10 Months
Dear Bean,
You are starting to have a will of your own and it is amazing to watch you attempt to express yourself—your joy, your contentment, your frustration. You’ve started showing both compassion towards others and determination to do things your own way. You love to share now. You also love to go where you are not allowed. You smile wide, wide, wide when we dance, and at night when we lie down together, you sing with me as I lull you to sleep.
This month you’re doing big-kid things like sitting and looking through board books for ten or fifteen minutes all on your own, with quiet interest. You’re eating macaroni and cheese, reaching for each noodle with your perfect pincer grasp, and drinking water from a cup. You sing for milk when you want to nurse, and wave “hi” when we do. Suddenly, your babbling has increased ten-fold. Each day you explore new sounds. And you can point to things you know: spoon, book, your Daddy, the cats. (You love the cats and pester them mercilessly. One day, they’ll expect payback. Remember this.)
I watch you now and swallow hard—your first year is almost finished. Never before has time gone by so quickly for me: months wash by in the span of a giggle. And yet, never before has time gone so slowly: when you’re fighting sleep and I haven’t had enough, those moments stretch out forever, rubbing every nerve, and I can’t wait for them to be over.
So now you’re ten months old and almost walking—balancing recklessly in the middle of the room for brief moments. Today with your little friend Bella, you kept picking up your toys and handing them to her. You smiled at each other in wonder that you are both small people, and were amazingly tolerant of the fact that each of you has about as much muscle control as a stroke victim, and as much eagerness as a Labrador retriever.
Being your mama is everything like I imagined, and nothing like it. I came from a family of women who have made hard choices about the timing of their children: either choosing to have them, or choosing not to, and before you came I struggled with these choices too. Around me my peers were trying to shape the building blocks of their careers, and it was often said in passing: to have a baby would be the end of independence. Before I had you, I believed that. Even during my pregnancy I wondered, worried. I was reluctant to become a mother. I worked up until the last minute, and then, all of a sudden after twenty four hours of labor, you were there and you fit. Perfectly.
I want you to know that after we sigh with relief having put you to bed at the end of a long day, your Daddy and I then spend another ten minutes talking about how amazing, and silly, and wonderful you are. Tonight, for example, you went to bed early because you missed part of both of your naps and were literally falling apart at the seams. After I finally got your little body to unwind, shushing you a hundred times, I tiptoed out and told Daddy what you did to the slice of orange I gave you earlier.
It was too cold, so when you bit into it, it surprised you and you made an awful face and your whole body shuddered. Then you threw it on the floor, and ROARED at it. You kicked it and roared some more. Then you picked it up, and threw it down again, and roared a little more.
You can count on us laughing about the silly and ridiculous things you do for a good long while. But you can also count on us to be proud. So proud. Like when you put the wooden puzzle pieces into the correct slots tonight after Daddy showed you how. Each time you slipped the piece into it’s place, we clapped, and grinned at each other above your head in wonderment and glee. We think you’re pretty darn incredible, kiddo.
Love,
Mama
Looking for the right words
Tonight at the writing workshop I try to untangle a little more of the story I am attempting to put down in ink. The people I write with are an mismatched, well read, easily humored crowd who all have day jobs. We sit around eating pretzels, discussing the virtues of present tense. They ask me about my dad.
I try to explain how my relationship with my father, who died nearly four years ago, has been evolving in a one-sided way since then. Sometimes it’s hard to locate him in my memory, except in freeze frame images. Snapshots. Mostly, I can’t help looking through the lens of the present: dissecting who he was, his beliefs and flaws. I know that then, when we were in our relationship, I couldn’t see outside of it. I know I didn’t analyze his beliefs in the way I do now, measuring them against my own. The seam between my thoughts and his was often blurry. I loved his way of thinking. His persistent, disciplined way of examining the spiritual world through meditation and questioning. I loved how he could apply logic to the fixing of a broken radio, or the cutting of a fallen tree.
After he died, for weeks, months, the first year even, I could call to mind his face, his smile, his fierceness, and our love was very present. Now, I spend hours hunched at the computer, my body mirroring his posture, writing about the ways I’ve been shaped by him. It’s a strange shedding process that is taking place. I’m slipping out of the skin of my childhood as his daughter and fitting into my own. I am gathering myself up—finding abundance in one hand, loss in the other.
Looking for harvest
I beg for you now,
your absence is an ache
like a sadness at new moon.
A craving for touch,
a shock when I look at familiar photos
and know those bones and skin,
are not around the corner.
I do not know my feelings now.
Cannot grasp onto any understanding
of moments or metaphors.
You hang like a crescent moon in my heart
a sliver, a sickle, a tool of harvest.
Yet I do not know the fields
where I can go walking
to find your abundance.
I know not where to find
the round fruits of your love.
So I wait. Polish the scythe.
Hold on to my heart.