{my topography}

Words tomorrow. Tonight, simply this. These boys, they rock my world.

Tonight I feel like lint flicked from a pocket on the breeze, or like a piece sky blue ribbon caught in a snarl of twigs, or like a small field mouse, ears transparent and patterned with intricate veins betraying a tiny fluttering pulse, curled into a nest of fuzz and scraps of cloth beneath the woodpile logs. Unraveled, scattered, tired. My heart beating in my temples. Trying to learn what recuperating means, as I realize that instead of rest I’ve been holding everyone else together these past few days. Doing too much. Hard not to.

I haven’t learned yet how to protect my energy without being selfish. How to take care of myself without hoarding my time. Is there a way to balance this, as a mother and as an artist? The filament feels so flimsy between me and the world tonight.

Things to Think

Think in ways you’ve never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

From Morning Poems by Robert Bly (© 1998 Robert Bly)

I have mastitis and feel like crap.

Help me take my mind off it by leaving me fascinating links in the comments from the last post. Or just whimper with me. Whichever.

Sprout is one month old and change today. I keep wishing I could go back to old posts and find out what Bean was like at 1 month, but alas, I didn’t start blogging until he was more like 3 months old so I am forced to trawl my gmail archives for the laboriously detailed emails I exchanged with another mom from the birthing class DH & I took.

We’ve since lost touch, but going back to our emails I discovered that not only did we document every single little thing about our babies, but she also introduced me to blogging by sending me a link for dooce’s site.

I remember having no idea what a blog was and finding out felt like a revelation. There were other women out there who were also feeling isolated by new parenthood… and the were writing about it! Astounding! Now of course dooce has gone on to become famous and our entire generation of mamas have been dubbed “digital moms.”

How things have changed in four years.

***

I already feel rather guilty comparing Sprout and Bean because I grew up in a household where comparison was regular and toxic. My sisters and I were always in competition, always being compared, always coming up short…and it is my goal to never do this to my boys (overtly pigeon hole them into categories: you are the artist, you, the musician, you the flighty one, you the responsible one, etc.)

But there is something to be said for comparison now, in these early months when what Sprout is capable of is mostly limited to bodily functions and sucking on a pacifier.

It astounds me that I had so much to email about with Bean. My friend and I exchanged almost weekly emails going into extensive details about nursing and pumping and bathing and burping and whatever. Bean was apparently much fussier than Sprout at the same age. He also seemed to have his night and day mixed up, though now, four years later and equally sleep deprived I can hardly recall this.

I do vaguely remember being awake–as in AWAKE and doing things–in the middle of the night because Bean would be screaming…and thus far Sprout is mostly asleep at night, or eating, or performing another bodily function that often involves lots of grunting. In general he’s a happy-go-lucky second kid, and is mostly content to snooze on my lap during the day as I sit on the couch and write.

In honor of Sprout’s one month birthday and my original discovery of blogs this same time four years ago, I am sharing some links I’ve found lately that I just absolutely love. I realize I don’t do enough of that any more, but Marta inspired me with her blog hunt a while ago.

Here is my version. Will you play along? {Five new links you love.}

1. Loving: Color Me Katie–She makes me want to skip and twirl & wear polka dots and eat lolly pops and do things just for fun, just because. Love her sense of wonder and whimsy and delight. And also, her photographs.

2. Looking : The Blue Hour and Grass Doe–A writer friend sent the link for Grass Doe. The pictures inspire words. All the more alluring since there are no words anywhere on the site…the photos are breathtaking, and tell such a story. The Blue Hour I found while googling for info on Grass Doe. I love going back through Blue Hour archives to see how much he’s grown & changed as a photographer. Just goes to show–if you are committed, you can hone your art.

3. Listening: 8 Tracks–Found this via Brian’s blog & am experimenting with making tracks & listening to other people’s tracks. Extra credit if you make your own track and share it here. Here is one for you, from me.

