Park

We tried to take the baby to the park today.

This necessitated unearthing the stroller from the garage, where it had accumulated a light frosting of spiderweb and dirt.  We scraped this off with paper towels, tossing the blackened sheets straight into the outdoor trash, but then couldn't remember how to click the infant carrier into the stroller base.  So we half-disassembled the stroller while continuing to fail to remember.  The next ten minutes were devoted to quarreling about whose responsibility it was to remember how to interlock strollers with carriers.

So we tried the same rigamarole with our backup stroller until we realized it was the wrong brand to interface with our carrier. Next we decided to pile in the car to buy the right brand on our way to the park, which meant entering Target on a Saturday afternoon, which no one should ever do.  One hard-fought hour later, we purchased something that was not what we wanted, but which we nevertheless attempted to assemble with no tools on the outskirts of the 93 degree park.  Then we spent fifteen more minutes trying to stuff its pieces back into the trunk.  By this time the infant was pink with heat and squalling with hunger so we headed back home.

We need one more person in this marriage.  A person who assembles things.

21.25''

I have no memory of my son when he was as small as my daughter is now.  Which means that, more than likely, I will have no memory of my daughter when she is as small as she currently is- which is, really, as small as she'll ever be.

 I don't know what to make of this impending loss.  The idea of trying to seize the memory, pin its wings and make it stay, makes me sad.  But so does letting it fly.

I'll settle for half-measures- taking the pulse of the day, feeling its flutter against my skin.

One Thing

As a new parent, you are in emergency mode.  It's not the only life event that can kick on your crisis function, of course- there's death, serious illness, job loss, divorce, and all the smaller ways in which the lives we know flare up and consume themselves.

But new parenthood is a reliable flint.

The pitfalls of emergency mode are many- you drop balls and lose sleep and develop an allergy to nonessentials.  Your life narrows.  

Which is also the signal virtue of emergency mode: your life narrows.  Your days contract. Miraculously, your to-do list shrinks.

You do one thing.  Maybe you do one thing plus staying alive.  

And if you do that, you've done all you can do.

Rodeo Two

The greatest gift of second-time parenthood is that you understand you will survive.

The first time around, yeah, sure, you know intellectually that there are people who make it through parenthood alive.  People you know, and also that guy you saw on the street, and your 4th grade teacher ,and even national politicians: all of them have had children and yet, inexplicably, are still walking and talking.  So you know it's a a possibility.  But the first time around you're unable to grasp this viscerally, and so you have, within you, always that linea nigra of fear, the arrow pointing downward toward dark.

The second time you bear your survival like a shield.

The Dark Hours

And suddenly, time expands, a pupil dilating, a yawning sack.  In the morning, I wake.  A falsehood.  I am already awake.  I have been awake for hours, maybe minutes, but more likely hours- the baby is crying and I'm adrift inside every second, clinging to its spar.

Time during infancy is the most voluminous it will ever be.  And the most constricted.

This is not a new observation, but every observation, embodied, cuts.

Cusp

Cusp is an ugly word.  That merciless /k/, sticking in the throat before disgorging itself into a bland, muddy vowel, the tongue lodged in its rut.  To close, the ungainly tangle of consonants, a hiss and a spit. The worst thing is how the word hurls itself from back to front, as if loosed by an emetic.  

Time- that great ipecac.

I'm about to have a baby.

She's angling to be overdue.  My first was overdue, so this shouldn't be a surprise, but yet I'm dismayed, bemused, lost.   Babies are one of the two remaining things we must wait for, marooned amidst the rubble of our calendars with no app or screen or hapless agent to harass for an updated time of arrival.

Death is the other.

Overdue means lonely.  It means a stripped down, too-big life; my obligations strafed, my will enfeebled.  I'm ready; of course I'm not ready.  I can't bring a baby into this blackening world; it's far too late not to.  I know how I'll fall.  Just not when.

Decades

Because summer is when now scrapes itself down to skin; because the late light allows you perceive, through the moment's membrane, the pumping of what was and what might have been; because the heat pins me, blanches my will-

I'm looking back through past blog entries.

I was a good writer.  I am not as adept, now.  I was a quick thinker.  I'm slower, now.  But I was also hungrier, and lonelier, and poorly housebroken.  I'm not sure who I'd rather be.

Forgetting is how we keep on.