November 3, 2009

When I came downstairs this morning I found Grandma Ricki holding you on her knee with her left hand and pushing a wooden train with the other. The train is from your Great Aunt Lisa and Great Uncle Ed. Each of the five cars is the size of a book of matches and the three middle cars each carry one of your initials: T, A, J. The cars are held together by round silver magnets that slip apart a little as your grandmother drags the train over the plexiglass surface of the coffee table. "Choo-choo, choo-choo" she says. Your head still slumps forward, chin into neck, your face scrunching into itself, cheeks shoved upward so that your eyes look smaller.

Upstairs, there was the sound of your father's razor, then the shower, and then he appeared in a maroon sweater with a collared shirt underneath.

Last night your father and I left you with Grandma Ricki and went to the Contented Cow. We sat on a red couch beside a fire and drank white wine and talked about you and jobs and moving. Your father held my hand, still a little greasy from popcorn, and we stared vacantly at the wall in front of us: a clock, a cow statue with a sign reading "I sold my cow do I don't need your bull" and a framed certificate claiming the Cow as the best in Northfield at something. I told your father how I am scared about going back to work, about how much I love watching you change and grow, about how being away from you for six hours in a row seems like an eternity. Your father doesn't make enough money at his job for me to stop working and if we move to a new city, where he does have a tenure-track job, then I would be remote from friends and relatives and a community that would make being a stay-at-home mom a healthy option for me. At least I think so. So it feels like a catch-22. And I cried a little. And your father held my hand and then drove us both home.

I spent this morning reading a romance novel filled with hard erections and heart-shaped faces and Donna Karan wool knit pants. On my computer, I clicked on someone's face and was transported to the poem he wrote. Then I learned, via Facebook, that Tom is "doin the dishes" and that Brendan "never had a rational dream in his life" and that Ishanaa is "overwhelmed by the literature on African democracy." And I wonder, by the time you are 30, how often you will be updated--on everything--and if this will change your brain into a mechanism that works in flashes and lurches rather than meandering, stream-like. I wish for you days when you only think about one thing, slowly. I hope your mind turns things over and circles and returns. I hope sometimes it is still, like a fox whose coat is drowsied with shadow. I wish you days sitting on a porch swing at Holden, watching the summer leaves shake and glisten when the wind moves down the valley. And I wish you long aches at the base of your back and your hair wet and scentless with glacial water and the taste of carrot sticks dipped into a creamy white dressing. You will forget to watch them while you eat because you are watching a figure come up the road and your heart is lifting with the dust.