Tag: children

Art, Divorce

June 11, 2005

smirkpretty

Wedding Cake

My son wants to know what the plastic box contains. It is in his room on the dresser where I have stashed it in the hopes of a near-future move. We lift the lid and I show him the colored paper. The stack of card stock is a jumbled rainbow of hues. Inside the lid is pasted a stylized directive: Please place completed scrapbook pages here.
 
Bug reads it out loud slowly. “What does that mean?”
 
“The box was from our wedding,” I explain. “Our guests drew pictures for us so we could remember them.”
 
From the bottom, Bug fishes one of the blank pages left from that day. A goldenrod square is pasted onto a larger lavender piece. A tiny stamp in the center of the smaller frame reads, “Your photo will be here.”
 
“How?” Bug asks.
 
“Like this.” The scrapbooks are all in his room. Weddings, pregnancy, first tooth, first steps. Tee and I hug in faded sepia on the front of one. I pull it down and nestle with my son on his bed. “We made two books because we had so many creative wedding guests. One is for family and one is for friends. This is your family too, you know.”
 
We flip past all the announcements and shower invitations. In a save-the-date , a silhouette of Tee and me leaps against a Lake Michigan sunset. A handmade flower-petal paper sports its indigo raffia bow. The booklet from the wedding day slips around in a plastic sheath that protects the lyrics to James Taylor’s “How Sweet it Is” alongside the cowboy-hat story of our first meeting.
 
Someone had the bright idea to use one of the tabletop disposable cameras to capture a few shots of the scrapbooking table. A violet satin cloth is littered with stamps, stickers, pens. Everything is so very bright. Sunburnt guests brandish markers and grins. The daisies my friend planted months in advance pop from their hand-painted pots.
 
I point out cousins my son knows now as older. He has me read their wishes to us.
 
“Was I there?” He asks.
 
“You were the reason we were all there, but no. You weren’t born yet.”
 
He turns another page. “Nelson!” he cries. “He was there!”
 
“You know Nelson?”
 
“Of course,” Bug says. “He lives at Daddy’s house.”
 
Nelson. A stuffed plush banana slug from a trip to an Olympic Peninsula lodge was a key player in Tee’s and my courtship. Nelson was present at the third and final proposal. Sometime during the wedding reception, Tee snuck the slug out of his jacket pocket and propped him onto the cake table. Nelson’s big-eyed welcome is now a sunny flourish against our melting, blue sky confection.
 
Bug slips down from the bed and goes back over to the box of blanks. He pulls the lavender-and-gold card stock from the top and settles down at his desk.
 
“Are you going to make one?”
 
“Mmm-hmm,” he murmurs. He is already in the flow. He outlines the shape of a purple butterfly with his marker. A red flower. I let him draw for a few minutes as I turn back through the album. A few cards at the back sing out their happy wishes. The rooftop group shot with all of us jumping is a cascade of smiles. Grandparents, siblings, all so much younger. They glisten and wilt and whirl and bounce.
 
I try to feel sad but I just can’t tap sorrow. It was a gorgeous day. Tee and I were giddy. I couldn’t stop giggling as I walked down that makeshift aisle my mother rolled out on the grass from a bolt of rainbow upholstery fabric. The sunflowers arching behind fiancé and friend opened their delight to me. Happiness still pulses there, beating in a subdued major key.
 
“When you are done, baby, do you want me to find a picture of you to put on the page?”
 
He nods but does not turn, still bent to the task of making his garden come to life. “Yep. And then put it in the book.”
 
“Okay. We can make room for you in there.”
 

Creativity, Poetry

Economy Class

smirkpretty

Here’s my kid in his Jack Sparrow
goodwill T-shirt, belly-down
in a spill of hand-me-down legos
pressing flat planes
into airplanes
singing
“I’m gonna pop some tags
Only got twenty dollars in my pocket.”

What what?

The contraption has train wheels
on the front end and truck tires
backing mismatched engines
but it takes wing
with guns blazing, enemy fighters
crashing in a fiery screech,
no match for the patchwork leviathan
my kid is smoking
like threads
like foes
like the beat he pulls
with a what what
nod
from the hole
in his pocket.

