Balmy With a Chance of Kale

Balmy today and moist.  Thick covering of white clouds and pinpricks of sleet on the windshield.  Your sister clung to me at daycare today, didn't want me to say good-bye.  I know kids are growing all the time, but Thisbe is at an age where I feel like her physical being is trying to unfold.  Her face seems to be re-shaping itself: her cheeks are thinner, eyes more hollow, upturned nose is more pronounced.  And she takes great care of certain aspects of her own physical care.  She's insistent about dressing herself; prefers dresses that twirl, leggings over pants, screen printed Ariel and cheetah patterns over more humble hearts or stars.  Today she emerged in her favorite outfit: black dress with silver heart and plaid pink attached tutu.  Her hair was plastered to her head with Jergens de-tangler, her special "hair cream" that she applies with the Hello Kitty brush that chimes as she pulls it through her hair.

After meeting with my independent study student I took you to the ECFE baby shower where we got free gifts and reminders of who to call if you're developmentally delayed.  I drank hot cocoa out of a styrofoam cup and you looked at your wavery reflection in a rattle and I watched the babies who are six months old: their ability to maneuver on their tummies, their plumb-lined postures, and their slower, surer movements.  And you seemed smaller and less certain, your desire and will not yet completely hinged to your actions. 

You've been asleep since we got home and I've been puttering.  The lights are off and it's dim and quiet.  Crow cawing outside.  Whirr of the computer fan.  Kale and sausage and tortellini soup for lunch.  Grandma Gail arrives in a few hours so your father vacuumed this morning and wiped the salt stains from the porch floor.  I've cleaned out the refrigerator (hunk of brie, tub of hummus, sweet potato casserole, white face of half an onion and the pocked face of half a pomegranate, watery black bean soup) and soon I'll strap you into the Bjorn and we'll straighten the duvet and put my sweaters into bins and collect the glasses scabbed with red wine.  Then maybe we'll go up to the track at St. Olaf and walk and walk in circles until you arch your back and strain your neck for home.

Before These Boobs Were Yours

 
This morning striations of blush and bruise across the 7:30am sky.  Five degrees felt balmy, felt like occasion to remove my hat, to back the car out of the driveway without letting it choke out a little warmth first.

This morning, after I folded laundry and wrote a grocery list and you manhandled a number of rattles, shakers, crinkle books, and stuffed dragons, we went to Econofoods.  In addition to purchasing the usual items we also bought a violet orchid (thin little neck thrust out plaintively), two bags of Reece's peanut butter hearts (thank GOD the Valentine's display is already complete), and a Disney princess helium balloon.  These items we delivered to Daddy's class because today or a day like today is our kind-of anniversary.

We don't remember the exact date I walked into Daddy's classroom eight years ago, but it was at the beginning of January term.  Only eight years ago Daddy's class was in the basement of Boe Chapel and I didn't know what Daddy looked like.  I only knew that when I asked my brother John whether the prof teaching his interim course was "young, single, and attractive" that John answered "maybe" and so, en route from Minneapolis to Iowa City, I stopped by St. Olaf and sat next to John around a seminar table and waited for his maybe young, single and attractive professor to walk in. 

I knew the professor's name was Peder and so I was expecting someone with white blond hair and translucent-pale skin, someone thin and wiry (I say "so" as if that expectation made sense though clearly it did not).  Instead a gorgeously handsome man entered: relatively thin but not wiry, with dark hair and shocking blue eyes.  He was wearing a suit coat and tie (when you hang out in bars with male poets it's easy to forget this find of apparel exists) but a few of his dark hairs were standing on end.  The put-together-but-a-little-frayed-around-the-edges aesthetic was quite appealing to me.  And he started to talk about Nietzche and he scribbled words on the board that looked both smart and cryptic simultaneously.  I remember he abbreviated Christian as "X-tian" and I remember he handed out color copies of works of art and broke the students into groups and asked them to assess what Nietsche would have thought about the images.  Or maybe Kierkegaard?  The content is a little fuzzy.

I do remember doing what any intelligent, empowered, feminist, MFA candidate woman would do when faced with an attractive man she knows almost nothing about: I leaned over the table, pretending to look at the artwork but really squeezing my boobs together so the sexy man might see what I had to offer beneath my tasteful but low-cut shirt.  Your father claims to have absolutely no recollection of the milkmaid fantasy I was trying hard to suggest.  Instead he remembers that at the break in the class we talked about Holden Village and Lutheran Volunteer Corp. and all the people we knew in common.  He claims that is was our shared interests and values and blah blah blah that intrigued him. 

And there is more to the story, of course.  But that's the beginning of the story of your father and I.

