Awake

 It's 11pm and I'm awake.  It's 11pm and I am a single mother of two small children, either of whom will definitely crawl into my bed in the next few hours, and I'm awake. 

 If my oldest comes in first, she will wrap her arms around my neck as I lift her over me and into the space on my right.  She has to be in that space so I can be on the left edge when my youngest requires the same  feat of 3am strength.  If it's my oldest, she will wrap her arms around my neck and she won't let go for a short while.  She will silently fall back asleep.  She isn't there for anything except to be where I am.  She doesn't need conversation, she won't ask me for water, she's not going to insist upon a snack of pickles at an absurd time of day the way she used to.  She used to, and it drove me mad when all I wanted was some time to myself, and now those words dig a pit of sadness.  She used to.  Now, she creates warmth where there was none.  She used to do that, too.  She was born into that.  She creates warmth where there was none, and nestles her knees into my middle, and she sleeps as if muscle memory has told her where she should go.  She'll sleep there until I move.  She won't move first. 

If it's my youngest, she will wrap her arms around any part of me that is available and climb herself over the mountain of her mother's hips squarely into the middle of the bed.  She will say, "Hi, mommy."  She'll tell me she loves me.  She'll tell me she loves Cinderella, too, and her Aunt Alley and Grandpa Jim.  She'll say she wants blueberries in her cereal, and that she's sure the sun is awake enough for us to tell it good morning.  She will be wrong.  I'll spend 45 minutes telling her so.  I will wish that she would believe me because we are in the RightThisSecond and not yet in the She Used To.  She will eventually fall asleep so close to me that her tiny body seems to forget that it exists separately from mine.  Right then, it does not.  Right then, she is just as much a part of me as she has ever been, and she doesn't know herself without me.  I don't know myself without them.  

I was terrified to do this alone.  I sat at a dinner table sobbing over my sleeping three week old while my toddler played in the living room and their dad said that he was sorry, but he was out.  I couldn't imagine worse.  I lost my vision in that moment and moved forward trusting that my parents and my sister and everyone else I loved wouldn't let go of my hands until I could see again.  They didn't.  You know who else didn't let go?  My kids. 

It's been three years now, almost to the day.  The parts that I was scared of aren't scary.  It turns out that you can feed and bathe and dress and read stories to and get out the door with and teach and learn from two children by yourself.  You can do all that on startlingly little sleep.  Some days are easier than others.  Some days, I cry.  Some days, I cry in front of them and my youngest grabs a bandaid, because that's how she knows to fix crying.  She affixes it to the same spot on my ankle every time.  She hears it crack on occasion, and hasn't yet met the version of her mother who broke that ankle in a feral Caribbean tent village.  Some days, I cry in front of them and my oldest holds my hand, creating warmth where there was, actually, plenty.  But most minutes of most days are bliss, when I am smart enough to notice it.  They are mine, and I barely have to share them. 

 At first, I missed having someone to share side glances with.  Inside jokes, mispronunciations, reports of unsubstantial tantrums.  I have grieved for the loss of shared experiences that the parents of small children have together.  First steps.  Parent/teacher conferences.  Swim lessons.  The first time my oldest came home from school and declared, "Mommy!  You are a NOUN!"  But in the end, how lucky am I that those moments are mine?  When they think of time with their mom, it won't be shiny ski vacations and fancy restaurants.  It'll be help with homework, hot chocolate on a cold Tuesday, dance parties in the living room, and the smell of coffee in the morning.  It'll be crawling into a warm bed, open arms waiting to lift them up. Just us.  

 This time in my children's lives is like a firefly that I get to catch a glimpse of just before it moves on.  I will do what I can to keep the light trails in a mason jar so I don't forget when They Used To.  It is 12am, and I am a single mother of two small children, either of whom will definitely crawl into my bed in the next few hours.  And I am awake.  

A Mom Saves Herself

 The magic of this life. 

My dining table is a mess. Most of the surfaces in this place would make you think they're gasping for air.  Maybe you would say that about me, too.  We hold a lot; there is a lot of space that used to see light, and now does not.  But every toy unicorn and book of nursery rhymes sends a beam straight up towards the sky.  Each one, the recent memory of a tiny voice asking for time, which is attention, which is love, which they brought into my life like oxygen.  

This house is the northern lights with moving, living beams suspended above every inch that reads, "mess."

So no, I'm not gasping for air.  I am swimming in air.  But, on occasion, I do find that I need to hold my breath for  moment.  I need to remember when the lights in my life glowed from the city, or from an island sky, or from the boats in Menemsha.  I've decided to forgive myself for needing to hold my breath.  I've decided that loving what my life is and sometimes needing to live in a different one are not mutually exclusive.  What a strange, unexpected gift to have room for both. 

