three weeks in a thousand pictures.

You are potty training. Potty learning? We’re not really the “training” type. You do it when you feel like it, which is most of the time we’re home. You lower yourself onto your little plastic potty like an old, old man. It’s really funny. And then you hop up and turn around to check your progress every time you fart.

There’s a lot of exclaiming I HAVE FARTS IN MY BUTT these days.

Needless to say, if anyone needs us, we’re probably in the bathroom. It’s a PROCESS in there.

Sometimes you need to read a book. Sometimes you need to wear a mask.

I totally understand.

Hey! You can see me in your Darth Vader eyes. I don’t show up much around these parts.

And I haven’t really been writing much lately, either. I mean, actually, I’ve been writing a ton. Every single freaking day, to be precise. Just not here.

That’s SKWAP clutched in your little hand there. It’s an offshoot of Soft Thing. You’ve been obsessed with it lately, with this remnant of the whole–of the whole thing that you use to soothe yourself…just a part.

Me too.

Spring has sprung and it’s like we’re new girls. Shit, it’s like we’re a whole new family.

It’s good.

I’ve been thinking in words and pictures lately. Like, I have a thought and it’s quick, and words and pictures are seamlessly bound, and then my brain shoots back and re-has the thought, picks and chooses which pieces to give name and form to, and then saves that thought like slides in a storage box.

It’s like living in a picture book. It’s like always writing.

I am trying to pay more attention. No–better attention.

I think I just spent the better part of two years seeing the world in a blur around your body. Keepherinfocuskeepherinfocus, my brain churned. It’s like, you both showed me the world anew, and showed me the world without my self at the center of my relation to it. Not that those are such separate entities, just different places to rest in awe.

But now you’re around the corner. Now you’re reading to yourself. Now you’re at dance class.

You’re twirling hoops. And dressing up. And making faces. And telling me to go away.

And so I get to re-meet my self.

And the thing I’ve been finding is that I’m really different than I was the last time we met.

Really different.

I imagine it’s kindof how an astronaut feels when they return to Earth.

Like, it’s good to be home, but MAN things have changed.

There is space for the irretrievable journey in my heart now. There is an unsealable hole in my gut. You are the only person who knows those places, too, and you are quickly forgetting.

Not that we aren’t all lonely travelers, because we are.

It’s just that the two years I spent reoriented around your body were a death in my life. A generative, people-making, world-building death; a long, hollowing scream.

It makes me think of Robert Frost’s Road Not Taken:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

 And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The thing about re-meeting me is that I’m re-meeting you, too. I’m re-meeting everyone and everything, really.

It feels like possibility.

It feels really silly, too. All of my hellos stand on quicksand, ready to sink into goodbyes or hello-agains or whatevers.

Really silly like underwear that can just as easily be worn as a hat.

I feel calm in this endless slip, can’t help but laugh at the endless newness and oldness of being alive.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll write here. There are the ethics of writing your body, of sharing your story, and there is the worry of what you might think someday down the road.

But more than that there is ME. I am letting you go and gobbling my self up, like the first ice cream of the season–cool and sweet and forecasting months of sun.

I don’t know.

I’m not done here yet. Not quite.

I can see the door I’ll walk through some day soon. I just haven’t decided what I’ll put on the other side to usher myself through.

Maybe you’ll push me. You do, somehow, every single day.

XO.

at the library.

Chair to chair you hopped, trying each on for size. Yup, they were all designed for kids your height. The blue one, though, you decided was just right.

You tested the puzzles. The fruit one worked, and the vegetable one, too. Go figure, kid.

With no other kids around, you were free to put all of the puppets in chairs and then walk down the row throwing them each to the ground. I sat back and watched, ready for when you wanted me but also marveling at how you’ve come to play alone. It’s a rich world inside your head and I’m savoring these first glimpses of your imagination.

I piled the toys you’d played with and books you’d fingered through and brought them to the librarian. We have MRSA in our house, I said, and she was sweet instead of sour like I’d for some reason expected her to be, and she took the stack to be wiped down before other children take their turn with them. Easy. Easy easy. It’s nice when things are like that.

I’ve been taking this writing class for the past few weeks. It’s the first writing class I’ve ever taken and, to say the least, it’s kicking my ass. PROPERLY. I mention it because it’s part of why I haven’t been here as much. I mention it, too, because you are suddenly surrounded by conversations about words, about sex and death and ecstatic states (the theme for the class). It’s seeping in, I’m sure. I’m remembering constantly that I am a better mama, a better partner, a better ME when I have my own project going on. The stuff of this class is some of my favorite stuff. I am remembering that I love few things more than writing and learning. Maybe nothing.