—

Apologies to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Thrift Shop.

Home, Living in the Moment

This Home Here

smirkpretty

Story
 
In the back seat of the car, my son flips through the pages of Dolphin Tale. Bug fell in love with the story of Winter and her prosthetic tale when the movie premiered. His obsession has reached a fever pitch since I announced we’d be taking him to Clearwater, Florida the day after school ends.
 
“Do you know who lives there?” I asked.
 
He thought for a moment.
 
“Do you want a clue?”
 
A nod.
 
“It’s not a person but it is a living thing.”
 
His eyes widened, a light flashed inside his skin, and he fell over backward on the rug. Lying there with his arms spread wide and his whole face beaming, he cried, “The dolphin!”
 
Now, he follows the story. From the back, I hear him slowly piecing the words together. “Sawyer was worried that Winter might not make it back.” These are word bubbles popping along a graphic version of the story. And that is my son, reading to himself.
 
Did you catch that? My son. Reading. To himself.
 
When I ask what is happening in the book, he does not respond. In the rearview mirror, I watch his gaze dances over the page. He is bent to the work. His focus is absolute.
 
—
Sport
 
When I pick him up at Chicken School, Bug is playing Uno with his buddies. “Ready for basketball, kiddo? Or do you want to finish the game?”
 
He has two cards remaining in his hand and is inches away from victory. Nevertheless, he tosses them onto the discard pile and hops to his feet. “I’m done. Let’s go.” He gives his best friend a pat on the head and tells him he won by forfeit. Then he races out the door.
 
The red barn has two hoops bolted to the side at two heights. We slip-jog down the hill to the woods to schlep up a trio of lost balls. On the concrete, Bug squats and leaps, sinking one basket after another. Airborne and streaked with sweat, he stands as far back as he can and hurls the ball with all he’s got. Pow. It’s in. Again, again. He walks up close, darts to the side, heads to the edge. Every angle. Low basket, high basket, sometimes just bouncing the ball off the rust-red clapboards to see how close to the pitched roof he can get it.
 
He does not say “look at me.” He does not even ask me to play, though I do anyway, moving all around him. He barely registers my presence. He races after the ball, brings it back, mutters a sharp “Yes” to no one when he makes a perfect swish.
 
—
Journey
 
Once home, Bug says he want to walk the dog with me. I grab her leash and we run run run down the cul-de-sac to the green corridor between houses. Grandma is putting the finishing touches on dinner but we are sure to be late. We bound into the fern-shagged carpet of the woods. Dry leaves up to our shins, mud in the creek.
 
The dog takes off up the hill and Bug leaps down into the ravine. “Do what I do,” he says. And so I scoot under brambles almost my belly even though going over would be so much easier. One after the other, we scale the eroding creek-bed wall, slip on the exposed vine, cross the creek on the fallen tree, back again, then shimmy down the tumbling rocks. Bug ducks and darts and clambers ahead, whistling back the pooch and making sure I don’t cheat. “You can’t just go over, you have to step on it,” he tells me. I double back and do it right. He sees a frog and shrieks with delight.
 
Up ahead, the dog grabs a mouthful of something white. She skitters away but we chase her down back towards home. She eyes me warily as I pry the bone from her jaws.
 
“Can you see what it is?”
 
“A head,” Bug says.
 
“Huh. I can see why you think that. But look here. You see that hole going down through the middle? And the wings?” I turn and lift my shirt from behind, bending so he can see my spine.
 
“Oh! It’s a backbone!”
 
“A vertebra.” I touch one of mine. “They’d be in a string like this, all down the back. Probably a deer?” Below his blue t-shirt, I press my fingers into his ridged line. “It protects the spinal cord that carries all the messages from the brain to the rest of the body.”
 
The dog is panting and watching my every move. I return her prize and Bug picks up a walking staff twice his height. He uses it to fly between stumps. He calls it a broom. He chases down an invisible golden snitch.
 