And so I sit here on Sunday mornings with my coffee and a crossword puzzle, and with the silence that evades me every other day of the week.  Grateful for the quiet, and for the noise.  Grateful for the lives I've led that landed me inside this one.  Grateful for light beams dancing above surfaces that should, in a life other than mine, be empty of color.  

New Life, Old Me

 Hello from my teenage bedroom.  I am here alone, except for my cat, Goose.  Goose, who won't get an inch away from me, and thank God for that tonight.   My babies are with their dad.  My babies are with their dad and I am not with their dad in all of the ways that you can imagine that statement to exist.  So, I am under a patchwork constellation of glow in the dark stars that I pasted to my ceiling when I was 14.  Before I knew what a manic-pixie-dream-girl was.  Before I wanted to be one.  Before I tried to become one, which was before I decided that a steady family life might actually be ok, which was before I landed here, in my teenage bedroom, under these glow in the dark stars, alone.  

Things end.  Good things.  Real things.  Things you thought you would never forget the shape of become soft and rounded in their edges until they come to have no edges at all.  And you are left wondering if faded is kinder than sharp, and you are unsure. 

Most nights, I will have my babies.  I will yawn through 5am after having been up at various hours for various reasons and I will make breakfast for two of us, and for three when the bottles run their last round.  But only three.  It will always stop at three.   Five nights a week, my girls and I will sing in the kitchen and battle through bath time and bedtime, just us.  Five nights a week, I get to be the mom I want to be without the ankle weights.  Five nights a week, I will do my best to pretend that everything has gone according to plan. Most nights, he will not have his babies.  I am not sure what his 5ams will look like.  That is no longer mine to know.   But I don't breathe very well without him, and it's difficult to tell if that is because he is oxygen or if it is just because his lungs are so tangled into my own that the removal of one set from the other is life threatening.  I suppose you can't know the answer until you try to separate.  I suppose the answer is not love, but a desperate grab for breath. 

I have no idea how to do this.  I have plenty of practice leaving things I knew to be temporary, but this is the first time in my life that something was supposed to be permanent and, actually, was not.  I don't know how to be a single mom.  I can't scream loud enough with my inside voice to expel the acid of being left like this.  Even the catharsis of writing it down is hot like a campfire ember, burning my fingers as they fly across the keyboard, searing the skin of them any time I stop to feel.  

So, here I am. Under these stars.  Staring at an empty bedside bassinet, and sleeping with the teddy bear that my toddler left behind.  I moved things from one home to another this afternoon.  I drove southbound on the highway alone.  Trunk full of boxes, car full of breakup songs.  

New life.  Old me.  Time to find my own breath. 

Meditate for three minutes, write for two.

I tried to meditate today.  For three minutes, I closed my eyes.  I sat on my bed with my arms softly crossed in front of my chest, and I listened to myself breathe.  If my phone had buzzed, there would have been trouble.  But it didn't, thank goodness, and so I was able to disappear for a moment.  I don't remember the last time I listened to myself breathe.  The Caribbean can be meditative without effort, and I remember floating on my back in the salty sea, water so calm that I didn't move, and allowing my ears to sink just below the surface.  The sun warm on my face, the sea cool on my fingertips, the water like two hands covering my ears, asking me to hear only me. 

It is hard to focus lately.  As a mom, most of my mental (and physical) (and emotional) (and all other kinds of) energy is absorbed into one tiny human, who doesn't allow for anything other than being the sun in my heliocentric world.  It's fine.  If one day, she told me she was the moon, I would move to revolve during the nighttime so that she could glow.  That is the truth of motherhood.  And it is cliche to remind moms to take care of  themselves, and it is not totally understood that "self care" has become another part of the job. 

My phone has become a crutch.  I lean on it when I'm bored.  I lean on it when I think I'm bored.  I lean on it for far longer than I need to, because I have somehow become convinced that without it, I am crippled.  My god, what a waste that is, huh?  There was a time when losing a phone was a joy (this happened often, for the Caribbean Sea, while meditative, is not particularly friendly to electronics.  Perhaps it is meditative because of this).  I find myself envying that girl, and wondering if she has blocked my number or if I could dial her up for coffee.  If she even has a phone right now.

So today, I tried to meditate.  I realized in those gentle few moments that I need to remember to put it all down.  That taking care of myself is less a bubble bath and more permission to truly disappear, even from myself.  And, on occasion, from the sun.  (While she's napping or with her dad or something, I'm not crazy) 

Now and Ladybugs

In time, I will get used to the lawn mowers.  That sound, a weekend sound, a nostalgic sound of days off under the blue sky, will fade from the front of my mind into the back.  In time, these suburb summer sounds will soothe me like they did in my childhood, and I won't need speakers in my ears to drown them out. 

But it is fall, and it is not time yet, and I must admit that these soothing suburb sounds make me long for the white-noise quiet of a busy city.

