Mirror

I'm heavier than I've ever been, by a whole lot.  I gained substantial weight when pregnant, far more than the recommend amount; being pregnant seems to turbocharge my appetite.  I'd also been toward the top of my own weight range when I started.  I've lost 28 pounds since my daughter was born, and I'm now the same weight I was when I was nine months pregnant with my son.  In order to the very heaviest part of my normal range, I still have to lose 25 pounds.

This is daunting and distressing, especially because I love to eat.  It's also my first glimpse at having the person in the mirror look startlingly different from the person in my mind.  My image of myself simply doesn't match what I see, and that's jarring.

I do recognize that this phenomenon will only increase as I age.  Does any ninety-year-old carry around a ninety-year-old image of herself?

Eh

Why is infancy so much easier this time around?  I mean, it's still a slog, but it's a slog we carry on kind of absent-mindedly in the background of several other slogs.

It has to be that, the first time around, I wanted to do it right.

All pretentious to righteously correct parenting having been long since beaten out of me, I approach this baby in the spirit of trying to do things mostly OK.  

Neighbors

Maybe because I've been home so much more, I've been more deliberate about being friendly to our neighbors.  It's a curious relationship, being a neighbor.  You don't choose your neighbors, except insofar as you've been able to choose the location of your residence and that location's rung on our increasingly segregated socio-economic ladder.

But it's different from other unchosen relationships.  You don't have the web of obligation that binds you to your family.  You don't have the need to accomplish tasks that lashes you to your work colleagues.  But you do have the strange intimacy that comes from forced proximity.

I know when the neighbors across the street leave for work and when they return. I know the neighbor next door likes to work on classic cars in his backyard while playing jazz.  I know that the neighbor three doors down puts on cartoons every day after work, and retrieves the paper with his shirt off.

You know mundane details of their lives, and they know mundane details of yours- yet you may not even know their last names.

One of my neighbors knocked on my door yesterday.  Jeannie, from across the street and one door over.  "Is your last name XXX?" she said.  We'd been expecting a digital piano, and it had been delivered to her house by mistake.  She knew my first name because I'd introduced myself once; we're always out  at the same time in the early morning, she walking her dog and me walking... myself.

"Bring friends," she said. "It's heavy."

It was more than heavy.  It was 125 pounds.  My husband and I stashed the kids in the house and entered the relationship armageddon of trying to move something that was far too heavy for us.

Which is when the neighbors across the street drove up (5:45, per the usual).  "What do you have there?" said Dave, whose last name I only learned last week.

He helped us finish dragging the thing up the lawn and into our house.  It had felt odd to ascend my neighbor's porch, and now it felt odd to have my neighbor enter the house, like a violation of some kind of neighborly code: pretend you don't see; pretend you don't know.

I'm thinking about the neighbors over to say thank you.  It will feel awkward, as if we're crossing an invisible threshold.  Maybe we are.

Mushrooms

There are five white toadstools in the front yard.  At first there was one. Then that one died. Now there are five more, possibly its spawn.  I know this because I am a parent.

I 'm not kidding.  Knowing how many mushrooms there are, noticing the routes of busses and the phases of the moon and the shapes of leaves, is one of the unexpectedly sweet parts of parenthood, a sop you get thrown to dull its varied and abundant gut punches.

You foreground parts of your world that had long ago faded to a background hum, because noticing is a prize, a scrap of juicy meat you can drag back to your den and stuff in the mouth of your child.  And if you pay attention, the world is delicious.

Quiet

There's really no quiet in my neighborhood.  It's one of the fistful of things I don't like about where we live; fortunately there are a couple handfuls more of things I do.

But the lack of quiet is probably my sharpest regret, and it was a surprise, because I was I was careful to choose a home at least half a mile from a highway, blocks from a major street, far from railroad tracks, and outside the residential stains oozing from universities. (Too much time in college towns gave me a healthy fear of undergraduates; my realtor thought I was nuts.)

But we're on a hill, and, in many wind conditions, the hum from the highway six tenths of a mile to the north carries.  So does the racket from the main drag a few blocks west, and the train tracks one mile south.  And although we're ten miles at least from the airport, we're under a flight path, and so, mornings and evenings, the planes bleat by like a herd of deep-voiced sheep.  My preschool-aged son is delighted, and his delight is also noisy.

