{my topography}

… If every 3 ½ year old goes through a phase of DISAGREABLE that involves rejecting every choice and every option presented to him, and also often involves throwing himself to the floor in sobbing dramatics when told that those are his only choices, or even, at his very worst, saying, No Mommy! You listen to me! when told to listen.

And also…

If the rest of the world really thinks Palin is a charming and gorgeous as Pakistan’s president does (ick.)

Why anyone in the world really thinks Palin would make a good VP, or, god forbid, the president.

Why McCain thought smirking endlessly during the debates would make him come off as anything other than an ass.

Why anyone really would vote for someone who has voted for 90% of the things Bush has voted for. Seriously.

Why I am still feeling indigestion/nausea/ridiculous unpleasantries when I am 18 weeks pregnant.

Tonight we went on a run. As a family. All three of us. Granted, my current version of running is more of a run-walk-galumpf than a real run…

Still, Bean was thrilled. He put on sports socks and sneakers and kept up a good pace for almost a half mile before he needed a rest in the running stroller. DH went on ahead of us for a while, but I was content to slow-jog with Bean as he spent the next mile and a half periodically resting and clambering out to run along side me.

Once while he was sitting in the stroller slurping water he said, “Mommy, did you know that tummies make water into blood for our bodies?”

“Really?” I asked. “Who told you that?”

“No one,” he said confidently. “I just figured it out.”

Pretty cool thinking for being three, huh? And so fun to run with him. So fun.

There was frost this morning. Gossamer. The ghost of winter creeping among the still-green clover and hip high grass . Autumn, with the flight of a hundred thousand monarchs suddenly southwards, is here. Prussian skies. The harsh calling of geese. Water, low in the creeks, reflecting the first flame flecked leaves on the maples.

It was a better day. Sun falling in bold squares across the carpet and the children’s heads as they flipped through books in the classroom. Lattes, tasting good again, finally. New bread, toasted with unsalted butter melting into the holes and fresh raspberry jam.

And the reminder to live life alertly, asking for more, being more.

+++

What are my verbs? What would I do if these jewel bright days of early fall were numbered?

Write like a madwoman. Submit recklessly, and with determination. Paint until every canvass in my studio was covered. Paint still more, onto the pages of all the old books I’ve gathered (I can see the installation in my head.) Press my cheek against my husband’s chest. Listen to his heart beating a hundred times a day. Kiss his face. Tell him how sometimes when I think of how much I’ve grown to love him, my heart feels like helium. Swim. Wander every day in the woods with my small boy, building fairy houses among the tiny perfect trees of moss and mountains of quartz; teaching him to pump on his own on his tree swing; show him how to climb confidently in the crowns of trees until his feet clamber far above my head.

+++

I used to think that living an extraordinary life meant breaking rules; and that living in this way was incompatible with everything ordinary and stable and secure. I used to think that living the verbs of your life meant living like a bromeliad, subsisting on thin air, roots tucked up under you, bohemian, vagabond, wayfarer. I pictured Prague or Istanbul or Manhattan tiny apartments with crooked windows and tilting floors and late nights. Alcohol, and the heady lightness of being around people who spend all their time talking about ideas and little of their time making a living.

I am an artist. How could I not? I practically devoured Nin, Kandinsky, Rothko, Diddion.

Create.

This is my verb. It sings in my bones, a siren song that makes me content (if not foolish) to never work for a salary worth an eighth of what I’m capable of were I to take on Wall Street. It’s that raw, wild, ambiguous verb that stirs up the purple thunder in my chest, that makes me hungry, that makes me quiet. It is the verb that makes me slow, as I drive to work, until I’m crawling along the gravel road, watching the sky change, watching the fog burn off, taking note of the startled deer, the red fox in the tall grass, the grouse thrumming in startled flight.

I can remember being sixteen, being eighteen, being twenty four, and saying, “My one goal in life is to live so that I don’t regret not doing.” And for the longest time this was both a mantra and a terror. I felt compelled, driven, anxious. Lately it’s been a different feeling, one of less compulsion and more gratitude. This is my good life.

