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Thomas: ”Is it school today?”
Me: “Yes. And then violin lessons. And then the Millers for dinner.”
Thomas sighs.
We go about getting on clothes. Too tight. Too scratchy. Too cold. Off on on off. Stuck on his big noggin — when he was a baby and height and weight were in the 20th percentile, his head was always off the chart.
Bea stays curled up until the last possible moment, and then grumbles that she doesn’t have any clean sweat pants. She hates jeans.
“Bea, brush your hair.”
At the table, Bea keeps working on her Interesting Word List for English class. She eats her bagel in little bits. Ignores me.
Thomas is on the sofa with his Lambie. He hollers: ”Snuggle!!” (That means: Mama, get over here NOW and hold me.”
“I’m busy getting everything ready for everybody. In a minute.”
I call out the school lunch menu for the week. They get to choose one lunch. Invariably, they choose pizza. This week it falls on Friday, Alex’s one day of the week to make lunch for them. Damn.
“Bea, brush your hair!”
Bea ignores me. Says instead: ”We have ITBS today. I’m scared.”
“Honey, it’s a test. Sadly, you’ll take many many tests in your life, many that really don’t matter all that much. But perhaps the best thing you can learn from this is how to take a test and how to be comfortable doing it.”
She looks at me like I’m half nuts, half sage. Too much information? Not enough? Ah, the tightrope walk of parenting.
Thomas: ”Mama, where are you?”
Me: ”Um, right here. About 5-feet away from you.”
“SNUGGLE!”
I stop. We snuggle. He burrows into my shoulder. Bea comes over, sticky bagel in hand and nudges into the other side of me. We sit like that in silence for a minute or two. Then Mama Brain checks the time on her cell phone. It’s 8:19. The first bell is in a minute. I call Alex to see where the heck he is, while also encouraging the kids to the door. As the phone rings, I hear Bea, “Daddy’s here!”
He stands in the doorway, letting in the cold air as I scramble to find gloves and get the backpacks zipped. “Just come in and help, please!” I implore.
I scrunch down over Thomas’ shoes, trying to buckle them.
Alex barks: ”Thomas, you know how to put on your own shoes.” (I hate it when he barks. He says it’s my Midwesterness, that everyone on the East Coast talks like this.)
Thomas, as though it were a question and not the rebuke I hear, says, “Yeah.”
“Well, do it.”
I now feel foolish sitting on the floor over his feet. It’s as much a rebuke of me as it is of Thomas.
I get up and zip Bea’s coat which sticks and which Alex is standing there ignoring. He snaps at her and at Thomas again: ”Hurry up guys!”
“I really don’t appreciate you bringing this energy into the house,” I say, oddly aware of the fact that I’m wearing a thin nightshirt and no bra and he’s fully dressed, looking like a grown-up.
“I’m just trying to help get everyone going.”
“It would have been more helpful if you’d been here ten minutes ago.”
Bea: ”Yeah, dad. She has a good point.”
Ah, I love my daughter – with her hair that looks like a bird’s nest and cream cheese smeared on her cheeks. She sees it all.
…that’s what my friend said to me while we drove through Minneapolis with our kids in the backseat. I’ve known D. since we were 20-years old. Now we’re both writers and in somewhat parallel situations as writers who stay at home with our kids. But his wife brings home a good paycheck and he salted a lot away during a decade in Hollywood as a screenwriter. I’m trying out the idea of moving to the Twin Cities during this trip but having a hard time figuring out just how or what would actually get me up here. Other than a leap of faith. I’ve taken a lot of those in my life, but I don’t have another in me at the moment.
“You’ll just have to find me some wonderful man, so I can move here to be with him,” I muse to D.
“You don’t want that,” he says a bit sharply.
“How do you know?” I ask, wondering just what it is I do want.
“Don’t you just want to be alone?” D more says than asks.
“Some days yes. Some days no.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” he says. “I would love to be alone. I mean, minus the kid,” he nods to the backseat where his son is chirping about Pokemon with my son. This dark haired, big-eyed boy is clearly his favorite person in the world. As for his wife, they are in a detante. Things between them could be worse, but they could definitely be better. The two of them have begrudgingly chosen togetherness, but D, it’s apparent, dreams of solo-ness.
We whiz home because D has invited friends over for cocktails at my insistence. I’m hungry to meet new people, to feel part of an urban groove. She’s an artist who does large-scale installations and he has some lucrative writing assignments that I want to hear about. I’m imagining a slightly boozy, high-brow, funny talk.
Jack and Sal pull up in their mini-van with two kids. They’re all apologies because they only have a short window of time before they have to leave to take the boys to baseball games. The red wine goes untouched because Sal is detoxing. So much for the urban groove. But he is worth the whole visit. He is lovely and I am smitten. I imagine her accidentally slipping off a ladder while working on an installation and me moving up to Minneapolis to be with him following an appropriate grieving process. His mouth is perfect…
My son comes into the room looking for his stuffed animal and I snap out of my reverie.
Last night, during a yoga class, I nearly touched the ankle of the man in front of me during one pose. He wasn’t an especially appealing person, I just can’t remember the last time I was that close to a naked male ankle.
There may be nothing wrong with being alone – and certainly being around the subtle cat fight of this particular marriage is making me see its benefits – but I’d take a little togetherness of a certain ilk. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Bea in the bathtub playing a game with multiple characters: ”No, no, silly; he’s not my daddy. He’s my mommy’s friend.”
