Last night, my Mister and I talked across our nightly distance. We told each other stories of gifts. What had we received that had really knocked our socks off? What were we proud to have given? Both of us had to reach far back for the most shivery memories. A brother’s model aircraft carrier. A first double-cassette stereo materializing in the bedroom on Christmas morning. Continue reading “Present Moment”
Tag: parenting
Seven Turns This Way
He turns seven. He is not alone in this. The weekend is endless pinball flash and spinning light. Too many parties. Cookie dough ice cream. Pokemon legends raining down on a tumid Chima lego metropolis. Deforestation at the borders. A relentless hunger for more and more.
For three nights, sleep is drawn and quartered. Whole symphonies of yelling smash their percussive chords against each distended limit. Love is squeezed down in its most elemental form: the exigency of coexistence in the absence of affection.
Finally, Sunday carries night over and drops it at our feet. Everything is half-done but somehow complete. He falls away from me during the third book and I recall the shape of ease for the first time in days.
Now I must find my own way under perseveration’s cruel echo. In bed, I kick and kick against the spooling film, all blooper reel and captured sin, the worst lines caught on repeat in the projector’s teeth. Eventually the bulb burns through and cuts me loose. I dive with one last surge and I am under, finally confined to sleep if not by peace at least by the simple pressure of submersion.
Wailing wrenches me back to the surface. I choke on my own breath. He is silhouetted in the door, wracked with sobs.
“Oh, baby, what’s the matter?”
He careens over the carpet and plows into the bed. “My back. My back!” Then his voice shatters. I open my arms. He climbs up and folds fetal into me, quaking with a fear made corporal. He is no longer a baffling, windburnt stretch of leg and scar and huff. He sheds all seven of his years. He is the night following the day he was born, completely undone by something for which he has no name, completely trusting me to make him safe.
I touch his spine seeking warmth or blood or bumps. A stingray? A troll? There it is. A flat plate, stiff and certainly not skin. I lift his shirt and peel off the alien invader.
“Sweetie, look.” I hold it up in whatever line of sight the dim night allows.
“What is it?” he says.
“A Pokemon card.”
He reaches up for it. A soon as it is in his grip, he shivers down to stillness. “Oh.” He pulls the card in like a baby blanket and curls his arms around it.
“I think your back was a little sweaty and you rolled over on it.”
“No,” he says with a drooping sigh. “I wasn’t hot. He was the one who was sweaty.”
“He who?”
“The Pokemon,” he tells me. “From fighting all night long.”
“That could do it.” I nudge him up and we plod back to his room. He asks me to cuddle there. His mattress is a candy-floss cloud compared to mine and so I agree. “Yes, but just for a few minutes.”
“A few long minutes,” He says. “As many minutes as you can.” We pull up the tinkerbell blanket and he tucks my hand in under his side. I settle in close to him. I stay until he drifts off and then linger a few minutes more, at least until turning, turning the way he does, he turns back into his years and there is no room for me.
Party Clasher
The credits run and he starts to bounce. “Let’s have a dance party, Mommy!” Without a movie to glaze his eyes and glue his backside, he clambers up onto the back of the couch. I groan. Bedtime has outrun us again. We haven’t even brushed teeth.
“I don’t know, Buddy. It’s late.”
“But –“
“But you know I can’t resist a dance party. Just a few minutes though.”
My little boy high-steps across the cushions. Crazy witching-hour light spirals in his eyes. I find a Fios station sizzling with Latin hip hop and feel a roundness start to pull at my hips. Bug leaps off the couch and hurls his full mass at me. I step back and bend down to face him. “I don’t want you throwing yourself into me. Please keep your body to yourself.”
“Okay okay okay,” he says. He jumps across the room and turns several lurching circles. I wave my arms in the air and he waves his. He’s grinning so big. He starts towards me again.
“Let me go under you like when I was swimming,” he says. I make my legs into a bridge. “Okay, go!” I laugh. He squeezes himself small and pushes halfway through. Then, like Pooh and the honey pot, he gets stuck. He grabs at my knees pretending he can’t get out, arching his spine up, trying to lift and topple me.
