Since I went back to work (in the fall of 2007), the sleep arrangements in my house have deteriorated badly, and I have not had the wherewithal to turn the tide. Little Man's dad used to put him to bed: after reading a few books together in his dimly-lit room and singing a few songs, Little Man's dad would place him gently in his crib, pat his back a few times, and leave the room. Little Man would sing sleepily to himself for a little while, maybe hold a brief, one-sided conversation with himself on possible breakfast foods or doggie escapades, and then go quiet. No problem. We were blessed (after a period of utter sleep hell in his infancy, during which no one in the family got more than 4 hours of sleep in any 24-hour period, we felt we had earned the right to this bliss).
Then I went back to work, and Little Man went to daycare. And got sick. And got sick again. And got sick some more. And coughed all night, feverish, crying because his throat hurt, his stomach hurt, he hated the coughing, he was too hot. Etc., etc., etc. We were still nursing then, only minimally (usually once a day at bedtime), but we ramped it up again, because it helped with the coughing and sore throat. I finally took him to bed with me, during the worst of it, because I had to get up and remember how to teach the next day.
Then he got better, and we tried to get him back to the old ways. But he had seen a glimpse of paradise, and he wasn't going to let it go that easily. I can sleep with Mama? really? why would I stop doing that?
And so on and so on. We worked on it, we stopped working on it, there was strep throat, there was weaning, we worked on it, finally ending up with a pattern of my lying down with him in his now-big-boy bed, reading bedtime books and telling a long, serial story we make up together about Sally-the-Cow and her many and varied animal friends (living in some kind of throwback commune on a mountaintop), and I lay with him until he's asleep. At various points, that would be the end of it and I would eventually be able to retreat to my own bed/life; at other points, he would wake up at some point and call for me and I would have to repeat the process until he slept again. For weeks I might fall asleep in his bed before he does, and wake up groggily at 2 a.m. to stumble into my own bed, only to find that I can't sleep (because I had slept from 8:00 to 2:00!) and end up downstairs, reading. Until he would wake up and call for me again, and I would go up to him and lay with him until he fell asleep again.
Drag. Double drag. If I had to go out at night, Little Man refused to even think about going to bed until I returned. Daddy would NOT do. Daddy doesn't have the right voice for bedtime reading, Daddy doesn't know the Sally story saga, Daddy takes up too much room when he lies in bed with me. So I would come home after a dinner out with my friends, to find Daddy and Little Man both asleep sprawled on the couch, all lights on, everyone still in their clothes. Rebelling against any changes in sleep management. All alert to any possibility of going back to the old ways of independent sleep. Vigilantly defending his post.
And the thing is, I get it. Really -- it's nice to fall asleep with your arm tossed around a loved one, a foot leaning against a knee, a butt cozying up to a stomach. I can't reconcile this: I need to sleep in my own bed, with my own husband, vacationing from parenthood for a few precious hours. I myself don't particularly want to sleep alone, and I am an adult. Not four, unclear on the existence of robbers and/or bad guys, negotiating the pull towards independence and the desire always to stay a baby, cuddled in mama's arms. (I mean, you know, on a good day I'm not.) Why shouldn't he prefer co-sleeping to isolation in his own room, away from the family that makes him feel safe?
It's not that I hate it myself. There are times, curled up like spoons with my small son, his hot little bare feet resting on my bent knees, my arm around his waist, my face leaned up against the hair on the back of his head, when I feel as happy and cozy as a blind newborn kitten, surrounded by siblings and nuzzled up against her mama cat's belly. He will say, sleepily, in those moments: "Mama, I love you." "Mama, you're my best friend." "Mama, you're the best best best best best best best mom in the wholewideworld." Or there's the night we had a long sleepy conversation about my extended family, and his dad's, and the grandparents and great-grandparents and what were all their names and where did they live? He was thrilled to find out that my aunt was his great-aunt: "She is my aunt and your aunt too?" he asked delightedly. Anything that means we are the same, related, connected forever, makes him happy. And the tales of our family's interconnectedness made me feel happy too, unconscious for a moment of the factors which separate, divide us in conflict or disagreement. We both fell asleep content that night. Still, the fact remains that this system is not a good long-term plan.