And of course: neighbors.  I may have escaped the undergraduates, but I have not escaped humanity in general, and humans produce noise.  Car doors closing, kids yelping, the occasional saxophone riff from my neighbor who likes jazz.  Some of the neighbors own dogs, and while I am of the opinion that dogs should be seen and not heard, and should keep to themselves, more like cats, and in fact should probably just be cats instead- my opinion falls on deaf (floppy) ears.

All this to say that the occasional bit of quiet is piercing, a hypodermic shooting straight into your veins.

This morning, Sunday, 5:00 AM: turning a slow circle on the sidewalk before bending to pick up the paper.  Still dark and still hot, even in this coolest corner of morning, but, just for a moment, quiet.

The neighbor's AC rumbles on and I head inside.

All Hail

My husband has made a small tabletop shrine to St. Bartholomew using a flashlight and a three-inch-tall plastic disciple action figure.  I have no idea what my life even is anymore.

Scandal

A scandal broke yesterday about someone in my past.  A #timesup, #metoo conflagration, with multiple victims coming forward.  I knew many of them, and had even talked, in passing, to some of them about what came to light.

Thus I have no doubt the allegations are, at least to a greater extent, true.  And I'm grappling with that.  I knew about some chunk of what came to light, but I'd somehow failed to categorize it for what it was: sexual harassment and abuse of power.  I'd thought it was unfortunate, and definitely wrong, but ultimately it was something you simply rolled your eyes at and dealt with.

Partly this was because I didn't know everything.  But what else was holding me back?

I must reckon with the fact that, at least partially, it was because the victims were men.

And I must reckon with the fact that, at least partially, it was because the perpetrator's influence in my own life was positive.  More than that- wholly and substantially positive.  The perpetrator was someone who believed in my musicianship, encouraged me, and advocated for me.  He played a small part in helping me become who I am.

We are more than the worst of ourselves.  But when does the worst of ourselves overgrow the rest?

Oops

I forgot to write yesterday! To be honest, I have no memory of yesterday morning, when I would have intended to write.  Each day has oozed into into the one before, leaving a slimy trail of time like a snail's track.

This morning, though, something shifted.  I'd left the windows open last night, and when I woke, the comforter was actually managing to live up to its name.  The air was new, blue, and chilly; it nosed over the sill and hunted around the bed; the air conditioner played dead.

Outside, everything is still a virulent green.  The roses of Sharon riot.  My baby is still a very small baby.  But I felt it, this morning: the tilt of the world on its pin.

Six Words

Up at 4:00 AM.  Brief hush.

Boom

At 6:00 AM, the house erupts in wakefulness.  Baby squalling and pooping, four-year-old agitating and jabbering and coughing.  Everyone needing breakfast at once, and, to top it off, the sky throbbing with helicopters, strange, insectoid creatures wheeling over our house on their way to a nearby fire.

Monday, Monday.

Essie B.

For no reason and every reason, I'm thinking about my grandmother today.  My maternal grandmother was a woman with a knack for sourness.  

I suppose it's hereditary.  

I used to dread her visits.  Our whole family did.  She would huff through the door and stump through the house, trailing an oily slick of disappointment.  She was disappointed with us, disappointed with our day-to-day accommodations of her presence, disappointed with the betrayals of old age.  But most of all, she was disappointed with a life that had failed to render the entitlements to which she felt she'd been born.  Raised as an orange-grove heiress in Florida but reaching middle age's finishing line as a divorced working woman, she'd planned for one life and found herself living another.

Being something of a connoisseur of disappointment, I would bait hers, flourishing fabricated details of my own life like a bullfighter waving her cape.  When she asked me what I weighed, I rounded up ten pounds.  When she asked me if I had many friends, I whittled my number to zero.  It was petty- but pettiness was our shared coin, our means of transacting the business of being together.

When she died, her funeral was stocked with people who expounded on her virtues.  How she was funny, or encouraging, or a good listener.  She'd helped one woman decide to go to back to school.  She'd hosted sparkling parties for her friends.  She'd made them laugh.