4. Watching: Improv Everywhere–How can you not smile watching these? I adore the fact that there are people out there who are not nearly as shy as I am who have the courage and the whimsy to make life become art everywhere.

5: Inspiring: i [love life]–She has such an awesome attitude towards life~ and I am totally on board with the whole Niki + iPod + RUN. Can’t wait to go buy new shoes!

I have been noticing windows this week. Squares and rectangles with light pouring in, raw and bright, the way that new spring light does.

I’ve been noticing the way windows frame a view, just so: six small squares of pine and red maple sprouting tiny buds through the glass in the solid cherry wood of the front door; a triptych of blue mountains and bluer sky where my four orchids sit in clay pots on the sill, some blossoms dry now, like ghosts still clinging to sapling slender stems.

Today the afternoon light splashes through glass. It makes the walls yellower and my mood softer, even without enough sleep. Where I am sitting I can see the mountains from the window, but not the meadow where surly, possibly, a white-tailed doe is standing on slight legs, her warm nostrils flaring, among a mess of winter-dead grass.

We are always looking through windows, always seeing a view.

Two days ago, DH had a down day. He read the charts and made the wrong call and all afternoon he was tossed upside down in a bucket of hope, and I could hear him thudding his fist with frustration into his glass-topped desk, expletives filtering through the wall like parentheses, and I watched a squirrel scrabbling uselessly at the dining room window. The squirrel was trying to climb the slick glass to reach the bird feeder where fat sunflower seeds tempt nuthatches and grosbeaks. Eventually, after much commotion, it fell to the ground; forced to nibble at the fallen shells and millet seeds the birds had scattered and pecked.

Two days ago I spent the day indoors, looking out of windows and feeling listless and limited by the smallness of Sprout and the amount of effort it takes to bundle him into tiny warm things: woolen socks and a hand knit blue hat, and a fleece jumpsuit into which I must stuff his arms and legs like small sausages. I’d spent the day inadvertently waiting for something to happen, waiting for the view to change, for something sweet, for delight to find me here in this house were the walls sometimes feel very close and the rooms very small. And when DH came out of his office I turned to him like a little girl, my face wide-open, grinning like he was maybe holding a billowing cloud of cotton candy on a stick. And he just looked at me.

He looked at me in a distressed, tight-jawed way, and said “Right.” And “Mmm” absently to whatever I said and I knew he had every intention of spending the rest of the afternoon pacing in the dark rooms of his mind analyzing whatever it was he had missed or done wrong at work, curtains drawn. And I bit my quivering lip and rinsed the dish I was holding.

Disappointment, if it could have a taste, would be the taste you get at the back of your throat when you jump into a pool, expecting the splash and the plunge, but forgetting to hold your nose. Or it would taste like burnt toast; or getting the popcorn flavored jellybean instead of the lemon one when you pick a yellow one out of the bag. Whatever its taste, disappointment was there on my tongue with the many bitter words I didn’t say and swallowed instead.

It was arranged civilly: he would work out while I would continue to watch the boys; then I would be free to go on a run, solo. We used the fewest words possible, as if they were heavy things we did not have the strength to hoist about. We looked in opposite directions, my ponytail to his cheek; the back of his muscled calves running up the stairs as I turned to face him.

Under the imaginary table in my head I was kicking myself for doing it again: for expecting something, unnamed and remarkable from him at the end of a day.

Do you ever do this? Expect the world from the one you love, when the world is already right here, and you are already in it?

I could feel tears at the back of my eyes. They spring up now, often and unbidden, a symptom of the tiredness that has begun to inhabit my body, making the skin under my eyes transparent and dark, and my heart quick to ache.

But, after much clattering of plates and flatware I realized that the only thing I could change was my view. I desperately needed to get out of the house. Right then. Right that minute when the sun was still high and the breeze would bring the scent of warm mud and possibly skunk cabbages in thawing boggy places.