“Baby!” I laugh. “Please don’t grab! Go through. Can you. . . um. . .” I shake myself off and step over him. Anything to keep him interested? Anything competitive? “Can you turn ten circles without falling down?”
He ignores me. He has outgrown these diversionary tactics. “Spin me around!” He cries. “Please? Spin me!”
“Buddy, can’t you just dance? Watch Mommy.” The beat is right on top, plain and simple. “See? I listen to the ba-ba-ba there, like that. And it makes my feet go –“
“Please just spin me?” He backs into me and presses his shoulders into my belly.
My boy knows rhythm. We have been moving to these beats since he was floating fetal in me. It has never stopped. When he was two, three, four, we draped ourselves in scarves and sequins. The living room was Pagan bonfire. Castle ball. Disco. Catwalk. He knows dance.
He chooses clash.
“How about this,” I try one last time. “Saturday night fever!” For a moment, he copies me. In one Kumbia half-step, he’s turned the diagonal disco arm into a gun. He shoots. Showers me with bullets. Then he’s after me again, skewering me with the bayonet.
“Wow.” I stop and marvel at him surging against any exposed inch of me. “You are so intense.” I grab him and flip him around so he’s facing out. He shrieks in delight. “There’s this thing called DANCING,” I say, jamming my forearms under his armpits and gripping my hands together across his chest. “Dancing is this really nice thing people do sometimes. It doesn’t involve head-on collisions!” I lift him, turning around and around, trying to make sure his feet clear the coffee table. He is breathless with giggles. My muscles shudder with the effort.
I put him down suddenly. “Oh my gosh,” I say.
“What?” He breathes hard, face bright. He is yanking on my wrists, his body begging for more.
“I’m totally wrong. There is a dance made just for you.”
“What is it?”
“Let me show you.” I fire up YouTube. In seconds, a grainy recording of Bad Brains at some now-defunct DC club pipes sweaty kids into our living room. Artillery fire vocals, distorted guitars, and slamming flesh.
“That right there? That’s a mosh pit.” I tell Bug. “I bet that’s exactly where you are going to end up.” He watches for a second then starts to bend and arch. I click onward, finding Fugazi and a shirtless Ian MacKaye cracking his voice against a roomful of ricochet and roar. Bug is thrumming now. A moment later, I land on “London Calling” but it is just a music video. I start to click to find another live recording but Bug tells me to stop. “Leave it on! I like this song,” he says.
“You do?”
And I don’t have to hear an answer to know. He is in my grasp again, fastening my arms over his shoulders like a harness. He grips my biceps and tightens the hold, rocking from foot to foot to the bass. Then my boy is swinging left, right, a metronome on 184. “More!” he cries. “Faster!”
“More what?” I shout.
“More this! This! More. . . woah,” He propels the swing further over, velocity from the balls of his feet, our shared force pulling out from my rooted center.
“Never shake a baby!” I laugh. Joe Strummer predicts the apocalypse as my kid hollers, “Harder, Mommy! Faster!” My legs quiver. The coil of my spine groans but complies as I launch this charged weight back and forth, catching the full impact and returning with equal power.
The Clash spools out and my body buckles as the pendulum runs aground. Bug tries to jump-start the engine by yanking against my shoulders.
“Enough,” I say.
“Not enough!” he says. “More!”
Of course. Too much is never enough. I grab him in a rough hug and wrestle him to the ground. He shrieks and pushes against me. Feral and ferocious, my child is growl. He is drive. He will find his pack and bang out a strange tattoo upon the earth. Lyric, dance, screech, clash. Each is his reject or claim, to rip out the chords and re-assemble to a beat he chooses as his own.
No Fixed Address
In the parking lot of the state college campus where Tee was staffing an exhibition table, Bug nursed. We sat in the back seat with the door open to a spring afternoon. Tee came around the corner to meet us, concern folding in a face usually at full sail. He moved to block us and pushed the door partway closed.