—
Art
 
I finish the last verse of “Big Rock Candy Mountain” as Bug finally puts down his legos and crawls over me into the bed. He props himself up against the turquoise fleece cushion and picks up his pen and clipboard. I sing my way through “Baby Beluga.” He has a calculator now. He puts 10 tiny tick marks into 15 small triangles, does a quick calculation and announces, “A hundred fifty people.” He pulls the page off, lets it fall, and starts on the next.
 
I wend my way through the deep blue sea and Bug make an arc in fine blue ink. A box. Tiny wheels, a platform (which he spells out carefully) and trucks along the edges. His feet press into my side, squirrel under my back, find their cave. His eyes do not leave the page. With the morning sun, another day’s begun, you’ll soon be waking. . .
 
The song comes to its dozy close. Bug does not register anything different in the world outside of his design. He continues to add tidy, miniscule circles around the edges of the machine. “How does it work?” I ask.
 
Nothing.
 
“What are those boxes for?”
 
A pause. He rubs his nose. “People.” That’s all I get. Pen back on the page. His gaze is steady, tracing the leading edge of the ink.
 
Immersed, he has no need for conversation. He belongs exactly there inside his unfolding creation. Nested with his mama in a bed that works just fine, he is free to cross into the sanctuary of his imagination. His expression is both zeroed in and a million miles away. He’s found the sweet spot. He’s in the flow.
 
—
Dwelling
 
As I watch my little boy inhabit that generative wrinkle between ticks of the clock, I see how we live there together but in complete singularity. I cross that same threshold when dance fills me to soaring, when paper covers rock and its ink hushes the world. I know the place because it is where I walk under stars when my skin slips free and all I ever was and will be is night.
 
Story. Sport. Journey. Art.
 
Friend.
 
Song.
 
Clan.
 
We erect these places by the simple act of returning to them again, again, and shoring them up with whatever we dig from our pockets. When we come up empty-handed, we bend and scoop up fistfuls of breath. Of soil. Of our own flesh. Pack them into the cracks. Fortify our belonging.
 
We sing them open and fix our mezuzah on the door. We map their coordinates upon our names.
 
Here am I. Here are you.
 
We dwell in this Here we’ve chosen.
 
This here.
 
This, our home.

Love, Parenting

Close Shave

smirkpretty

With Bug in the tub, it seemed a shame to let all that water go to waste. Off went the socks and up turned the jeans. My grandma would call it a “hot soaky.” I called it Yes.
 
Oblivious to my freeloading feet, Bug dipped into little meringues of shaving cream decorating the rim. He dotted his arms with it and donned fancy white hats and matching gloves before spreading it in whorls on the tile walls. I dug out the old Gillette Trac handle made obsolete by the march of progress and removed the last rusted blade. In Bug’s hand, the flat head became a squeegee, a paintbrush, a snow shovel.
 
Bug glanced at his toothless razor, the foam, my legs. The troika of temptations coalesced into their one true destiny. His eyes brightened with the dawn of revelation.
 
“Mommy, I have an idea!”
 
Spa day over in three… two…
 
“I can shave your legs!”
 
One.
 
Bug took the lather into his palm and smoothed it down my calf. With uncharacteristic focus and gripping the Trac handle with two hands, he opened wide, straight(ish) trails through the white. “Feel how soft,” he said, touching the damp skin beneath.
 
This was over a year ago. Our bathtime routine took a 180, and sea monster battles gave way to regular mock grooming sessions. In terms of life expectancy of kid innovation, a year is the outer limit. The next idea has been right there waiting to pop. So, why does it take me by such surprise? Tonight, I hand Bug the cruddy Trac handle, he gives the foam a halfhearted swipe, and the light clicks on. “You know,” he says, eyeing the razor and then me. “I could do it for real.”
 
“Oh.” Not a chance. “You know, I don’t think so. You don’t need to be using blades on me.”
 
“But I could! I know how.”
 
My naked boy sprawls now, taking up the tub. I can still feel the wriggling fish of him against my flesh. As an infant, he was startled by the water and loathe to inhabit that terrifying echo chamber alone. I ladled him into the bowl of my lap and kept him afloat in the warm eddy there, nursing him through the shock of immersion. He clung, mouth and claw, his eyes anchored on mine as his jaw worked in defiance of the disquiet.
 
