Temptation

 Cold and bright today.  Wool sweaters.  Car panting in the driveway for long minutes before we could climb inside.  Sunlight banking off the frozen slugs of ice still clinging to portions of the sidewalk, the street.  It's Lent and today is the day when Jesus gets baptized and then tempted in the desert.  Because it's winter the temptations we face don't seem deeply interesting: zoning out in front of the computer, pouring a highly unnecessary extra glass of wine, circling too anxiously around ourselves (our own fates, our own jobs, our own book sales, our own pale and flaking reflections in the mirror).  Not interesting, but problematic nonetheless.

When I left the house you were screaming.  You pooped yourself awake after sleeping for about half an hour and refused to lean back into the arms of slumber.  You've grown up a lot in the two months since I last wrote.  We've been to Holden and back and you've slept in the rocking car of a train and in a (relatively) unmoving glaciated valley.  You now say tons of words: bus and cracker and milk and water and truck and baby and book and nana and buh-buh-wee and flower and piano and bye-bye and hi and hat and...on and on.  You insist on calling Daddy "Ga-Ga" although the fact that you call Thisbe "Di-dee" affirms that you can, in fact, make the "d" sound.

Di-dee, books, baths, and vacuums are a few of your favorite things.  You're content paging through books for endless amounts of time; you patter around in search of where Di-dee has hidden herself; you squeal and hop from foot to foot when the vacuum roars to life; you would spend your life in the bathtub if you could.

You played by yourself quite well yesterday, puttering through the room with a block or a spatula or your stuffed kitty while Daddy and I talked to the Holden students over cinnamon rolls and Cougar Gold cheese and coffee--or later when we ate pizza and drank wine with old friends.  The workers in the toddler room describe you as "chill." 

And your sister has changed too.  She is more amenable, less vitriolic.  Fewer tantrums, fewer accidents, no constipation issues.  Holden was tough but I think being in a new environment, around older kiddos, helped her become a better self. 

Yesterday I watched you and your sister in the bath, both of you crowded beneath the running faucet.  Thisbe's body is now skin stretched over bones that threaten to poke through that surface for air.  Her shoulder blades and collar bone look like sheathed weapons.  You are still all pudge: rolls at your belly, under your chin, bubbles of pudge where your arms meet your armpits.  Thisbe was holding a yellow plastic bowl and feeding you water with a silver spoon.  You kept bending forward to accept the spoonful and then leaning back and touching your index fingers together to signal "more, more."  The water had darkened your hair and her hair and your eyes looked unbelievably huge, your lashes tremendously heavy. 

Sometimes my temptation is to look away when things are going well.  When you're puttering quietly or Thisbe is doing a puzzle, when you're both actually playing together away from me without screaming or needing.  For me that moment is a temptation to shift my focus.  Given the opportunity to relax for 30 seconds, I usually start cutting zucchini or checking Facebook or asking Daddy a question about who is going to write the check for March release days.  I mostly interpret your moments of contentment as permission to look away rather than looking more deeply toward.  And sometimes, God help us, looking away and reading an Onion article is absolutely necessary.  But I think sometimes my venting about the two of you comes from the fact that I choose to look away from the moments that would bring me the most joy.

So I think my Lenten discipline will be to try not to look away.  So seek out a view of you both in those moments of peace, of calm, of discovery, of cooperation, of silly and exuberant joy.

"Sheesh!"

Did we go straight from a 6:30am flight to Santa's lap?  Yes, yes we did.

It's the day before the day before Christmas.  It's 34 degrees and the sleet-snow that covered our cars this morning has run into the gutters.  Thin gray clouds moving fast over a slightly lighter thin gray sky.  The coffee shop is full of people home for the holidays talking to people they think they should talk to when home for the holidays.  Or they sit at tables and check their iphones simultaneously. 

Today both you and your sister are at daycare so it's a special holiday for Daddy and I.  A holiday filled with grading and last minute holiday errands: wine and sweet vermouth and whole milk and butter and powdered sugar and grapes and sugar snap peas.

You are, 90% of the time, the sweetest creature imaginable.  We flew to Maryland and back last week and you actually were NOT a holy terror on the plane.  You were quite content to move from my lap to Dada's, to have Thisbe press butterfly stickers to your cheeks, to munch thousands of graham crackers, to point out to lion, the teapot, the umbrella.  Your lexicon mostly consists of "ba" and the closely related "ba-ba" which actually makes you sound reasonably smart when you point to a ball, a bubble, the bath, or a sheep.  Oddly, you also say Jesus but it comes out as "sheesh."  So there's a lot of pointing to creche scenes and saying "sheesh!  sheesh!"  You like to be close, to be cuddled.  Your daycare workers describe you as "chill" and are not worried about your upcoming transition to the toddler room. 

