Ideal World Schedule

Last night was a good night. You went to sleep at 7:15, then woke at 3am for a feeding, then woke at 7:30 in the dirty gray snow light.

In our living room is a salmon print that Daddy made in Alaska many years ago by dipping a salmon into paint and then pressing the salmon's body into the canvas. The print is beautiful; in places it is possible to count the scales. That a dead animal lingers behind the print is not quite so beautiful. The salmon print is framed and taped to the frame is a 4 by 6 piece of scratch paper. At the top I scribbled the words "Ideal World Schedule." In the Ideal World Schedule you go to sleep at 7 and wake at 3 and wake again at 7:30. You take a two hour nap in the morning and then an hour and a half nap in the early afternoon and a 45 minute cat nap just before dinner.

Truthfully, this is not my ideal world.

Truthfully, I am not sure what my ideal world looks like anymore.

"today my beautiful child eviscerates me" --Rachel Zucker

Today my beautiful child smiles when I walk naked from the shower. Today my beautiful child bends over the green plastic of her exersaucer. Today my beautiful child will feel the whiskers of Mr Meow against her cheeks. Today my beautiful child does not live in Haiti. Today my beautiful child could have five glasses of water if she wanted them.

Last night, on the news: "there is no money in Haiti today, water is the only currency"

Water coins, water bills. Where does water keep her money? What sound does water make when she is stretched thin? What does water think when she is separated from the larger body of herself, when she is only two drops on a dark lip? Where does she keep her silver? Her gold? Her romance novels in which the tsunami weds the brook?

On the news, a Minnesota woman is worried about two orphans in Haiti who are scheduled to become her children. The camera pans to a toddler bed with rails and a pink fleecy blanket. Then to paintings of the faces of the children, hung on the bedroom walls. "I thought it would make them feel more at home," she says.

Home as the place where your face is already hanging on the wall.

I admit, I find this slightly gruesome.

The woman says the orphanage has confirmed that the children have survived the quake but are now without food, water or shelter.

Here is the horrible secret dark thought that slithers its way through my brain once before I banish it with a broom, its black adder rattle softening off into the distance: maybe the quake was a good end to hard misery.

Never, never, never. Each human life of the same worth, each life worth fighting for, people living in poverty content or happy or happier than white upper middle class banker CEOs of our Prozac nation. My liberal self embarrassed to have had such a thought. My white skin glaring stupidly back at me.

Last week, traffic stuttered to a halt for a suicide.

If you throw yourself off a bridge during rush hour, you may not have a desire to live, but you do have a desire to be counted.

No one arrived home on time.

In the Ideal World Schedule I am home now, already, preparing you for a play date. I am not home now. I am shirking the Ideal World. I don't know what it looks like anymore.