I often forget: We are, each of us, more than the worst of ourselves.  

Crunch

I'm writing this as one child sleeps upstairs and one child perches fifteen feet to my left, alternating laps of cheerio inhalation with sprints of intensive monkey role play.  There are monkey noises, some freeform preschool rap, the clink of spoon against bowl, brief expostulations of "MOMMY!!! WATCH THIS!!!"

This is what passes for peace in this season.

I wonder if I really will "miss this," per the pronouncements of the universe's grandparent-aged contingent.  I mean, I probably will, if only because the nostalgia is like a deep fryer, rendering palatable anything raised from its bath.  But is this really the crispiest, tastiest, most unctuously delicious time in my life, as the grandfolk imply?

And if it is, would I be the better for realizing what I'm biting into?

Oh

This is it.  This is my life.

Whine

I used to wonder why parents gave in to badly behaved children.  I worked with kids, so I knew these parents were shooting themselves in the gut.  Show any sign of weakness and kids are on you like jackals.  Or, put more dispassionately, if you reinforce a behavior, you get a whole lot more of it.  

Now I understand.  It's a dose issue.  Eight hours of kid a day is one thing; 24 hours of kid is... three times that thing.  You have the potential to get ground down.  Add in exhaustion and distraction, water heater explosions and poop, and sometimes you crumble.

I'm still pretty good about not rewarding bad behavior, but my empathy has broadened; never a bad thing. 

Rain

It's hard not to be cravenly in love with the sound of the rain, even though, in adulthood, rain is an inconvenience- a hurdle or even a danger.  Will the basement flood again?  Will my flight manage to take off? Will I have to wedge my car onto the shoulder of the highway and sit frozen under thundering sheets of wet hoping other drivers won't be foolhardy enough to rear end me?

Rain, like snow, slowly converts from wonder to chore over the course of your lifespan.  It's the final stage in the hydrologic cycle, the one no one talks about: condensation-precipitation-infiltration-irritation.

But that sound!  Right now the rain is gentle and the wind is null, so it's a light tapping, a polyrhythm beaten against the lip of the window and the line of the roof and the flat of the ground and my skin when I sneak out for the paper.

Because I'm a fool, I've opened the window, so the sound has filled up the house.  Love may not be envious or boastful or rude, but it is slightly damp.

Puke

One of us ate a lot of bad hamburger and was up all night puking.  The rest of us ate comparatively less hamburger and are on puke watch.

Does one ever get inured to life's unceasing waves of crisis? Small, moderate, large- they keep rolling in.

Sunrise

I thought the things we remember were supposed to be emotionally laden, shot through with fear or ecstasy,:what Virginia Woolf called "moments of being."  And sure, I've got memories of "being" my way through my children's births, winning things, hearing bad news, etc. etc.  But I also have all these sense memories of the mundane.

Why would I have retained running under that particular I-64 overpass in Richmond, VA?  What good does it do me to be able to revisit, with a clarity so exquisite it is almost painful, that one time I drove down Curry Pike in Bloomington, Indiana?   Or past a cheese mart in northeastern Ohio?  How about that random stadium in Cincinnati?

I don't understand the presence of these places in my mind, but I am not ungrateful.  It is reassuring, somehow, that memory isn't only a plot junkie, that it is capricious and perverse and, in the end, unknowable.  I find it oddly comforting that this particular sunrise might end up being as much a part of my remembered life as my first kiss or my son's first smile.

Half-hearted, today.  Clouds and a fine, humid tension to the air; cicadas and muted birds. Only a little pink to the sky, quickly wiped away.

All By Myself

I am not going to be alone in my house until October.

For someone who believes being alone is to be savored, to be swirled and sipped and nursed like expensive whiskey, this is a very long time.

Solitude is among the signal sacrifices of childrearing, and I expected to lose some, but I hadn't quite mapped out the extent of my deprivation until yesterday.  My daughter will go to daycare when she's three months old, and until then, she or she and my husband or she and my son or she and my husband and my son will always be with me in the house.

