs the bag of salad greens. Since he usually reaches for the beer, I figure I’m on safer ground and don’t really pay close attention. Each time, I convince him to put the bag back on the shelf, which he does with much pride in his ability. On the last frig trip, I apparently skipped this step. I notice him with the bag, then decide to pick up some form of reading material from the coffee table. I double check it has no bunnies or ducks in it, no one going on picnics, becoming tragically separated from their mothers and then triumphantly reunited, no one deftly sneaking counting games into non-existent plots, and start to read. When I look up, my son has undone the twist tie and spread the lettuce around the room. The cats come out to investigate. Isaac, always willing to share, offers them each a wilty leaf. They are organic greens, in case you were wondering. Only the best for my boy…

Call me out of touch, but I hate cell phones. That’s right, I said it. Hate them. I won’t go into all the reasons here. My husband and I share one cell phone. My friends think this is strangely quaint. Of course, compared to what we used to have, what we have now is a big improvement. It would be like moving from an 8-Track to an I-pod. The phone we had for a long time, up until shortly before Isaac was born, in fact, was a complete dinosaur that could be easily confused for an 80s car phone. Its charge wore out in minutes it seemed, so we bought a battery that clicked onto it making it the biggest cell phone in the world and us the target of ridicule. This was not the slim thing that fits in breast pockets or eye glass cases. It was a monster. Our friends would steal it away, taunting and passing it back and forth. “Look at this!... No, no, ya gotta see this thing!” “Hey, give it back,” I’d whine, like a grade school bully had just stolen away my hat and wanted to play monkey in the middle. “It’s for emergencies,” I’d tell them, though it has yet to help me out of one yet…

Please, go to sleep, Isaac. That’s right. Night-night. Sleepy time. …(Pacabell ’s Cannon blares from the living room) SHIT! I fucking HATE cell phones!!!! Okay, Iz, wakey time then. Wakey-wakey. Mommy doesn’t want to answer the phone. Here, you have the phone. Play with the phone. In fact, go play with the cats. They’re under the bed. There. See? They really want to play.

My husband gets home from swimming lessons with Isaac. I’ve cleaned up the salad greens. I am under the covers trying to make the day go away. Isaac has tottered into the bedroom and is trying to fit one of his dad’s dirty socks over his head. “Did you return the bikini bottom?” I ask Mike, referring to half the little girl’s pink and purple flowered bathing suit he found in our swim bag last week. “Yeah,” he tells me. I am waiting for the rest of the story.

“So you knew whose it was?” I try.

“Yeah.”

“And what did you say?” I’m not willing to let it go yet.

“I said, ‘Is this yours?’”

“Uh-huh.”

“And the dad said, ‘Yeah’.”

“So you didn’t say, ‘I found this in my swim bag, isn’t that totally weird? Did you wonder where it was all week?’?”

“No.”

Isaac walks over to the bed so his face is next to mine and nods his head furiously up and down in agreement with his dad's reticence.

Can’t bleed nothing out of the men in my life. How’s a woman supposed to find things to write about?

coffee table smarts

Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.
- “How to Become a Writer” from Self-Help - Stories by Lorrie Moore

I’m trying not to judge. Not to be a snoot. Not to look at the world in terms of smart and dumb.

A fellow mom was complaining recently as her toddler reached unsuccessfully across the coffee table for a toy. “He does this every day,” she sighed. Her son, Isaac’s age, began to get agitated as he continued to stand where he was and reach for the fire truck. “Walk around,” his mother urged, “Walk around!” By this time, her son was pounding the table and screaming in frustration, his chubby knees bending and unbending, his face flushed. “Here, I’ll show you how to get it,” his mother offered, moving him to the other side of the table where, upon scoring the toy, he sniffled once and stuffed it in his mouth.

So, not 24 hours later there I was, minding my own business, when I saw Isaac walk up to our coffee table and reach once for a book too far away to grasp before walking to the other side of the table on his own and calmly picking it up.