Today there was no decolletage.  There was a nursing sports bra and an Eddie Bauer sweater and a down coat and cargo pants smeared with salt from the road.  There was my thinning hair (thanks, birth!) pulled back in a sloppy ponytail and my glasses and the pale skin of early January.

Your father, however, looked pretty much the same as he did on that day eight years ago.  Only today he was holding you in his arms.

Child's Pose

 
After I fed you at 6:30 this morning I sneaked out of the house in my pajamas, scraped the glitter of ice off the windshield in the dark, and drove to Blue Monday.  Hands around a warm mug I tried to make sense of the dates of spring semester. Numbers trickled down the page.  Poetry before nonfiction? Two days on images or one?  Should the peer critiques be one page or two?  Brain fumbling around.  Like trying to make a peanut butter sandwich with mittens on.

Back home by 8:45 and Thisbe was fever-less but watery-eyed and pale.   Daddy was leaning against the wall in the kitchen, dapper in cords and sweater and collared shirt, watching her spoon cereal (three kinds mixed together) into her mouth.  You were upstairs crying, not napping.  So unlike you.  You who are the dependable sleeper.  So Daddy took Thiz to school and I put you in your car seat and drove.  Past neat green signs saying Cannon River and Fairbault and Farmington.  Past ice on the road turned to metal in the sun.  Past the Malt-o-Meal factory puffing and cars puffing, gasps of white out of everything that wants to be living.  Past Arby's and Target and an eye clinic; Greenvale school and a glass store and the vet's office.  Variations on Hayden filling the car.

Then yoga.  The warm (WARM!) room.  Babies laid at the end of yoga mats like plump offerings.  Your heel cupped in my palm.  My hands gently wringing your thighs.  Your fingers around my hair, pulling, while I leaned back into my haunches in child's pose.  The press of Cassie's warm hands on my lower back.  Songs about rivers and children and earth.  One of the babies so new she looked almost skeletal, like a kind of fish that lives without light.  And your sounds over the top of all of it, mewls and grunts and groans and ohhhhs.  I didn't realize you were so vocal (how could you be next to your sister?) until, beside the younger babes, you made yourself known over and over again.

I Resolve to Blip

In honor of Alice Munro, who used nap time to perfect her genius at the short story, I'm going to use your nap time in order to write a blog post every day this month.  Not in order to perfect my genius at the blog post, but because you only sleep for 45 minutes at a pop which isn't really enough time to write a syllabus or correct page proofs or write anything substantial or, you know, "good."

So my writing this January will be blips.  Brief moments and images pulled out of the froth of the day, likely without any introspection, reflection, or rationale to accompany them.  Because it is a law of God that right around the time you begin to reflect on something or to grow a new idea, the baby knows and the baby wakes and the baby screams.

Today during your first nap Thisbe and I played Sequence, laying red and blue plastic chips onto pictures of penguin and zebra and moose and camel.  You and I dropped her off at school at 10:00am but by 12:00 I'd gotten a call from Teacher Sarah that Thisbe was languishing below her Hello Kitty blanket, complaining about leg pain.  I thought perhaps she was simply being dramatic but it turns out she had a 101 degree fever.  So I unzipped you from your Christmas sleeper bag and we drove back to get her.  Then, while you slept in your carseat upstairs, she and I ate chicken soup side by side in the breakfast nook.  Sun skittering scross the snow and into our eyes.  Toast brown but still a little too soft in the middle, the way it tastes when it comes from the freezer.  Thisbe put a blanket over our knees and snuggled against me and said how this was the perfect lunch, the best one she'd ever had.

After an explosive poop and a bath in the sink, you watched a little bit of Cinderella with your sister while she nibbled on cinnamon-honey toast.  The baby-zombie expression on your face explains why you're not supposed to watch Cinderella with your sister until you're two years old.

Then your sister watched Peter Pan and you took another nap and Daddy came home and I made kale and sausage and tortellini soup for dinner.  And then, big grown-up boy, you ate almost an entire jar or organic sweet potato puree!  We'd tried it a number of times but you spit it out every time, globs of orange goop (or ivory goop or puse goop) on the front of the bib and you making a face like a herd of cows had shat a moat of cow pies around your high chair.  But tonight, you figured it out.  Your mouth opened again and again for the purple-plastic coated spoon.  And your sister, cheeks flushed, in the room next door watched Arthur pull the sword from the stone.

Enter: Cold

The coldest day in decades.  Car making strangled sounds, wheels bumpy with frozen air.  Sunlight knifing the back of our throats.  On Facebook, videos of friends tossing pots of boiling into the air, liquid turning to snow in an instant.  Soap bubbles frozen before reaching the earth.  Nasal hairs stiff.  Tourniquets of cold on every arm, every leg.  We move as though each joint was locked, soldered into place. 