It's true that, since this is my second tour of infancy, my standards have lowered, and that being with my daughter in the house, and no one else, feels far closer to being alone than being with my son did when he was an infant.  This isn't because my daughter is less demanding than he was (she's very slightly more obstreperous).  It's because the first infant takes up enormous psychological space, catalyzing anxiety and bombarding identity, whereas by the time the second rolls around you mostly just treat her as a sentient alarm clock.

Plus you've garnered some additional experience living with toddlers and preschoolers, and infants seem quite restful in comparison.

These are exaggerations, but there's truth in every exaggeration, the spear of wood at the heart of the popsicle.

Still, I miss being genuinely alone.  No one looking at me, no one looking to me, no interruptions dangling over me  like miniature swords of Damocles.  I don't require much.  A room, a window, a glass of water.

Nightmare

I struggled out of a nightmare this morning at 4:45 AM.

When I was little, this was a fairly regular occurrence.  My nightmares were peopled with clowns and volcanos and monsters and murderers, and when I'd wake, it always took me a few moments to winnow what was real from the vast dark fields of what wasn't.

In my late thirties, my nightmares are apparently about being micromanaged by supervisors.

And it takes me even more time to thresh the true from the might-be.

Joe

The NY Times has a cover article today about how our world is beginning to boil.  The climate is shifting faster than we thought; we'll suffer the consequences sooner than we thought.  Our children will begin to kill each other.

It seems like a particularly inopportune time to be raising a baby.

Of course, we humans are skilled at ignoring unpalatable truths, because as soon as we are born we begin to hurtle toward death.  We grow and thrive entirely within the shadow of our own ends, and forgetting this fact is among the most critical of our tasks.

Ergo, this morning: I read the article, turned over the paper, and went to get some coffee.  I will die, and my daughter will die, and our deaths will contain some measure of horror, but we'll probably last through today's cup.

OPEN!

We've become a 24-hour family.  Full service!  For all your feeding and toiling and entertainment needs! Come on by!  Someone is always up!  

This is a slight exaggeration.  There are minutes or even hours when every creature in the house is sleeping, with the possible exception of the cat, who may only be pretending to sleep while plotting unknowable adventures, and is a mystery even to himself.  

But between the baby, who keeps the hours of a video-game-addicted methamphetamine addict,  and the child, who rises at 5:00 AM to play (at least from what I can divine on the video monitor) a happy-meal-sized game of hungry hungry hippos, there is not much down time.  Add in the chronological peregrinations of the adults who must attend these temporally deranged creatures, and moments of peace are scarce.

I miss them.  My most vivid fantasy right now is to be left alone in the house.

Again

Today I am doing the same things I did yesterday, with small variations.  My life has devolved into a piece by Phillip Glass.  I have even written about this topic before, which goes to show how little fresh meat there is these days.  Every morning: gnawing on the bones.

Vote

I love voting, despite the depressing ballot box results of the recent past.  There's a thrill to civic duty that never quite goes away, no matter that the duty itself consists of trundling into squeaky-floored school gyms or mouldering church basements and either standing in line irritably, or not standing in line while burbling in righteous irritation about what said lack of line denotes about your neighbors' civic dutifulness.

The actual event speeds by- you tick some boxes, stew in mild shame over not having done enough homework to weigh in on the eye-crossing, LSAT-like county charter amendments, click confirm and listen to the pleasant whir of the machine befor shuffling over to receive your benediction- the "I VOTED" sticker you'll slap on the back of your kid.

Then it's out into the summer rain, a short trudge home, some coffee- a citizen of the world.

Leave

I've got five weeks of unpaid leave left until I go back to the most traditional of my part-time jobs, but it started back last week, and since then I've been fielding a barrage of emails, phone calls, and texts, including on weekends.

It's a bit of a perfect storm: new boss, clueless replacement, general chaos...but still, it dawns on me that it might have just been easier to go back to work than to take time off, because each week I miss is going to cost me considerably in terms of the unpaid time I'm having to put in, the stress fielding and thinking about the crazy.... not to mention whatever I'll need to do to undo damage on the back end.

File under: poisoned apples.

