Golden Delicious

Last night when you went to bed, you seemed quite well. You've had a runny nose since September and a nighttime cough for the last three weeks or so, but generally you seemed your regular perky self.

Until around 8:15 when Daddy went into your bedroom to give you some cough medicine and found you slithering around in your own vomit. All over your sleeper, in your hair, smeared across Doggie-Do and Mr. Meow, etc, etc. I lifted you up and you vomited on me. I gave you a bath while Daddy cleaned up your crib and I washed your hair and put you snugly into a new sleeper. You vomited again. On me and on the sleeper, of course. So I waited 15 minutes, rocked you a little, sang some sweet songs, changed you into another sleeper, rocked you to sleep in my arms, held you sleeping for fifteen minutes, laid you back down in your crib. And--

Yep, that's right, more vomiting. Well, by this time, more like dry heaving. But with bile. New sleeper, new crib sheets. This time I had Daddy put an old comforter on our bed and I took you in with me and snuggled you close, the smell of vomit still lingering in your hair, the unmistakable coating of vomit on your breath--and we slept--until you vomited again, and again. By 11pm the Great Expulsion of 2010 was complete and we both slept. Kind of.

Today, with the exception of two fairly lengthy naps (YAHOO!) all was back to normal. No fever, no cough, you being your usual sparkly self.

You have refused all forms of sustenance except apples. In this sense, you may share some bizarre gene with your godparents. Which is appropriate since today is the first anniversary of your baptism!

Sometimes we are baptized with water. Sometimes with fire. Sometimes with the Holy Spirit. And sometimes with straight up vomit. Amen! Alleluia! Let advent begin!

In Thanksgiving, Of Course

Yowsers. The last ten days or so have been quite the blur, Thiz. For reasons I can mention and for reasons I can't.

You are becoming this miraculous little creature. Your spoken vocabulary is murky but your known vocabulary is huge. You tend to speak a word once, usually randomly, and then refuse to ever speak the word again. Your one-night-stand vocabulary includes words such as kitty, juice, bubbles, ox, outside, shoe, car, truck, book, duck, other, cheese, water, etc. Do you use any of these words of your own volition? No. And why would you, when simply by making the "please" sign (rubbing your chest) and pointing at an object you are able to receive almost everything that you need?

Although singular words are of little interest to you, complete rhetorical arguments are of seeming necessity. You are profoundly interested in educating Xena, Ricki and Peter's dog, and during our visit this weekend, you delivered a variety of lectures. These lectures involve head bobbing, hand gestures, and clear shifts in the tone of your babble: instructional to angry to soothing and back to instructional. Your lecture usually ends with an attempt to pat Xena using both of your hands. So filled with energy is your tiny body that you look like you're banging air cymbals.

A few days ago, Daddy refused your clear request to accompany him on a walk with Luxy. Shortly after he departed I found one of his shoes in the toilet. I didn't put it there.

You received your first haircut this weekend (Grandma had to sit in the chair with you--and your hair still makes you look like a Dickensian street urchin). You also had your first dose of true Thanksgiving food.

Last weekend GM Dorothy and GP Mark drove hours and hours just to see you for a day. It was a lovely visit, filled with soup and books and frosted windows (and glasses).

I must admit, it's been too long since I've written and there's too much to say--too many details and nothing feels quite solid in my head right now.

Let me just say how thankful I am for you. How thankful I am for this particular moment in your life when you are so full of joy and curiosity and wonder. How lovely it is to sit with you for up to ten minutes looking at a single book or to watch you push all sorts of wheeled devices in endless circles. I am also thankful for what will be (I think) our last few nursing moments together. I switched back to full strength birth control and my already meager supply has, I think, completely dissipated. The last few mornings your attempts to nurse have been sweet but exceptionally short lived. It's odd that this part of our relationship--which a year ago seemed to be our ENTIRE relationship--is slipping away with so little fanfare. I will miss being with you in those liminal spaces, Thiz, between sleeping and waking, between darkness and dawn. We used to slide into each other a little bit then--but that time is over now. In part because of the nursing and in part because you are becoming a being entirely distinct from your father or myself. This is perhaps when we marvel at you most, when you do something that reminds us of no one else we know, when you are simply being you, a creature who is new to us and whom we love without bounds.

10:20pm

It is 10:20pm. Upstairs, you are coughing. A new cold, though your nose has been running continually since September. We keep a basket full of old, thin cloth diapers at the ready downstairs and swipe at your face whenever you come near.