Now, he rolls like a walrus, laying all the way back with his head under. He listens for the hollow tones. Then, he sits up and takes another crack at it. “I’ll be careful, I promise!”
 
My son, using a razor on me? This kid laughs when I stub a toe. When overexcited, he cries, “I’m gonna smack you in the face!” Or he pretends to throw a toy at me then giggles when I flinch. Bug is too enamored of his power fantasies. No, I don’t want him anywhere near me with a sharp object.
 
Suddenly, my hot soaky seems scant protection against a chilling insight. I don’t trust my son. Fancy that.
 
This seems a rather dangerous state of affairs, and it extends well beyond us. Boys become men. He has to learn how to handle his ever-increasing capacity for harm. Isn’t it my job to help my boy become trustworthy? To harness his hunger for power and focus its generative force?
 
What if I give him the chance to make the choice himself?
 
“Please, Mommy?”
 
Never let them see you hesitate. Into the half-beat, his desire surges. “I’m old enough! I’ll be really, really careful.”
 
Okay. Here goes. “You know, you work hard at lots of things and I see you getting better at them all the time.” I stand and back the 4-blade Cadillac out of its valet spot by the shower-head. “This is a big job, but maybe you can handle it.”
 
“I can!”
 
I hand him the pink razor and we look together at the tiny teeth. He touches them with a fingertip. Then he scoops up a handful of foam and lathers up both sides of my leg. I roll the jeans even higher to make way for his expanding canvas. With intense concentration, he places the razor against my skin and begins to slide it down, down. He takes such care, the blades barely touch my skin. I lay my hand on his and show him how much pressure he can apply. When I let go, he presses in, glancing up at me before continuing. I nod. He is a Zamboni, not missing a single stroke. He even rearranges me, having me place my foot up on the wall so he can slip underneath and shave my calf from below. I call him Michelangelo. He pats all around and says, “Okay, other leg.”
 
My son doesn’t draw a single drop of blood. When he puts the razor down and helps me rinse, he has me touch my legs again and again. “See how smooth?” He crows. “They’re so soft!”
 
They are, as is his touch. My boy took an opportunity to hurt me and used it to care for me instead. He made a promise. For him to fulfill it, I placed a portion of my welfare in his hands. Apparently, this is how promise works.
 
What a tricky thing, love. We walk this roiling deck all the time. Hold off or venture? Guard or lay bare? When is it safe to unbutton the collar and open the throat to the whims of another?
 
It’s not never. It’s not always. It probably isn’t even when we think it is.
 
It might be when we catch ourselves tipping at the warm edge of a revelation. When we find our old tools cannot prize open the curtain separating this place from the next, and a sharper edge is required.
 
When we know there is peril in placing such power in untested hands. When fear beats a tattoo against the taut skin of old scars and yet underneath it, a whisper (has it been there all along?)
 
When we tune to its key and let the dangerous thing pass between us. When we choose.
 
Here, we say.
 
Here?
 
Yes. Like this.
 

Home, Living in the Moment

Hello Here

smirkpretty

On the brink of leaving this home for the next (inshallah), and I still don’t know what I’m after. Place? Family? Community? Safety? The list is long and it changes with the breeze.
 
Ambiguous purpose calls for simple acts. I turn to my son and say, “Let’s go outside.”
 
These days, he joins me. This is new. It used to be a struggle, cajoling and begging before demanding or giving up. Now, he pounds down the stairs, “I’ll put her leash on! Here, let me!” He throws open the sliding glass door and calls her with his quasi wolf-whistles. She is suspicious of his intentions but ducks inside, unable to resist the word “walk.”
 
Flexi-leash in hand, Bug races down the driveway dragging the dog. She tosses a few desperate glances back at me but I’m no help to her now. Bug has finally learned to slow long enough to let her have a break for her bladder. It rarely lasts past the last drop so she forgoes all olfactory temptations gets down to business. They lope down the swath of grass between the fences. At the bottom where the year’s accumulated leaves lay in drifts, Bug snaps off her leash and she tears off into the trees. He squeals in delight and tramps after her, knee-deep in brambles.
 
