Tonight, we lay together,
my son and I, body to body,
his back on my front, and I feel
his weight as we watch
fireworks explode over our heads.
His hair, blonded by the summer sun,
tickles my chin, and his heels kick
my shins. With each bang,
we shout, “Whoa!” in competition
to see who can shout
the loudest. My son
who can’t say much at all
explodes with sound as lights
blaze above us, powdering
the sky with shards of color.
Tonight we lay together,
our bodies like sedimentary
rock layers. Split my heart
open and this night is
the fossil you will find.
Tag: motherhood
Envy
The news that the baby has been born comes by email. There are exclamations around the office, like neighborhood fireworks whose rhythm of release is never quite mastered. There are gaping silences, then an “Oh!” and a “Baby!” I hold myself quite still and reread the email. A baby has been born to my coworker and his wife. It was a long delivery. A successful delivery. As they say, Mom and baby are doing fine. But I am looking for something else. I am sniffing for a hint. A hint that maybe not all is fine, and maybe I am not alone in having my idyllic dreams snuffed and reduced to smoke. I feel terrible, certainly. Write to a friend, the only one who understands: “Envy. It’s evil.” People use the phrase “murderous rage” as if it is the worst emotional pool a person can drop into, a force that will make a person do unspeakable and unforgiveable things. My envy may not cause me to kill, or maim, but I understand how it can because I feel poisoned by it. There was a murder here a year or two ago that was as horrifying and bizarre as any you’d read in the 14th book by a mystery thriller writer who has upped the ante with each book until she has ultimately run out of even semi-reasonable plots. A woman, desperate to have her own baby, murders a pregnant woman and removes the baby from her belly, hoping I suppose to keep it for her own, but kills the baby while performing the gruesome surgery in her basement. I would never. I know this. But I understand the pickling that spoils the heart, kills off empathy and human kindness like alcohol destroys bacteria. I want no one to ever be happy with healthy babies and fulfilled dreams. I must actively work to flush these feelings, drain them with a flood of self-talk to drive them like cattle back into the perimeter fence. The envy lives in me like a child. It grasps for someone to come and join it in its misery. Oh yes, misery loves company. How can I feel so alone among the rubble of my dreams? Won’t somebody come and play, somebody come and play today, I hear in my head the Sesame Street song that my now 8 year old son still listens to. He should be watching Star Wars or Disney films that I was all prepared to hate in all their lack of sophistication and misogyny. But I would kill to watch Aladdin for the umpteenth time, if only Noah’s mind could develop enough for him to fall in love with something new. There is so little new in a life set on repeat. Some parents write about how glorious it is when their kids with whatever kind of delay spit out a new word, or show a new interest. And it’s true. So true! There was a spark of joy when I asked Noah last night when he was playing in the bath with small animal figures who jump and splash into the water (a game he has played for 6 years made all the more fun when you accuse the figurines of being “bad” and not allowed to go the mall, which is Noah’s greatest fear) who the Bad Penguin was? He held him up over the lip of the bathtub and said, “Him!” It’s cute the way he said it. The way he says a lot of things, like “Day Du” for “Thank you.” And I celebrate it. Tell the story to Mark when he comes home. And we laugh as though we are happy and really feeling joy. But there is no true joy to be had in hearing your 8 year old son say a word that most kids master both verbally and grammatically many years prior. There is no true excitement that this work, this “him” might lead soon or someday to a sentence, or a story, or even, a glimpse into his inner life, if he has one. Does he? Does a child who has watched the same Elmo’s World episode 50 times have an inner life? Or is it like driving on autopilot? Sometimes I think being Noah must be like being a bit drunk all day, every day. His ataxia and nystagmus have him listing from side to side, and he trips and falls more times during a day than most of us in a year. But he shakes it off like a drunk might when pushing through the door of the bar the wrong way, or stumbling off a curb, or hitting a shin against the corner of the coffee table. He fumbles for words, spews emotions like a sad drunk who moves from giddiness to sadness between sips. He moves through is world with the same haze that I do when I’ve had too much to drink, but drive home confident that I know the way, that I will stick to the deepest worn grove, like I do when I get home and careen through the house to get water, Advil, let the dog out, stuff something salty in my mouth, brush my teeth, dress, not thinking keenly about anything. Everything is just a movement that leads to another movement that leads to another movement. And I hope I haven’t truly hurt myself in the process, and I’m certain that I will feel like shit the next day. How does Noah do that? How does he spend each day in some kind of quasi-coma that just leads to yet another day in that same fog and stumble and keep your head down kind of living. I know it is assumption. That I have no idea what his life is like. That none of us as parents know who our child will be. And for most parents that’s what’s so damn exciting. That’s the novelty. And that’s where our hope lies: it lies in potential. And my friend, the one with the new baby. He looks at her and sees the embodiment of all she can be. While I look at Noah and see what he will never be. How can I not be envious? Not of my friend’s good luck. But of his new daughter’s life? How can I not be envious of that life for Noah?