Carol came in her mink hat to watch you and Thisbe while I drove Daddy to his first day of class.  Then, while you slept, Thisbe and I sat on the leather couch, weaving our fingers thought the knit ivory blanket, reading a cartoon book about Sir Arthur.  The sword from the stone.  Potions disguising the beloved.  Dragons lurking under stones.  Bodies floating in biers down the river to Camelot.

You and I played with Emily and baby A in the library.  Baby A learning to walk.  Tiny shuffle steps.  Up and down in overalls.  Pushing a plastic bus in front of him like a cart.  Carrying around a Pooh Bear 3/4 his size.  And you sitting for five, six, seven minutes at a time.  Old man groans into your toe and ankle region.  Then wiggled dancing moves on your back.  Eyes following Baby A everywhere.

Thisbe and I reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at Blue Monday.  Hot chocolate in a blue mug.  What does miracle mean?  What is a risk?  I explain and she says oh a risk is like when you walk in the middle of the street and maybe you'll get hit by a car or you walk along the edge of a mountain but maybe you'll fall down the side and die or you put your piggy bank on top of a car and maybe someone comes by and eats it.  Yes, I say, exactly.

Chicken soup with coconut milk and edamame and corn and pepper for dinner.  The peeled mango is pale yellow, mealy, purplish near the pit.  You are frustrated at dinner.  Refuse to sit in your chair.  Spit out the tastes of sweet potato puree we spoon between your lips.  Thisbe can't find Princess Elsa in the bath.  Elsa's two plastic dresses lined up on the edge of the tub.  Rigid plastic so that they stand upright without a form inside them.  Thisbe swoops the bubbles away with her forearm, trying to clear a patch so she can see the doll's pale skin, her turquoise slippers.

In bed, now, I lean my head against the wall and feel the cold seeping through.  Even with hundreds of other people close by, even with blankets and space heaters, even with a stable dwelling and wood that could be burned in a pinch, we are taken back by the way it comes through everything, this cold, through fleece and wool and stucco and skin, glass and concrete and timber and down.  This is a different kind of vulnerability, not the kind that comes in the face of a typhoon or tornado, earthquake or tsunami.  I think of that town near the Chernobyl site, Pripyat, of everything static, still.  Of all of us going over to a glassy-eyed otherness, a place where our gestures slow and tumble and finally numb.

Home Again, Home Again

And now the party is over.  At least for a day.  Balsam fir needles shagging our carpet, scraps of wrapping paper nestled against the bottom of chair legs, new paints and glitter glue and Princess coloring books clogging the shelves-in-need-of-a-thorough-purging. 

It was negative 13 degrees when we woke this morning.  Chill sweeping up from the floor in the breakfast nook, your sister turning and turning the lid of her vitamin jar to release her new gummies. 

You are becoming sweeter and sweeter by the day.  Less frugal with your smiles, content to sit against the swell of a belly or propped within the crook of Daddy's leg.  Sometimes we have competitions to see who can get you to balance the longest in a sitting position before you tip to the side, a Buddha bowling pin without the reflexes to reach out your arms to catch yourself.  You can grab your toes but you're not yet quite flexible enough to bring them to your mouth.  Your hips have opened and you roll easily from side to side (then you arch your back and strain your head back but can't quite seem to flip over).  You are still a font of snot but now, with the help of the Nose Frida we manually suck the boogers out a few times a day.  It's disgusting and deeply satisfying at the same time.

You will be five months old tomorrow and last night Daddy and I arrived unanimously at the Cry for Awhile Terminal.  I don't think either of us would be capable of letting you cry for hours at this point, but all you really seem to need is about five or ten minutes of shrieking before you turn yourself off--a water spout going full force and the suddenly without warning, nothing.  Silence.  You fall asleep around 6:30pm and then (the last two nights at least) I feed you once, between 2:00 and 4:00.  Then you wake around 6:30am and I feed you again and bring you into bed and Daddy and I prop you between us with a crinkly book and you blow bubbles at the zebra-with-the-girth-of-a-cow or the snail-with-the-snot-silver-shell and we doze in the darkness until we hear your sister's footsteps, down the ladder of her bunk bed and across the floor.  She always stands in the crack of our open bedroom door, dressed in a nightgown and fleece pants, holding Dog Do, hair lifted in the odd angles of sleep, until we see her and call her into us.  Then she crawls over me and nestles in between Daddy and I, facing you, and she sings and talks to you and you smile and smile.