This post is too long already, but the upshot is, I think we may have fixed it, via a surprising ally. More in next post. I will miss the weird intimacy, but I think it may be over, or on the road to being over. And since it's appropriate and right that it be over, I will reserve my ambivalence on the subject to this blog, and celebrate with my husband and son our new independence.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Irrational desires
The starting point here is that I have screwed up nearly every major decision of my adult life (I won’t even go into my pre-adult life), so really, things turned out markedly better than anyone, by which I mean my mother, had any right to expect. Married? Homeowner? A kid, a car, a dog? A paying job, with a paycheck in real money and everything? Yeah, Ma, back off. I’m doing fine.
OK, so there’s a little more debt than income, so what? And yeah, so maybe our house is tiny and cramped and full of secondhand toys, and maybe I was the oldest first-time mom in my son’s playgroup. I’m extremely immature, so no one noticed. (Except they did, apparently: one measly little missed cultural reference led to one mommy to comment, placidly, “Well, I’m a little younger than you, I guess.” What, my willingness to hide from monsters under the laundry basket in your living room with a roomful of two-year-olds didn’t fool you? Whatever. )
The problem is that, while my husband is satisfied, and my kid, being four, thinks things are great (he hasn’t learned to feel embarrassed by us yet), I’m not there yet. I want another baby. Even though I’m forty-three, and the chances of it happening naturally are, well – let’s just say, Dionysus might stand a chance of impregnating me, but neither my husband nor even my genius and beloved (if Grateful-Dead-loving) fertility doctor can manage it. (OK, Ma, I hear you. I know, I started too late. My Fallopian tubes resemble the frayed ends of the shoelaces on my decades-old sneakers; my ovaries are like drooling, pinched-faced old men with prickly whiskers; my womb reminds one of – oh, nevermind.)
I want to adopt. I want the second-baby experience. I want to be able to say, in response to a friend complaining about her children’s inability to pick up after themselves, “Oh, my kids are just the same.” Saying “my son” isn’t quite it, somehow, even though I know I’m lucky, more than lucky – blessed. More than blessed. Still, though. I want more than I deserve. (I also want to triple my income and to go on European vacations and have someone cook for me, but those are further down on my list of entirely unreasonable desires. I’ll get to them later.) I want my son to have a sibling to hate and squabble with and complain about, but who will still hold him when he cries at his grandmother’s funeral, as my often-hated oldest brother did for me.
Do I browbeat my husband into agreeing to adopt? He doesn’t want to, but he didn’t know he wanted the first kid, either, and he has never been happier in his life and is a truly gifted and hilarious dad. Doting. Playful. Patient, most of the time. All those qualities that show up when you least expect it, in your black-humored, cynical New Yorker husband. Actually, I knew, though. The spousal unit has an uncanny combination of the darkly cynical and the – well, the not. I wouldn’t say I picked him at least partly for his potential parenting ability, but I wouldn’t say I didn’t, either. He has the most gallows-like humor of anyone I knew, and yet when I first brought him to visit my family (and, typically, he hates this story with the white heat of a thousand suns), he spent several hours – several hours -- helping my then 2-year-old niece do a big wooden snake puzzle. Granted, he was studiously avoiding the rest of my family at the time (and honestly, I don’t blame him), but still. None of my former boyfriends would have had that kind of patience with a very young child, whatever they might have been avoiding at the time.
All right. It’s clearly worth starting a conversation, even worth having to listen to the spluttering, not-amused bark of laughter that will certainly ensue when I bring up the topic, not to mention the aghast references to the meager nature of our current kid’s college fund, the space issue, preschool fees, the continuing need for new shoes, the fact that we have already (um, did I mention this?) given away a fair amount of our hand-me-down baby stuff. (Oh, yeah. That.) I’m not saying I’m being rational: if we were rational, who among us would have a kid in the first place? They’re expensive. They’re a pain in several areas of parental anatomy, on a daily basis. They make it impossible to read The New York Times Book Review in peace (or, you know, People magazine, or whatever). They force you, merely by existing, to hemorrhage money that you could be spending on European vacations.
