{my topography}

By writing about the few great nights. Last night he was WIDE EYED, and entirely NOT asleep for over an hour at about 1:30 a.m.

A full day back at the classroom. They greet me with eager smiles and two-page weekend news letters in ever more confidant print. They use capitals and periods and I challenged them to write about what they felt, saw and said. One little boy wrote, I could feel the wind and I said to J, “Can you feel the wind?” and he said back to me, “Yes I can,” as we biked down the hill. Such sweeties they are, though they seek to wring every ounce of energy and attention from me. If they learned one thing this year, they learned to be kick-ass writers

A parent share tomorrow, to celebrate the kid’s final writing projects. Books they’ve planned from storyboard to final hard-cover hand sewn copy. Their smiles and their bright pictures and eccentric text placement is something I’ve been wanting to photograph for a while, so I’m bringing my camera! I miss mixing my life more: art and teaching and writing. I like when it overlaps.

At home, before dinner, we got the chicken coop floor framed out, Bean following after us with a hammer—using it with flawless form. The sun angled long, and for dinner we had flat bread pizza. It’s been the third night in a row Bean has gone to sleep super tired by 8, without much cajoling, and slept through the night in his bed until 6 in the morning, when he patters his way into our room. I cannot tell you how utterly thrilled I am about this. I don’t want to jinx it of course.

And a few more paragraphs tonight. Up to ten pages. The story seems to be fitting together in unexpected ways, as though all the jigsaw pieces are speckled with Rorschach prints. I’m just following along, seeing what I recognize and going with what feels right.

And four things I’m enjoying that start with A:

Azaleas blooming along the back wall of my house, unexpected.
Antinori Vermentino wine: delish with sausages and crusty bread.
Aching muscles from hard work.
Animal, Vegitable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

I’m heady with delight. With fragrance. With blooming. Everything plunges into growth come the end of May. The short growing season makes everything feel even more astounding and vibrant and urgently beautiful. I cannot get enough.

(real, up-close pics are over at flickr.)

have made all the difference.

It always stuns me when I realize how entirely a lack of sleep and stress affect my life. How I feel completely altered, weaker, fragile at the center like a soft-boiled egg with days-on-end of stress and poor sleep; and then after a few days of extra naps and time spent in good company (family and friends, both) and suddenly I feel different. Whole. Laughter rises up easily and often like finches on the early summer wind. I remember how much I love making love in the afternoon with windows open for a nap, after. Family time suddenly feels precious and sustaining, not debilitating the way it can feel when I’ve given everything already and the dishes still need to be done.

This weekend has been full of frisbee tossing, and cutting grass. Renting a tiller to cut soil for our new garden. Listening to night rain, and having our hair tossed by afternoon winds. Getting the box ready for new chicks (coming this Thursday!) and taking Bean and his two-wheel bike + training wheels to the playground bikepath. Watching him fly by, all grins. Making pasta al dente with fresh red sauce and sausages, salad with new mustard greens and fresh corn off the cob. And writing: good solid pages of fiction. I cannot wait for summer.

Two weeks of school left (back tomorrow) and then off to the writing workshop with Pam Houston (! I know, I can’t believe it either!) A week to myself on the coast writing and soaking up other writers, and then the wide swath of summer streatching out ahead, humid and lush, to linger, to sweat, to write, to grow a garden.

I have plans: many rows of corn, mounds for squash and pumpkins (DH’s favorite), strawberries, peas and lettuce, green beans on poles making an archway for Bean to hid beneath, sunflowers, potatos, radishes, carrots, tall tomatos bursting in the sun. I know so little about gardening really, though I’ve always coaxed a patch of vegitables out of some corner of our urban yards. Now, it’s nearly a quarter acer of soil we’ve set out to till. I’ve never composted, but want to learn. So much to be patient about–the eager part of me wants it all now: the tall rows of sweetcorn. The scarlet runner beans and holyhocks along the fence. The chickens feathered and scratching underfoot as we picnic outdoors like we did at lunch today.