I am on my front porch, battling a bee who thinks he wants my drink.  I used to speak his language a little more fluently, but I now must resort to asking him less politely to be on his way. 

 Why does autumn make us ache?  What are we missing that causes fallen leaves to smell like a cracked heart?  Summer is leaving, and fighting its exit as always.  This is her second summer (a new, but immediately effective measure of time).  I look back at my summers often, both happy and sad to leave them in whichever ocean holds them.  It is a thick photo album.  I have tried to glue it shut on several occasions (even a decade of summers has some cold moments), but the seams don't hold and a song or a smell or a drop of rum on my tongue busts the thing open like a book with too worn a binding.  But this is my summer now.  Tidy and wrapped with a bow.  A beginning and an end.  Less insta-epic, surely, but so much more real.

I have been thinking about what is really is to have a kid.  I'm sure that sounds silly, or late, or obvious, but I've sat deep in it lately, nonetheless.  And as her second summer ends, all I can think of is how fortunate we are to be able to pay youth forward.  What a responsibility, and what an absolute gift.  Every sprinkler I ran through, I can give to her.  Every pile of leaves.  Every snowflake on my nose, every ladybug, every marshmallowy hot chocolate.  Every dandelion summer and every shimmering winter and every Narnia wardrobe or pillow fort or backyard campout.  All of the magic of my childhood is mine.  I hold it in my pocket, and carefully unfold it when I wish on 11:11 or hang Christmas lights, and then I re-crease the soft edges, and put it back where it is safe.  But in truth, all of the magic of my childhood is an heirloom.  It was always meant to be watched after and then given away

I won't have her for as many days as I think I will.  The agony of motherhood is that if you do it right, they come to need you less.  You give your whole life to teaching them magic; how to speak to the bees, how to catch snowflakes, how to fold it all very carefully so they can give it away later.  And you hold their hands until you don't, and you hope that what you gave them was enough.

 I'm not quite sure how to grapple with the juxtaposition of pain and pride that parenthood brings, and so I won't.  Not yet. 

And all the while, I sit on this porch in rare moments alone, and quietly, shamefully, and gradually less often pine for my life of summers and city noise.  In time, I will sit here and pine for the toddler who is asleep in her crib, soothed by the lawn mowers, dreaming only of now and maybe the magic of a few ladybugs. 

Time Traveling

  Sometimes, if the oscillating fan in my room shifts and squares and rusts a little and sends wind into my face like the Caribbean air, I can time travel.  When the light is perfect.  When I leave the window in my shower open and close my eyes and use a very specific shampoo, I can hear outdated dryers clanging, staining someone's clothes with rust, and I can hear friends collecting the recycling from Swoop.  I stay there as long as I can.
 
 I try to start from the top.  From the road behind my tent and the gate that leads down into the neighborhood of treehouses that still feels like home even though it's no longer standing.  I step flat-footed and cautious, knowing as all of us did that boardwalks are either splintered or slippery and nothing in between, and one must walk like an elephant to avoid injury.  I let my front door slam behind me.  I was one of the fortunate few who had a door which would actually close on its own, and so the slam feels a bit like privilege. I walk [flat-footed] down my own staircase, saying a quiet hello to the doorknob that had been bolted to our front railing by a ghost of Maho past, probably long before I had ever even heard of the magical place.  The 802 is to my left, and a boardwalk the leads to Bonnie's tent which was Joe Junk's tent, which was who knows tent before that is to my right.  If it's a little rainy on my time-trip, the Swoop showers are running, housing someone who is willing to risk a special terror for a chance at hot water.

Once, I got stuck in a swoop shower with a hummingbird.  Another time, with a tarantula.  Another time still, with an unidentifiable slime slicking the floor.  Against all odds, the hummingbird was the scariest.

If it's rainy or if it's not, the washers and dryers are running, the library is packed with books that no one will read, the closet is packed with clothes that someone will end up wearing as a costume some tipsy boat trip afternoon, and there is a shelf which holds up a past staff member's decor as if it might make sense to anyone else, asking to be placed in another random space in another random tent until season ends, and it lands back here.

Through Swoop, I am back on uncovered boardwalk with the Fishbowl to my left, and the Bamboo to my right.  Someone is watching a TV, wasting a perfect day because you forget that the days are perfect and you occasionally wish instead for them to just be normal.  There is a trail which follows some line or another down to Circuit City, which is really just Jared's tent.  The living room of the Fishbowl is to my right, open for the world to see, earning its name even in the daylight.  Further to the right is Where the Sidewalk Ends, which is really Marty's tent.  I walk and walk along the long, central boardwalk in staff.  Under the shoe tree.  Watching ahead through the gate that leads to E-section, where you don't go, where only guests and 4-hours go, where you are proud to not belong.  I try to walk slowly here.  This boardwalk is the resting place of a number of heavy conversations, and it deserves the respect of time taken.

