A Burst of Warmth

Before any 5K or 10K or marathon or half-marathon, as the runners stretch or jog in place or tuck their hands below their armpits (if it's cold) or breathe slowly with half-shut lids or titter anxiously in front of the port-a-potties, there are always one or two runners who run back and forth beside the huddled mass, raising their knees as they jog so that they look like marionettes whose handlers got a little generous with the gin.

If one of these runners were placed into a pink fleece sleeper and then sized down to 24 inches, and then set horizontally instead of vertically, this would be you.

I think this metaphor got away from me. What I mean to say is that you have started kicking, rather furiously, as though you are on a stair master turned up to eleven (That was a reference to a movie called Spinal Tap. You should probably stop reading and go and watch that movie now. Followed by Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show.)

You have also become a fan of the exersaucer, which is really just a desk for babies. Today, while you sat in it, I crawled back and forth behind the couch. I would peer out from behind one side and call your name until your eyes caught me, and you recognized me, and you smiled. Then I would crawl to the other side and we would repeat the process.

Also today: a burst of warmth. And so: a walk. We stopped often to look at dark twigs against the snow.

Also today: celery and plantain chips and chocolate chip muffins at Emily's house.

For dinner: pork chops dipped in a mixture of mayo/mustard/fennel seed/lemon zest. And potatoes drizzled with olive oil laced with garlic, parsley, and red chili flakes.

Now: a glass of white wine and The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver's new novel.

You: asleep.

Downstairs: Your father, still in his work clothes, hunched over his computer. NPR playing and in the kitchen, pork chop bones on navy blue plates.

Banal and Proud of It

Today I read a review of Michael Chabon's new chronicle of fatherhood, Manhood for Amateurs. The reviewer, John Rodwan, Jr., was not particularly kind to Chabon:

"Perhaps another English poet better captures the problem with Chabon. When he writes, in a poem about how parents damage children, “don’t have any kids yourself,” Philip Larkin gives general advice, applicable to anyone. But Chabon’s essays suggest it has special relevance for writers, since having children evidently can reduce a witty and clever novelist into someone who finds the unexceptional mesmerizing and the most faded clichés vivid, someone who relentlessly ponders the everyday parental concerns that are wearyingly banal to everyone else – someone, in other words, who assumes others find his family as interesting as he does (always a fatal assumption)." (from open Letters Monthly)

These assessments did not sit well with me. In part, this is because I know I am guilty of the same thing. This blog is for you, of course, an audience who hopefully will (someday) find the banal details of your childhood interesting. But it is also for me, as I try to learn how to jump the wake on the twin water skis of motherhood and writerhood; and let me tell you, it is no easy feat.

I don't usually write nonfiction and I don't write about myself especially. In poems, the speaker and I are usually half a world and three shots of tequila away from one another. I love persona poems because they announce to the reader, in clear and patient terms, that the writer is definitely not the I. And why, why do I avoid being myself when I write? There are many reasons. First and foremost, the writing generally turns to crap as soon as I let myself (as myself) come waltzing through the door. I no longer have any sense of which details are pointed, telling, necessary and which are just there because they are there, uninvented, in my memory. If I were to render the story of today into a confessional poem entitled "Mommy Had a Crabby Sunday," would the red velvet bow on your sleeper be a revealing detail or a boring detail? I don't know. I only know that it was there.

It's also difficult to tell whether a nonfiction piece has emotional resonance because of the writing or because it happened to me and so I vividly remember just how lonely I felt when the Navy Seal turned his back to me and would not touch my bare skin after sex. I wrote a lot of confessional poems as a young adult and thought they were exceptionally moving. And they were. To me. Not so much to others.

So now I live on the other side of things. Convinced I am boring and have nothing to say, I write to inhabit the skins of prostitutes and beet farmers and apostles, people who might prove to be vivid and exceptional.

Of course, at some level, the writer is always in the character or persona. There is no total separation; sometimes, there is not nearly as much as the writer would like to believe. I like the unknown. I like not knowing the way a poem will end, how it will turn, what image will scoot to center stage. I like discovering who a character is, like watching her reach for the shell encrusted knife or the tumbler with purple wax around the rim; I like watching him doggy paddle across the pool, keeping the red curls of a clown wig just barely out of the water. I like the unexpected unfolding always before me. When I write something "true," nothing miraculous occurs.

Next semester, I will tell my students that the surprise is in the revelation, in the discovering meaning where you thought there was none or discovering less meaning where you thought there was a gold nugget of insight.

The review bothered me because I feel the faded cliches and the banality here, too; I know I am guilty. But there is something about parenthood that makes me want to utter these cliches, that makes me want to share the most banal details.