Your sister remains the opposite.  She continues to have a tough year.  Struggles with constipation and anxiety.  Today she asked me which Santa I thought would be coming to our house tomorrow.  "What do you mean which Santa?" I asked.  "Well, there's the Santa who came to Gak's party and the Santa we saw yesterday at the store.  I don't think the one at the store was the real one."  Which made me realize that we were idiots to introduce her to two different Santas.  But her comment also made me feel that crack, that sliver of the real world that's beginning to creep across the veneer of safety and certainty of the world we've created for her.

I've been feeling bad this year for the way, in all honesty, we celebrate Santa more than Jesus in our house.  Your father has been good about trying to wedge an advent reading into the twenty seconds between when we sit down at the table and all hell breaks loose but I'm not certain those readings are sinking in too much. 

This time of year stresses me out.  Me and a lot of upper middle class Americans.  It's not really justified stress, it's created entirely out of our own consumptive choices.  Not just stuff but also experiences.  Building a ginger bread house!  Going to see "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas"!  Going to see the "Nutcracker"!  Drinking coffee and shrieking at the Santa party!  And there are adult versions of all this too: holiday work parties!  holiday book parties! holiday drinks with friends!  I think until this year I didn't realize that my over-full feeling comes not just from the cookies and Manhattans and tinsel and wrapping paper and gifts but also from the fifty zillion Christmas activities that we should do because they are so fun dammit!  The accumulation of experience as its own kind of consumption.

My own favorite holiday moment will be seeing your sister on Christmas morning (assuming no one is puking or running a fever KNOCK ON WOOD).  The absolute joy that I think comes not only from the mystery of wrapped packages but also the mystery of this mythic figure showing up.  Making himself known.  And I think there's part of me that likes watching because a part of me wishes God worked that way too. 

And part of me aches to have Thisbe's relationship with God work this way.  Cookie crumbs and wrapped Elsa dolls so that she sees and feels in a palpable way that she is remembered, that she is loved, that she is not forgotten.

Instead she is transitioning into seeing this world.  The one where thousands die of Ebola.  Where students at the St. Olaf need to lay their bodies down for four minutes so that we remember that black lives matter.  Where someone can go out for a walk and fall or be hit by a car and changed, hurt, instantly.  Where cancer slides its grubby fingers into people that we love and each day animals vanish and disappear and don't ever come back again. 

And the truth: in the middle of all of this, God does not always show up.  Or rather, God does not always show up in the way we want God to show up.  If you're being persecuted and someone promises you a savior, I bet it sucks pretty bad when all you get is a baby.  We've made baby Jesus into the happy ending of the story we tell today.  But a baby is not a leader or a conqueror or a politician or a lobbyist or a radical or a medical professional or a genius or a scientist.  A baby sure as hell does not solve the practical problems of someone who is suffering.

It is hard to learn that the world is a complex place, full of violence and pain and rage and hate in addition to the joy and peace and reverence and love. And it is harder still to learn that a sparkling figure will not arrive to offer us exactly what we desire.  It's easy to help a kiddo have faith in Santa Claus; it's harder to help a child to have faith in a God who mostly appears in the shards of grace and goodness in those around us. 


So this year Santa will not bring Thisbe exactly what she desires.  There will be no Disney Elsa doll below the tree.

Instead there will be the Creative Kidstuff knock-off Elsa doll.  Because, you know, baby steps.

This photo has nothing to do with Christmas.

This photo also has nothing to do with Christmas.

Extra Laps

Six degrees this morning.  Blue skies and all the parking lines downtown smudged away with snow and ice.  We bundle you in a coat that makes you look like the Michelin Man and an ear-flapped hat and mittens that velcro around your wrists.  You rip the mittens off and by the time we get anywhere, your hands curled into cold comma marks.

