greener grass

On occasion, Mike (and other friends with multiple kids) and I have thrown each other knowing looks, chuckled with the satisfied been-there-done-that confidence of middle age and said, "Remember when we just had one? And we thought it was so hard? We had no idea! One was a breeze! Ha ha ha!"

Maybe that's why I thought making the transition from working during the day to mostly being at home with Beatrice would be pure, unadulterated, leisurely heaven. No more returning home at 4:30 pm to bits of breakfast left on the table, coffee grinds scattered on the counter, jackets piled by the door where a kid left them after searching for one particular item on the way out that morning. No more of the mad hurtle towards dinner: overseeing homework, loading the dishwasher, fetching snacks, chopping onions, listening to two big kids talk at once, wondering if I did the right things at work, all with a clingy baby on my hip who cannot bear to be put down.

Well, of course she couldn't bear to be put down! I had missed her all day, too.

At first, after the semester ended, I felt odd. The relentless pace quieted down abruptly, leaving space for me to wonder about things like the threadbare, stained couch cushions (couches - where does one get couches?) and the eternal problem of finding a lunch Frances will eat at school. I began checking out new cookbooks at the library again, and thinking about strawberry picking. Creative domestic energies flowed in to the small spaces that working life had dominated for so long. It's a pleasure to re-inhabit that pace and focus.

However. It turns out one baby actually is hard. Did I really look back and laugh at my hand-wringing first-time parent self, wondering what all the fuss was about?

She never wants me to put her down. She sees me all day and she never wants me to put her down. She adores Mike and Frances and Gabriel, but if she is playing with them and I leave the room she shrieks and hightails it after me. I can make an after-school smoothie with one hand, I can maneuver the stroller full of library books and backpacks with one hand - but I don't enjoy it.

I remember a good talk, years ago, with a fellow social worker who had decided to stay home full time with her son after having worked full time. She told me staying home was the right thing for her and her family, but sometimes she felt as if all she did was move things from one room to another, all day long.

I didn't get it then, but now I do. I spent at least an hour of precious naptime today moving things around my house: laundry from the basement to the kids' rooms, dirty sheets from their rooms back to the basement, a stray Lego to the Lego box, a bottle of vitamins that had been kicked to the corner back to the cabinet, a stack of old homework to the recycling bin, a stack of dirty dishes from the dining room table to the dishwasher. And one has to spend naptime moving stuff from one room to another when the baby cannot bear to be put down, because it is too hard to stoop repeatedly with only one hand free and 24 pounds of baby on your hip. So I kick and nudge things out of the way instead.

Friends, acquaintances, readers - if I ever laughed in an annoying way and suggested to you that life with a baby is way easy - I apologize. That was total baloney. 

(I say baloney now instead of bullshit. I really do.)

The Blue Angels have been flying around overhead the last couple of days. It's been a few years since they have flown during Commissioning Week here in Annapolis. I first saw them fly low, in a dizzyingly tight formation of four, while sitting with Beatrice in our backyard sandbox yesterday. She nearly leaped out of her skin. It sent me right back to being outside, watching them with Gabriel, who at two thought they were nothing short of amazing. I feel his little boy thrill when I see them today.  

And I remember all the open space we had together, he and I, in the early days of Homemade Time. I had to learn to hold onto my own agenda but lightly when I first forayed into staying home, and I am slowly remembering how to do that now. On Monday Gabriel and I took Harry Potter and a blanket outside during Beatrice's nap. It was glorious weather. As soon as we settled down he asked if we could have a conversation together instead of reading.

We stretched out in the sun and talked about everything and nothing, the sun soaking into my brain, making me feel lazy and close to my boy. Then Beatrice woke up way too early, and I felt annoyed at the interruption. But we brought her outside with us, and she climbed over her brother, showed off her new walking moves, pointed and yelped at the caterpillars he held - and it was just as perfect as it had been when she was asleep.

It could never have happened if I had been at work. 

the joys of life

Frances will be nine this June. She is a long, lean, soulful, hot-tempered, mystical, insatiable, observant and ambitious bright star of a restless bookworm. Kind of like she was at seven, and six, and five - minus the chubby cheeks - except then I would write about her freely. Now she is more her own person with her own private thoughts and desires, and needs to keep some things to herself. As she grows older and adolescence seems a less and less remote destination, she isn't mine to share in quite the same way.

I'd tell you all about Beatrice's naked antics in the bath, or latest outrageous diapering incident (sorry!), but not my eldest. As ever, she can infuriate, inspire, and amaze, but I respect her too much to write about it in the way I once did.

As an older kid, my skin would crawl when I'd overhear my mother talking with a friend about me on the phone. Don't talk about me! I wanted to shout. (Maybe I did. Mom?) You can't represent me, you can't know what really happened, how I felt, what I did, why it mattered. I can't even imagine what I would have thought had my mother posted about me regularly for the viewing pleasure of hundreds of people on Facebook, let alone written about me on her blog. Oy vey.

So what does a blogging mother do when her kids get old enough to rightfully claim some independence and control over how they are represented?

In this case, acknowledge that it's complicated to write about Frances ... and then write a little about Frances.

Sometimes she and I get into communication ruts. We follow a kind of nightmarish snippy script, wherein I nag and she pushes back with negativity and exaggeration, then I try to use infuriating reasonableness to poke holes in her claims about every other kid in her class or something being the worst thing that has ever happened in her entire life, then she pushes back harder still, then I do, and everything goes south in a matter of minutes.

Last night after Gabriel was in bed I invited Frances to read with me. She has been rereading Harry Potter for weeks now, gobbling it up at every opportunity, refusing to be read to at night so she can pore over one of the books until the last possible second. Mike and I are both sad about this, as we miss reading aloud with Frances. It's something that has been a dependable connecting activity for all of us since she was 3 months old and we're afraid that era is ending.

But - but - she finished the series a couple of nights ago. I saw the door swing open again, and I tried to muscle my way through it with new book suggestions, despite the fact that she really wasn't interested in reading with me. I felt my temper simmer. We started getting snippy. I flopped onto the couch in despair. Why was this happening? Where was my sweet daughter, ever ready to snuggle up with me and a book...?

Frances sat in the chair opposite and looked at me plaintively. Why are we fighting, Mama? I don't want to fight.

I don't, either.

Let's think about happy things instead.

So we began free associating: ice cream sundaes, Christmas, dancing, birthdays, flowering trees in spring, Beatrice's eyes, a card in the mail, listening to you play the piano, reading, writing, running a 5k with you.

We kept on and on, and got happier and happier. Frances called it The Joys of Life game.

We played again tonight. Mike was at seminar, and Gabriel and Beatrice were in bed. We ate frozen yogurt out of those weird tubes, draped over the furniture in our bare feet and new summery skins, and began to list: singing, bakeries, Miyazaki movies, time together, 'lying around when there's no homework and nothing on the agenda at all,' friends, traveling, popsicles in summer, swimming at the pool, Bach, birthday cake, yoga, swinging.

Frances amazes me. She saw we were headed for a crash, tapped the brakes, and with no help from her mama - who sat beside her grimly bracing for the impact - she turned the car in another direction and discovered something entirely new. She took me with her, and it was terrific.

We felt so close to one another, my eldest and me. I had no idea we had it in us. Joys of life, indeed!