The last week has been full of loveliness: Thisbe lumping through the snow of Lake Harriet with Gak and Ampa and Karu, making snow angels and running the length of the frozen dock; Anna and Martha walking you in a burst of warm weather, taking turns strapping you to the fronts of their bodies; Dot flipping crepe after crepe on the stove, passing us yogurt and syrup and cherry jam; John and Anna and Dot and Mark and Daddy and Mama moving down a snow-covered path in Excelsior, dark figures against a white board, night swift all around us, talking about Amy Adams' side boob and the re-making of the Self in American Hustle; your sister's joy on Christmas morning pulling princess fruit snacks out of her stocking ("He CAME, he really CAME!!!"); Thisbe squeezing drops of color into bowls of white icing; watching the Christmas eve service on a screen because our church was too full; Mama in the fall of snow on Christmas eve, shaking jingle bells in the cold porch light below Thisbe's window; Martha singing the final lyric of a song just outside the door of your room; loaves of french bread filled with artichoke and garlic and cheese, smoked turkey, pans of chicken and wild rice, almond bread, chocolate rum balls, Negronis and Manhattans, red and green M and Ms in a glass dish; your father's sniffling at the end of Frozen and your sister's peanut butter sandwich crust, crushed with sweat in the palm of her hand.

And there was the friction too, the places where we hurt one another, the smaller slights and the larger gaps in understanding.  On Saturday afternoon, Daddy brought Thisbe to a McDonald's to meet Gak.  The plan was that Thiz would spend a night in Minneapolis while we all spent one more night in Excelsior.  But by the time Gak showed up, Thisbe was curled in Dada's lap, crying that she just wanted to go home. 

All four of us, I think, are most grateful for this: to return to our home, to our routine, to the usual. Oatmeal with craisens and the familiar art table at school.  To the red formica table in the coffee shop and the mobile with polar bear and crocodile and bear and whale circling predictably.  To the staticky blankets and unvacuummed carpets and slightly empty, slightly sticky refrigerator shelves.  To the whirr of the humidifier and the chugging of the electric train and the creak of our own floorboards.

Yesterday we got to watch John preside at the church where he's doing his internship.  He was graceful and confident, raising his arms of the prayers, inviting people to sit and stand, lighting the baptismal candle.   The gospel text for the day was about the slaughter of the innocents.  The baby boys Herod killed out of his great fear.  But I am thinking today about what this meant for Mary, to have given birth in a foreign place and then to be told she had to go immediately to Egypt, to flee to further strangeness.  For her, there was no going home, no return to the routine and the regular.  And I am thinking today about the people in our world who have to live like Mary.  Not just the refugees, but those who are homeless or mentally ill and must move forward, always, into what is foreign, unfamiliar, uncharted; who must go, again and again, into unsafe territory.  And I wonder if for Mary, faith came because she needed a home and God was one, a place to rest, finally, that was familiar and sound.

Family Spa Time

Whenever I get stressed out or tired or feel bad, your father always suggests I take a bath.  I don't really like baths all that much but tonight I capitulated because you've been waking up about four times a night and I'm exhausted and achy and have that tickle in the back of my throat that signals impending doom.

And, because you were with Barb The Nanny for three hours today and I was feeling like I should do some sort of special baby bonding, I thought I would take you in the bath with me.  Everyone knows that bathing with your baby is a miraculous experience; you can snuggle and get a sense of well-being!

So I got undressed and got you undressed and we climbed into the bath together and I gazed into your eyes and moved you through the warm water and you smiled and then pooped everywhere.

I screamed for your father and then you started screaming because I was screaming and then there I was, standing with you in the tub while Daddy hosed fecal matter off of you and me and the tub.

Then Daddy whisked you away and I moved on to the "private tub-time" recommended by the article above.  First I dumped in some promising looking bath salts.  They had a picture of a bundle of herbs on the front and all the writing was in French.  The water immediately turned neon green so I squealed again and this time Thisbe came in and said "Ewww Mommy.  What did you do?"  But it smelled OK so I lay back in the flourescent water and listened to my baby cry in the room next door while my four year old turned and turned the doorknob of the bathroom while repeating the phrase "MommyIneedhelp" incessantly.

And I thought, through the haze of joy and relaxation, about the Henri Nouwen passage we read in our advent reflection book today.  It was all about patience and it was very Zen-like and wise about how impatient people long to reside outside the present moment.  And at dinner I nodded and thought about how impatient I am and how much I have to learn.  But later, I couldn't help thinking how Nouwen likely wrote that quote at a desk with a cup of coffee that hadn't grown cold and not while swimming in flakes of excrement.

And so my unheroic wisdom of today, Matteus, is this: patience is a good skill to hone, but there will be times in your life when you are in the poop tub, and when that happens it's also OK to long to reside in a different moment.  And it's also good to feel grateful to the One Who Washes Away the Feces.

(Note: my gift to you and anyone who reads this blog is to NOT provide a picture of this precious moment.)