And even on the spiteful days, when I can only look at the unfolded piles of laundry or the way the food scraps cling to the strainer in the sink, I know this.

I used to believe that I had to be extraordinary in an external way—that I had to be chic or wild or daredevil to prove to the world what I felt in the pulsing of my blood. Now I am starting to see that extraordinary can mean just waking up and being present. Holding the aching moments close, holding anguish closer. Reaching up to hold the sky, or out, to hold the heart of the person you love, even as you feel week and small and their heart feels as impossibly large–the way the earth must have felt for Atlas.

Now I am starting to understand that extraordinary can mean trusting your life. Not in a soporific stumbling way, complacent in a day to day pin-ball game of accomplishing the same things, the same actions, moving slowly forwards or back. But rather, trusting with eyes wide open that life holds us all, even if maybe the world doesn’t know who you are. Even if the only person who thinks I am a superhero is the person I wake up to be every morning. Or maybe my kid. Hopefully my kid. And possibly, graciously, my husband too, on enough days to make me keep wanting to look in the mirror he holds up, where I find myself imperfect and flawed, and filled with a fierce hunger for joy.

What are your verbs?

I have been in a catastrophically bad mood. All day. I have tried, desperately to shake it, but it seems to still have the better of me. I convinced DH to haul Bean on a hike up the mountain through the first fallen red leaves. I took note of the bright blue sky. Munched a fresh-picked apple and ate potato chips on the bank of an old beaver pond. Watched the light angle through the quivering leaves. And still, I felt like crying.

Everything makes me cry. Everything makes me surly. Every word angled carelessly in my direction. Everything, including the bin of maternity clothes DH fished out of the basement for me, and all I could think as I looked through them was, “dear lord, these are all hideous fat clothes.” Even though they’re not. Even though there are some pants in there I entirely forgot about that are not half bad at all.

To make matters worse, Bean has been a monster today. There have been maybe five days in his entire life where I didn’t like him very much, even as I love him desperately to bits, and today was one of them. Everything I asked him to do was met with tantrums. Sweatshirts have become a heated issue. He hates them. Yet he must wear them. It makes going out of the house a royal pain.

The only redeeming thing about Bean’s mood (which matched mine, I know, this fact is not lost on me) was that he drew a picture of a monster today on his easel, and the picture could just as well have been a self portrait with three googly eyes, a whole mess of teeth, a big slobbery tongue and four ears. Oy.

I have resorted to ice cream. I have not yet eaten said ice cream, but it is my only hope that any small shred of the day might be salvaged.

I come home with a sore throat. Tuesday. Every week Tuesday seems to day that kicks my butt the most. I feel like a rug worn to the weft. Like the delicate filigree of a leaf’s veinwork—all that’s left after a season of snow. Or like the gray goose feathers scattered about the yard, down torn along the quill.

My small boy is waiting for me, playing in the backyard in the slanting sunshine, his hair lit gold, his face smudged with a mustache of dirt. He burrows into me, a full body hug. He hands me a bottle of bubbles slick with soap, “Blow bubbles for me mommy!” he instructs, then waits until I fill the air with transparent rainbow spheres that float up towards the blue sky, cloudless and bright.

We walk down the driveway, the geese following us, a rumpus of flapping and honks, they think we’re Mama. Anyone with two legs. Mama. The leaves have started to turn, though for the most part everything’s still lush and green and the air, until today was warm like summer. But today we can feel a crispness.

Suddenly I’m craving grapefruit and apples. Peaches and watermelon seem like afterthoughts. In the garden, potatoes wait to be dug, and pumpkins have grown fat.

It’s Tuesday and my throat hurts and I want to curl up and make time stand still so that I can catch up with myself. I lie in the grass after Bean goes indoors with DH. The evening sun is falling towards me. The grass is cold. I can here an owl, the baaing of sheep, the twitter of birds. The geese settle in next to me, preening. They nibble at my hair. I try to let myself sink down into the moment, noticing. Noticing layer upon layer of sound, of smell, of light, of hue.