I forget when I’m stressed to that teary weak point of nothing, how much I love to just ramble. To post about the cluttered mosaic of our days as a family. To make sketches in my flora notebook, or linger by the window watching the humming birds that are nesting in our lilac trees. And I miss all of you. Over the span of time I’ve had this blog, so many people have become bits of what make me whole, remind me of what I want, keep me inspired. What are you up to?

Tell me: five things you did today.

Sometimes my heart feels like a starfish belly: outside me, devouring the things I love. Sometimes it feels like an urchin’s purple back: a hundred quills around its pliant center. Sometimes it’s like the soft belly of a cat: turning to the sunlight, thrumming with internal delight. Sometimes it’s hard to have a heart this tender, this wide open to other people’s grief.

At work we’re just finally now sorting through the relics of trauma that we’ve carried like splinters through the school year. I’m more okay than many others, in part, because I was new there, and also because I am young and resilient. The middle kid in my family. The peace maker. The relativist who can see both sides, while still seeing the cup half full. I wasn’t rooted, familiar with the way ‘things always were.’ The lives lost weren’t ones I knew.

And yet, oh and yet, it is so very hard for me to sit in a room with everyone’s emotions running high like floodwaters, just below the surface of their pale blue veins. So hard to see their faces hurt, to see the different sides, to see the grief and feel it all. I try to envision a protective shield to stop some of it from saturating, but the sorrow and loss and anger that fills the building, and eddies as two people pass in the halls, is so present, so tangible, I can’t shake it off. I am devastated, still. And then I read in the paper about the little girl in Portugal, abducted from her hotel room, or about sweet|salty’s beautiful tiny premie boys and my heart feels pulpy and fragile and broken open all over again, as if sorrow were a new ingredient in air.

I came home exhausted today. I think I’ve come home exhausted all year. I thought I was the only one, but in the past two days of meetings, everyone says they’ve been ungodly tired, sleepwalking through the days. Someone said it was like we were trying to fix four flats on a car with the car still moving. And it has really been like that, post trauma, moving full throttle forward because of the wide eyed kids who want to learn about the arctic and the desert and addition and how to spell the word miss-iss-ipp-i.

Then I stumbled on this:

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.

Dawna Markova

Saturday: It hit me in the middle of the night, up again, one more time, because of the small inconsolable wailing and flailing of a sharp elbow having, night terror dreaming, teething Bean, that I was officially one step away from going insane.

I told DH as much, in a whimpering whisper, having already burst into tears at least once between the time I got home and the time I went to bed, and the next morning he let me sleep in. Until 10:40. When I woke up on my own accord, stretched a leisurely stretch, and basked in a hot shower.

At 7:30 he took Bean and went to breakfast and Home Depot and to the coffee shop for freshly roasted beans and the market for a list items we’d run out of, and he left me with the entire bed to myself, with all the covers and the pillows are fluffed just so and the slatted shades drawn so the room stayed wrapped in yummy semi dark but the window was open to let the sweet fragrance of spring waft in.

I was beaming all day.

Sunday: Some people probably (no, definitely) will think I am strange because I derive a great amount of joy from doing yardwork… But I really do. I’m always happy when I have the weedwacker in my hand, it’s loud whine drowning out any stray thoughts, so that I am simply there in the moment, watching the grass and leaves fall in swathes. I spent the morning doing this in the lower meadow, cutting a huge square where we plan to till for a garden, while above me, on the lawn, DH circled back and forth with the mower, Bean perched on his shoulders. Watching them together like that always makes me burst into smiles. Bean clutching two handfuls of DH’s summer-curly hair, both of them grinning wide as they make the turn nearest me, waving.

Then we started on the chicken coop, which, after several debates (not all were pretty, either) we concluded would best be made not in a new structure, but in our existing “barn” shed that once housed a horse before we came to own it. The floor is entirely being reclaimed by nature, but the walls are stick-built and sturdy (ha! knock on wood!) and the roof seems to still work in spite of the moss growing there (or perhaps because of it.) We spent several hours cleaning out all the left-over planks of flooring we’d tossed there hurriedly last spring around this time, when we were frantic to be finished with flooring and could not yet fathom living here.

