November 2, 2009

Your father and I fought this morning. All the while, I bounced you on the exercise ball and you slept.

Before the fighting: a walk through the grasslands behind our row of town homes. The grass is brown and dry and waist-high. There are paths, about the width of a car, plowed through the grass, and it takes about 20 minutes to walk the entire circumference. The park is bordered by Cedar Avenue and the town homes and a yard which houses three angry black canines that I call the dragon dogs. They attacked Luxy once, when she was running off leash, and I will always carry with me the image of her, writhing on her back and whimpering, while they frothed around her. Today, though, Luxy was pleased as punch. Your father threw a purple ball (the size of a small cantaloupe) into the grasses and Luxy would bound after it and then bring it back to us. You were strapped to my chest, your head poking out of your father's down coat, alert and blinking when the sun hit your face directly. And there was sun and blue sky and an old fashioned windmill turning in the yard of the house on the other side of Cedar Avenue.

Then, later, me bouncing you up and down, up and down, while your father stood in the kitchen doorway and raged. Or as close as your father gets to raging which mostly means his voice gets louder and darker and his arm movements larger and jerkier, as though we were suddenly on stage and performing our fight for an audience of thousands. I am much quicker to raise my voice in a fight, and this time all the words went right past your cheek and the conch curl of your ear. And you slept on and I bounced.

This afternoon we read at opposite ends of the same coffee shop. Not out of anger, I think, but out of a need to be in our own space with words and papers and thoughts.

When I left the house, Grandma Ricki was bent over your changing pad (on top of Luxy's kennel) and you were cooing to her. Your mouth widens into smiles and then shrinks back into a tiny "o."

You spend more time pressed to my body than your father does. I kiss the top of your head more and marvel at your skin more. I clean the lint that collects along the life line of your palm and clip your nails stealthily while you sleep. Some of this affection used to be showered on Luxy and some on your father and I think he must feel the absence of my touch more than he lets on. We have been intimate a few times, but half of my hearing and being is always tuned toward you so there is no time for lingering or bottom-of-the-ocean slowness and purposefulness. But I think it is touch more than sex that he misses and though I want to say there is an abundance of affection to go around and that the added doting over you should not mean a lessening of doting over him, the truth is that I do not have enough energy to give both of you what you need and what you deserve. And so our marriage will have to survive for a while on scraps and leftovers. But I think it is better to admit that we are hungry then to pretend that we are corpulent and well fed.

November 1, 2009

At church today I wrote "Kaethe and Thisbe" in red permanent marker on a sticker and then affixed it to the front of the Moby Wrap. Inside, you slept through communion and the prayers and a sermon on Lazarus. "I have two questions for you today," said the new pastor, "Who are you remembering today? and who are you in this story?"

It was All Saints Day and we were instructed to write down the names of those we remembered on a beige slip inside the bulletin. Your father wrote "Lillian" and I wrote "Grandma Dythe" and "John Steven Paul." On the alter, four white roses and four unlit candles paid homage to four Bethel members who died this year. At 8:30am the congregation was a sea of foam-gray heads.

During the adult education time, your father talked about Luther and vocation. There was a metaphor about concentric circles but he also talked about your poop and how last night at 3am he leaned over your Pack N Play and put his pinkie in your mouth to quiet you. When he mentioned your name, people laughed and shifted in their chairs and smiled conspiratorially at one another. I am not sure they understood about Luther's idea of two kingdoms (the second largest of the concentric circles) but they did understand that your father was a new parent, and I think this made them more sympathetic and eager.

I signed up to pray for an 8th grader named Jayden. I don't know her but now I've seen a picture: blond hair pulled back in a thin white headband, smile spread across a wide, round face.

My throat is sore and exhaustion creeps in and out of my body, a slow thief. You slept seven hours in a row last night again...you've had a run of six or seven hours every night for the last five. This means only one night feeding for me. Sometimes I wake up, startled, thinking that I've falled asleep while nursing and that you are somewhere beside me, suffocating amongst the blankets.