Bea while reading a variation of Cinderella before bed, looking truly concerned: ”You won’t let a step mommy turn me into a servant, will you?”
Thomas cuddling with me after school and laughing: “I’m your daddy!”
Me, smiling but still wanting to remind his of his grandfather: ”No, my daddy – your grandpa – passed away. Remember?”
Thomas: “Yes, but I’m your daddy now.”
Thomas to Bea: ”When we get married, do you promise we’ll stay married?”
Bea: “Of course. You’re my brother forever.”
I am not wracked with guilt about the effect of divorce on my kids. Maybe that’s selfish or short sighted of me, but I’m also so aware of how absent their dad is that it just doesn’t seem all that different than if we’d stayed together. It does strike me sometimes – and with a thud – that their concept of marriage and long-term relationships will always be different from mine. My parents were married for forty years, separated only by my dad’s death. They rarely fought. They were friends (though I’m not sure if they were really lovers). My concept of marriage as a partnership that lasted was formed by watching them. And now my kids’ will mainly know their parents as apart, not married. Alex and I were married 15 years, and yet in our children’s memories, we’ll be mainly unmarried. Thomas was only two when Alex started going to grad school out of state. He was five when he learned his parents were divorcing, and he’ll be 6 1/2 by the time it’s actually legal – an event he hopefully will hardly know about, as any disruption is hopefully done for him. What will “marriage” mean to him when he’s 16? 25? 45?
Alex called from Mombasa just now. He’s safe. He’s broke. I’m broke. We compared notes on where future funds might come from. We went through our taxes. I have to get everything together and I didn’t know where all of the previous year’s info islocated. (Organization has never been our thing.) I asked him where the radon switch is – I’d been down in the basement looking for it yesterday to no avail – and also if he could remember the whereabouts of Thomas’ rocket, which Thomas suddenly wants – no, needs. All of this was being shouted across oceans and continents, through waves of static – shchesscheeeeeessccheeeeee. This domestic stuff, the ongoing low-level background noise of a life that’s intertwined, this noise will never really end so long as we share our kids, which means forever.
It’s been raining for about 24-hours straight and I suddenly feel like I’m back in Seattle on some lazy morning when Alex and I would go out for breakfast and noodle around the Market or go to a movie. Ah, all the movies….
I started craving Greg Brown’s song All Day Rain. Greg actually lives a few blocks over, and I’ve been listening to his music most of my life, but it meant the most to me when I was in Seattle and his songs about thunderstorms and little Iowa towns brought me home. They made me ache. We played his song “This Band of Gold” at our wedding and bought most of his CDs together.
Alex put all of the music he wanted on his iPod before he took off. “You can have the CDs,” he told me. I have no idea if he copied any of the Greg Brown. But now I have the words and the memories. I love this music. I don’t want to get rid of it, but god, it makes my heart ache with a melancholy for what was and a longing … to be held, to be cared about, to not be alone.
I’m cleaning my kitchen pantry as I listen. The flour moths have returned with a vengeance and I decided to be proactive. There’s laundry going in both machines, and muffins in the oven. But my heart is full of rain.
Bea has been having trouble sleeping. She’s never been great at it, but lately she’s become so anxious about it that she’s often awake at 11 or even midnight. We went to talk to a friend who is a therapist about the problem. Our friend went through the usuals: a bedtime routine, the bed as a cozy spot, visualizations for self calming. We’d heard it before, and though Bea earnestly listened, trying to be good, I could tell she was disappointed that the therapist wasn’t going to give her a silver bullet, a surefire trick. But then, unbeknownst even to the therapist, she did.
“What do you every night? Maybe not right away, but eventually,” our friend asked.
Bea looks stumped for a second, then made a guess: “Sleep?”
“Yes. Has there ever been a night when you didn’t sleep?”
Bea nodded no and I noticed a light coming on behind her eyes, a light that simultaneously indicated that the idea was simplistic and yet very true.
Three nights have gone by since and it’s worked like a charm. Each night, Bea says, “I am a good sleeper. I am a good sleeper. Every night, I fall asleep.” And by-golly, she does it! Just like that. She’s recalibrated her relationship to sleep.
There’s a lot of recalibration going on in the world right now. Altering perception. Seeing gray where before there was only black. Feeling thankful where previously you felt presumption or even ignorance. A friend’s husband came home from work tonight in a much better mood than when he’d left that morning. A lecturer at the local college, he’d expected to be laid off today, but instead discovered that he and his colleagues would have to teach an extra class. For the time being, their jobs are safe. Though I know the same job has struck him as a ball and chain at other times, today it is a blessing.
I got a notice that one of the several jobs I’ve applied for is on hold until spring due to the employer’s financial situation. But a book project is suddenly heating up and I’ll be plenty busy through spring, even if some of the payment won’t come until later. Still, I have just enough money to get me through. So I’ll recalibrate and see it as a good thing – time to finish a project that has the potential to be fulfilling.
The snow is starting to melt. This weekend when it gets near 50-degrees, the patches of mud and the months-old dog poop will suddenly be an aesthete’s nightmare. But there will also be the tiniest whiff of spring in the air. The sun is starting to feel a bit closer, a little more intense. It’s a reminder that winter will end, and so much of what appears to be frozen or ugly will warm up to blossom and nourish us again.