There are way too many people in the world – these are adults I’m talking about now – who refuse to walk around the proverbial coffee table but prefer to stamp their feet and scream for what they want. How do I teach my son to move in this world? He knows better. He does better. But smart is recessive. If you mix smart and dumb, you get dumb. Really smart people start to do really dumb things sometimes. I’m constantly making concessions for dumb people, mainly, it would seem, so they don’t find out just how dumb they are. I think it’s time to stop this kind of behavior. We cannot protect egos when our children’s fate is at risk.

getting away

I regularly have to forgive myself and others for not acting as though this time away, whenever it comes, parsed out in however meager, disjointed bits, is as sacred as the sunrise. My time away the other day was to jaunt over to the post office. Sadly, I pined for this adventure - to move toward a goal not connected to my son, to speak to other adults not connected to my life. Eventually, I forget that the woman I’m talking to – the postal worker pushing 60 – is wearing fussy, green bunny ears on a headband. I reach into my bag for my wallet, which is not there because I’ve left it on the seat of the car, but I do produce an orange rattle with a monkey on it, a pacifier that has clearly seen better days, a lot of saltine cracker crumbs, and an old grocery list. The fuzzy-eared clerk tells me her baby's in his 30s now.

Evil Colander Boy

waiting for the Cat in the Hat

The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
All that cold, cold, wet day.
- The Cat in the Hat

Northern California sees record rain, braces for more wet weather
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Weather-weary residents reeling from the Bay Area's second-wettest March on record should expect more rain...
Mudslides Cause Problems Along Central Coast
KSBW-TV
8:24 a.m. PDT April 5, 2006
APTOS, Calif. - It was another day of wet weather along the Central Coast on Tuesday, and the saturated ground led to mudslides throughout the region. Rain left many residents frustrated and Pacific Gas & Electric crews were working around the clock.
Along Loma Prieta Drive in Aptos, the back yard of one home slid down into the front yard of another. ...

St. Daycare

Put it on the list of things I thought I’d never do. Consider sending my kid to Saint Anywhere. Daycare. Part time. Not easy to find. Even harder to pay for. But possibly the ease in my week that could build a kinder, gentler mommy, one who talks to adults sometimes and combs her hair. The daycare that might work the best is attached to a church. Not a church I am part of, would be part of, or even know anything about, really. What harm can they do to one-year-olds? my husband shrugs. Okay, I tell him, but we’d have to find somewhere else for him to be in a year or so, my religion meter blinking red. What harm can they do to two-year-olds? my husband persists. I don’t know the answer. I have a year to figure it out.

Now I know that that bullshit line that was popular with righteous moms some years back, maybe still is, about people having kids so that “someone else can raise them,” is truly absurd. Naturally, I had a kid so that my unrealized dreams could evenutally alight somewhere and I could extend my mortal life through this recomposite of my genes, but that’s neither here nor there…This job is 24-7. Most days it feels more like 29-12. And the idea that if my kid goes to daycare for 7-2, interacts with other children his age, is introduced to other adults’ style of being in the world, I am somehow shirking my responsibility is just part of the lie machine that churns, I’d say, at least 24-7.

So why do I feel guilty considering it? Fuck. They got me. I’m spinning. The machine is dropping lies ticker-tape style from the sky, like invisible petals printed with doomed fortunes. We get zero help in how to keep from losing our minds – to boredom, toddler logic, or the factory model society we move in. We really have to be ever-vigilant in our quest for sanity, creativity, and time to blow our noses. Perhaps St. Daycare can save my soiled soul, or at least that of my offspring.

don’t do it

People, please. Let’s get together on this. If you can’t get to the battery in a toy without having the skills of my crazy mechanical husband or my son in another 10 years, DON’T BUY IT.

Sooner or later, they take over. Look, from Toy Story to the Nutcracker, batteries or not, these things can go wacko, and they don’t necessarily have our best interests in mind, so why encourage them? I currently live with a frog driving a car, who, for no good reason and with no one and nothing around him, will scream out “BEEP! BEEP!” every so often. I also keep company with a firefly that won’t stop giggling. No matter where I stuff the thing, I can’t seem to dampen its spirits – from under the cushions of the loveseat it chuckles, unsolicited laughter pokes out from beneath pillows, inside backpacks. Shut up, Crazed Toy! Shut up!! There is also the bear that whines the most pathetic rendition of Rock-a-by(e) Baby you’ve ever heard, though, thankfully, his cheeks no longer flash red while he does.

As I type this, the giggling continues. I think the firefly is the ring leader. They’re out for me. And if this is the last thing I write before they come for me, know it was no accident – that frog knew exactly where he was driving!

saving the light

Soon, it’ll be Daylight Savings Time again. Or is that what we’re in now? What I mean is, soon, we’re changing the time. You gain an hour, you lose an hour. No one is ever really clear on the concept. It’s one of those things – like how everyone always calls Memorial Day Labor Day and Labor Day Memorial Day and no one really pays attention. We know there are three-day weekends at some point in May and September and to store any more information about it would be to tax our already troubled brains, so we let the news anchors fill us in and our computers do their automatic updates.