Anytime we ask you for a word, you say "gah-gah" which sometimes sounds like "cracker" or "dada" but nothing like "boat" or "spoon" or "weevil."  Unlike Thisbe, who resorted to anger and screams of rage when she didn't obtain desired objects as a toddler, you resort to acting like a heartbroken teenager.  Yesterday, after I mixed the batter for a pan of brownies, you pointed at the bowl emphatically.  "No," I said, "all done."  Then I even washed the bowl and showed you the glow of the clean glass to further reassert my point.  But your face simply melted downwards, the edges of your lips threatening to run over the bottom of your jaw, tears streaming freely.  You sat, cried mournfully for a few seconds, and then laid on the floor, cheek to linoleum, and cried further.  You did this until your sister entered with a drum over her head at which point you promptly got up and started following her, signing "please, please" against your chest. 

You repeat this process (desire, grief, desire, grief) probably ten times every hour about tragedies like: not getting to go outside, not being permitted to play with Mommy's computer, not getting to touch the pot of boiling pasta, not getting to color with permanent markers.  It's like the Gestapo around here as far as you're concerned.

Your sister is decidedly your sister.  She likes to spend her post-dinner hours leaping from the couch to the ottoman and back, often for hours.  She also enjoys drawing pictures of houses, stars, flowers and carriages pulled by slaves (thanks, Sunday school).  On Saturday, in the middle of a playdate, I found Thisbe and her friend Mae sitting on the floor of Thisbe's room sliding their legs open, closed, open, closed.  They were pretending to be swimming instructors.  Inspired by the fact that she is now forced to sit through the entire service on Sunday mornings, she often spends Sunday evening carrying around a Lutheran Book of Worship and offering us songs and prayers composed on the spot.  Yesterday one included the line, "this is my chance to walk away / God loves Jesus and the day."  Last week there was a lengthy section that went back and forth between "God have mercy on me" and "God worship me."

Your father and I spend our days scrambling eggs for you in the morning and picking up tambourines and rubber ducks in the evening.  Your father wore the same purple sweater every day last week as part of an exercise for his creation/environment class.  I tell my students to cut up facts and information, to spread it across their dorm room floors and rearrange.  Your father shovels, heaves bags of dirty diapers out the back door, washes the dishes while you head-butt his thighs.  I exclaim over the new design in the foam of my latte at Blue Monday, carmelize sweet potatoes and onion and kale, return library books before they expire.  Every once in awhile we walk together around the track at the YMCA and every once in awhile we have to think about a big change or the absence of the possibility of change.  Every once in awhile his eyes glaze with tears or mine do and for a few laps we hold hands.

Waxing and Weaning

Today the temperature plummeted and wind scraped the rest of the leaves from the emaciated branches.  In front of the car, curled and dry, the leaves went tumbling, skittering, scrape-wheeling across cement peppered with drops of rain.  It's not really legitimate to complain about the weather; the last weeks have been blissful.  The sky a continuous parachute of blue, trees fanning their bronze-ey wares, temperatures permitting us walk after walk without the fuss of mittens or hats or blankets tucked beneath thighs.

Last weekend we went to Trego, Wisconsin for Holden on the Road.  We saw friends and family and went for hikes through the woods and ate doughnut holes and drank too much coffee.  Daddy did a session on the ethics of the PolyMet mine and I did a session on nature writing and Thisbe played the Frozen matching game with Grandpa Mark and constructed jigsaw puzzles with Grandma Dot.

You and I didn't go to Vespers.  Instead we sat on a chair between two wooden bunk beds, beside a dresser filled with your Robeez slippers and Thisbe's cheetah leggings, facing a window outside of which the light stretched from golden to umber behind the black vertical stalks of trees.  I nursed you and while I nursed I sang all of Holden Vespers, off key and out of tune, "God of daybreak / God of shadows / come and light our hearts anew."  And somewhere in there, as the light behind the trees smudged into the darker forms of the trees themselves I decided that this would be the last time I would nurse you.  I'd been thinking about it for a long time.  You've only been nursing at bedtime for months now and I knew that I would definitely stop next month, when Daddy and I go away for three days.

I don't remember the last time I nursed Thisbe.  I didn't think it mattered to remember because I thought there would be another baby and I was so ready to have my body become entirely again my own.  And I didn't feel sad to wean Thisbe.  It felt right.  And OK.  But somehow with you I wanted to be aware of the last time.  Wanted to take stock.  To remember the moment.

But last night I regretted my choice, you hollered when I put you to bed and I thought, at 10pm, that maybe I'd been mistaken, maybe it wasn't time, maybe you nor I was ready.  So I slid into your room and took you out of your crib and tried to feed you.  You didn't wake, not really, you just started to make a sweet sucking noise inside your mouth without actually opening your lips.  I tried to get you to open your lips.  I was the ridiculous mother stuffing her fingertip into her sleeping toddler's mouth because maybe I wanted to know that we were still connected, that my body was somehow still your body, that you needed me still in this most basic way.

