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.

When the World Tilts Toward Autumn

Today is that day when the weather turns and the world tilts toward autumn and we know that even if there are days of warmth to follow that in the weather scales those days will be on the lighter end, the side rising higher and higher into the cool gray air as we begin our decent to winter.

This means you wore gray fleece booties and a mustard yellow Columbia fleece to Econo-foods today.  It means I drew your fingers across waxy orange skin saying "pumpkin, pumpkin."  It means we peck at you with Kleenex already and constantly.  It means in the car your sister wept when she couldn't pull her pink fleece pants down to stuff them in her socks.  She's grown and there's a rim of skin below her cuffs.

This means Daddy and I are back in the swing of tic-tacing e-mails to students at all hours.  This means that on Tuesdays and Thursdays we put on slacks and shirts from hangers, stuff tupperware tubs with leftover soup into plastic bags, try to remember the set of car keys that has our office key attached.  That we communicate mostly about who will pick up whom and when and who has the department meeting and who has the student conference.  Who will make sure there is dinner on the table and who will get the oil changed.  Who will go up the stairs and turn Thisbe's pajamas right side out and who will wash the steamed carrots out of your hair.

Today is that day when the weather turns which means our blood is trying to thicken and seems to speak with a slow drawl as it courses through our veins.  It means that the wind is pushing our front door open and I'm setting the crock pot on the counter.  It means the coffee shop is a warm cocoon and on the street drizzle swishes its wings past our faces.

This means on Tuesdays I bring a patchwork bag with ballet slippers and a black leotard with rhinestones stitched to the front to Thisbe so that she can point and bend and make monster faces in front of a wall of mirrors.  It means that we eat dinner at church on Wednesdays.  That on Tuesdays and Thursdays we label string cheese and fruit pouches with your name and leave you crying beside five other babies.  That on Mondays when we go to the farm we come home with the heaviness of squash and onions in our bags, the spinach floating light across the top.

Tomorrow I am teaching Robert Hass's "Images" essay to my students.  The personal images he draws on are from this season, "the submerged melancholy of the end of summer."  And he talks about the way that images, unlike metaphors, "do not say this is that, they say this is."  That in the arrest of the image "what perishes and what lasts forever have been brought into conjunction, and accompanying that sensation is a feeling of release from the self."

Today is that day when the weather turns and the world tilts and you tell the students (so that you can tell yourself) to write it down so that this time stands still even as it is already swept away. 

Metaphoric Failure

It's August 31st which means that behind this window on my computer screen are open word documents sprouting kind-of-finished syllabi.

It's August 31st and 75 degrees, sun and flaking clouds, a mass of black-eyed susans waving at the boulevard in front of our house.

You're sleeping upstairs, curled around Mr. Meow, wearing a red onesie with a train puffing across the front.

The last few weeks have been so busy, such a blur, that I'll share images again:

Thisbe furiously dog paddling from the place where a white water slide dumped her to the edge of the pool, bangs pressed into a razor-straight line across her forehead, fluorescent pink suit creating its own kind of hallucinogenic light below the surface of the water.

Your right index finger, pointing.  To lights, to people, to the peach pieces you want in your mouth, to the stairs, to my nose, to the window when you want outside, outside.  Oftentimes, pointing just for the sake of pointing.  You've still got no consonant sounds, no words, so the pointing seems to be your way of marking the world, naming it through gesture.

A ramp unfolding into a dark lake, heat behind and cold ahead.

Thisbe elbowing you repeatedly as she tries to play Old MacDonald Had a Farm on the toy piano Grandma Gail and Grandpa Michael gave you for your birthday.  Each letter trapped inside a colored bubble.

Items we used to make damp wood burn: pages from Thisbe's art pad, crumpled snippets of an Ely tourist magazine, a welcome brochure from Camp Du Nord, a paper bag from the Co-op.  Fire starter, finally (thanks, Bonnie and Dan!).

The deep-throat sound you make when you push a train back and forth, the "vroom" of a corpse coming back from the dead.

The way, after standing for ten seconds on your own, you fall on your butt and promptly begin applauding yourself.

Scent of children's de-tangler in my hair and the weight of a necklace on my head ("it's a crown with golden leaves!") as I sit at Thisbe's beauty salon.  When asked where she was trained: "at the Northfield Minnesota state fair."

Cheerios filing the the tray of your stroller, Cheerios stuck to the bottom of your pants, Cheerios crushed to dust on the kitchen floor, Cheerios lining the bottom of my back pack.

Thisbe dressed in long underwear on a stage, holding up her hands as claws, roaring with a gaggle of four and five-year-olds, the lake peeled gray behind them.

Cut up canteloupe in tupperware, yogurt mixed with spinach/pear pure in tupperware, string cheese broken into bits in tupperware.  Tupperware labeled "Matteus."  A stack of diapers labeled "MJ."  A white crib with Mr. Bear inside (his ears chewed to wet, dark knobs) beside five other identical white cribs. 

Labor Day weekend feels like the longest bridge in the world.  I'd rather stay on the summer side, marking each morning with writing time, marking each afternoon with walks with you, train time at the library with iced latte in hand.  And I wish that on the far side of the bridge, Thisbe was entering kindergarten.  I thought I would feel OK with her spending another year at daycare, but I don't, not really.  I think she's ready to do the next thing--though I know if she were starting kindergarten I'd also be torn up.  You, Matteus, seem to have made the transition (to part time day care) the most effortlessly.  I'm grateful for that. 

Whether we want to be standing on the side of summer or the side of fall, Labor Day weekend feels like the longest bridge in the world.  May we have the grace to take in the view while we're here. 

I've just realized that the moral of this blog post is also the moral of "Thomas and the Big, Big Bridge." If that's not incentive to NEVER WRITE ANYTHING AGAIN, I don't know what is.  Sigh.