But we want them; and when we have them, sometimes, some of us at least, want more.
OK, so there’s a little more debt than income, so what? And yeah, so maybe our house is tiny and cramped and full of secondhand toys, and maybe I was the oldest first-time mom in my son’s playgroup. I’m extremely immature, so no one noticed. (Except they did, apparently: one measly little missed cultural reference led to one mommy to comment, placidly, “Well, I’m a little younger than you, I guess.” What, my willingness to hide from monsters under the laundry basket in your living room with a roomful of two-year-olds didn’t fool you? Whatever. )
The problem is that, while my husband is satisfied, and my kid, being four, thinks things are great (he hasn’t learned to feel embarrassed by us yet), I’m not there yet. I want another baby. Even though I’m forty-three, and the chances of it happening naturally are, well – let’s just say, Dionysus might stand a chance of impregnating me, but neither my husband nor even my genius and beloved (if Grateful-Dead-loving) fertility doctor can manage it. (OK, Ma, I hear you. I know, I started too late. My Fallopian tubes resemble the frayed ends of the shoelaces on my decades-old sneakers; my ovaries are like drooling, pinched-faced old men with prickly whiskers; my womb reminds one of – oh, nevermind.)
I want to adopt. I want the second-baby experience. I want to be able to say, in response to a friend complaining about her children’s inability to pick up after themselves, “Oh, my kids are just the same.” Saying “my son” isn’t quite it, somehow, even though I know I’m lucky, more than lucky – blessed. More than blessed. Still, though. I want more than I deserve. (I also want to triple my income and to go on European vacations and have someone cook for me, but those are further down on my list of entirely unreasonable desires. I’ll get to them later.) I want my son to have a sibling to hate and squabble with and complain about, but who will still hold him when he cries at his grandmother’s funeral, as my often-hated oldest brother did for me.
Do I browbeat my husband into agreeing to adopt? He doesn’t want to, but he didn’t know he wanted the first kid, either, and he has never been happier in his life and is a truly gifted and hilarious dad. Doting. Playful. Patient, most of the time. All those qualities that show up when you least expect it, in your black-humored, cynical New Yorker husband. Actually, I knew, though. The spousal unit has an uncanny combination of the darkly cynical and the – well, the not. I wouldn’t say I picked him at least partly for his potential parenting ability, but I wouldn’t say I didn’t, either. He has the most gallows-like humor of anyone I knew, and yet when I first brought him to visit my family (and, typically, he hates this story with the white heat of a thousand suns), he spent several hours – several hours -- helping my then 2-year-old niece do a big wooden snake puzzle. Granted, he was studiously avoiding the rest of my family at the time (and honestly, I don’t blame him), but still. None of my former boyfriends would have had that kind of patience with a very young child, whatever they might have been avoiding at the time.
All right. It’s clearly worth starting a conversation, even worth having to listen to the spluttering, not-amused bark of laughter that will certainly ensue when I bring up the topic, not to mention the aghast references to the meager nature of our current kid’s college fund, the space issue, preschool fees, the continuing need for new shoes, the fact that we have already (um, did I mention this?) given away a fair amount of our hand-me-down baby stuff. (Oh, yeah. That.) I’m not saying I’m being rational: if we were rational, who among us would have a kid in the first place? They’re expensive. They’re a pain in several areas of parental anatomy, on a daily basis. They make it impossible to read The New York Times Book Review in peace (or, you know, People magazine, or whatever). They force you, merely by existing, to hemorrhage money that you could be spending on European vacations.
But we want them; and when we have them, sometimes, some of us at least, want more.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Little Man's recipe for Pumpkin Muffins
"Put the canned pumpkins in a bowl of sugar. I really am a recipe because I make up recipes, you know those things that make up recipes and are boys? They're called a recipe man because they make up recipes.
"Let it sit there for a minute and get a little bit of water. Then we have to find, cut-it-out, paper coffee filters, for the paper of the muffin, and the bread part has to be soil, bread and a recipe cook. So we have to be a expert for that. OK? Well, that's it. The pumkin muffins are cooked. Want to look at them?"
Another one for the cookbook.