But you wouldn't open your mouth.

So I went back to my own bed and sobbed.  Daddy tried to stroke my back but also I think Daddy thought I was a little nuts.  I thought I was a little nuts.
"We're never going to have any more babies," I sobbed.
"Matteus still doesn't talk yet," said Daddy.
"I know," I said, wiping snot on my sleeve, "but I mean we're old now.  This part of raising children.  It's done.  It's gone."
"Well, if you don't want it to be done you could get your IUD taken out," said Daddy.  Not helpfully.

I cried again after class today, driving down Olaf Avenue, the leaves skittering and scraping ahead of me.  Maybe I'm sad because you're a boy and I don't know if or how we'll have a close relationship as you get older.  Maybe I'm sad because I won't be able to offer you this source of comfort anymore, when you inevitably get sick (likely within 48 hours).  Maybe it feels like loss because today in class we read an essay about lynching and an essay about racial captivity and talked about the complexity of the world, victims becoming abusers, telephone poles turning into gallows and maybe the act of nursing just feels simple and straightforward and GOOD. 

When I started this post I wanted to work my way to an enlightened ending, wanted to find a way to make the sadness lessen or make feel more justified somehow.

But I think I needed a ceremony.  A way of stepping across this particular line, a way of marking this choice and this particular ending.  I'm not usually one for smoking sage or burning origami swans with "intentions" written on the wings of henna-ing my hoo-ha (I don't think that's actually a thing).

But this week I could have used a litany.  This week I wanted the strong hands of women near me.  This week I could have even used some floating tea lights bobbing in my bathtub, some imperfect sign of what it feels like to get go of something that doesn't have a name.

Thank you (no, seriously, thank YOU)

Fall keeps flaunting ridiculously glorious days.  50-60 degree highs.  Cloudless blue skies.  Leaves the color of ripe pears sieved with sun.  At the park this afternoon we chatted with good friends and ate clementines and brownies.  You attempted to go down the baby slide for the first time; meanwhile, Thisbe played a lengthy game by herself, barefoot, on a stone wall.  I watched her talk to imagined figures on her right, on her left, and then raise her chin, denying her servants something.

You still walk as though there's a see-saw inside you but you're getting faster, more adept.  Except when we put you in sleeper pajamas.  Then the hard wood floors become an ice rink and you slide all over the place.  You play for long stretches on your own (thank you, baby Jesus!) and are fairly content at daycare or the YMCA childcare center or the church nursery. 

A few weeks ago, Daddy's book, "Kierkegaard, Aesthetics, and Selfhood: the Art of Subjectivity" was published and then last week my memoir, "Tailings," was released.  My first copies of the book arrived just before you and I were headed out the door to join Gak and Thiz at the library so I brought a copy along. When we arrived in the children's section I swept the book out magically from the diaper bag (beside the red couch that was recetly removed for cleaning after someone spit up down the front of it).  Gak tried to "ooooohh" and "ahhhh" over the sound of you whacking a fake cabbage against a fake log (in the Peter Rabbit display) and Thisbe whining (because attention had been diverted from The Berenstain Bears Teach Us Another Dull Lesson About How to Behave).  I then pointed out to Thisbe that her name was in the book and she quieted and gazed at it far more reverently.

But for a second, before we arrived at the library, when you and I were walking down second street, your hair glinting, your tiny index finger pointing to everything and nothing, it felt like a bell had been rung.  Like all those crimson, marigold, glorying leaves were reverberations of sound.  For this long moment I was proud and happy to have this book in my hands.  I have written with the real hope of "being" a writer since I was 21.  I am very grateful for that walk, for those moments when the book felt like mine and my heart just circled around it happily, tail wagging.


But now the book isn't really mine anymore.  It's out there in the world.  It means that people can buy it or forget to buy it.  Read it or skim it or shelve it between a cookbook and "Where the Wild Things Are" and then never look at it again.  Some people will find themselves, or a version of themselves, on the pages of the book.  And those people could be angry or hurt or upset; they could be grateful or nostalgic or indifferent.  The book being in the world means that I can go to Amazon and watch the rank of the book rise and fall.  That reviews can be written or decidedly not written.  It means that I have to say, again and again, "here, this is a part of me, will you buy it?"  And it means that though my husband will repeatedly tell me otherwise, that I will judge the import of my story and my writing and a small slice of who I am on whether people buy this book.  This is all the truth.