It seems like it’s been such a long, long time since that time of nailing floor boards and longing, our days painted with worry and exhaustion. Here we are, a year later, and I’ve planted rose bushes along the front of the house and scattered native wildflower seeds down the bank and found purple trillium growing along the old stone wall at the edge of our land. A year, and everything is different.

Bean spent the evening zipping around the wide expanse of our kitchen and livingroom floor on his bike. A few weeks after we bought it, he can now steer and pedal like nobody’s business. He’s getting reckless in that little boy way: looking over at us and grinning while he steers in entirely the opposite direction. He rarely falls. It will be a different story on the packed dirt of our road, but inside, where the floor is smooth and the way unobstructed, there’s no stopping him.

Monday: Before 7 and the sky is gray and I’m huddled in my bathrobe smelling the heady scent of lilacs that my sister picked and brought to me before she left (I miss you!) and listening to the birds calling back and forth. We have a pair of Orioles. Bright orange and black brushstrokes fluttering across the canvass of green woods. The first time I saw them, I held my breath.

The kids stare longingly at the windows and look like second graders already. I watch them read now, and see they have hardly a ny memory of the time when the stragled in at the beginning of the year, wide eyed and tangled in short syllable words. Assessments are mid-way. It is gratifying: they’re doing well. But also laborious and utterly one-dimensional. Tests only say so much about a person, and in my opinon that ’so much’ is a rather small fraction of the whole.

I’m still burning the candle at both ends, as the saying goes. Can’t quite get myself to settle down and go to bed early enough, and when 5:30 rolls around I’m stumbling and bleary eyed. The staccato of the keyboard and strong coffee gradually bring me to up to speed, but then I’m out the door.

Bean got a fever today, unexpectedly, after a weekend of visiting with my sister (whom he followed about and pesterd, a long-eyelashed grin ever ready to bat her way.) Now he’s curled in our bed. Twenty seven months today. It dawned on me that I didn’t write him a letter last month, and now there’s almost too much to say. Tonight he feverishly pats the spot next to him on the bed and says, “Here mama, a cozy spot for you.”

The spring rains are here too, torrenting down. Everything is finally lush and green and blooming. We have chickens arriving in two weeks. No physical arrangements for them yet–but that’s a must-do this weekend, or they’ll be in our bathtub. Five Aracuna day-olds. Bean talks about them as if they’re already here.

I’m trying to find ways to wind down this week. I’m one of those people who needs big chunks of decompression time, and at the end of the day I find myself sighing as I try to bring awareness to snapping bean stems off and sauteeing them with butter, lemon and toasted almonds. What do you do to settle back into the quiter corners of your self? How do you unwind after a nonstop day?

Sometimes, blowing on a dandelion gone to seed, I wish for superhuman capabilities. Then I count my wishes as the tiny seed umbrellas lift on the wind and scatter, and my popsicle juice-faced boy laughs wildly in delight.

I wish I could be okay with just four hours of sleep, instead of the seven I must have to function. I wish I could whirl through household tasks, setting things right, watering plants, doing laundry, and still have time to sink into a corner and read chapter after chapter in a good book.

I wish I could come home after a day of teaching, when I’ve felt every fiber in my being be endlessly tugged and frayed, as though my heart were a rope toy and the children a pack of eager pups, and still have something rich to give. I wish, after a day of reading, reacting, redirecting, reconciling, and reconstructing all the little important fragments that are meaningful to the children I teach, I could regularly have energy left for here: in my studio, after daylight has ebbed away from the walls, and lamplight pools at my desk. Energy to write two thousand words instead of two hundred.

I wish I could feel patience overflowing the bowl of my soul every night when I’m snuggling in the dark with my boy. Patience, as he reaches out his thin soft arms in the dark and wraps them around my neck, fiercely, in a lock hold. Patience as he begs again for one more snuggle, one more hug, one more kiss. Patience as time slips by and I become languorous, my eyes aching, my body sinking into the spinning dark as I sing tuneless melodies into the curve of his small ear. Patience, as I want to be right there and anywhere except there in the same breath.