"Let it sit there for a minute and get a little bit of water. Then we have to find, cut-it-out, paper coffee filters, for the paper of the muffin, and the bread part has to be soil, bread and a recipe cook. So we have to be a expert for that. OK? Well, that's it. The pumkin muffins are cooked. Want to look at them?"
Another one for the cookbook.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Parfumeur
"Mommy, you smell good-- look, smell yourself! That's why I like you better than Daddy, because you smell gooder than Daddy. Daddy smells like a planet dipped in sauce. You smell like ice cream!"
birthday hell
Does anyone but me freak out about their children's birthdays? My mother used to make birthday cakes in the shapes of animals: horses, elephants, rabbits. The neighborhood kids would be invited, along with local family members: aunts, uncles, cousins. We would all wear those cardboard birthday hats with the slightly painful elastic string under our chins, sing "Happy Birthday to you!" and watch the birthday kid blow out candles and open presents. It was fairly simple. Nowadays, the parents host their birthday parties at children's gyms, amusement parks, bowling alleys, fire stations. They hire magicians or clowns or storytellers. They invited not three or four but twenty kids. I have taken my kid to these parties. The birthday kid is often looking a little shy, holding back. The whole scene looks like a class on a field trip, rather than an individual kid's party. That would make more sense for an eight-, or even six-year-old. But three-going-on-four? Too young, I think.
Last year, I invited the entirety of Little Man's playgroup from my pre-back-to-work days, all of whom he saw regularly for a year or so. It was maybe six kids and their siblings and moms (and, in one case, a palpably bored dad). Not so big, right? And yet, Little Man was overwhelmed, and mostly sat anxiously in my lap while I chatted with one or two of the moms. Granted, we have a tiny house, and it felt very cramped, but I was still surprised, since he had known these kids most of his life. It was only after the cake part was over, when many of them left, and it was only two kids and their moms in the backyard, that he started having a good time, running around and giggling with the two kids who were still there.
So I was thinking, this year for my kid's birthday (in two weeks), No. How about, instead, inviting two of his closest friends, and some (adult) family friends that he adores, letting the kids play in the local playground and them bringing them home to the house for pizza and cake? I did look into other options: a local indoor kid's gym, etc., but they seem to expect a big party, and I wanted to avoid that. So I'm planning this very low-key event, pleased with myself for staying so sane, when Little Man starts telling me in no uncertain terms, "I don't want my birthday to be at home! I want it to be somewhere special!" Did I mention his birthday is in two weeks? Well, I planned the party a week early, because his dad has to go out of town the weekend of his actual birthday. So, one week.
So, what I do now is, well, what? Keep the small event, and plan something bigger for sometime next month? And who would I invite to a bigger party, in a more fun place than our little cramped cave of a house? His entire preschool class? He's only been at his new school for a month and doesn't seem yet to have made individual friends. There are 25 kids in his class. He barely remembers his playgroup friends, and we've only stayed in contact with one kid from his old school.
Now that I'm writing about it, I realize that the problem is really numbers. I don't want a party of 20 kids, because I know my kid, and it's too much. He wouldn't like it. He does want it to be in a special place. So, maybe I call the local firehouse and see if they'll host a 3-kid party? In a week?
Last year, I invited the entirety of Little Man's playgroup from my pre-back-to-work days, all of whom he saw regularly for a year or so. It was maybe six kids and their siblings and moms (and, in one case, a palpably bored dad). Not so big, right? And yet, Little Man was overwhelmed, and mostly sat anxiously in my lap while I chatted with one or two of the moms. Granted, we have a tiny house, and it felt very cramped, but I was still surprised, since he had known these kids most of his life. It was only after the cake part was over, when many of them left, and it was only two kids and their moms in the backyard, that he started having a good time, running around and giggling with the two kids who were still there.