Eventually, the Kingdom is to my left.

(I have to stop for a moment, sweet reader, as I realize that I have gotten lost in Staff section.  The Quite Please is farther up, but I cannot recall how to get there.  Flanked by Skull and Bones and the Compound, it was twice a home of mine.  For reasons I won't share here, I think my memory is probably doing me a favor by blurring that path, and so I suppose I will leave it where it is)

I lived in the Kingdom.  I painted its floor from black and white to green and lived in its tiniest room and loved its dining table and the year and roommate I had there.  I knew its occupants before more, and I knew its occupants after and I will love that fallen tent forever.

Down a few stairs, and the Barefoot Mansion, which has always been the Barefoot Mansion is on my right.  Bits and Pieces is on my left, another tent I called home, another floor I painted, another life I lived.  I survived my first heartbreak inside those screened walls, and learned who I could be when I thought I was gone.

A tent called Betty Ford is a bit down and to the right.  The last of Staff.  It's actually Karen and Mike's tent to me, and though it certainly deserved reinvention, I'm not sure that Betty Ford was fair or just.

If I've planned this poorly, I let that latticed staff gate close behind me and find myself nose to nose with the Donkey room.  I smell humid trash and bacon.  I smell crappy coffee that I'll dress with the cream that they let me steal from the kitchen.  I drink it from a blue cup as I check out the breakfast specials drawn on a whiteboard, and the friend whom I sell wine and Panna water and pretzels to will take my order.


My less and less tiny daughter has just woken up. Nothing wakes you from the past like a baby crying in the present, and so here I go.  The staff will eat breakfast without me.  The rest of that boardwalk will wait there for another daydream.

Dear Clara

    Dear Clara,
   
        I just put you down for a nap.  You had already been asleep for a little while, but you woke up early as you are wont to do, and I needed to sit in your overpriced nursery rocker and push your hair back so I could kiss your forehead until you fell back in.  You like my breath on your forehead.  You like to hold my finger in your hands.  You don't particularly like to rock, ironically, but you seem to like how the arm of that chair cradles you on one side so I can cradle you on the other.  You fell asleep fairly quickly, and so I stayed longer than I needed to.  I stared at your face and marveled at your little mouth and your little nose and your little ears.  I don't usually do this, I'm afraid.  Part of staying home with you is the home bit, and I've got things to do while you sleep.  But sometimes, I allow myself the respite of looking at you.  You've got soul-healing properties, I swear.  They tell you that you've never known love until you've had a baby.  They say that you never understand what it is to stop mattering to yourself and to know that that's actually ok.  They tell you about the chaos, the sleeplessness, the baby-proofing, the diaper pails, the overwhelming sense that you will forever be overwhelmed.  They tell you so much, but come to think of it, I don't recall hearing about the calm of holding a heart that you made.  The peace that comes with loving someone more than you love yourself.   More than that, I don't remember actually feeling the calm until recently.

   As I held you just now, kissing your tiny forehead, I cried.  You just turned one this last Saturday, and I cried for how all of this felt a year ago and the calm I didn't feel.  A year ago, I held you much the same way.  I cradled you to my chest and touched my lips to your forehead and all I felt, aside from terror that any movement I made would wake you, was like I was under water.  Not drowning, but not breathing.  Floating some, sinking a little, hoping that filling my lungs with air would bring me to the surface that I could see clearly, but somehow not quite reach.  I was supposed to know you, and I didn't.  It was all so fast and so strange, and it felt like I knew you better when you were still a physical part of me.  Before I could see your face or watch you sleep.  One six-inch incision, and nine months of learning you was slashed like a tire. I was deflated.  The sense that you were supposed to be my oxygen was there, but that hardly seemed like a fair thing to expect from someone so new.  I loved you deeply, but I did not understand you and I did not understand myself as your mother.  Wasn't something supposed to change?   Wasn't I supposed to close my eyes one moment and wake up the next and feel different?  I felt as inept as ever, counting the rises and falls of your chest, hoping that I was good enough, feeling like you were too perfect to have chosen me as your mom and that someone somewhere made a huge mistake. 

There are so many things in life that you don't realize you are learning until you look back at where you were.  A year later, the calm is here.  The magnitude of the chaos is, as well, and I still feel inept more often than not.  But a year later, I hold you and cry because I needed you to be my oxygen and you were.  You are. We save each other every day.  A year later, I understand that face.  A year later, you smile and you hug back and I know that any movement I make is just fine even if it does wake you because you like my breath on your forehead, and my finger in your hand, and the way the chair cradles your right side. 

Dear Clara,
   Thank you being so patient with me.   A year from now, I will write you again, certainly shocked by how little I knew and how far we've come, and still the luckiest person alive because I get to be your mom.