So I sent the little guy down to the basement gym with a collection of Matchbox cars to hang with his Daddy, and I patiently nursed Sprout and then burped him and dressed him in the multiple small layers of fleece and bootie and hat, and then pulled on rubber boots and a jacket and strapped the baby to my chest.

Of course he cried. Of course there were those two minutes that felt like a hundred hours when I tried to get him into his fleece jumpsuit and all of his limbs were like rubber and his face was squished into a wail of discontent, and my body was suddenly awash with heat. But we both survived and I made it out the door, suddenly furious at everyone and everything and muttering under my breath. But then, looking down at my shadow, backlit by bright sun, I could see heat waves rising up around my shoulders and head, and I had to throw my head back and laugh. This is the crazy I am right now. Heatwaves. Out loud muttering. Mud boots. Mood swings.

And instead of just going to collect the mail as I had intended, I kept walking. I climbed the neighbor’s stile and jumped down onto the springy earth on the other side, and then walked down the trail through muddy places and over a small stream and then up, up into the woods along a creek bed where the snowmelt babbles and sings. Along the trail coyotes had gone before me, leaving their unmistakable canine prints in the mud, and a piece of sheepskin snagged on the bark of a hickory. The neighbor’s lambs are born every February, and one or two almost always end up being carried off despite the barbed wire and the barn doors and the three fierce lamas who stare anyone down and chomp impatiently at the air with their buckteeth.

Further up the hill, I saw the rest of the sheep’s wool, along side the stream: a soft blanket of death and feasting. No lamb after all. This was a full-sized sheep, carried here on one of those full moon nights when I woke to hear the yapping and felt the familiar prickle of goosebumps on my arms.

As I hiked I found the answers, scattered like last year’s fallen beech leaves on the snow. I realized that what happens with us is something that must happen to many people who fall in love first, then become parents, preoccupied with the sudden demands of need and responsibility.

It’s easy to forget that once we were each other’s only only, and while we are not now, our hearts still long for this.

Once we gave each other full attention, French kisses, boxes with small gifts and colored ribbon, handfuls of wildflowers, photographs, mixed tapes, late night movies at the theater, sandwiches, new books, back rubs, curiosity. Now, the hours in the day are not enough and like the coyotes, we’re both hungry for our share of time. Without intending, it’s easy to become absent, distracted, distant, disheartened. And so there we are. There I am.

I realized I was not mad at him for his dark mood or his down day or for having to watch the baby after I had already done that all day long, or for the dishes in the sink. I was not mad at all, I found, when I opened and closed the many crammed drawers of my heart.

Instead all I found was a kind of loneliness. A hunger. Not for just anyone. For him. For us the way we were, before this. Shit. It’s so easy to let it slip. You blink, you have a baby, you dig into the present of your life, the clock’s hands go round and round, and zip, it’s gone.

An hour later I was back. The rhythm of my body had long ago lulled Sprout into a deep grunting sleep, and the rhythm of climbing and stumbling through almost knee-deep snow on the North-West side of the mountain left me newly bright eyed. But they were gone.

I could see his blue truck was missing from the drive as I crested the hill above our house and for a minute I felt the disappointment flip flop about in my ribcage the way a stunned bird does when you scoop it in your palms and hold it, after it has flown unexpectedly into a windowpane.

“You deserved it,” I whispered. “You were the one who left without saying where you were going.” And it was true, I had, and I did. And it wasn’t really his fault I expected him to be my moon and stars that afternoon. It was mine.

But then there he was in the driveway—the boys had been driving up and down the road looking for me. On both of their faces smiles bloomed like sunflowers when they saw me at the door.

“Let’s go into town and get dinner,” he said.

Time spent moving, sweating, had had the same affect on him.

So we went for pizza at a little hole in the wall place where kids in hugely baggy pants were playing pool and a juke-box was mounted on the wall and the pizza crust was thin and crispy. I had root beer, and we sat by the windows, and Bean was preoccupied with watching the fire trucks and hatchbacks and delivery trucks that passed by on the street. And so, unexpectedly, DH and I had time to talk.