Your daddy and I walk past a retirement community on the way to church. There is a human-made pond surrounded by bark chips colored to look like redwood. Amongst the fake redwood chips are pockets of flowers. A sidewalk meanders by the pond and beside the sidewalk, at various locations, are exercise stations. Each station has a bar or bench and instructions written on a plastic sign that explain how to do a simple exercise using the equipment. These are nice things, these attempts at beauty and community and health, but they make me sad somehow, as though we have forgotten the natural way to do these things and had to re-remember and re-invent them ourselves.

October 31, 2009

The nurse yesterday was pale and overweight, hair pulled into a bun, scrub shirt falling around her like a tent. She turned you so that you were laying along the width of the examining table and folded your legs (from the knees down) over the edge of the table. With her stomach she held your legs firmly in place while her hands busied themselves over the vials and the needles. Your father and I bent over your screaming red face and tried to calm you. The circular beige bandages cover almost half of your thigh.

Then Amy placed you belly down on the table and you pushed yourself over onto your back. Amy startled backward a little, surprised and then laughing. "You're not supposed to be that strong yet!" she told you.

The sky is gray today but not uniformly gray. The clouds are bands of gray and between them lighter patches of white let a gauzed version of the sun through.

Carol laid on her back on the couch this morning with you on her chest. She pushed her glasses down to the tip of her nose and peered over them at you. You shook your head back and forth, rooting into her blouse. Alvin bought "Millions of Cats" for you at the bookshop where he works. He sat on the edge of the couch, elbows on knees, and talked about the memoir he is writing about Yugoslavia.

Here at Blue Monday I am reading David Foster Wallace's essay "Ticket to the Fair," making notes about declarative sentences and how to be funny without being condescending. Out the window in front of me a black lamppost sans hanging flower basket, a tree with half of its green leaves still shivering, the haunch of a dun colored brick building, and on the haunch three windows (two dark, one lit) and bricks where a fourth window should be. What room lives there, behind those bricks? I am late and should be home already. Sometimes it's hard to go.

October 28, 2009

Great-Grandma Judy, age 87, holds you close to the robins stitched into her sweater and bounces your tears away on the exercise ball.

Grandma Gail, dressed in yellow corduroy pants, sweater, and fleece (to keep out the cold) touches your cheek with her finger. On the living room couch, you stretched beside her, she puts in one contact, squints at you, puts in the other, then touches your cheek again, tiny tears of contact solution in the arcs below her eyes.

Grandpa Michael sits at the dining room table, glass of lemon soda and caramel roll before him, and reads an old "Classic Toy Trains" magazine.

Upstairs, the sound of a razor whizzing over your father's face. You kept him awake last night for half an hour, not with your sobs but with your smiles. It is impossible to walk away from those smiles, even at 2:30am. Then, after half an hour, you kept him awake for another hour with your fussing.

I told your birth story to a room full of new mothers last night. My turn came just after a woman whose birth experience caused her post traumatic stress and dreams of cutting and blood. I hope we can end on a note of joy, she said, turning to me. And so we did. Your genesis story, Thisbe, is filled with humor and light.

Mia and Nico had their baby today. Her name is Lucy. I hope you will get to meet her one day.

October 27, 2009

Is it possible to write in a form that is both immersed and distant, farseeing and swallowed? I am thinking now that this is what women have been attempting in the last decades. Not simply to enter the world of masculine discourse but to transform it with another kind of knowledge.
--from The Red Shoes by Susan Griffin

I think of a stone with a thumb print worried into it, of a piece of green beach glass, the edges worn soft. I think of the divots trod into the the center of a marbles staircase, of mattresses that retain the press of the sleeping one's spine, long after the person has left the bed.

My beliefs and practices, my own sense of the severe line between the public and the private are similarly worn into me. I take containers of old milk, hummus, half and half, beans and rice, stew meat, plastic bags filled with a slice of cantaloupe or head of lettuce or onion, and I dump all these things into a larger white garbage bag and twist tie it shut and drop it into the maroon garbage can in the garage--all because your grandparents, my in-laws, arrive today and I do not want them to see what has gone bad inside our house.