Then they’re at the doorway wanting me for dinner, and I go.

I’m not sure why I feel compelled to write about the messy sharp-edged rawness; skies the color of cement, thunder storms, evening clouds ripped to shreds and stained vermillion with the setting sun. Except to say that I write because these things matter, and my words are like the layers of snow buried within a glacier of all the winters that have come before.

Maybe it’s because I want to know that I was here, that we were, again and again. I want others to know this too; perhaps to offset the Hollywood happily ever after we’re all fed as teenagers.

As a culture we spin so many myths and prick ourselves in the process like the princess in Sleeping Beauty. We easily fall into a slumber of illusion, the roses growing thick around us, all those velvet petals and sweet fragrance blurring our view of the thorns that grow there too. We lie about our happiness, over and over again. Perhaps we cannot help ourselves.

Flip through any magazine, and without fail there are the glossy images of women defying death: skin taught and unwrinkled, eyes bright as they stare dreamily into the eyes of some muscular man poised to sweep them off their feet (or at an equally dreamy handbag.) The illusion is complete: beauty, possessions, money—these things make you happy.

I remember when my husband and I were camping in Puerto Rico long before we were married. We were both in college still. It was spring break. The sand was like sugar and flecked with shells. The water bluer than blue. Every evening postcard perfect clouds in rose and choral decorated the sky just for us. We were in love. Naturally we decided to spend a night sleeping under the stars right there on the beach, without a tent, just us, and our sleeping bags zipped together and partly open to the warm night air, our naked bodies tangled and salty from playing all day in the waves.

How many times have you seen the image of lovers sleeping on the beach—or making love for that matter, hip deep in salt water, her shirt white and wet hugging the alluring curves of her firm round breasts? Enough times to believe it, right? Well it fucking sucks in actuality. Sleeping on the beach feels like being rubbed down with sandpaper. Sand in every crevice: eyelids, nostrils, ears, unmentionable places. There are also sandf flies and the endless worry of an unusually high tide.

Sometime after midnight when the full moon was directly above us and we both finally stopped pretending to be blissfully asleep, DH turned to me, “Wanna go back to the tent?” he asked. Hell yes. Still we kind of felt like romantic failures–until we burst into uncontrollable laughter, and rolled together into a heaving heap in our tent.

But isn’t that what we learn? That true love, true happiness, and a real romantic marriage is always happy and glamorous and exquisite. The beach is never really sandy. There are never any sand flies, or sunburn or yeast infections or heartache or ego.

So I write about the days when things are tense and the friction feels like the sand felt on my sunburned skin.

Maybe by circling back to these moments I create a different illusion—that my marriage is fraught with conflict, which is hardly the case. There is so much sweetness between us, so many moments jam-packed with goodness like this morning, when we went to the farmers market and wandered around grinning at each other licking cinnamon and sugar from our fingers. So many hours, days, weeks even, when we fit together like seals basking on salty rocks: effortless in our play and our contentment.

But I want to record the other times too, because they are hard. Because growth never comes from the moments of easy pleasure. Growth comes when the ache is greatest, when wanderlust and terror swell equally in my chest and I choose instead to stay, to say I’m sorry, and to grow with this man at my side. Again and again and again.

The corn is tall now. It rises up on the sides of the road like skyscrapers in this rural landscape of field. The sky is stormy. By the pond in the morning I no longer see the blue heron that stood all summer, balancing on one leg as it fished in the shallows; and in the evening the sky is scattered with the jagged V’s of geese. The wind brings the first round crabapples to the ground. We startle deer when we walk in the evening as they munch on the tangy wild fruit.

Some days when we can’t help it. Our words intersect but never meet. Our conversations sound like a Salinger story, each line of dialogue unfinished, bifurcated like the V’s of geese cutting through the air; my intentions going one way, his another.