This year I am really looking forward to the extra hour. What it’ll look like in my world is Mike arriving home with the sun still in the sky and the possibility of he and Isaac going for a walk or otherwise leaving the premises and me to myself. This will be good.

Last year, things were different. The extra hour was a smack in the face from the hand of “Shit, I’m a mom now.” Instead of relishing the extra light, the extra energy that normally accompanies it, I found myself cursing the clock and pulling the blinds shut so as to begin the “nighttime routine” and try to get my kid to bed before dawn (so that I could then try to get him back to bed another half a dozen times before dawn). That hand came down and WHAM. Nighttime routine?!? This is the long haul. This is the real thing. This changes everything.

It’s been a year now. Besides 10 hours a week with the sitter beginning when he was six and a half months old, I have stayed home with Isaac full time. They say you have to admit your problem before you can change it. I am a stay-at-home mom. Forgive me if I don’t read that sentence back for another year or so. They say babies grow up so fast, enjoy every minute. They say some people aren’t “baby people.” They say this is a “great age.” They say that about every age. They say “you look great.” They still say that. They say you seem like you are doing really well.

snot lines on black jeans, hook-ups, and la Virgen de Guadalupe

The Laundromat. I am a foreigner here.

I have never owned a washer or dryer, yet, I have somehow racked up enough karmic skeeball tickets to cash in on years, perhaps a decade even, of accessible laundry facilities, making a trip to the Laundromat unnecessary. Until now.

Oh, we moved into a house with “hook-ups”. Big freakin’ deal. People advertise this in rental ads like it does us renters any bloody good. “W/D hook-ups.” As if we couldn’t buy the house, but we thought we’d haul a pair of incredibly heavy, unwieldy appliances with us from temporary spot to temporary spot, just stoked to pay for extra Uhaul space.

My black jeans ringed with snot lines just above the knee on each leg, I shake off my babe and head to the Laundromat.

My college memories include hauling the dead weight of dirty socks into a small, olive green room and up to old machines, half of which had their coin slots covered with looseleaf paper scrawled with the word “Broke.” I walk into our local Laundromat with a baggie of quarters and no real sense of what I’ll find.

I can hardly tell which are the washers and which are the dryers. These are chic, new models that flash the number of quarters they are still waiting for as you drop in one after another: Kansas, New Hampshire, Maine. An altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe perches on top of the vending machine that dispenses soap, bleach, and laundry bags. I am the only one who has brought reading material. Everyone else has brought family and friends to entertain them. The place is buzzing with activity.

The first thing I do is check out the huge, extra-expensive machines to try to salvage my oatmeal-splattered futon cover. Missing the sign that reads Machines lock at start and remain locked for the duration of wash cycle and concerned about screwing up my cover with detergent, I put in the soap, drop in my $2.50, and proceed to lock the empty machine. Okay. Well, I don’t think anyone noticed, and surely I’ve lost more money on less noble endeavors.

Eventually, I manage to get my futon cover and two other regular loads of laundry moving along, after which I sit, rather self-consciously, and flip through my magazine, uninterested. Kids ranging in age from about three to about seven race around laundry baskets and in and out of the doors as happy as if the washing machines were slides and swings and the dirty linoleum floor sand to dig in. At one point I make a field trip from my seat (you know, the sea foam green plastic chairs bolted to each other in a long line) to investigate the dryers, since soon it will be time in this little adventure to spread my wings and tumble. I slink over to a vacant metal monster, its big, round mouth open and hungry. I must make more coin offerings to the beast in order for it to grant my wish of dry clothes. Better coins than word puzzles or witches’ brooms, I’d surely end up schlepping home with sopping wet underwear.

I return to my seat, but without all of the information crucial to my next step. I interrupt the two men about my age talking in Spanish next to me. I ask them how much time you get for a quarter on the dryers. I’m proud of myself for pulling words like “ la secadora” out o my butt since it’s been way too long since I’ve conversed in Spanish and never, to my recollection, about laundry. The man closest to me hesitates, then tells me, “Ten minute.” Exchanges like this have always left me wondering – was my Spanish that bad that he couldn’t bear to continue the conversation in his native tongue? Was it important for him to let me know he speaks English?