“What are you doing?” I asked. In my lap, Bug raised his eyebrows up and back to get in on the action. He didn’t lose his grip. Besides the perfunctory drape in an airplane or shopping mall, modesty had rarely factored into Bug’s mealtimes.
Tee shrugged and shuffled. “Everyone can see. We don’t know people here.”
Deposed
It is almost 6:30 pm. Congestion on 66 West backs it up all the way to Falls Church. After a grind of a day, a co-worker saves me a metro trip by letting me hitch a ride back towards home. My car waits near the station, a stack of overdue library books in the trunk alongside a bag of clothes destined for Goodwill. Somehow I will have to make room for the giant sack of special Active Maturity dog food I hope Target has on the shelf because PetSmart is in the wrong direction. The dog’s bowl has been empty for nearly two days.
In an hour, friends will be gathering for Team Trivia at the bar. As for dinner? The leftover apple banging around in my backpack will have to suffice. As we sit in stop-and-go traffic solving the problems of the world, my phone rings.
Noisy air when I pick it up. Then, “Mommy?”
“Hey, buddy. What’s up?”
“Can I stay with you tonight?” His sing-y, plead-y voice spills into the car. Sweetness bomb. My friend rocks from the blow.
Close Shave
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.
Hello Here
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.
I Just Called to Say
Today, I call up Tee to thank him for our friendship.
“Last night, I learned all over again that if you look for what’s wrong, you find it,” I say. People defeated by chance are out there bashing their exes as we speak. I have done my share of this. Now it makes me cringe.
Tee and I have something more precious than I ever knew. Some of it is the luck of the draw, and I breathe a sigh of relief for the hand I hold. Some of it, though, is a choice we make every day.
This is not Then
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.
Child Proof
We are partway through Chapter 4 of The Goblet of Fire. Bug sits up in the bed and heaves a sigh as big as Mt. Rainier. “Mom, can I have a cool cloth? Please?” His cheeks are flushed.
“Sure, baby.” I put down the book and go to run water over a cloth. He unfolds it and wipes it across his face before draping it over his head. It hides his eyes. He presses his palms against the pink terrycloth, cooling his cheeks and ears.
He has been coughing for a week, but who hasn’t been? The bipolar arrival of spring yields nighttime frost, daffodil pollen, and no escape from airborne funk. “Do you think you have a fever?” I ask.
“I guess I do,” he sighs again. “Can we take my temperature?”
“Sure.” I start to crawl out of his bed.
“I’ll get the thermometer,” he cries. He drops the cloth and clambers over me. “Where is it?” It’s the kind with buttons and a digital display. It’s almost as compelling as my iPod.
“In the closet. I think I have to get it, bud. There’s that special handle on the door.” When we moved in nearly three years ago, I stashed all the medicine and cleaning supplies in the hall closet and secured it with a knob cover. It spins around and requires a grownup grip.
“No, I got it,” he calls. “I go in here all the time.” I hear the door open then close, and he strolls back in the room with the ear thermometer. “How do I turn this on again?” He presses all the buttons as he climbs back over me.
“Wait one minute, mister,” I say. “What do you mean you ‘go in there all the time’? You’re not supposed to be able to open that door. It has a child-proof handle on it.”
“Mom.” Bug levels his gaze at me. “I am not a child.”
“Oh really? What are you?”
He gives his nose a little lift of dismissal. “I am a big kid.” The pink washcloth is flopping on his head again and the thermometer is jammed into his ear. He presses the button, hears the beep, and reads the display out loud.
“97.7,” he says. “Is that a fever?”
“No, baby. You’re fine. You’re just hot.”
“Hm. I don’t know.” For the sake of accuracy, he tries the other side and follows up with a few dozen more checks of each ear. “98.1? 97.6? 97.9. . . ?”
My baby isn’t sick. Also, he is not a baby. That is just a straight up fact.
He is still a child, though. (He doesn’t need to know that.)
Shannon E. Williams 