To be a parent is, in part, to lose perspective entirely. It is to let bias consume you.

Thisbe, you are the most perfect creature on the earth. I believe this with the entirety of my being. And the fact that Michael Chabon or I (not that Michael Chabon and I have anything in common except, apparently, children) cannot write about our children with needle-nosed accuracy is part of the characters we have become. The banality and cliches are part of the truth.

The Lady with the Ermine Coat

Your fever broke. Of course it did. And so yesterday was filled with gingerbread cake and half filled glasses of Diet Coke and car seats squatting along the hallway. Our living room area is small (4 by 6) but the world outside is still cold and so yesterday brought 6 other mamas and 7 other kiddos into the space; tripping, spilling, rolling on one another, but all of us glad to be cozy and not alone.

You love to stand, with support of course; you love to stiffen and thrust your face forward, toward whomever is holding you. Sitting, you remind me of the stump of a tree. If I take my hands away, you can sometimes balance for five or six seconds before beginning your slow fall back to earth. You don't yet have the instinct to protect yourself from the fall, you don't reach out your hands or turn in the direction of the motion. You believe you will be caught. Or, you don't know you are in danger.

Still, it is cold.

You have invented a new sound. I call it radiator whine. Or mild discontent. Or woman-with-ermine-coat-and-leather-handbag-is-told-she-must-walk-the-twenty-flights-to-her-penthouse.

While I broke eggs into a glass bowl for the gingerbread cake, you held onto the wire strands of a whisk.

Last night, I drank my first gin and tonic from a tall blue glass. My first since becoming pregnant with you.

During sex, I still feel you at the edges of my consciousness, still cannot help thinking of how you emerged from me, through me. My body still does not entirely belong to me.

Yesterday, it occurred to me that one day you will no longer need to nurse. Such an obvious fact, such a snag in my throat.

It is 1pm on a Friday afternoon. Your father is done teaching for the week. We are sitting side by side on the couch, laptops open on our laps, Luxy curled at our feet. Upstairs, you are crying in fits and starts. We raise our eyebrows at one another every few minutes, look at the clock, look back at our computers. One of us will go to you eventually.

Fever

12 pounds, 10 ounces; 24 1/4 inches

And a fever. 102.4
Your very first fever. And I am a wreck. A whale full of worry. It is different, this worry, than all the other worries. It is as though I have put on a new garment. The worry just sits heavy on me, wet-sweater like, and does not leave.

You are sleeping in your crib right now. All I can think, every other minute, is that maybe your fever has worsened, maybe you are having epileptic fits, maybe you have died. And so every fifteen minutes I go and check on you.

I walk into the room and over to the side of your crib. I look at your bright red cheeks where the fever likes to settle. I look at your blue sleeper and hold myself very still to see if I can see your chest rising and falling. Usually I can't. So then I look at your throat, where a tiny patch of soft skin flutters with your heartbeat. I feel relieved. For about ten seconds. Then I look at your cheeks again and try to determine whether they have grown more flushed since the last time I checked on you.

The fever could be a result of the vaccinations. Or it could be a little virus you picked up AT THE CLINIC yesterday. If the on call doctor would call me back, then maybe I would know.

I'm sorry I don't have much more to give you today, Thisbe. It's hard to be creative or interesting or coherent. I am too worried. I will probably play Tetris for the next six hours. Because I can rotate the little blocks and worry at the same time.

Note: In the picture above, you do not have a fever. But that's a little bit what you look like today. Except your cheeks are five shades redder.

Just a Monday

The picture above is not from yesterday or today. It is from the day after Christmas when you played duets with Grandma Gail for a long, long time. You are fascinated by music; oftentimes, your father can make you stop fussing just by singing "Wade in the Water" or "Nap Time for Thisbe." I imagine the ivory also felt good, cool and smooth below your fingers.

Today, the cold continues, but you are cheerier and this helps.

Yesterday, Ricki and I walked you around the track at Tostrud. You hung in the Bjorn, stiffening and leaning forward as the runners passed us, as though you wanted to join in the race.

For dinner: spare ribs and green bean casserole and small yellow potatoes, boiled and buttered and salted.

Then I clipped the skin of your left thumb. You screamed of course, one of your first real pains, while I blotted the wound with a washrag. Smudge of blood. Smudge of blood. Smudge of blood.

You drank 7 ounces of milk from a big bottle with a purple ring on top. Then you slept for 12 hours straight.

Only I woke, with the nightmare I always have, that you are lost in the comforter around me, that I have forgotten to tuck you back into your crib, that I have smothered you instead.