Here is another truth: in church today Pastor Tim reminded us in his sermon that those of us in the pews chose and choose to recognize ourselves first as Christians, before our roles as citizens or teachers or mothers or husbands.  This was in the context of what to render to Caesar and what to render to God.  But part of being a Christian means believing that you are loved, completely and entirely from your beginning by this Being that knit you in your mother's womb. I trust that I am loved by God, but that love often feels vague and amorphous to me unless it's shown in the humans around me.  (And it's also easy for that love to get drowned out by my obsessive anxiety rooted squarely in a gentle waxing toward narcissism.)

And this next part will sound stupid and obvious and banal and cliche, but I when I let people know about the book on Facebook the other night, I was completely taken aback by the outpouring of kindness and support.  I don't mean people were buying the book.  I mean, maybe some people were buying the book, but that's not what I mean by kindness and support.  People just seemed legitimately happy and interested.  Like they really wanted to celebrate with me.

There are also a lot of people dying of Ebola right now.  A bunch of "likes" on a Facebook page seems pretty superficial in light of bodies being left on the street. 

Except, I suppose, that it's a good reminder that our communities, these people around us who bring us cream of broccoli soup and text us recipes and remember our children's birthdays and sing us songs when we're dying and offer us "yahoos" and "congrats"  are what make the moments, all the moments, bearable and rich and holy.

This post is my way of saying thanks.  Not just to you and Thisbe, though I am thankful for you both, but to the people who have been my village for almost 35 years.  Family and friends and mentors and teachers and pastors and colleagues and whoever the one guy is in Estonia that reads this blog.  You're in my village, too, Estonia guy.  And maybe some day I will travel to your good food resort.

Thank you and thank you and thank you.

"Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness"

 
Today is 60 degrees and gray but the weekend was lovely.  Full of the warmth and drowsiness and o'er-brimm'd-ness of Keat's autumn, the "later flowers for the bees," the "fume of poppies," the "last oozings." 

The trees are blazed and blazing.  Their colors look violent, pensive, mysterious.  And then there is the pattern of the falling leaves that turns some trees into torches and others into ruined faces, empty bowls. 

You are taking your first tottering steps.  You don't care about walking.  You do it only when you're not thinking about it or when a single step or two seems like the easier route from here to there.  You've started up with consonant sounds, chugging them out in the back seat of the car or sending them lilting around the darkness of your room at 6:30am.  Last night you had a fit because we promised you a bath after dinner, failing to consider that "after" in not a concept you appreciate yet.  You sobbed through most of dinner, pointing to the doorway, until finally I carried you through the squashed bits of spinach pie on the floor and up to the bathroom where you slapped your palm emphatically on the porcelain edge of the tub saying, "ba! ba! ba!"  You've also finally figured out the hand sign for "more" only instead of bringing all your fingertips together, you use only your index fingers so the expression of the word seems more delicate and solemn.

This weekend your father and I went away for a night for the first time in 18 months.  We were supposed to go to a dear friend's wedding in Chicago but then a rather wounded individual lit an air traffic control tower on fire and thousands of flights were cancelled so instead of getting fancy in Chicago we got fancy in Minneapolis instead.  We stayed at a hotel downtown that had recently been remodeled.  This meant that bright red chairs in the lobby were back lit by forty television screens together projecting images from nature.  On each floor, the elevator doors swished open to the same fluorescent pink print of what looked like a virus under a microscope.  Meanwhile, Daddy couldn't look at the hallway carpet for fear of vomiting, such was the nature of the white/navy striped pattern.  Our room flaunted a wall papered with drawings of cassette tapes.  That we did not find all of this cool confirms that we are old.

We pretended not to be old, though!  For lunch we ate fish tacos and chicken salad on Nicollet Mall.  A bee flew into Daddy's beer and he rescued it and then poured water on it to try to resuscitate it.  I sipped chardonnay and grew too hot in the sun.  We spent the afternoon being lazy and then went to dinner wearing our fancy wedding clothes.  We tried steak tartare for the first time, scooping the pink bits onto toasted circles of baguette.  Afterward we went to an underground bar with a purple door (thanks for the rec, uncle John!) and sipped cocktails infused with pine buds and charcoal and chatted with the bearded, plaid-shirted bartender whose name was also Peder but who pronounced it Peter.  The next day we read the paper in bed and shopped for towels at Macy's and had lunch at the Sculpture Garden and I drank a latte infused with honey and lavender.  It was good.  Though I am still sad to have missed my dear friend's wedding.