As you grow, we keep trying to get you to make distinctions: day vs. night, mommy vs. daddy, sleep vs. wakefulness. Similarly, I want to be able to preen you into good behavior for the arrival of these relatives. I have already dressed you in a clean onesie and a sleeper with lavender and pink flowers knit together at the breastbone. When they walk in the door I want you alert and cooing and smiling. And partly this is because I want to show you off, I want them to see immediately how perfect you are. But partly it is because I am already trying to teach you a public persona: this is how you smile big when the in-laws arrive, this is how you cover your breast out of modesty, this is how you tie a scarf around your neck so you will be taken more seriously.

But you don't know the difference yet between public and private and though you will need to figure out this division to succeed in the world, part of me is jealous that you still exist in a world where "should" is never attached to the way that you behave.

This morning I walked by where you lay in the Moses basket, your eyes flickering open and shut. You focused on me, your eyes widened, you shrieked, you smiled. The sunlight fell across your face while you nursed, turning your skin pale and translucent. You are in love with light; at every opportunity you crane your neck backward to track the glowing bulbs or the reflection of the bulbs on the painting's glass.

October 26, 2009

Many people are naming their babies Henry. Sharma, Sarah, and Abbie all named their babies Henry. At Katie's motherhood celebration last night: a baby Henry. Today at Baby talk: a baby Henry. By the time you are grown you will have to date only men named Henry. And we will have to call them all Henry because Hank sounds like the name of a man who tucks a blue kerchief into his breast pocket and has black specks beneath his fingernails. Don't say I didn't warn you.

It was a busy weekend. We ate buttered bread and salami at the Cassons, hennaed Katie's belly into a radiating flower, wet our pant cuffs on a walk through the natural lands, and finally achieved a few moments of intimacy in the bedroom. You interrupted the intimacy halfway through, of course, and so we turned on the television to try to calm your sputtering fuss sounds. The only channels that did any good were two cable access stations, one broadcasting the Bethel church service we missed last Sunday and the other broadcasting octogenarians square dancing. Your father thought one of the square dancing women was dressed as a pumpkin for Halloween but on closer examination we found she was just fat. Before you were born there were spontaneous moments of grasping on the couch, there were foreign films we watched curled naked together in bed, there were fantasies about buxom brunettes and fitting room threesomes whispered into one another's ears in throaty voices. Now the sex happens in the midst of communion, square dancing, and baby sobs. And in the midst of our laughter. And I thank God for that.

October 24, 2009

Last night, around 10pm, you woke a little from your slumber and started to fuss. Not the full throaty cries of pure anguish but the chortles of dissatisfaction that often build up into a full force fuss. So I got out of bed and walked over to where you lay (in the Moses basket in the Pack N Play) and stood next to you. Your eyes had the look of someone who has been squinting through Venetian blinds too long, but you saw me. And you looked. And you grew quiet. And then slowly, slowly, you closed your eyes again. And you slept. And my heart broke.

To know that it is no longer just my breast that interests you, but my whole being, this whole human self, that it can bring comfort to you, dressed in fleece pants and an old marathon shirt, without speaking or touching you, just the sight of me, oh Thisbe, it broke my heart.

Meanwhile, the world is dying. Storms where there should be drought and drought where there should be storms. Leaves falling green before they're ready. Warmed water slowly licking back the ice. Snow dusting the pumpkins long before carving. Most of the time, I don't think about it. Not until it touches me. This is a horrible way to be. Your great-uncle Paul has dedicated all his time and energy to ending climate change. Well, that and frisbee-related activities. Anyway, today I contributed 3.5 lines of poetry to a project that is trying to post lines from 350 writers by midnight tonight (because today is the International Day of Climate Action). Here's what I wrote:

when you say body of water

you mean containment, here

we mean the way the groaning

breaks.

Today is sunny and the red leaves are wet. Luxy happy bounding through the tall brown grass, seeking pheasants to flush. You, pressed to me below Daddy's down coat, and he and me walking, not touching, but no callouses in the air between us.