“A friend of mine at work is getting a divorce,” he said, holding the pizza like a taco, folded, pepperoni and cheese dripping out the side.

“He said it’s partly the job, and partly they’ve just grown apart. They’re taking a week apart to think it over, but I told him he should really taking the week with her, without the kids, to remember what they had in the first place.”

Next to us a family of four had almost finished dinner. The father got up and left the restaurant at a run. His family waved to him as he ran by the glass, on a mission to get something. Grinning.

When the mother and two girls finished eating they cleared their paper plates and walked out into the night.

I could see them through my reflection in the glass, lit by the yellow streetlamps, looking in the direction the man went. Then after some deliberation they walked the other way.

DH said, “It’s so damn easy to forget, to get distracted. Like you said the other day, you really can loose it all like that, without really noticing.”

The man came back. He burst into the restaurant panting, expectant. Saw the empty table where they had sat, then turned slowly to leave. Outside on the corner he stood for a moment, looking up and down the street. Then walked off.

“It really is,” I nodded.

We kept talking. The baby slept in the crook of my knee. I licked cheese from my fingers and shared sips of root beer with Bean who found a new love: calzones. He was busy dipping pieces of cheesy dough into marinara, a saucy smile spreading ear to ear.

The lady and the girls came back to the corner outside the restaurant. They looked up the street again, then stood there, shifting in their jackets, saying words I couldn’t hear through the glass. Finally they turned and walked in the same direction the man had gone, and I caught myself hoping desperately that they would find each other and laugh instead of being bitter or snapping at one another in the dark beside their parked car.

“Oh! They missed each other twice,” I said.

DH turned to look, then smiled and reached across the table for my hand. “You’re always noticing that stuff,” he said.

And I couldn’t help but grin. Because somehow, right then, we had exactly the same view.

I went on my first run two days ago, and another today. Two miles each time. Sunshine, mud on the road, my squishy middle conforming to supportive snug of lycra and elastic, my feet happy in my shoes. It was a small, micro slice of euphoria: those thirty minutes, me, and the muddy road.

Along the way I noticed how a part of my body would ache, or tighten or complain, and I’d follow the complaint, the ache, the tightness through. I’d listen to it, run into it, and then miraculously it would disappear, and I’d be further down the road with a completely different outlook.

It occurs to me that I’ve left you here since my last post with some perception of me entangled in the marshy thicket of marital woe. But indeed, life has gone on, and there have been moments of entwined fingers and kisses, laughter and wood stacking, and lo, on the table the branches of forcythia I brought in a week ago have burst into a riot of wild yellow blooms.

This is the thing about showing up at the page. Life is tender and fickle, like the first new days of spring when the thermometer creeps up and the buds swell but the mountains are still hooded in snow and the weather could just as well turn cold again over night. This is the thing: there are days when I wake up content and rested like my sleek marmalade cat, and the whole day crumbles to mud and tears by afternoon; and there are other days when I wake, my head zinging with tiredness and I can’t remember what I’m doing, and the baby is crying, and the little boy is crying, and DH is frustrated about something very much within the small orbit of his own internal world, and I am very sure the day will be hell. But then it isn’t.

Every day really, every day I write, every day I put words on the page and remember, is a day when I am writing a love letter to my life. Especially on the days when there is strife and angst between us; when the night is smithereens and the day is topsy-turvy, because it is on those days that I know I am becoming something new within the skin of my soul.

My life, my beautiful life is such a thing to be in. This is what I am feeling right now, as inarticulate as that may sound; as Pollyanna. Even as tonight I am soaked with exhaustion and Sprout has caught the viral cold/cough combo Bean brought home from school.

His breathing is labored and at the back of my mind I am continually listening to him breath. Last night was sleepless because of this more than because of him waking or fussing, though he did some of both. It makes me wince to hear him snore the way he is now, head against my chest. He seems so small to be sick, and yet that seems to be the lot of the second sibling: hand-me-down shirts and viral infections.