The dog is the leader but doesn’t know it. Winding and snoofling through brown tangles, she takes us on a looping journey up and back down the hillside. Scattered clumps of daffodils poke their way up into patches of sun and purplish flowers unfurl from buried brush. Light threads its way down through dry spindles scratching the sky. I carry a plastic shopping bag and collect the crumpled cans and muck-filled Corona bottles that peek up through the leaves.
 
I follow Bug. Bug follows the dog. The dog follows her nose. We come upon a creek snaking out from under a neighbor’s chicken wire fence. Across the way is a clutch of bamboo as high as a rooftop. It bends against the breeze. The road beyond is near enough to keep me vigilant. Bug fords the brook with a single leap and slips up the muddy bank beyond. He picks his way through the deep green flutes, swishing them low. Feathered leaves stroke the water’s golden skin.
 
“I’m in the bamboo jungle! There is a tornado coming! Get out of the storm, Mommy!” I duck across and hide with him in the cool dark there. Cars roar just feet from our back and I holler the dog back from the roadside. She bounds into the creek, splashing us with wet silt.
 
When it is time to go, we gather leash and garbage and assorted leafy treasures. I urge. Bug dawdles. The dog drips. Eventually we shimmy into a dry creek-bed and follow the tracks of raccoons and deer back to the trail into our neighborhood. Just as we start up the hill, we turn and see a strange sight. In all our years of walking here, we have never come across such a thing.
 
A boy.
 
He is making his jerky way over the buried roots up to a log that bridges the dry trench. His black hair and pale skin trace a ghostly curve over the hillside. He looks up and sees us. I wave. He pauses then waves back. Bug and dog and I are poised on the forest edge ready to go home.
 
“One second, Mom,” Bug says. And he is off. He plows straight through the weeds and pricker bushes and heads straight uphill. The boy leaps off the log, starts to climb, and then slows. Bug is talking to him. He turns and responds. In a blink, they are deep into it. By the time I have gotten the dog turned and have approached the pair, they are discussing the bamboo forest and the forts up on hilltop that some older kids built years ago. “We come in here all the time,” the boy says.
 
“So do I!” Bug cries.
 
They talk pets. Neighbors. Teachers. Movies. Books. The boy is into the Warriors series and Bug is reading JK Rowling. I hang back and marvel at their ease. They compare notes on the best scenes from the last Harry Potter movie. Bug seeks and seeks a common footing. The boy, a few years older, is happy to oblige. They giggle about an explosion at a quidditch match then giggle some more when the dog grunts and tries to lick the boy’s hand off.
 
The sun is sinking and it is past time for dinner. Bug manages to tear himself away. We plod back up the swath of grass. Bug watches the boy return to his own porch and join a group of children there. A grown man sees us and waves a big Hullo. I return the greeting.
 
“We come in here all the time,” the boy had said. We had never seen him, yet here he was. We have paid attention to this place for years without looking for anything. The dog’s nose has been a truer guide than our own intention. Only in today’s purposeless looking do we stumble upon what we didn’t know we’d been after: a person who shares our place and a similar way of wandering through it.
 
My son’s bold delight stuns me. Even with no idea what he will find, he bridges the distance to meet what glances against his sense of wonder. Call it innocence. Call it courage. Whatever it is, in our new home (inshallah), may that wide-open not-looking to guide us to what we seek.
 

Divorce, Letting Go

This is not Then

smirkpretty

It is impossible to run from the truth of him anymore. Without another man to hide behind, my naked heart receives the full blow. He walks into the house to drop off our son and he towers now in a way he never did. The sensation is not desire but it is similar enough to make the ground tremble. He is not the weak one anymore. That role is mine now.
 
Finally.
 
In the Saturday sun, Bug and I pound a volleyball back and forth before picking our way through brambles at the neighborhood park. Our path takes us around by the community gardens where folks till black soil into stirring plots. An erratic series of reports through the brush leads us to a basketball court glistening with a damp frenzy of male limbs. We watch for a moment before climbing a hill to a buttery yellow house trimmed in white.
 