Every Minnesotan was outside this weekend, I think.  It was the last swelter of opulence.  The oozings and the drowsiness and the hum of bees will soon give way to the cold and the starkness, the swift blanket that mutes perfumes and hardens sap.  Jennifer died at this time a year ago.  I am glad to be especially reminded of her now, in this season where we fill ourselves with food and warmth, with long walks and the claps of color from the trees, when we prepare to give our bodies over to a different way of living in this world.

How to Eat a Taco at Our House

Decide to make turkey tacos.  Set your laptop on top of the microwave, open to the Food Network recipe you've selected.  Smile inside, maybe a little smugly, about how you will be using vegetables from your CSA for these tacos.  Touch lovingly the dirt-smudged skin of the onion, the green hulk of the zucchini.  Set up a Paul Simon Pandora station, begin to saute in rhythm to a song that sounds like something Paul Simon might have written if he had a sore throat or no hands.  There is a tugging at your pants. Look down into the big eyes of the baby who is not really a baby anymore.  Open the doors of the cabinet in which you've stocked only baby-proof items.  Tupperware and packets of tea and Emergen-C.  From the other room there is the sound of the five-year-old flopping onto the leather of the couch.  Keep chopping.  The baby flings the tupperware about the room and then lays on his back, crying for no apparent reason.  Say to the baby: "Can you find the piggy?" and point toward the magnetic farm adhered to the refrigerator that sometimes randomly makes oinking noises when you take out a piece of pre-sliced cheese late at night.  The baby keeps crying and begins to move his legs so it looks like he is back-stroking across the kitchen floor.  Say: "Daughter! Can you find something to do with your brother?" Five-year-old enters with the wooden recorder from who-knows-where that tastes like patchouli when you play it.  Five-year-old is playing it.  Baby stops crying for no reason, brings himself to feet and waves his hands in air.  Sister dances around not giving baby recorder and baby begins to cry for an actual reason.

Peak head into living room.  Husband reading "Entertainment Weekly."  Carry baby into living room and deposit on rug near husband.  Return to kitchen.  Attempt to look sunny and pleased when daughter asks if she can help.  Dump olive oil and salt in a bowl and let her spread mixture on tortillas with a little brush.  Someone who is not Paul Simon is whistling and singing about trains.  Add 2/3 cup broth to the sauted vegetables.  While you wait for sauce to thicken set out plates and sour cream, CSA greens and a bib for the baby.  Ignore the heavy yellow sheen of oil soaking into all the tortillas.  Place them in the oven.  Stir the sauce and notice that it is not thickening.  Announce loudly that dinner will be ready in five minutes.  Cut avocado while five-year-old rocks back and forth on step stool chanting "Mama, mama, mama, mama" and baby, after re-entering kitchen, attempts to use his head to bulldoze your feet.  Note for three seconds the pleasure of scooping out a neat row of avocado pieces with your thumb.

Stir the sauce again.  Note that there is no thickening, that you've created seasoned meat and veggies swimming in broth.  Decide to serve it anyway.  With a slotted spoon.  Ask your husband to prepare the drinks.  Remove the tortillas from the oven and sprinkle two with cheese.  Return to oven.  Buckle baby into chair.  Bark at five-year-old until she sits on bench in breakfast nook where you eat all your meals because it's too much work to carry everything the extra five feet to the dining room.  Say table prayer with baby screaming, five-year-old pushing index finger into piece of avocado and husband tipping box of wine toward coffee cup with the insignia of college where you teach upon it.

Take melted cheese tortillas out of oven.  Sit down.  Cut tortilla into pieces with pizza cutter for baby.  When five-year-old tries taco meat and says in a whiny voice "I don't really like it, Mama," say "thanks for trying it!" in a falsely bright voice.  When baby screams and flings bits of avocado on the floor exchange The Look with your husband, The Look that means my-God-we-are-lucky-to-have-children-and-we-love-them-so-much-but-why-is-each-meal-such-a-shit-show-is-it-too-late-to-live-in-Victorian-times-when-we-would-only-see-our-children-occasionally-after-they-had-been-bathed?  When five-year-old slides from bench onto floor, let your husband tell her to sit on her bottom please.  Ignore the fact that she is not eating but instead deflating each of the air bubbles in the tortilla with her fork.  When she says, "Mama, put your finger in here," say "I'm eating my food right now." 

Remember to take a bite.