Rocky Mountain High
We’re off to Colorado tomorrow for ten days with my family. At last count there will be five new adults to hold and entertain our children. Hooray!
I’ll be back with stories to tell.
Happy Birthday, Grace Mae
There is an old shed in our yard whose sash window frames have been stuck open from both the bottom and the top since the day we first saw this house five years ago. And four years ago today a bird flew into the space between those frames and could not get out.
Reboo, who was just Rebecca then, saw the bird first and then Chris and I saw it, and heard it—heard the strumming of its wings against the glass, saw it tossing between the panes, scooting itself a few inches up then sliding down, not able to make it to either opening. Rebecca tried to slide the swollen window frames away from each other, tried to keep them staggered so as not to crush the bird. “Up!’ we coached, “ the other one! “No, no, the other one!” It seemed like that bird was never going to get out and then all of the sudden it fluttered over the top of the splintered wood frame to a perch in the lilac bush a few feet away.
I had two contractions during the 10 minutes it took Rebecca to free that bird. I don’t remember who decided it was time to go to the hospital then, but we did. An hour later I was naked in a tub of water trying to make my way through contractions that were separated by less than a breath. And then, after 15 minutes of pushing, the frames of my body slid apart and our baby was born.
On Gracie’s first birthday I took her blueberry picking and when we got home I saw that there was a bird stuck between the sashes of that very same window. If this post were a piece of fiction I would not be able to tell this part of the story because it would seem too contrived. But it really happened. I set Gracie and the blueberries down on the grass and I freed the bird. There was probably a bird stuck in that window (why didn’t we ever close it?) many other days of that first year with Grace, but I never saw it. Maybe I saw that one because it had been a year since I saw the other, and I was looking. Maybe that is what birthdays are for.
Of God & Mail
I spent the better part of yesterday worrying. Worrying about little June who is, perhaps, just a bit too little. I won’t go into the details, mostly because I am trying very hard to not dwell on them, but suffice it to say that it seems possible that not even my complete and total abstinence from all the foods I love is enough to keep the peace in her volatile GI track.
So I was worrying and praying, which are sometimes the same thing and sometimes not. When I pray I’m asking for patience, and endurance and perspective. I try not to pray for things to turn out a certain way, not because I don’t think such prayers will help, but because I’ve learned from experience that asking for what is true not to be true makes it hard for me to find my way out of whatever sorrow or fear I’m swimming in.
Because of my hesitancy to pray for direct intervention, mum was the word of God for me during Gracie’s first year of life. What new mother wants patience and perspective? I wanted miracles. I wanted immortality. I wanted a baby in a holy water bubble. Better to just focus on science and hand-washing and five-point harnesses. Better to leave praying to the professionals.
But eventually Gracie started to walk, and to fall. Eventually there was a car accident, and high fevers in the middle of the night. I could not help but ask for help. And I got it, because my life is full of the best people you could ask for, and because I am so very lucky. And because of grace.
Yesterday I was trying to pray as I walked out to the car with June so that we could drive to town and pick up a little plastic cup for us to fill with her worrisome poo. I was trying to pray because I was tired and worried and tired of worrying. I wanted to give my worry to someone else. I wanted to give it to God, although every time I tried I had to ask for it back so that I could add just one more little thing.
I stopped at the end of our road to get the mail. Catalogs, a few bills, and an envelope addressed to June. I recognized the return address as the home of a friend from church, an older woman who once confided to me that she tried, many years ago, to conceive a child using artificial insemination but was not able to, and that she holds our children close to her heart even though she does not know them well. I opened it, and inside was a page from a calendar, one of those small ones that’s no bigger than a 5×7 photograph and is more about having something beautiful to look than having a place to write down your therapy appointments. This page in particular was a watercolor of Gerbera daisies marking the month of March 2008. Tuesday the 4th had a heart drawn around it with red ink. I turned the page over and this is what it said:
Dear June:
Welcome to our world. You are a wonderful little girl and I so love seeing you in church.
