Go Boom!

You have kind of exploded.

It is warm here in Northfield, not warm with the cool behind it but warm with the warm behind it. Summer warm, not spring warm. The leaves are big and full and everywhere on campus girls are laying on their bellies with i-pod buds in their ears and their hair fanned out mermaid-like around their crisping skulls. Finals have begun and so everyone is running "extreme"--extreme stress, extreme tension, extreme celebration, extreme nostalgia. Students who haven't been concerned about their grades for the last 15 weeks are suddenly VERY concerned and very good at sending e-mails expressing this concern. Meanwhile, professors are walking around with pinched looks on their faces, as if staring permanently into an abyss of yet-to-be-graded papers. I am full of longing to feel relaxed. I am full of desire to smear sunscreen on my chalky thighs. We are all just ready to be done.

You, however, are in a permanent state of "go." You've now mastered the crawling thing and you're feeling better and better about crawling out of sight--down the hall, into the bathroom, around the couch. You're also beginning to love pulling yourself up to a standing position. This morning, I turned to say something to your father and in the blink of an eye, you'd crawled all the way to the front door, pulled yourself up, and begun to engage in a massive make out session with the glass.

Unfortunately, you haven't yet learned how to get back down after pulling yourself back up. Two nights ago, you screamed for 45 minutes at bed time. Turns out it was because you'd pulled yourself up in your crib and didn't know how to get back down. This happened again during nap time yesterday. The first time, it broke my heart. I set you back down and rubbed your belly and gave you Mr. Meow to fondle. The second time I wrinkled my brow in concern and mumbled something about "my sweet baby girl." The third time, I videotaped.

It's hard for a poet-mom not to see the bigger parallel in all this. Daddy and I have both spent many years learning to do what we do and we feel pretty smart and strong about these areas of knowledge we have (tiny areas of knowledge in the scheme of things). But right now, this whole spring, we have been sad and confused and terrified because we hadn't learned, still haven't really learned, how to back away from that, how to let go.

So I've begun to practice with you. While you stand I hold onto your hands and say "go boom! go boom!" and I tug backward just a little until your knees bend and you flop down onto your diapered butt. Then Daddy and I cheer for you, loudly, because learning how to to fall, to undo, to "go boom" gracefully isn't easy.

I pray for the courage to be able to learn to do the same.