Preying on Time
I am driving, and I am happy. I am streaming George Michael’s greatest hits–Ladies and Gentlemen–from my iPhone and into the speakers of a Toyota RAV we were given by your parents, a gift, no doubt because they feel somewhat sorry for us, for the lost dream, but it has a JVC bass and a V6 engine, so the music sounds good and I can accelerate through traffic when every car seems to move more slowly than I can possible stand. I am driving from an hour spent with my physical trainer, who is good-looking but not very interesting, and so the perfect recipe for a stranger who might touch my body, watch how my body works, correctly it with a slight touch of fingertips. He costs me $52 an hour and I have been seeing him weekly for a year, and have something like 18 pounds and a more defined waistline to show for the investment. I am driving from two hours spent under the not-so-tender ministrations of my hairstylist–(I am too Minnesotan to utter an “ow” when she pulls a brush through my hair which still knots up into a rat’s nest like it did when I was 7)–who has made my long hair copper, and my eyebrows less sprawling, for $170 dollars (including tip.) I said yes, when she produced a new product from her cupboard, to be used during the dying process to increase the likelihood my hair will “take” the color, though she can’t guarantee it, because everyone’s hair is different. I justify my acquiescence by reasoning that the dye is expensive itself, so why not try to make it last; plus, any time I walk into a Target or Walgreens, I seem to buy $25 dollars worth of stuff I’d never planned to buy, so why not spend it deliberately in this way? I am heading across town, my workout behind me, my hair gleaming and straightened, the music I wrote my undergrad thesis–short stories, not all of them about love–to, this one: Praying for Time, playing in the cocoon of my car, heading up north to a shop that specializes in “ski, tennis, and snowboard” and is as high-priced as it seems. I am getting my tennis racquet restrung, possibly because my elbow has started hurting and new strings may solve the problem, but also because I have been losing a lot, losing to both better players and to players that shouldn’t have the skills to beat me. I know I am mentally suspect. I know that when push comes to shove, I tighten up, and that is why I lose more than I should. But maybe new strings will turn my luck around, lift my confidence so I can fire off the forehands that make up the majority of my game. My game. It’s pretentious for a 44 year old woman who has only been playing tennis for 10 year to refer to herself as having “a game” and no doubt I’d roll my eyes at any middle-aged weekend basketball player or early-morning round of golf before going into the office who referred to himself has having “a game,” but I spend a lot of time and money on said game, because hitting a down-the-line winner during a match feels as good to me as a kiss, and winning? Definitely as good as an orgasm. Since my husband and I have no time or energy for sex, I take what satisfaction I can get by hitting a backhand slice dropshot against that one lady who called my T-serve “out” when it was obviously in. I try not to let her gamesmanship affect me, but it usually does. I try to shake it off; I try to lighten up; I even call one of her in shots “out.” But I’m shaken. Put on the defense. Forgetting to play my game. At the shop, I see that they are offering a sale on last year’s racquet models. Spontaneously, I buy one for $125, as a backup in case I break mine–it’s becoming more frequent that I bang my racquet on the hardcourts when I make a particularly dense error–or even just break a string (which likely will never happen because I simply don’t put that much spin on the ball.) Better to be safe than sorry, and it is a good deal. I justify spending money on tennis as a way of investing in myself. I’m not thin, and I don’t run, and I like to eat too much of just about anything, but I love tennis–I joke that my last life was as a labrador because I’ll only stop eating if I’m chasing a little yellow ball–and I’m glad something gets me moving. Perhaps that one form of exercise will amount to even the smallest increase in my life expectancy, because it’s true that I can never die. I mean, I will. But, this thought, fleeting as the shadow of a hawk as it glides low over a field in search for a mouthful, a talonful, of field mouse, comes again, right then at this moment when I am so happy, when I am doing the right things to be happy, because this is a good life with a good job that allows me to buy everything I need to be happy in this and any moment, and a good marriage that allows me to the freedom to find and do these things that make me happy, but really, how can I ever be happy, knowing that when I die, when I die sometime between now and, maybe, another 44 years, I will leave behind a son who will never be able to care for himself by himself. Another new fissure is added to the many, too many, that striate my heart at that moment when I swallow the truth that there is no happy, just forgetting. A friend once told me that people are like antelopes in the plains of South Africa. We have to forget that there is a lion, a predator lurking just over the rise, or our anxiety over dying would subsume us, exhaust us for the escape. When Noah began having seizures and a futureless future was like a blackhole looming on the horizon of my life, I spent a lot of money, money that we didn’t have, in order to distract myself. Maybe that’s what I’m still doing. Maybe I’m buying back some of that lost dream. Because every life needs evolution, some kind of stone-rolling that justifies our experiences, painful or no, and we often live our evolution outside our bodies, through the lives of our children. We put everything we have become into them, hoping they stay safe, alive really, and learn from our knowledge, knowledge that has long evolved past what our parents knew and their parents knew. But my son cannot. He simply cannot. So I evolve for him. I will do what he cannot. I will be happy because I can make myself be happy, like clay into a vase that holds happy, an extra supply because maybe then my happy can be his, because unhappiness cannot not touch him as long as I am alive.
Rough Drafts Only 