My colleague died yesterday. He donated his eyes. Today was impossibly sad.

At ECFE you dipped the wheels of a red truck into red paint and then rolled the truck back and forth across a piece of plain white paper.

While you napped, Grandma cleaned our bathroom. She fed you kiwi and Amy's Macaroni and Cheese.

You are coughing still.

I called Michael about a cruise. He explained the difference between the first deck and the fifth.

My writing group came over and we drank wine. After they left, I put much of the uneaten food (snack mix, almonds, crackers) back into boxes.

You are still coughing.

Any time, really, could be the end. Death reminds us of this.

The next day we forget so that we can go on.

Cars and Trucks and Things That Go

Today is gray and chilly. The gray has been a long time coming and, I realized today, walking under the saggy sky, how lucky we have been this fall, not only in terms of temperatures, but in terms of sunlight too. Against the gray sky, the brown, bare branches look so much sadder and more sickly. Against blue sky they look dramatic, dark veins or a brilliant idea.

You did not help my mood today, Thiz. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of this week (i.e. the days when I am in charge), you have refused to nap in the morning. Today I sat, drinking some luke warm coffee, addressing submission envelopes with a hand going slowly shaky from frustration at the high pitched shrieking coming from your room. As though you had been battered and dipped in hot oil. That kind of sound. So finally I brought you downstairs and tried to address the envelopes anyway but you stood next to me, tugging at my thighs, wailing and bounching slightly to emphasize your frustration. Somehow, this was made all the worse my your outfit (my choice) which consisted of overalls and an orange acrylic sweater with geometric patterns in green and white. When Daddy got home he said you looked like an old woman with mom jeans. In times of extreme distress, your cuteness is the main thing you have going for you--and the fact that your cuteness was marred by an old-woman button-front sweater did not help your cause.

Today is rather out of the ordinary, though. I have spent the last week, in fact, talking about how much I love the way this age (14 months!) looks on you. You're generally happy. In the morning, you give Daddy and I each a kiss or hug before pointing toward the doorway of the bedroom and grunting. You love to read Richard Scarry's "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go" and can identify such things as: unicycle, pig family, fire truck, ambulance, tank, Gold Bug, Flossy the Fox, dump truck, pickle truck, pumpkin car, and broom.

Yesterday, as I read "Curious George and the Dump Truck" (a book which you adore and I find to be only vaguely tolerable) I asked, "what sound does Curious George hear outside his window?" You very solemnly replied "qua, qua, qua." The ducks in your head are French, I guess.

You hate, more than anything in the world, to have to SIT DOWN in your car seat or stroller. Each day, we go through the Stages of Sitting: resistance, bargaining, distraction, force, submission, and acceptance. I hate, HATE physically forcing you into these seats, but if I didn't we would never go anywhere. Ever. You always look so sad and defeated once I do get the harness around you, a single tear glistening (Romance novel style) on the top of each cheek.

But mostly, mostly you are affectionate and curious and full of overwhelming excitement about everything. Here is a video (assuming it will load) of what happened when we put sunglasses on you and told you to dance.

To See Feelingly

It is lovely outside today. 62 degrees and sunny. Piles and piles of leaves still stiff enough for you to crunch through. Today you and Daddy and I walked around in the grass behind our house. It's not really our yard, more a wide open stretch of green that connects three different town home divisions. You pulled a flap of bark off a tree and chased a lady bug over the back of your hand. Across the yard, in a town home with big, low, windows, another one-year old girl pressed her face to the glass and waved at you. You toddled over (tripping once in a patch of slick, dry pine needles) and pressed your face to the other side of the glass and put your hand up to her face.

Rich, a colleague of mine at St. Olaf, has cancer. His liver is failing and on Friday he decided to enter home hospice care. This Friday also would have been his daughter's 21st birthday. She died years ago, before I moved to Northfield or met your father or had you. Rich's wife, Karen, also teaches in the English department. Last Tuesday she offered to hold you while I tried to scribble in ovals on my voting ballot. She is always dressed to the nines. Always asks how I am. Runs miles with a running group every weekend. She is Catholic. She believes then, theoretically, in God, though I have no idea what she believes right now. I don't know what I would believe if I lost a child and then had to face my husband entering hospice care.