It’s not about anything, or it could just as well be. His day was hard, mine hard too, and without meaning to I start something by saying I’m disappointed. Disappointed when the plans change. When he changes them. When it’s because of his moods (which are directly affected almost entirely by how his work day has gone.) He turns stormy and turbulent, everything I’m saying an easy target for something.

Sometimes (many times) I’m wrong. It’s hard for me to say so. Harder to apologize, to reword, to back down. But generally I do. Still, there are times when I’m not. When I’m genuinely I’m blindsided with the intensity of his reaction, when he’s out of line and last night this was how I felt. Bullshit. It’s not me this time.

Eventually there was a truce, but it took until tonight to settle back into the kinder way we are with one another. It’s so damn hard to give everything ounce of what you have when you’re feeling like shit; when your day was shit; when whatever. And really, there’s nothing either of us can do about these times, except agree to stop, to give in, to say I’m sorry. To take a breath, or several. Because it’s neither of our faults, really. It’s just life, handed to us full and brimming, with not enough hours or energy in the day.

On the dirt roads work crews are preparing for winter. They bring loads of gravel, and grade the worn surface until it is even and new. Over the summer, the roads become washboards. The hollow bowls where puddles were become the places the axels hit hard.

The thing is, sometimes being grown up just sucks, and even though we’re thirty, it sometimes still hits us hard. We’re both nostalgic for the time when we’d bring a roll of quarters to the laundry once a week; eat grilled bagels in the Student Center past midnight; squander a whole afternoon mountain biking or playing Frisbee at the beach. It was easier then. There was less demand on us. We could just skip the plans, change them, not even have them, and same difference really. But now, when we’re both feeling this ache and our days are crowded and off kilter, it’s easy to turn each other into a target.

It’s what we used our parents for as teenagers, remember? Humans always seem to want a scapegoat. Someone else to blame for their own feeble attempts and failures in the scope of a jam-packed day where it’s impossible to measure up. And sometimes this lashing outis as unavoidable as the frost that will come to kill the sunflowers.

Still, when it happens, every time it happens, I’m stunned. I’m like a badger caught in a trap, yelping and indignant. The injustice of misunderstanding feels so huge, so insurmountable, especially within the small parameters of my own hormonal take on things.

But then I wake up in the middle of the night and hear him breathing next to me, his muscles twitching, whelp like, his jaw slack. Vulerable and tender. And tere is nothing between us in the dark. No words left. Only breath and the warm heat of our bodies, and I burrow closer waiting for sleep to return.

This morning, racing to the toilet in an attempt to avoid vomiting all over the floor, I ended up smacking myself in the face with the toilet seat cover.

Hard enough to bruise myself.

Crying + vomit. What could be better? Sigh.

DH and I went to our first ever parent night tonight. Our Bean is suddenly a big kid, a school goer with teachers and routines. I couldn’t help the feeling in my chest: like a hundred silver minnows all darting at once this way and then that. I couldn’t help feeling shy and overwhelmed, and at my side, DH equally shy and overwhelmed. It seems so official, going to parent night. And also, the end of something.

The end of moments where his orbit is only family; the arc of his moods, willy-nilly with glee or tumbling with gloomy sorrow at some slight wrong, only ours to witness.

Now he’s out there in the world, navigating friendships and expectations and the contents of his school lunch box. And it makes breath catch in my throat.

He has the sweetest teacher imaginable (who, by the way, volunteered to email me every single day to let me know how his day went–because I can never come to pick up to read the daily journal. How awesome is that?) And on his school days he wakes up early and full of smiles like bright slices of oranges.

Still.

And also, I think I’m feeling flutters of the baby kicking–but not regular flutters—and I am wondering when it’s normal to start feeling regular movement? I can’t remember what I felt last time–in fact the only thing I remember about my last pregnancy was my gag reflex in response to the smell of catfood; my hatred of maternity clothing, and very little else.