And with that calendar page (and a tightly latched five-point harness) we made it down the hill and back home again.
I’m Still Here, Sort Of
I have been wanting and trying to post something for the last several days, but I am too tired. June, who used to be such a tremendous sleeper that I never dared post about it for fear of raising the ire of the sleep gods, has become a terrible, terrible sleeper in the last three weeks or so. It’s not even so much sleeping that she does anymore, just resting. Loudly. In my arms. It can take anywhere from 3-5 hours to get her to go to sleep at night, and she doesn’t stay down for more than an hour or so. Last night was better in that she went right to sleep, but she needed to be settled again 11 times. Before midnight.
All this is to say that I am exhausted and demoralized and anxious and short-tempered. Did I already say exhausted?
I will be back with a real post just as soon as someone answers my Nighttime Wet Nurse ad on Craig’s List.
Life With June is Like One Long Yoga Class (and not just because I’m always wearing loose-fitting pants)
I’m often annoyed when people talk about their “practice.” Yoga is my practice. Knitting is my practice. Gardening is my practice. Eating an entire bar of Green and Black’s chocolate in one afternoon is my practice. (OK, no one has ever said that to me. But if someone ever did, I would immediately love her.) I’m actually annoyed whenever anyone (this woman notwithstanding) talks to me using any kind of Buddhist or eastern religion terminology. And because our state bird is the Tibetan prayer flag, people around here talk this way a lot.
But lately I can’t get out from under the idea that June is my practice. Since she was born almost five months ago, I have been away from her for a total of about 6 hours, at least half of them spent with Gracie. This isn’t including the time she spends sleeping, but still. Six hours, if that. And as much as I like to scoff about attachment parenting, as much as I like to say (and truly believe) that its tenets take a major swipe at feminism, Dr. Sears couldn’t conjure a better poster mama than me (aside from the fact that June sleeps in a crib and you can’t swing a dead cat in this house without hitting a pacifier).
I didn’t spend this much time with Gracie. I had a few hours of child care a week from the time Gracie was six weeks old, and Chris and I did a fair bit of trading off. But this time around trading off has been replaced by divide and conquer. And because I’m breastfeeding, it’s usually just easier for me to be with June. So now, five months in, being with June is like breathing. A day with June feels like just that: a day, with June. We need groceries? I drive to the store with June, wear her in the sling while I shop, nurse her in the car before we drive home. Gracie is hot and sticky and wants to swim? I stand waist-deep in the river with June in a sling while Gracie kicks and sputters in circles around me. The raspberries are ripe? Then there’s June, her head tucked under her sun hat, her tiny fingers reaching out for the vines. And up until last month when June started taking naps on her own, I even wrote while wearing her. I would sit on an exercise ball and type while she slept. When she started to stir I would just bounce a little to get her back to sleep.
Now don’t get me wrong, I have tried to get more time away from her. Earlier in the summer I searched high and low and high again for a babysitter, with no real luck. (Let me amend that: I did find one college girl who was interested, but she had never held a baby before, so after about an hour of going back and forth between my office and the living room, gently suggesting various things she could try to keep June happy, I just gave up and sent her to the post office with a package and a bunch of letters that needed to be mailed. Unfortunately, I forgot to tell her to insure the package, and it was never received by the mail-order company it was addressed to. An hour of child care during which I did nothing more than check my email and fold towels? $165.00. Knowing that no babysitter at all is better than a babysitter that can’t sit your baby? Priceless.)
All joking aside, I actually have made some sort of peace with the fact that June and I spend so much time together that we’d be finishing each other’s sentences if she knew what a sentence was. I’m in some sort of rhythm with her, but not a rhythm of schedules or cycles or anything predictable. Just a rhythm of getting up and getting on with things, and of those things always, always being done (or not done) in her company. When she was a small baby my body hurt terribly from the weight of her. She was not particularly heavy; it was the constancy of her body on mine that was causing me to strain. But I don’t wake up sore these days. Tired, yes. But my body and my psyche can endure the weight of her now, even when they do not want to.