“Right here, buddy,” I say. My feet find their way to the precise spot. For a blink, everything is a bright a June day. Bug climbs up behind me.
 
“Right here what?”
 
“This,” I say, spreading my hands, “is the spot where your daddy and I got married. He was there looking at me. This tree was absolutely covered in white blossoms.” Back then, two of the flowering trees had stood side-by-side. The arch studded with sunflowers had formed a bridge under the canopy of snowy petals. Now the larger twin is gone and just one tree stands bare. Eight years have passed. There isn’t even a trace, not one scar in the earth. Bug and I gaze all around the grass as it makes its tentative appearance into early spring. A few pink and purple pansies have been planted in mulch by the door.
 
“Everyone was in chairs here. Your grandmas and grandpas, all your aunts and uncles and cousins.” I retrace my steps backwards along the path I took holding my father’s arm. Oh, how I had laughed during that walk! The giddiness returns in a shiver. It is as potent as the moment I strode out between all the people I loved towards Tee, sweating and grinning there by the blooms.
 
“Were you embarrassed?” Bug asks as he follows me. We make our way through the trees and down to the tennis courts.
 
“Embarrassed? Why?”
 
“You were in front of all those people.”
 
“No,” I say. “I was happy.”
 
Bug darts ahead into an empty court. A brisk wind has been cutting into our collars. Bug follows the white lines, kneeling occasionally to press his cheek to the sun-warmed clay. On the neighboring courts, groups of doubles thwack and scrape, hollering at one another. We make our way around the back and look for the next trail into the woods. A man calls out and asks us to toss back a ball.
 
“Where?” I ask.
 
He shrugs and laughs. “Somewhere out there.”
 
We walk on, scanning. “I see it!” Bug hollers. Hiding in the grass is a lighter shade of green. He grabs the ball and races up to the fence. It is chain link nearly two stories high. Bug stops a few feet from the edge, pulls back, and hurls the ball. It sails up and over, clearing the top by at least twelve inches. Everyone on the court whoops and cheers. Bug’s pink face shines.
 
Early in our courtship, Tee spent weeks teaching me how to throw a baseball. First he had to un-teach me and then I practiced the awkward new pitch until it became second nature. In the field near his apartment, I could send that ball soaring over the power lines. He had to walk further and further back to catch it, and he smiled so big and called out his praise when it really flew. “Can you feel the difference? I can see it!”
 
The return of my maiden name has restored other lesser lords to their previous stations. Old muscle memory has regained its dominion. Solitude has settled back onto its cinderblock throne. This regime was not democratically elected, and so it happens that it is not easily unseated. I understand now that a coup d’epouse is an impermanent solution to the challenges of becoming a truly human creature.
 
That passage from the white-trimmed door to that lush duet of foliage is now only a neural pathway. It turns out I could not plant a new civilization in the soil of me just by crossing those 20 feet. Like the whole of the absent sister tree, the petals I remember are black earth now. Neither grass nor root has a record of our covenant.
 
Bug and I walk on. The yellow house where I donned my white dress recedes behind us. The park is not just the place where Tee and I married. It is the place where Bug celebrated his 5th birthday, burying pirate treasure in the volleyball sand with his preschool friends. It is the place where a visiting friend joined me on a stroll earlier this winter and we stumbled across fallow garden plots I did not know existed.
 
It is the place my son shows me that he has inherited not only his daddy’s pink glow but his throwing arm, too. Undoubtedly, he will be as ignorant of the rarity of his innate athleticism as he is of his fortune in the assignment of fathers.
 
Today, it is where I learn that I did love that man once. And it is where I practice walking under the weight of my own name in the other direction.
 
As it turns out, a swath of awakening earth is up ahead, warming itself for my arrival.
 

Family, Outdoors

Takes a Licking

smirkpretty

We do not comb our hair. We shove our feet into old sneakers. The dog dances around our knees.