I am feeling scattered tonight. Tired. Sentences come in fragments. These are the moments I don’t want to forget from today: The way the house is warm from the accumulated heat of the day, rather than from the wood stove. How I am sitting on the couch and next to me on one hand is the cat, curled, her feet over her nose, and on the other, is Sprout, his feet pressed together, dreaming.

Today and yesterday, and for many days now he has been rolling over. Tummy to back. Really.

Somehow until now I have forgotten to write about this, and realizing this makes me realize also how fast he is growing. He hardly feels like a newborn any more. Something has shifted. He is not as ethereal; he spends less time asleep, and more time wide-eyed and cooing. He feels like a part of our family now, a regular.

I watched the thermometer reach 60 degrees today. The air was alive with insects. Robins were on the lawn.

After my run I took Bean out on our muddy drive on his bike without training wheels for the first time ever. I expected him to fall. I expected gangly legs tangled in spokes. But I let go and let him try—and there he went. He didn’t fall. Not right away. Not at first. Instead, my small boy just rode away from me down the drive into the golden late afternoon light, and my heart felt like a balloon tangled in the high wires.

This life. This aching, beautiful life. What do you want to remember about yours today? What moments do you want to preserve in the amber resin of words?

I was once caught out in the waves of a stormy northern Pacific in a too-big wetsuit. Hypothermia made me stupid. My brain filled with heady, irrational thoughts. It is quite possibly the closest I have come to dying. When I made it to shore, barely, after clinging to the muscled arm of the boy I was with, I could barely unzip my wetsuit. My fingers stumbled. Sand was in everything. My lips were purple. My hair whipped my face in ropey tangles as the wind increased. Desperation became something I could taste, like metal, like a nosebleed.

Finally inside his old burgundy Toyota with its sun-damaged vinyl seats, the heat on full blast, things felt like they could be okay again. The blood stopped pulsing in my ears, the vertigo slipped away like water down the drain. But out there, with kelp grabbing at my ankles and the current pulling me further towards the horizon rather than closer towards shore, I doubted everything. I became undone.

I could feel the way the air would leave my lungs, painfully and with a fight. I could see the way the water would look: like light filtering through a blue glass jar from beneath. I knew how I’d stop seeing the blue and see only light and then black.

It is sometimes like that now, on some days when we are both too sleep deprived to make reasonable sense. These are the days where our hearts are beating under translucent skin. We say things wrong, things that are true, but distorted. Hyperbole has become the present.

The day has been long. He takes the baby because he knows he should. I need a break. I’ve said as much. He wants to be good. But he’s also reached a tipping point. Typical male, he thinks he should muscle through it, without complaining, without saying a thing. He keeps it to himself, his own asphyxiating fear. He let’s the baby cry.

I sit at the dining room table in the dark and try to make a circle with words. I want to climb inside the circle and be taken somewhere else, but my fingers fumble with the keys. The words lurch. The spaces between are too large. The crying seeps in.

Wind is tugging at the house tonight. It makes the windows shiver. Earlier it ripped the wind chime from the tree. Sprout is crying so hard his voice is hoarse. His voice is louder than the wind. DH is talking to him in the dark. Outside rain has been falling all day and the meadows are scabbed with melting snow.

“Doesn’t it bother you when he cries?” I walk into the room and reach for Sprout, voice tense and trembling and soft.
“He’s a baby, that’s what babies do.” he spits.

And we’re off.

Our voices sound like bent metal. He laughs at me because I am being dramatic again, rummaging again in the trash heap at the back of my heart for the same worn scraps: what if we fall apart? I thrust this towards him already knowing it is futile. My heart is entangled here. This land, these children, they have become the net that catches my restless tumbling heart as it catapults about, distended and opaque like an echinoderm’s belly.

Only half his face is lit from the light falling in at the open door.