Your cheeks are redder, rounder, they hang a little off the sides of your face. The swell of your belly slims to a tiny waist, often marked with red splotches from the tight of your diaper.

On a white scrap of paper on the coffee table, a list of questions to ask Dr. Ripley today: What are the tiny yellow discolorations on the inside tips of Thisbe's eyebrows? Should we still be swaddling her? Would it be OK to take her into a chlorinated pool?

Secretly, the answer I hope for: Your daughter is the most perfect child I have ever seen. You are excellent parents.

In the Bleak Midwinter

-26.

It seems we are on the underside of things. The arctic belowness, the cold howl under the stairs. We should have fangs. We should have special powers against frigid bigness and bone cutting sun. If the sound of a saw blade on an armored car were translated into a temperature it would be this. No meal is warm enough. No sound quite calms.

You are in a monkey suit. Four month crankiness trailing its muddy cape into today. Last night, between breasts, you screamed while I changed you. The room was dim, perhaps you could not find my face. Perhaps you were teetering between dream and truth and finding the humidifier's air too cool and real.

There is a barista here who claims he likes every kind of weather. "Even this?" I said to him darkly today.

He swirled a leaf into my latte's foam. "Yep. I get to wear my boots," he said, raising his leg to show me, "and my other cold weather gear."

This is the kind of attitude it would be good for a mother to have. One who, given lemons, is already grating their zest onto a cake. I am a mother who, given lemons, complains about their weight and the space they are taking up in the refrigerator.

In church today we sang "In the Bleak Midwinter." The last line never fails to make me teary. But church does that to me often, makes me feel soft and tender even if on the outside I'm all iron and bite. Today we listened to John's birth story, the one that contains no birth. No angels or oxen or swaddling clothes, no mother or father or baby. Just the Word made flesh.

And there are times, my sweet darling daughter, where you are words made flesh for us, too. Words like joy and grace and love. And I am being sentimental here, I know, but it is true. You are the embodiment of the abstract for me, the imagined made real, hope made palpable.

You poop and you cry and you spit tiny chunks of milk. And Jesus did too. And so the Word became complex and unpredictable; smelly and staining; uncomfortable and unrelenting. Humbled and humbling.

Winter Weather Meltdown

-25 degrees this morning. No wind. In the Honda, the gear shift and steering wheel were stiff, breakable. Frost frayed across the windshield, frost like dandruff across my down coat and corduroyed knees, frost sprinkled across the rear view mirror.

At the end of the street, a truck left a trail of exhaust that hung in the air long after the truck itself disappeared. At the coffee shop, the cold was a dry-ice mist around the boots of all who entered. At home, on the Saran around the back door frame, the cold left an icy column of dashes and dots, winter's DNA.

You are combating the cold with sleep. Your morning nap is approaching three hours now. Zippered into a blue fleece sleep sack, you snooze with a blue star below your chin.

On Christmas Eve, you saw masterpieces from the Louvre: a hand-tooled leather box, a gold tiara, a painting of Jesus carrying the cross. Outside the masterpiece exhibit, you liked the four red, white, and blue letter prints ("L" "O" "V" "E") and the black and white photos, wall sized, of mountain climbers scaling waterfalls of ice. You also enjoyed the Native American textiles: beaded bags and ceremonial moccasins; vests and pants made of soft fur and animal hide.

The truth is that you are cranky and I am cranky. As I put you into the car seat at Peter and Ricki's, you started to scream. "Please stop crying, Thisbe, please stop," I begged and then I started to cry too, the wear of foreign Pack N Plays and metal detectors and interrupted sleep have finally rubbed us raw, the both of us.

When I started to cry, you suddenly quieted, just stared at me from underneath your pink knit hat, blue eyes wide, and watched. Maybe there is a law that says we cannot both cry at the same time. My friend Kristine likes to tell the story of her her very first breakdown. Her husband was away for three days and her six-week-old son would not sleep for more than 45 minutes at a stretch. As she held him, sobbing, one night, she looked down into his lovely face and said "I just don't know if I can do this anymore." And at that moment he smiled his very first smile.

Thisbe, today I imagine you and I as a wrestling team. We are called the Winter Weather Meltdown. My ring name is Blizzard and yours is Ice. We wear silver leotards and glittery blue capes. Your grandmother has painted snowflakes around our eyes. Our teeth chatter incessantly, as a sign of our power; our earlobes have permanent frostbite. I like our boots the best, white leather with fringe running up the back.

The mat is white. The sun is relegated to a single seat. The crowd roars.

We pretend it is not the wind.