November 6, 2009

Dear Thisbe, there will be moments in life when you will meet someone or read something someone wrote and you will think "I am so very like that person. I am so very close to being that person." But that person (in real life or lurking behind lines of print) will be just a little bit more than you. A little bit funnier. A little bit more caustic. A little bit more honest. And you will look at your own face in the mirror and it will look like it's been washed down in a bland sand bath and your hair will be flipping up in the wrong direction and you will feel like a puddle of dirty water.

Actually, my hope is that you NEVER feel this way. But if you do, maybe there will be a tiny bit of solace in knowing I felt this way too. Hopefully, we have raised you with a better and more confident sense of self than what mommy seems to possess.

Where is all this coming from? A blog on motherhood and life by a woman who seems to be like an upgraded version of myself. She is beautiful and says wonderfully sarcastic and insightful things. She's very brave and swears but is also articulate and a former Mormon. Jealousy is a seething porpoise in my heart right now. Probably because she's also rich. She makes lots of money from the web site and the books she publishes that contain posts from the web site.

BUT. There is something eerie in this too. Something about making money off your story as it unfolds, without any time to reflect or process or edit, seems off to me. It reminds me a little of Egypt, 2006.

Your father was in Egypt with TIME (ask him about TIME sometime, but get yourself some coffee first) and I went to visit him. For 10 days I toured with the group--tombs, pyramids, museums, temples, sphinx, toppled statues, the works. And at every site, there were the 26 of us, taking as many pictures of the artifact/ruin/statue/temple/obelisk as was humanly possible before hopping back on the bus and watching the gray haze over Cairo while listening to U2 on our i-pods. Notice I do not put myself in a separate category here; I was as trigger happy as the rest of them. There is a desire to capture the moment exactly so that you can take it home and take it out to look at and show to others--not a bad instinct--but it's hard, well nigh impossible, to actually capture what the moment was like...but you find you've spent the 15 minutes before the sphinx trying to capture a moment that you're not even living in because you're outside, trying to record it.

I am guilty of this with you, too. The minute you start to smile or coo I pick up the camera because each moment feels so fleeting and beautiful and breathless and I WANT it forever. I do not want it to go away. But you, Thisbe Agnes, are not an idiot, and as soon as I get the camera in front of my face you stop smiling or cooing or whatever darling behavior you were up to. You stop and you stare directly at the camera as though it were a portal back to God. You stare so stoically that I get nervous and put it away.

Point being: I worry that if I did what this woman does (blog about my life for money), that I would get so caught up in how I would report on my life that I wouldn't be in my life. Of course, it could also have the opposite effect; that is, maybe I would always being in the mode of paying reverent attention to everything. Loving. In awe. You would cry and I would bask patiently in the sound, trying to memorize the timbre and tone exactly. I would take off your dirty diaper and stare into the poop for minutes, like tea leaves, searching for a comparison other than cottage cheese, searching for a color to describe it other than lime or chrysanthemum.

You were a fussy pants this morning. And I didn't get enough sleep because I was up late reading the other woman's blog and thinking about how I could have done the exact same thing and why didn't I.

It's blowsy today. Blowsy means the American flag and the blue Minnesota flag are twisting on themselves in the wind but there is also sun warming the side of the yellow house. So it feels blowsy outside. At 2:30 your daddy and I will be vaccinated against the H1N1 virus. By the time you read this, that last sentence will either have no meaning for you (as in, what the heck is H1N1?) or else you will be printing out this post and taking it to school as show and tell (as in, this is what people thought of the virus when it was just beginning. See how naive my parents are? At this point in time they don't realize we will end up spending a whole year in our bathroom eating ramen noodles.) At the moment, however, you are tucked against me in the Baby Bjorn, shaking your head back and forth across my breastbone as you wake and then nod yourself back to sleep.