So I was thinking, this year for my kid's birthday (in two weeks), No. How about, instead, inviting two of his closest friends, and some (adult) family friends that he adores, letting the kids play in the local playground and them bringing them home to the house for pizza and cake? I did look into other options: a local indoor kid's gym, etc., but they seem to expect a big party, and I wanted to avoid that. So I'm planning this very low-key event, pleased with myself for staying so sane, when Little Man starts telling me in no uncertain terms, "I don't want my birthday to be at home! I want it to be somewhere special!" Did I mention his birthday is in two weeks? Well, I planned the party a week early, because his dad has to go out of town the weekend of his actual birthday. So, one week.
So, what I do now is, well, what? Keep the small event, and plan something bigger for sometime next month? And who would I invite to a bigger party, in a more fun place than our little cramped cave of a house? His entire preschool class? He's only been at his new school for a month and doesn't seem yet to have made individual friends. There are 25 kids in his class. He barely remembers his playgroup friends, and we've only stayed in contact with one kid from his old school.
Now that I'm writing about it, I realize that the problem is really numbers. I don't want a party of 20 kids, because I know my kid, and it's too much. He wouldn't like it. He does want it to be in a special place. So, maybe I call the local firehouse and see if they'll host a 3-kid party? In a week?
Friday, September 26, 2008
Young and big, old and small
It's the blending of big-guy independence and little-guy vulnerability that shivers my heart into splinters at unexpected moments. Not the independence itself ("I can do it, Mama!" he insists as he squirts something close to his body weight in soap onto his hand), nor his not-infrequent moments of wanting to be a baby again ("Can I cuddle you, Mommy?" he says sleepily, sliding his bare feet over the wood floor to my chair at the dinner table, his hands already preparing to grip my arms as he climbs up into my lap, all forty-some-odd pounds of him). Both of these make me smile and grimace at the same time, amused and touched. They happen daily, so frequently that they barely register in the crowds of other, needlessly anxious thoughts about work to get done, money to scramble for, character flaws to worry over, small annoyances to dwell on. (Who was it who said "My mind is a bad neighborhood I shouldn't go into alone"?) Rather, the eerie, minor-key overlay of one perspective on the other.
This morning, I drove Little Man to his new school (which I love: it's a Montessori school, much more suited to his quiet temperament than his old school was). It's a beautiful autumn morning, the first chilly day, a little cloudy, but in that pretty autumn way that makes you want to build a wood fire and eat apples while wearing hand-knit sweaters. Little Man is getting over a cold, so his voice is a little rough, he's a little less chatty on the way to school. He's wearing his new back-to-school clothes: a long-sleeved shirt, tan cargo pants, froggy rain boots, carrying his dinosaur lunchbox. When he's climbing into my lap at home, or pretending that I'm the big bad wolf and he's the woodsman who cuts me open to save Little Red Riding Hood and her hapless grandmother, he seems huge, strong, ferocious even, able to withstand anything. In this moment, on the way to school, he seems so small, so vulnerable, so open to anything. I ask him if he wants a handful of Kleenex to stuff into his pants pocket, in case his nose gets runny, and he nods, having admitted that he would feel shy about asking his new teacher for one. His hand as I put the Kleenex into it feels warm, silky, and very small.
I pull up to the door to drop him off. One of the teachers comes to the car to retrieve him from his car seat. He's very business-like about this: hands her his lunchbox, pauses to push the Kleenex deeper into his pocket, takes her hand to step out of the car in his green froggy boots, barely pausing to respond to my "Bye sweetie! I love you!" with a quick waved hand. He's preoccupied with getting out of the car, following the teacher's directions; he's in his school mode now. The teacher leads him to the steps to wait while she retrieves another child from the car waiting behind mine, so I have to go, but as I start driving away I look back to see Little Man standing on the steps, not watching me leave, looking strangely small against the gray stone steps, his cheeks a little flushed with the morning chill. Not clinging to me or begging me to stay, as he used to do, just waiting for the next stage in his school day.
I surprised myself by blinking back tears as I pulled into traffic. Do I want him to stay a baby? Well, yes, of course I do, in a way. The idea of his growing up and leaving home eventually is awful and wonderful at the same time. But it's the small sensualities I'm afraid of losing: not only the "Can I cuddle you, Mama?" moments, but also the "karate-chop!" moments when he pretends to cut off my arm. All of it, the profound and the mundane.