Time to dry. In an effort to try and shake off my feelings of outsider, I linger over the baby clothes before throwing them into the great mouth, holding them out as if to align myself with the other parents there, looking for any place to stand in this foreign land of rinse cycles and social gathering. I have never gone out of my way to advertise my parenthood and at this point, I just want to go home – It’s Saturday for godssake!

I do go home, briefly, to hang the futon cover on the line. (Yes, we have a clothes line. How very cool. I think clothes lines were prohibited by the city in our last neighborhood. -- I am not joking about that.) I live really close to the Laundromat, and anyway, I’ve always been one of those trusting souls. If anyone cares to take my wet sudsy jeans, maybe they really need them. I’ve been known to wander from my purse in shopping carts engrossed in the differences between free-range, “vegetarian-fed” and organic eggs (does anyone know?), abandon my luggage in the middle of bus stations to go buy a ticket or visit the restroom. Maybe I’m not the smartest cookie, but I play the odds and expend less energy worrying that the old lady in the babushka may steal my dog-eared Berkeley Guide.

When I return, I wait. …

It’s an art.

I wait longer than I need to take my clothes out of the dryer. I’m still ignorant of the rules of this land and after what happened with the futon cover machine, I’m afraid if I stop the dryer to check if my clothes are dry and they aren’t, maybe I won’t be able to start it again. When I do stop it, things are burning hot. I’m not exaggerating here. I am trying not to cry out as I extract onesies from the depths of this fire pit that singe my arms with their metal snaps. I begin to understand the presence of the Virgin of Guadalupe. These machines are mean. You need someone on your side.

Clean and folded, my laundry has grown in size exponentially from what it was coming in. Lugging it in two bags to the car, I feel a little like Isaac trying to carry around his dad’s work bag. I teeter-totter, making funny faces and walking a dizzy line, finally tripping and falling forward over my burden. No one picks me up and cuddles me. No one tells me I’m cute. Inside, the demon machines roar quietly in smug recognition and crank up the heat another notch.

The week following these incidents, I am reluctant to partake in certain activities I used to enjoy, like sitting with Isaac as he practices spooning yogurt into his mouth. I’m jumpier playing outside with him. I mean, what’s that line all those parents use? Something like “Don’t get dirty, Honey!” And that certain laundry pile was much bigger. The half-dirty pile. The one of “if I get to do a wash soon, this could go in, but I’m not making full commitment to its filth and if I need to wear it again before I get to do a wash, shit, I’m putting it on.” What’s a snot line here or there, between friends?

baby brings fit kitties

Lately I’ve been quizzing Mike on the cats’ physiques.

“Don’t you think Zappy looks thinner?” (I’m met with silence.) “Well, don’t you?”

I stroke Emily’s plush coat head to tail, beaming like a proud Mama. “Emi’s trimming down a little, wouldn’t you say?” (Mike raises an eyebrow; leaves the room.)

On the inside of one of the doors of my desk, I have a photograph of Zap Mama when she first came to us—eight months old and nursing her kittens, tiny, lithe, face angular, clearly with Asian short hair leanings, her ears sticking up like enormous grey triangles pinned to the top of her puny head. I have no pictures of Emily that soon after she arrived to us. I couldn’t have looked. Her ribs stuck out, her fur was coarse as sea salt, what food she couldn’t finish at one go she’d bury with her toys or her placemat in a heartbreaking move that screamed scarcity issues. But over the years my girls have been, shall we say, making up for time lost?

That could all change now. Our kitty cat fitness program is called: the Baby Gate.

On the Baby Gate Program™ your cat can eat all she wants…as long as she jumps over the safety gate to get to it! That’s right. You too can have a fit and trim kitty in just 90 days with the Baby Gate Program™. The extra-tall, pressure mounted gate fits any doorway space and comes in white to match all the boring walls of a rented house. It goes for a ridiculous amount of money at Target, but we have it for you here for only six easy installments of $9.95 a month. Call right now and we’ll include a SECOND safety gate for FREE that you can put between your cat and her litter pan! Just by performing her normal bodily functions on a daily basis, your cat will LOSE WEIGHT. Call NOW!

(The Baby Gate Program™ is a registered trademark of Isaac Raphael Productions.)

strings attached

Just when I think I’m all old and grown up I realize that no, I’m still Jonesin’ to be the kid in this arrangement. I’ve often used my blog as a confessional venue and here I am again: I’ve eaten all of Isaac’s string cheese. But have you experienced this stuff lately? I mean, come on! How cool is it? It’s cheese and you pull it off in long strings and eat it and it’s like food and toy all in one! And after a long day of diaper changes and crying fits, a person might need to play with her food. And did I mention it’s cheese too?...