Predictably the baby stops crying the minute I take him from DH’s arms. He burrows into my chest and is asleep in seconds. This only makes matters worse.

“I’m pissed at him for making you mad at me,” DH says, the muscles in his chest hardening.

There is a kind of stupid logic to what he’s saying. I stare at him almost dumbfounded. I am in the ocean with my too-big wetsuit heart. All this ache, this fierce need to protect things; these unglued bits of my soul will surely pull me under.

The fire is choking in the chimney. The cat has vomited on the slate by the back door. The clock tells us it is already too late.

But the one thing we have is that we keep talking. We stay. This is what makes us, what keeps us. This is what love looks like too.

“What if we eff this up?” I ask, biting my lip. “What if we ruin this beautiful life? We can you know, if we keep on with this.”

He sighs with exasperation.

It’s like we’re standing on rocks in the middle of a river side by side and slipping. Instead of reaching for each other to balance, we’re snatching at soaked black sticks and the sharp scaled backs of fish. When we’re this tired neither of us knows how to be a pillar.

Yet we’re here, facing each other, and we get to this: it’s not his nature to be part of a team. It’s not intuitive for him to reach out. When he’s stressed, he resorts to trying to fix everything.

He puts it this way “You said you needed a break. I was giving you one. Then you came and told me I wasn’t doing a good enough job. I felt like I was doing the best that I could. What the hell am I supposed to do now?”

Then he says, “It’s fight or flight, right? I always fight, and I guess you always are threatening flight.”

I almost laugh. Is this really what we’re doing? Adrenaline thundering in our veins? Are we really that primitive, still, after ten years of sharing bread and sleep and dreams?

We hold each other for a long time in the dark. I press my face into his chest, tears soaking his shirt. Then we go to sleep.

***

Yesterday a dog got after the chickens. It had one in its mouth as I ran from the door yelling. It dropped the bird, still squawking, tucked tail, dashed in a different direction, still giddy from the chase. The neighbors came. Parked their blue pick-up, and chased after their dog. Two big men in flannel, running through the mucky melting fields after a black streak. Only when they had captured her and driven off did I notice that my feet were bare and that I was standing in snow, and mud, and the soiled hay from the coop.

I walk back to the house, suddenly feeling the cold on my soles.

The hens scatter and take flight; then settle in the lowest branches of a pine.

Learning Curve.

There are days when I feel like cloudy water in a glass. Days when I feel spilled and lonely, and the color of the sky and the color of the melting snow is like cement, perpetual and repeated as far as the eye can see and all I want to do is crawl into bed and sleep.

There are days now, when I feel utterly incapable as a mother of two. There is certainly a learning curve to it, and the curve is steep and scrabbling.

Today is one of those days. Stir crazy. An open jar of nutella. Going to pick up and Bean up at preschool with Sprout in tow. Thus far all efforts to take both boys anyplace by myself have gone disastrously. Sigh.

Today, sun. Today water droplets falling steadily from icicles along the eaves. Today, fat buds on the forsythia, neighbors running lines for sugaring, the sky the color of a bluebird’s back. Today I am less tired. Still, it is an adjustment, a translation, a prayer.

Sprout is eleven days old. He sleeps in his bouncy seat dappled with sunlight, making porpoise noises. Under the table Bean builds with blocks and talks to himself, his fingers still sticky with mango from lunch.

Things are already different than they were. Sprout is growing, and even with stagger-tired nights, I feel more like myself during the day. Five pounds to go before I’m back to my pre-pregnancy weight—except, alas, nowhere near as fit. My belly is a morass of softness, and though the stretch marks have been kind, and there are only a handful of them, they are there, like purple ribbons running up my belly.

I have decided to do a self-portrait documentary of getting back into shape.. Every week for a year, a photo. Already my dear friend and I have a goal for the fall: bike the entire state.