The stained coat is good enough. At least it is lined and will keep the wind out. “Hold her tongue,” Bug tells me. He means for me to squeeze her snout closed to keep her from licking him. I do not do this. It would be easy but he has grown stronger with the latest surge. He is rough with the dog now. He is approaching her weight. He torments her with the grooming comb and scarves from the dress-up trunk. Instead, I place her head against my knee and try to force her still while pretending to be gentle. I try to model tenderness but it is hard when my most regular company is a 72-RPM boy and an oaf of a dog. Continue reading “Takes a Licking” →

Art, Children, Friends

Love before Love

smirkpretty

Valentine's Soup

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

– Elie Wiesel

Bug creeps out of his bed and tiptoes into my room. “Mommy, I made twenty-eight bowls!” His eyes are far too bright for this ungodly hour. For the third time, I walk him back to his room and perch next to him on the bed. He has been drawing a Valentine’s Day picture. The pink and red markers are running to chalky streaks.

“You know it’s well past time for sleep, buddy.”

“I know, but see?” He starts to color in the legs of the lone person on the page, already forgetting why he called me in. Continue reading “Love before Love” →

Friends, Mindfulness

Pressing Need

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Press for Help.

This is printed on the big red button in the surgeon’s room. If I do, will someone pick up my son? Get us to school and work in the morning? How about a hug, a hot meal, a belly laugh? God knows I could use all of the above. Right now  my right hand is numb and 1/4 of my index fingernail has just been sliced away. I don’t imagine I’ll be in very good shape by the time the Lidocaine wears off. Driving is going to be fun, what with the splint still on my left arm from an unplanned encounter with gravity during a recent roller skating session.

All of this from a little splinter picked up at the lake. Don’t I get extra points for playing in the dirt with the boys? Maybe someone will send a car around with a driver and a mini-bar in back. I am tempted to press. Alas, I am fizzing in a beaker of peroxide at the moment and the button is a bit out of reach.  Continue reading “Pressing Need” →

Music, Parenting

Last Night, I Couldn’t Sleep

smirkpretty

We are a little late getting to bed. Bug has just returned from a long New Year’s winter family camp weekend at the Frost Valley YMCA in the Catskills. His dad reported that Bug actually sang a Justin Bieber song at Karaoke in the dining hall in front of everyone. This, in addition to rocket-making and going down the tubing hill 13 or so times.
 
When my kid returns from these camp weekends, he has adopted funny new mannerisms. Tonight, he makes a little tchk with his cheek and cocks his head while he chatters at me. While he builds legos, he sings, “We are never, ever, ever, getting back together” under his breath. Also, his face is smeared with blue, his hands are purple, and he smells. Hygiene is not a top priority at camp.
 
After bath and jammies, we settle into his bed together. I finish the last book and set it on the floor. Bug is deep into his drawing of some complex set of ladders and pulleys again. I rub his back and start to sing. I don’t get one line into “Baby Beluga” before Bug stops me.
 
“Don’t sing, please.”
 
I stop rubbing. This is new. “Do you want a different one?”
 
“No.” He is coloring hard with dark blue marker. The work of our bath is quickly being reversed. “No songs. Just cuddles.”
 
I stoke his back again with a little more care. He colors in silence.
 
Is that it? Did it just happen? Did my little boy cross over? Someone once said that you will never know when read your child Goodnight Moon for the last time. We step blindly over milestones as if they are just cracks in the sidewalk.
 
I think back to our Christmas week together in Texas. On the first evening there, we sang from our caroling songbook. The second night, Bug asked me not to sing. I thought this was some combination of the laryngitis making me sound like a geriatric goose and the general overstimulation of our lodgings. The final three nights of our visit, he asked me not to sing. This was fine with me because even speaking had become a burden.
 
Are we finished with bedtime songs? Was it over the night before Christmas? Surely, it can’t happen like this. Boom, a kid enters a new stage and there is no looking back? Doesn’t he understand how momentous and heartbreaking this is?
 
“No songs at all?” I venture. “Not even ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’?”
 
“No, thanks,” he says.
 
I watch him add an extra ladder. Adapt or die, as they say.
 
“What are you drawing?”
 
“Guess,” he says.
 