Boy, Birthday with Cup, Large Red

mocos: welcome to the neighborhood

I’ll admit it. I had my doubts about this new place before we moved here. Isaac and I are always out and about, the neighborhood matters a lot to us. Before, I’d walk down the picturesque little tree-lined streets of downtown peering in the windows of consignment shops or craning to see the surf crashing just a couple more blocks away. It was gruesomely sweet, strangely polite, cruelly foggy, but it was comforting none the less. What would my new space bring me?

I was buying a bagel sandwich for lunch in the ugly shopping mall that is now what is closest to home – closer than the surf or the unreasonably-priced little blue sets of china. Isaac was in the backpack still sniffling from his teething (#7 and #8 are through the gum line!) and the end of a cold. The woman waiting on us was pleasant enough, kept glancing back at Isaac, admiring my handsome boy, I was sure. As our transaction came to an end and she handed me my change, she leaned in a bit and confided softly, “He’s got mocos.” Excuse me? I asked. “He’s got mocos,” the woman repeated.

Mocos is the Spanish word for snot, boogers, or whatever else might be running or hanging out of the nose. “Oh. Thanks,” I told her, not sure the proper reply to such a statement. But I walked away happy. She didn’t have any kind of accent at all; and I certainly don’t necessarily project “Spanish-speaker” when you see me coming, yet she chose to use and assumed I would know this term, never anticipated I wouldn’t, in fact, even when the unexpected nature of the comment had me asking her to repeat herself; she never altered her vocabulary. Cool. This is the product of our new neighborhood, which, I must tell you, I am enjoying greatly.

I am reminded of a trip Mike and I made once to a hiking spot about an hour away. Before we got there, we stopped in a little town called Gonzalez that sits virtually in the middle of nowhere to get gas. Mike went into the minimart store to pay. He came out beaming. “They spoke to me in Spanish! Me!” he squeaked gleefully, pointing at his Irish, French-Canadian complexion. “What did they say?” I asked him. “I have no idea!” he told me, still high from the experience. “That’s great, honey.”

I think we’ll like it just fine here.

lessons still to learn

Isaac is obsessed with shoes. He loves them. He wants to wear his all the time. He wants us to wear ours all the time. It signifies going outside, which he wants to do, all the time. So the other day I took him with me to go shopping for a new pair of sneakers, figured he’d like it. He liked it okay, but I was disturbed by the outcome in general.

I tried on one of the only pairs I saw that I liked. I put them on as best I could, since I was in one of those discount clothing stores where the security tags make it impossible to actually tell if the shoes fit, much less if they are comfortable. There you are, a grown adult in public, tottering around in jerky steps, your feet tied six inches apart, a plastic tab digging into the arch of your foot, trying to make it to those leeeeetle mirrors on the bottom of the seats at the end of the aisle so you can see how your potential purchase will look on you. You do your best to enact your imagination so that you can think of yourself striding gracefully through crowds of people who part when you approach and point in awe at your footwear instead of tripping clumsily onto the little seat above the mirror where several pairs of men’s size 10 Adidas have been abandoned, their boxes strewn about.

The problem is that I am a size 8. Sometimes, I’m an 8 and a half. The sneakers I wanted only existed in size 9. They weren’t “super” big, and I bought them. Walking home, Isaac in the backpack wiping snot all over my collar, I realized the implication of what I’d done. It’s as if I don’t or can’t expect to find what I really need, and so, I settle. It’s as if I don’t have faith enough in the Universe to provide what I need, the right thing, that I’ve learned “good enough” is as good as it gets and might give you blisters, but them’s the breaks. I realized I don’t want to pass this lesson on to Isaac. But so far, I haven’t returned the sneakers.

birthdays call for Balloons

…Brother is making
His balloon squeak like a cat.
Seeming to see
A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it,
He bites,
Then sits
Back, fat jug
Contemplating a world clear as water.
A red
Shred in his little fist.
--Sylvia Plath, from “Balloons”

Sylvia Plath’s poem “Balloons” is one I’ve always liked a lot. It’s one of my favorite Plath poems. Okay, let’s face it – it’s one of the few I fully understand. I kept thinking of this poem as we prepped for our big birthday/housewarming soiree. Like so many things, it’s changed for me now that I’m a mom. I see it differently these days. As in, what the hell is she doing letting the baby play with a balloon and put it to his mouth?! Can you say ‘choking hazard’?! Put down your pen, woman, and go supervise your child! What are you? Crazy??… Oh. Nevermind.