And that is the reason I can finally understand what people are talking about when they are talking about their practice. When something is your practice, you do it every day, without regard for desire or energy or mood. You do it without thinking, so that, in the doing of it, you can become mindful of other things.
I am tired all the time. But I am also– I can’t believe I am about to use some Buddhist terminology here– so very wide awake.
Anniversary
On Sunday we took the girls to the lake. In the car on the way there I suddenly remembered something.
“It’s our anniversary!”
“It is?”
“It is!”
“I thought it was the 13th.”
“Today’s the 13th!”
“It’s our anniversary! Happy Anniversary.”
And then, in a worried voice from the back seat: “It’s your anniversary? Who’s going to babysit us?”
We got married on September 21st. We also got married on July 13th. September 21st was buckets of hydrangeas and champagne toasts and my 80 year-old grandmother having sushi for the first time. It was me in the most beautiful dress I will ever own and Chris in bare feet and everyone we love standing around us as we smiled and cried and promised and promised again. July 13th was Chris and me and our minister in our living room at dusk. It was Chris in shorts and me in bare feet and Chris’s hand on my stomach and our unborn baby as our witness. It was a poem and more promising, and then more still. September 21st was because we wanted to. July 13th was because we could. Maybe that’s why it’s easier to forget. Maybe that’s why it’s such a pleasure to remember.
Our Children’s World
Yesterday I was driving the girls into town and on the way I passed a young man in a wheelchair. He was in the wheelchair because he didn’t have any legs. As I drove by he looked up and smiled and waved, and I smiled and waved back, even though we do not know each other. His face was bright and healthy looking, his hair thick, his shoulders broad. And in that instant I knew, I knew so clearly, that he didn’t have any legs because he had been in the war. This war, our war. The war I marched against once, before I had children, the war that I have never supported, the war that I have not done nearly, remotely, vaguely enough to register my outrage over. The war I sometimes forget about for days at a time.
We parents talk so much about the world our children will grow up in, the warming world where floods and famine will become even more common, the world where mountains of plastic diapers and empty Evian bottles will greet them at every turn. The world where our kids will roll their eyes when we reminisce about texting and IM and how much we loved our iphones, and then turn away from us to engage with their friends using a device we can’t quite master.
But we never talk about the world they will grow up in where their boyfriend’s father did three tours and doesn’t have any legs. We never talk about the world where their college roommate’s aunt is homeless because she can’t stop thinking about what she did in Fallujah long enough to hold down a job.
Yesterday while I was nursing June I read a George Packer article in the New Yorker about the dilemma Barack Obama will face as the election grows nearer and Iraq becomes, despite us, more stable. What will his pull-out strategy be? Whatever it is, and I hope–Lord, how I hope–it is smart and swift, I am more interested in his strategy for healing those who have been broken by this war. Get out soon, I say. Hell, get out on January 21. Then let’s turn around and look behind us at the souls for whom we did not get out soon enough.
and the old years blow back like a wind that i catch in my hair
Yesterday I went for a run. Not a long run, not a fast run, but still. I ran. I ran because I have grown tired of walking, and because June was at home with Chris, and because I just wanted to see if I still could. If I still knew how. I had planned on running to the end of the road but then I got to the end and felt like I could keep going, so I turned around and ran back. When I started to get tired I thought about how great it would be to tell Chris that I had run, that I had run the whole way. The idea of telling her kept me going. It kept me going the same way it kept me going all those years ago when I ran twelve miles for the first time and then burst into my apartment where I knew Chris would be waiting for me. If memory serves we didn’t sleep much that night either, although it wasn’t a baby that was keeping us awake.
It is good to be back in this body again and I am glad that it has not forgotten how to run. But most of all, I am glad that I am still running home to her.
*The title of this post is from Lucille Clifton’s poem”i am running into a new year.”