If I can’t sing, I can at least have a conversation with him. In the split second it takes him to enter adolescence, he may well become more irritated by my existence than indulgent of it. I suppose I better get with the program. I look at his drawing more closely. He inks a line from the ladder to a platform where a smiling person stands.
 
“A zipline?”
 
“Yep,” he says. “It’s a high ropes course.”
 
We talk about this for a few moments. He points out what is what. Our exchange is pretty spotty because he is still focused on his composition. The side of his hand and the wristband of his new digger-truck jammies are smeared gray-blue.
 
“Alright, Bud. I’m going to get everything ready for school tomorrow. Finish up the picture and lights out in just a minute, okay?”
 
“Mmm-hmm.” He starts on the higher element at the top of the page. The Flying Squirrel? The Postman’s Walk? He doesn’t give. I kiss his head and go downstairs to finish the dishes. I have almost finished loading the dishwasher when I hear the plaintive cry from the landing. “Mommy? Mo-o-o-mmy?”
 
“Yes, baby?”
 
“You forgot to put the cool water by my bed.”
 
I grin and come upstairs. “We are out of practice after a few days away, huh? I filled it up when you were brushing your teeth but we both forgot to take it to your room. Here.” I help him find the cup. He has not stayed in this house for eleven nights. I have to remember that these transitions take some adjustment. He gulps deeply and crawls back into bed, picking up an orange marker on the way. I stroke his head. “You need to finish up so you can get some sleep for tomorrow.”
 
“Okay.”
 
I lumber back downstairs to finish packing snack and putting away laundry.
 
“Mommy? Mo-o-o-mmy?”
 
I walk to the landing with a sigh. “Yes, buddy?”
 
“I need to go potty.”
 
“So, go potty.” He smiles big, wrapping his arm around my shoulder as I climb the stairs. “Let me guess. You took a nap in the car on the way home from camp today, didn’t you?”
 
He bounces into the bathroom. “What do you think I’m going to say?”
 
“I think you’re going to say, ‘yes’.”
 
He makes a silly face then nods. We goof with our faces going from stern to giggles. “Do you want to come in and see what I drew after I go potty?”
 
“Sure, baby. Then it’s bedtime.”
 
He digs out a pile of sketches that he has produced in the few minutes I was downstairs. This one shows an elaborate series of ladders and several emergency vehicles including two medi-vac helicopters. “It’s an underground hospital,” he tells me. “That’s blood. All full of blood. And that’s the thing with the wheels they take the people out of the helicopter on.”
 
“A stretcher?”
 
“Yep. And this is an ambulance. And here is the X-Ray machine.”
 
“Baby, it is so far past your bedtime, it’s not even funny.”
 
“Okay.”
 
I go downstairs to make copies of his paperwork to start the new before-school program.
 
“Mommy? Mo-o-o-mmy?”
 
I take a deep breath, round the foyer, and mount the stairs. “Bedtime,” I say quietly. “No more coloring.”
 
“But why aren’t you in bed?”
 
“Because I can’t finish my chores with someone calling me upstairs every seventeen seconds. Here. Hop into bed. We’re done.” I take away the clipboard and set it on the floor and put the sack of markers in the drawer. He pulls the blanket up.
 
Gently, gently, I make the offer. “How about a song to help you get to sleep?”
 
He nods and wiggles down under the blanket. “Okay. Will you lay down with me?”
 
“You bet.”
 
“And maybe do all three songs?”
 
“Sure thing, buddy.”
 
He smiles his dozy, droop-eyed smile and presses up against me. As the tune leaves my lips, I hear every word of every verse much more clearly than I have in years.
 
Tonight is probably not the last page of this chapter, but how could I know if it were? We just never know how close we are to the end. There is no way to flip ahead to see. I sing him the whole of each song well past his bedtime and deep into slumber. I add a free fourth tune for good measure just to make up for all the ones I will never hum into his drowsy neck again once he says goodbye to the lullaby for good.
 

Let’s not talk about fare-the-wells now
The night is a starry dome.

As long as this moment lasts, I sing my boy to sleep.
 

—

From Joni Mitchell’s “Carey” off the forever twilight album, Blue.