I wish for more times when, tumbling into the sweet curve of my husband’s body, the prospect of following my tongue and my red-hot whimsy isn’t in a dead heat with every cell in my body screaming or one more hour of sleep.

Becoming a parent brings your life abruptly to full capacity—or full catastrophe—and sometimes both, at the same time. You don’t really get this before becoming a parent, though everyone tries to tell you.

There is no way to understand before you’re in the thick of it, how you’ll simultaneously feel like a circus act and a soothsayer, mumbling, “Isn’t that what mommy said would happen?” when the lightening fast extension of your heart falls headlong over the handlebar of his wagon after he’s pushed it full-tilt into the couch, and then comes to you wailing, his perfect cheek already swelling.

The acrobatics of this kind of love leaves me breathless and aching. Also, often, it leaves me entirely blindsided. My compass spins wildly, truing to an imaginary north. I want so much, yet feel so small and brittle and insufficient as each day splatters at my feet overripe and bruised with too many demands for my time.

Maybe it doesn’t hit everyone this hard.

I wasn’t ready for it, the day the two blue lines showed up, and most days I still feel like an interloper. Arms akimbo, trying to balance my enormous ambition, my longing, my wanderlust, and my fierce sense of self preservation with the endless needs of my sweet boy.

At the playground with Bean, on a day off over my vacation, I can’t shake the feeling that I don’t belong at the green metal picnic table, discussing toddler clothing labels and snack foods. I feel the prickly heat of guilt rising up as I notice a thousand thoughts that have nothing to do with the fact that I’m somebody’s mom, crowding my mind. Pushing him on the swing, my heart swells with complete pride. He’s so adorable, tilting his head back and smearing a perfect grin across the sky—and then seconds later I’m somewhere else entirely: lost in thought.

A part of me understands that this intensity will ebb, or at least alter somewhat, as he grows more independent, but this fact seems so abstract right now when all I long for are six days back to back to sink up to my ankles in fiction.

Each time I pick a dandelion going to seed, I hold my breath, examining the fuzz, planning just how I’ll release my breath so that every seed will detach and float away. I’m good at this, and also good at finding four leaf clovers. I know how lucky I am in my life. I know how good it is, how blessed I am to be a mother. But I also know that most times, when I exhale in a quick burst of air, a few fluffy seed heads will linger like tiny javelins, right close to the stem.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

(I am totally aware that he looks like a little urchin in this pic.
As he put it:”I got some CRUD on my face.”
Don’t ask me where he learned that.)

Alas. One day he will be big enough to use a urnal. In preparation for this event, I’ve done extensive research on the subject. What follows are a few directions to hopefully help him navigate that complex, highly technical piece of machinery.

1. Aim.
2. Go where you aim. Do NOT go on the floor or the surrounding walls.
3. Do not shake dry on the floor or surrounding walls.
4. Flush.
5. Please for the love of god, wash your hands.
6. Zip up before exiting .

I know, sounds easy, right? I think so too.

Except every time I use a unisex bathroom (or slip into the mens room because the line for the lady’s is immeasurably longer than my blader’s capacity is big,) the floor invariably has a sticky yellow trail edging downhill from the general direction of the urnal. What is up with that? Do you guys LIKE that sticky feeling on the soles of your shoes, and that horseflies-in-summer stench? Or is it really more complicated than I imagine?

Moving on.

Except really, we’re not. Because all things potty have become central to our daily lives here at casa mytopography. On good days this involves much cheering and hoopla for a job well done on: prior notifcation, proper underware removal, etc. However, there are the other days when Bean thinks it’s particularly intreguing to hide, in say, the central island cupboard, while pooping in his underpants. And then there is still his all consuming affection of going outdoors, which he does on his own, whenever he can–except that he can’t quite tilt his hips in the right direction so it likely goes all over the bib of his overalls or the waist of his jeans. Clearly there is more to this than meets the eye, people. But I can’t quite figure out what I’m missing here. Alas.