Tag, I'm it!

I was tagged on Facebook and thought I'd reproduce my list here.

25 random things about ME:

1. I often surprise myself by enjoying things I hate doing (like scraping ice off my windshield), and hating things I love doing;
2. Maybe that's why I tend to deprive myself of doing things I love doing, like writing. I don't want to find myself hating it;
3. I am a fool for old-school funk;
4. Dancing is one of the few areas of life in which I have very little self-consciousness. Well, there are a few more, but not many;
5. Cooking is weirdly stressful for me. Even things I've made a million times. Even when it's only me who's going to be eating it. I love food, though. If I were rich I'd hire someone to cook me gourmet health food meals every day (hi Karen);
6. There are areas in the world I love beyond all reason, for reasons of nostalgia: Portland, OR; the Catskills; Edgartown, MA; the Isle of Skye; and a small mountain town in Morrocco the name of which I can't spell and am too lazy to look up;
7. I am ambivalent about most poetry. Not all, though;
8. I have a short list of novels I read at least once a year. I have to work to wait that long, but if I don't, the magic doesn't work as well. It's a great and very rare pleasure to add to that list;
9. Becoming a mother, somewhat late in life, shattered me, in almost exactly the same way a sprout shatters a seed. After four years, I'm still trying to figure out where some of the pieces of me went;
10. I have daydreams of getting together everybody I've madly loved, men and women, for a dinner party, without telling them what the connecting link is. I'm pretty sure lots of them would not like each other. (Some of them might not even know they were madly loved by me at one time.) I like to think of them sitting around, asking themselves, "Why am I here? who are all of these people? Some of them are VERY ODD." Or trading phone numbers.
11. I love driving, and also riding a bike;
12. Jazz always makes me think of my dad, and the expressions on his face when he listened to it;
13. I miss my dad (who died while I was pregnant), all the time. He lacked a few parenting skills, but he was a wonderful friend;
14. I like getting things done in very short spurts. I am also very good at doing very little (read: nothing) for long stretches of time. It doesn't feel like doing nothing when I'm doing it, but technically, that's what it is;
15. I am getting very good at telling elaborately detailed bedtime stories (see #4). I feel as though I should write them down;
16. I read several mommy blogs, and feel oddly close to the writers, whom I've never met;
17. I like talking and writing about myself, but I fear I enjoy it too much;
18. Some of my goals in life are mutually exclusive, but I have no real intention of reconciling them;
19. I am not always consistent, but I am excellent in an emergency;
20. When I think about my own death, I feel a sudden shock which isn't entirely unpleasant. It's good for me to have deadlines;
21. I am happiest when I'm socializing more often than I usually have time for;
22. I often think of a Shakespeare professor I had in 1984, one of the smartest and coolest women I've ever met, whom I haven't seen since;
23. I am sensitive to the sounds of people's voices, and remember them vividly no matter how much time has passed;
24. I once sold a book to David Byrne, in a bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. It was a book by Doris Lessing (hi Jean);
25. I should give up coffee, but I never, ever will.

Only Child?

Well, it's official. My 3-year-old son will be an only child. He was an IVF baby in my late thirties, and we waited until he was 3 to try the rest of the frozen embryos, resulting in pregnancy and miscarriage.
This failure to provide the little man with a sibling has given me a strange new perspective on life. There is sadness, but also relief: we are older parents, not well off, struggling on a few levels, and we were unsure how well we would handle another foray into the weird, wild world of parenting an infant, this time with a preschooler in the house no less.

The sadness is great, though: the other day I saw a friend of my son's walk out of the preschool door holding the hand of his 2-year-old sister, and tears came into my eyes. My little man would have been a wonderful older brother: curious, generous, affectionate. I base this on what, exactly? I ask myself. Well, mostly how he treats the dog: a mixture of delighted affection, irritability, and teacherly guidance. ("This is a bus, doggie," he explained one day, showing the dog a picture of a wildly decorated schoolbus I cut out of a magazine for him. That was the day I first talked with my husband about the sibling question, tears in my eyes.)
Friends with more than one children have that inevitable photo: the first gaze of the older on the new younger sibling in her hospital bassinet. If possible, you want to get the photo shot in the exact moment that the most moving look of wonder comes into the older sibling's eyes: "Who is this new creature in my life"? the child's eyes seem to ask. And, "Did I come out looking all wrinkly like that?" Who knows if that's what they're really thinking, no matter how poetic the gaze. Probably it's more like "Will this creature bother me while I'm playing trains?"
Or maybe not. It's unfathomable to the Little Man that anyone would bother him during such a sacred activity, until someone does and he looks up with a kind of incredulous indignation.

But I digress. The idea that I will never hold an infant in my arms again, or feel her desperate searching for the nipple 800 times a day, or feel the wriggling around in the womb again, makes me clench up to avoid sobbing. But what made me wait so long? Did I secretly want an only child? Did I know myself well enough to know that two children would be too much for me? It may be true, but that doesn't mitigate the grief.

The grief, though, may be instructive, or even creative. Will it make me get back to writing?