The other night, in my pre-bedtime sleepiness, I was sitting at the kitchen table, idly looking through the newspaper before starting bedtime rituals, and Little Man came in, engrossed in examining the wheel of one of his trains, to see why it wasn't turning anymore. He saw me sitting there and came over close and leaned against my arm, still fiddling with the train wheel. My arm came out and went around him and I kissed the top of his head as I went on paging through the newspaper. We stayed like that for several moments, until he wandered away to find a different train car. I wanted to call after him, "Honey, will you still do that when you're forty? Promise me!"
If he does -- if when he's forty and living in his own house with his own family, and I am visiting him, and I am sitting creakily at the kitchen table, paging with arthritic crone-like fingers through whatever freaky digital form of newspaper they will have by then (maybe floating slightly above the floor because we will be living on a space station, having caused too much destruction to earth to live there anymore), and he comes in idly tinkering with his kid's toy and leans against me for a moment, unconsciously, before wandering away again -- if he does, I will be grateful.
This morning, I drove Little Man to his new school (which I love: it's a Montessori school, much more suited to his quiet temperament than his old school was). It's a beautiful autumn morning, the first chilly day, a little cloudy, but in that pretty autumn way that makes you want to build a wood fire and eat apples while wearing hand-knit sweaters. Little Man is getting over a cold, so his voice is a little rough, he's a little less chatty on the way to school. He's wearing his new back-to-school clothes: a long-sleeved shirt, tan cargo pants, froggy rain boots, carrying his dinosaur lunchbox. When he's climbing into my lap at home, or pretending that I'm the big bad wolf and he's the woodsman who cuts me open to save Little Red Riding Hood and her hapless grandmother, he seems huge, strong, ferocious even, able to withstand anything. In this moment, on the way to school, he seems so small, so vulnerable, so open to anything. I ask him if he wants a handful of Kleenex to stuff into his pants pocket, in case his nose gets runny, and he nods, having admitted that he would feel shy about asking his new teacher for one. His hand as I put the Kleenex into it feels warm, silky, and very small.
I pull up to the door to drop him off. One of the teachers comes to the car to retrieve him from his car seat. He's very business-like about this: hands her his lunchbox, pauses to push the Kleenex deeper into his pocket, takes her hand to step out of the car in his green froggy boots, barely pausing to respond to my "Bye sweetie! I love you!" with a quick waved hand. He's preoccupied with getting out of the car, following the teacher's directions; he's in his school mode now. The teacher leads him to the steps to wait while she retrieves another child from the car waiting behind mine, so I have to go, but as I start driving away I look back to see Little Man standing on the steps, not watching me leave, looking strangely small against the gray stone steps, his cheeks a little flushed with the morning chill. Not clinging to me or begging me to stay, as he used to do, just waiting for the next stage in his school day.
I surprised myself by blinking back tears as I pulled into traffic. Do I want him to stay a baby? Well, yes, of course I do, in a way. The idea of his growing up and leaving home eventually is awful and wonderful at the same time. But it's the small sensualities I'm afraid of losing: not only the "Can I cuddle you, Mama?" moments, but also the "karate-chop!" moments when he pretends to cut off my arm. All of it, the profound and the mundane.
The other night, in my pre-bedtime sleepiness, I was sitting at the kitchen table, idly looking through the newspaper before starting bedtime rituals, and Little Man came in, engrossed in examining the wheel of one of his trains, to see why it wasn't turning anymore. He saw me sitting there and came over close and leaned against my arm, still fiddling with the train wheel. My arm came out and went around him and I kissed the top of his head as I went on paging through the newspaper. We stayed like that for several moments, until he wandered away to find a different train car. I wanted to call after him, "Honey, will you still do that when you're forty? Promise me!"
If he does -- if when he's forty and living in his own house with his own family, and I am visiting him, and I am sitting creakily at the kitchen table, paging with arthritic crone-like fingers through whatever freaky digital form of newspaper they will have by then (maybe floating slightly above the floor because we will be living on a space station, having caused too much destruction to earth to live there anymore), and he comes in idly tinkering with his kid's toy and leans against me for a moment, unconsciously, before wandering away again -- if he does, I will be grateful.
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