I have been something of an insomniac as of late. I lie awake thinking about Rich and Karen or about cancer in my own bones. I wonder if I've locked the door and I try to decide what I will wear the next day. I hear you cough in your crib and imagine you've stopped breathing. And my rational side keeps my body from getting up to check, but my mind doesn't stop, continues to play out the scene, finding your blue body, calling 911, calling my mother, finding the insurance card. What else would I take to the hospital? What would the realization of your death feel like? What would it be to have my mind simply freeze? I go on and on like this, not sleeping, filled with worry. Then thinking about God keeping track of the sparrows and the lilies being clothed and all that shit. Then I lie on my back and try to take deep breaths. I imagine the color lavender filling up my body. Then I remember that my cell phone probably needs to be charged.

Daddy and I watched King Lear last night. The version with Ian McKellen. Sir Ian was talking about the play, about the character of Lear in an interview after the movie. The play doesn't have a back story, he said, so I had to invent some things about King Lear. I decided that he'd been married twice. The first marriage produced Regan and Gonneril and ended--I don't know exactly--in divorce or the wife getting run over by a carriage, something like that. The second marriage was the love of his life. But that wife died giving birth to Cordelia. And so Lear raised Cordelia on his own. This is why they are so very close.

Then he talked about Lear's relationship to the gods. This extreme devotion to them at the beginning, the way he calls on them to curse his daughters, and the progression, throughout the play, to a kind of unbelief. A reliance instead on human relationships--friendship, love, filial connection (not obligation) to understand the truth of human existence.

I hadn't noticed this shift before, somehow, though I've now read the play a dozen times. I realize, though, that this is perhaps what makes it so devastatingly sad to me. That truth and love are knit up with unbelief, that human and divine are never reconciled, that they spiral away from each other and we are left only with what mortals can offer--jealousy and resentment and greed and deeply flawed offerings of love.

Writing well, acting well, can be a powerful practice in empathy. I have been trying to think about what it means to be Rich right now, what it means to be Karen. To really enter their fear and grief and pain. And I can't. They are, of course, not characters to be inhabited, but still I want to understand, want to know so I can share this walk in some small way. But I feel wooden, feel like if I let myself really imagine that, I would crumble. You are still so new. Your absence would be an abyss that I don't know that I could recover from.

Maybe this is why I practice death and disaster in my head every night. And why I want to remember today and every day. Your small finger pointing to the pickle car in "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go," my cheek pressed to your temple so that I can smell, slightly, the banana and egg you had for lunch. The accumulation of detail as a defense against death. Or so you can remember me when I go.

Om

I went away from you this last weekend, Thiz. I went all the way to Iowa and stared at balding trees in a valley low and sweet. Grandma Ricki and I got into the car with our clothes and our books and our computers and our coffee, directions scrawled onto the back side of an envelope and winter coats thrown on the back seat just in case. We drove through fields still green and fields with the corn shorn down to stiff, pencil-sized stubs. We drove a road that told us to slow down to 45 and then 30 when we passed through a town, we drove on a road mostly dark and sound and straight. We spent the night in the Country Inn. There was a fake fire in the lobby and a cookie jar with cookies crisp enough to leave a Hansel and Gretel trail on our shirtfronts. I spread out like a starfish in my very own hotel bed. We talked to other writers and drank wine and sat facing a stage, our bags leaning against our legs.

At home, I am told, you did absolutely entirely just fine. You fed Daddy Cheerios in bed at 6:30am and went trick-or-treating through the dorms in your dragon costume; you visited Carsten and slept and woke and slept again. You sat in your father's lap and read Curious George and the Dump Truck and you nibbled on crayons and then spit the waxy bits onto the collar of your shirt. You ran your peanut butter fingers through your hair and chased bubbles in the tub. And when I got home, you did not look at me with surprise or relief or joy. It was just me again.

And I have to be honest here and say that although I thought about you all the time, I didn't miss you in the way I thought I would. I was both ready to come home and ready to stay longer.

On Sunday afternoon, Grandma Ricki and I took you on a walk through the grasslands. The grass stands twice as high as you, brown or golden depending on the weight of the sun. You were wrapped in a pink winter coat, hat and tennis shoes and mittens. I caught a grasshopper and held it out to you on the finger of my black glove. It hopped away and I retrieved it again. Then we walked a while longer. It was a little bit hard, I admit, to suddenly be back in this life, the one with the baby and the husband, the one with burnt out light bulbs and grilled cheese for dinner and my black boots still in my open suitcase, unpacked.

I had ideas, there in Iowa, that already I've forgotten.

You learned to say "come" while I was away. "Om, om, om." And though I know this mostly has to do with Luxy, I like to think you learned the word you needed to say to bring me back to you again.