Sick

My preschooler is sick.  Which means my infant will almost certainly get sick.  Which could be serious.  It's like watching a tree fall on us in slow motion.

Size

Next to my infant, my son looks gigantic, a Brobdingnagian representative of some mutant race.  His eyes are so big!  His hands are so facile!  He generates syntax!

The funny thing is that, prior to the infant's arrival, I was sure my son was small.  He is, in fact, small.  And he's also measurably small for his age, skulking at the bottom of the growth curve; this fact numbers among the vast constellations of things about which I worry, a galaxy that also includes climate change and nuclear disaster and Alzheimer's and the bathing of babies and whether or not that plant I can't identify in the backyard is poison ivy.

But compared to the infant, my son is monumental.  I have trouble believing he was ever as small as the baby, even though I know he was, because I was technically (if only partially mentally) there.  I have even more trouble believing that his personality, his whole lollpping, silly, cautious, ingratiating self, fit inside a being as small as he must have been.

It makes me think that the baby's future self must be lurking inside her grizzling shell as well.  That if I could only get past her pink and wriggling limbs, her furious blankness of face, I'd be able to see her personality lying tightly coiled inside her like a tapeworm.

Barriers

Baby is almost one month old, and yesterday I had the thought: Only eleven months to go on the prison sentence!

That I can entertain thoughts like these even as I'm yanked off my feet by the undertow of powerful grief for the loss of babyhood and delicious infant snuggles- well, that's what raising a kid seems to be about.

But it does get easier after a year or so, and even easier after that, at least in the sense that you, the chief cook and bottle washer, have fewer bottles to wash.  

Leaving the house: case in point.  

When we leave the house with my four-year-old, we take my four-year-old. 

When we leave the house with my infant, we take my infant. And a diaper bag stocked with at least five diapers, a pack of wipes, ready-to-eat formula, nipples and/or bottles for same, a portable changing bad, hand sanitizer, a blanket to shade the infant from the sun, an extra outfit in case of blowouts, a pacifier, a giant bucket carseat, and the ragged scraps of my sanity.

Eleven months.

Free Food!

I am only slightly exaggerating when I assert that the best part of having a child is free food.  I really, really like free food.  I like free food even more than I dislike cooking, if such a thing is possible.  And free food when you are possessed of a baby and assorted other beings dependent on you for sustenance is the best kind of free food, in that, like Lassie when you've fallen into the well, it arrives as deliverance.  

Plus it's often either homemade or delicious or both.  And it comes right to your door. And people tend to throw in things like pie.  Hosannah to the lasagna!  Etc.

(As an aside, my own career delivering free food is on hiatus: the last delivery I made, to a friend who'd had her first baby, included fancy artisan soup (see: failure to cook). Approximately six hours later, long past the dinner hour, the local grocery where I'd bought the soup issued a recall notice due to improper canning procedures. My friend and her husband and their new baby then spent the remainder of the night downing emetics at a local emergency room.  Since which time, I've been casserole-shy.)

Did I have a second child to score more free food?  No comment.  

But the only times in our lives in which food appears on the doorstep are births and deaths and grave illnesses, and of the three, birth seems preferable. This is almost certainly last child, so when next free food visits my life, I'll be in some kind of terminal pain.  

I don't look forward to that.  But at least there will be pie.

Biceps to Spare

My son is under the mistaken impression that predatory man in the story of Beauty and the Beast is named "GaStorm."  When I attempt to correct him, he's insistent.

"Mommy!  It's GaStorm!  Not Gaston.  You know, like Jackson Storm."

Jackson Storm, as far as I can gather, is a sentient and possibly disturbed vehicle from a shambolic Disney or Pixar dynasty called Cars.  My son hasn't seen the films, but school is a cultural Petri dish, and what grows, it seems, is anthropomorphized Hyundais.

I'm a stickler for accuracy, but I sympathize.  For what is my kid engaged in if not the noblest of human endeavors: wedging the crampons of what we know into the cliff of what we don't, rocketing our small scraps of knowledge into the vast galaxies of our ignorance?

I let GaStorm ride.  He's got more elan than Gaston, and I harbor a vague hope he knows how to drive stick.