Keys

I spent a good two hours looking for my keys today.

This is how my life drains away.

Whoosh

I number among the small wounds of adulthood its purposelessness.  Your youth is a high-speed train ride, a terrifying hurtle through country you don't understand toward a destination of which you've only seen mock-ups, dioramas of what might be.   But in adulthood, you have arrived.

Inevitably, in the manner of destinations, it is not what you imagined.  But this is a secondary affront. 

The real loss is motion, the way the world rushed by, your sense of yourself on your way.

Shots

It's a lousy business: watching your kid get hurt, knowing it's coming, and knowing you've permitted it.  I understand the beneficence that is vaccination, but it doesn't shield me from the pain of subjecting my child to pain. 

Labor Day

This is the part of summer in which you come to believe the earth has stopped turning.  It took long enough, billions of years of revolving, a time scale so vast that the year, as a unit of measurement, seems presumptuous, like telling the Queen of England to step up to the yardstick before she can ride the throne.

But it's happened at long last, in just these past few weeks, the ancient gyre of our planet shuddering to a stop, heat like a record stuck in its groove.

We go out walking, my son and my daughter and I.  Sweat gilds us, dampens our clothes, makes  laundry piles bloom. My daughter in her moist onesie probably shouldn't be out in this weather; we take her anyway, and the heat swaddles her to sleep.  My son complains, but desultorily; he's still the age at which it feels so good to move, all other considerations are chimeric, dissolving as he strides.

We seek shade.  Shade is our drug, our sweet, sweet high.  We crisscross the street for it, changing our route.  New to eternity, the sun is not kind.  It dogs us through the neighborhood.  It barks and bites.

September: the whole world holding its breath.

Weekend (Long): Redux

On the other hand, there was a moment this morning in which one child lay grizzling happily while the other child helped me extract a startling variety of objects from underneath his bed, and was so thrilled by the physical act of this, in the wedging of his small body under the mattress until he became, to the watcher, little more than a pair of wriggling legs, that he continued until we'd amassed a small army of forgotten toys -two lost bus passengers, a wooden stove, a small, incomplete family of penguins, three discarded stickers- while outside the window, despite the morning heat, the sky turned infinitesimally bluer, darkening one jot further toward September's slate, and I thought: 

OK.

Weekend (long)

Nothing strikes fear into a parent's heart like hearing your daycare is closed for a long weekend.  Having to entertain a preschooler for days at a time while sustaining the life of an infant, attempting to accomplish work, and keeping the household afloat amidst the tide of chaos is like running a marathon along a fault line.

I'm on Day Two.  I feel like long weekends used to be a good thing?

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?