There is more. Always, of course, but also due to my sporadic posting as of late. There is the dinner and a movie date that your dad and I went on last night, laughing and drinking and walking around. I like that guy, I must say. There is sweet, sweet Linda Lou who you have been having fantastic Friday play dates with so I can finish my weekly assignments for the aforementioned class. There is your endless adoration for your Shirley and for your Uncle Sam and for your grandparents. There are your panicked declarations of I’M FINE and I’M PERFECT when talk of your latest wound comes up as, you know, it does everyday. There is and there are and there always will be, so here’s where I’ll stop for today. Off to read books and sing songs and tuck you in, you sweet sweet little Squid.

it’s one big party.

Yesterday was your dad’s birthday.

You made us wear party hats–metallic gold, to be exact. We ate early so we could celebrate as a family, us three with little cones on our heads and streamers strung around the table. You were so enthusiastic, so sweetly swooning over your dad and his day.

You “cooked” the strawberries for his cake, putting them into a bowl as I sliced them and stirring them around with sugar. I COOK DEM you announced as the cake was sliced and served, your head dipping forward a bit with pride.

You have a new sore, but we seem to have intervened successfully. Every time we look at it you yell I OKAY! I’M FINE! and we tell you that you are and that having booboos doesn’t mean you aren’t. We had hoped we’d make it through three months without the appearance of anything remotely MRSA-esque–we even whispered 6 months sometimes with a glimmer in our eye–but two months was what we got and, since it was twice as long as the windows we were previously being afforded, we’ll take it. Plus, so far anyway, it looks like we’ll be able to keep you away from the doctor with this one. Fingers are crossed.

But it means that after a day of playing in the yard and climbing all over your dad, today we’re back to hot washing everything we own and sterilizing surfaces. So it goes, it seems.

Maybe we’ll don our party hats while we scrub.

uncle sam.

If you’re wondering where I’ve been, Uncle Sam is visiting for the week.

A fact that you, quite simply, could not be happier about. Everything you do you announce to him. LOOK! UNCLE SAM! I STOMP PUDDLES! I EAT YOGURT! WEAD ME A BOOK! UNCLE SAM IS SILLLLLLY! I IS AWAKE UNCLE SAM!

It is so sweet, this adoration and friendship you each offer the other. My baby brother and my baby–that’s some of the good stuff in life, the stuff that leaves your belly full, that eases you back in your chair to sit back and watch and savor.

don’t rush back to bed.

A lot has happened since I last posted and I’m sorry for my absence. Sometimes things move so quickly that days slip by unnoticed until they turn into weeks and then almost a month.

This is a tiny post, a quick missive before I settle into bed to watch tv with your dad. Tonight we are night weening.

I don’t know where the decision came from, though I imagine it’s been taking root for a while. I stopped sleeping through the night before you were born, when my belly became globe-like and turning over required both hands and sometimes a nudge from your dad. And I haven’t slept through the night since.

I don’t nurse you to sleep. I never have. Or, in all fairness, that’s never been your thing, not even as a newborn. But I’m ready to stop seeing you in the middle of the night, ready to stop gently bouncing on our booba ball (a yoga ball I got when I was pregnant), waking myself just enough to struggle back to sleep after I tiptoe back to bed.

Writing that–I’m ready not to see you in the middle of the night–just shot tears to the brim of my eyes. It is a small severance, but a sacred loss. The blue light. Your sleepy body. Your kneading hands and closed eyes. The gentle thud of your head against my shoulder as I carry you back to your crib. Though I’m sure I’ll still see you in the middle of the night from time to time, our silent communion has come to an end.

I told you all day that we would have booba before bed and then again in the morning, but not in the middle of the night anymore. You stared at me, brow furrowing slightly, one of the times that I told you. The rest you simply made eye contact for, though, offering neither resistance not affirmation. Your seeming ambivalence bolstered me, helped me feel that it is ok for me to stop this part of our nursing ritual, that it is ok to reclaim some of my body and bodily experience.

But good god I’ll miss it, Maxine. I’ll relish the sleep, I’m sure. We all will. But this is a radical break and it makes me feel loose-limbed, gangly and a little bit lost.

The last time I pulled your fussy, restless body from bed in the quiet cloak of night was March 6th. I didn’t know it. I wish I could go back and slow down, turn up my senses, imprint it somehow to visit in all its particularity. I know I carry the nights with me, that they are an inextricable part of my concept of self, of my body memory. But I want a visceral photograph of that last night nursing. I want to tell myself not to rush back to bed.