It’s been so long.

Wasn’t I supposed to be online on February 20th, yelling to cyberspace about my little boy turning one? One. One whole year on this planet. One. One whole year as a mom. Both of us are still breathing. It’s a triumph, nothing less. But it’s so hard to find the time.

I want to learn how to write about it. New. It’s what we all want isn’t it? To write in fresh turns what we’ve experienced as a species forever. Ha ha! No, Kitty, it’s not what we all want. It’s what you want. Or what writers want. To explain, somehow, about how it’s too much – bearing the weight of his love (i.e., dependence) and then, at other times, how I just look at him, or at the two of them: my boys, and I am overcome, want to lap them up like milk.

crying in the arms of the enemy: if the world worked so

Isaac isn’t feeling well. Just a touch of a cold. Snotty, sniffly baby germs passed on in potentially a million ways. Just as things were starting to settle down here and I got rid of a yucky stomach virus myself, and the house is beginning to look like ours, and the list of outstanding projects reaches from nose to toe, not beyond, this – this annoying little sickness, the week before he turns one, the extra fragility, the warm, weary head, the fitful sleep.

This morning we are playing “open the bedroom door, close the bedroom door” in a happy repetition that could numb the brain faster than a quick sip of ice slush at the county fair in August. Isaac is giggly, proud of his skills, fascinated with hinges, periodically lurching into my lap, smiling and wiping snot all over the sleeve of my sweatshirt. Then, as these things go, suddenly the winds of humor change, and he is whiny, lost, not able to communicate what he wants, malcontent with his surroundings.

I remember a brief episode of heightened concentration that took place not long ago and decide to check his diaper. This action greatly displeases the Master, and he calls out for all to hear of the injustice done unto him.

Will against will, we battle. What would be a quick and simple task, becomes a mammoth undertaking. Limbs flail, promises are made and broken, privacy lines crossed, old wounds ripped open anew. Finally, a truce. The stronger party having succeeded more or less well enough in her mission to at least claim a self-defined victory. The weaker participant is vocal, angry, so angry, pulling away, moving on as fast as possible. Away from the source of distress, disgrace, until he stops. Sits. Turns, crying still. Unsure of where he’s headed, realizing the enemy must also be his salvation.

I reach out my arms and he is there, racing back to where he ran from just a moment before. Throwing his tiny body, his underdeveloped ego, against me and holding on. I rock him, hum softly, hold on right back. I never once think of charging him for any rancorous melodrama in the past, never think about imposing my greater strength.

In a matter of minutes he’ll be fast asleep in my arms, his long lashes wet, clumped into triangle rays below the half-circles of his little, flawless eyelids, forming suns like the ones I sketched in the high corners of my drawings as a child. This is how the impossible is possible. It’s like this. Without memory of any old pain lingering. It is in this moment’s scene. Our newfound peace is beautiful.

party house

So, we've moved into this house, right. And, it just so happens that it is the perfect party house. It has a huge driveway - ample off street parking for the first arrivals, a yard for BBQs and carousing, and a bathroom outside. No, not an outhouse, a real bathroom. See, there's this unfinished addition in the back that now amounts to a patio with a utility room and extra bath off to the side. Truly, once I can stay up past 8:00pm, watch out, par-tee.

In just a couple weeks, my little one will turn a whole YEAR OLD. Unbelievable. I'm sure I'll freak out more about that in another entry, but meantime, we are planning to put together a kind of combo housewarming/birthday deal soon, and so I was thinking... How many one-year-olds have keggers for their big day? Why not grab the present moment to take advantage of our party house? It could be a tradition, in fact. Isaac's birthday could be a real kick ass time every year. He wouldn't know anything else. It's dangerous but true that you as parent set "normal" for your child. Ha. Think about that one while you're deciding which 80s CD to put in over dinner.

Of course, there is the intrusive outside world. I mean, once he made it to kindergarten, say, he could possibly have questions. Questions like "Mommy, why do other kids have their birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheeze?" to which I'd naturally reply, something in the ballpark of "Cause they're wusses, Isaac, now knock the head off that brewsky and slide it over to your mommy, will ya, kid?"

Look, if I don't get a book deal, at least I can give my kid a chance at a juicy memoir.