My body and spirit are craving this activity. I miss my feet pounding down the dirt road. I miss hiking. I miss the feel of my bike’s handlebars and the way sweat feels cool on my forehead on a summer afternoon. And while there is something so final and bittersweet knowing that this will be the last time I’ll breathe in the scent a newborn or hold him close before there are words for love or milk; before laughter, or sitting up, or teeth, or squashed fruit; there is also something remarkably liberating knowing that I am thirty-one and done with giving birth.

I try to remind myself of this when I’m restless with the crying and the juggling of two boys and the last month of winter. Nothing lasts.

Still, it is hard not to be impatient for everything that I know is to come: blossoms and seed starts and a warm chinook wind; longer hours of daylight; mud on the road and puddles for splashing in as we take long walks. And also: Sprout’s giggles and smiles; a regular school schedule for Bean again (he’s been on vacation the past week and a half); and some sort of routine for writing daily and running.

I’m craving new peas from the garden, and teaching Bean how to climb taller trees, and just simply being able to go out the front door without boots and jackets and blankets over the baby. Nothing lasts.

Today the late afternoon sun falling towards the lake makes the mountains rosy and purple. Through the jar of stems on the table, the light is milky and opaque. As daylight slips from the room the temperature drops. Chickadees flit off to wherever they go at the end of a day, and the woods at the edge of the snow covered meadow beyond the garden is silent.

Today DH and I haven’t been able to say a sentence, just us together without distraction or misinterpretation or interference. Today our sentences fall apart like brittle clay in ways that leave us confused. We blunder into one another’s emotions. While I’m feeling slightly more on even footing today, he is less so. Not sleep deprived per-se, but drained nonetheless. He feels put upon by the needs of a newborn, even though he dutifully, gently, patiently responds. The crying jangles him, he’s told me this, and to him Sprout is currently just a bundle of crying and soiled diapers.

It was the same way with Bean—it took until he started to smile back and to react with noticeable recognition that DH really established a connection. Now of course they’re thick as thieves, inseparable, adoring.

Maybe it’s because men tend to like things obvious, upfront, and straightforward and loving a newborn is exactly the opposite of this. It is unspoken, and blurry, and intuitive. This is not to say he doesn’t love Sprout. He does, fiercely. I saw this when he first held Sprout for the first time, almost breathless, grinning. But there’s something about the newborness that makes him feel helpless or incapable perhaps.

And I want to be as understanding of this as I can. I am. But also there is something about knowing that he doesn’t feel the tender indescribable love that I do towards our baby makes me…oh I don’t know. Something quivery and uncertain, like the way ice is when it’s breaking up and melting, all thin and silvery blue and black at the surface of a pond. It makes me feel fragile, as though if push came to shove it would be me who would have to fend off the wild beasts, even though of course this isn’t true.

Nothing lasts. This palpable state of tenderness doesn’t last. The light doesn’t last. The quiet doesn’t last. The winter doesn’t last. In a year from now I won’t be able to remember this. The way the days were at once stretched thin, and broken into tiny bits. The way between DH and I there is a building urgency for touch and intimacy that’s been missing for a few months: our hands quiver when we touch. I lift my face to the soft part of his neck, and feel him wrap his arms around me and press me close. Under the ice, the water is turbulent. Want. One word in the dark. And yet there with us is the babe, every three hours, nursing, my body still not mine, and in the soft morning light when the little one sleeps, it’s Bean tumbling into bed all limbs and giggles, stroking our faces.

Nothing lasts. Today the daylight has become twilight. The sky is the color of mandarins on a china blue plate. The snow is blue in the shadows. The fire has been started again, and the flames lick at the glass. Today, as evening falls, miraculously both boys are asleep: the little one on my lap, the bigger one on the couch having fallen asleep in the car when DH when to pick him up from his grandparents house. In a moment I will get up, move Sprout, and invariably he’ll wake. Bean will wake too, grumpy and startled to be home. The sounds of dinner will ensue. Night will gather. And then another day. Nothing lasts.