{my topography}

I know that nothing lasts. I know that spring in this place, northward where the light is lingering now and the first dandelions fleck the lawn, will become summer before I blink. I know these days will pass, and I will look back, suddenly much older than I am, with a heart full of longing for the sweet scent of my son’s head after playing in his sandbox until noon and for the way each year we celebrate the first trillium, purple and secretive by the tumbling stone wall, with our own little giddy dance.

I will likely not remember this season’s heart full of ambiguity and ache. I will probably entirely forget how Bean has entered a new SUPER BOSSY exceptionally annoying phase this past week where he’s trying on YELLING and DEMANDING just to see how far he gets with that. (Not far, little man. Not far at all.)

I know this, and yet I’m still struggling with being right here in these moments, because damn, right here in these moments is an uncomfortable place to be sometimes.

I know they are not unique, these moments of stress and financial strain and oh damn, I’ll just say it, it’s spring and I’m feeling a little tethered by these two boys. I still don’t know how to take on the playground, or any trip for that matter that involves just me and my boys. I don’t know how she does it with her girl tribe and her positive attitude all the time, because right now nothing terrifies me quite as much as the prospect of being out somewhere when they launch into their perfectly synchronized meltdowns.

I need to know how you do this with two. How do you get two into the car and then back out of it—without a double stroller. How do you make sure the big one doesn’t fall off the swing at the playground or get run over in the parking lot while toting the enormous weight a car seat carrier or a baby strapped to your person? What do you do with the big one while the little one needs a diaper change at the bookstore, and the situation demands an entire change of clothing due to an apparent explosion up the back? Or, how do you possibly navigate something as civilized and pleasant as a story hour for the bigger one, if the littler one is present and possibly grumpy? Not to mention—shopping for a new pair of jeans? (He’s here, he’s there, he’s under every freaking clothes rack in the store, and oh joy, he’s managed to unhang eighty nine dresses, even though of course, he didn’t mean to.)

My solution thus far has been to stay home. Which is decidedly not a good solution. It is spring after all. Picnic baskets seem in order, and swinging at the playground and trips to the bakery for croissants. There is a consignment store for fabulous vintage jeans I’ve been dying to poke around in, and there are errands of the more mundane sort (the post office for more stamps, we’re out of Vitamin C, the chickens need more hay) that seem to pile up, never getting done. I’m floundering a bit. This two thing is hard. Not loving them, just having them. Together. Logistically speaking.

I know it will all pass, and I’ll be grinning like a cat after a bowl of cream in four or five years when I can use both hands for carrying things like lattes and shopping bags, and my boys will be SO BIG. I know it will get easier, and I’ll take a not-so-secret glee in watching my currently childless friends whose lives seem divinely effortless right now, navigate these same first years with their own little ones. Because it just is the way it is. Littleness demands patience and selflessness and satisfaction in small things.

Guess what I’m figuring out?

Having little ones means showing up for parenting even when you don’t feel like it. It’s not Bean’s fault or Sprout’s that I’m worried about money, or that DH and I sometimes climb a proverbial tower of Babel and are unable to say anything the other one understands, or that my pants are tight, or I miss my girlfriends. Because these days that are passing? These hours of bright sunlight and stormy afternoons; these rain puddles and duck feathers and muddy garden beds; these moments? These are their childhood.

Theirs. Short, fleeting, glorious.

So even though DH and I were both tired and preoccupied after going for a run yesterday (with both boys in the jogger and the sun warm on our backs) I went and got the little plastic terrarium and hiked down to the neighbor’s pond because I promised I would.

I promised Bean I’d help him catch a tadpole, and he held me to my promise, big-eyed, curious, eager. We went before dinner, and I tried very hard to just sink into our time together. The grass was scandalously green. There were soft catkins from the birches under foot, and mud, and sparkly rocks. We went barefoot, and in the pond the silt was soft. The reeds from last year’s cattails were limp and brown and lumpy with gelatinous bobbing egg sacks.

I waded out, sun-warmed water up to my knees and scooped the jellied eggs. Polliwogs soon, we think. We also caught a newt. Still with gills. Its belly jewel like, spotted, yellow and green.

“I love you, Newty” Bean kept whispering later, as he sat at the kitchen table in glorious evening sunlight, drawing what he saw.

These moments, how to hold them? How do you hold them and let them be enough?

Oh restless heart, be still, be still.

You are there in the field of tall grass,
your shoulders hunched

and I am inside at the table by the bowl of daffodils,
trying to do other things

while in a tall dead maple
the woodpecker knocks

and we are both hearing this,
even though you say ‘I want to be alone’

and leave through the screen door banging
and walking away from me

I know where you are
I’ve been there too, a fierce dry sorrow making my throat swell,

still I climb the stairs and find you across the field
wearing orange like a small flame

everything could tip right now, we both know this
but I keep feeling like there isn’t anything we can do

except kneel and give thanks,
except pray as we listen to the woodpecker’s

morse code of the heart.

Too many favorites from the weekend to just post one pair of topograph photos. Since I’ve been doing these I’ve become so much more aware of my environment. Of textures, light, sound, color. How one experience influences another, how one image brings something to the next. Delight is effortless when I take notice.

White wine & stake frites, just him & holding hands, window shopping & pretty dresses, ice creams, 85 degrees, sunset on the lake.

Spring finally, catching tadpoles, rubber boots, woodpeckers, small boy wipe-outs on the bike, Neosporin, compost, more seed starts, the first sunburn of the season.

An impromptu Sunday road trip, the best BLT ever, old train stations, collard greens & trout, cupcakes, piano jazz, picking daffodils, and remembering that sometimes making memories and being present is enough. More than enough.

***
What was your weekend like?

Aperture n., 1. An opening, such as a hole, gap, or slit. 2. A usually adjustable opening in an optical instrument, such as a camera or telescope, that limits the amount of light passing through a lens or onto a mirror.
[Middle English, from Latin apertūra, from apertus, past participle of aperīre, to open.]

This word keeps rattling around like a magnet in the bucket of my mind. Aperture. Opening. To open. To be open. The glimpse we get of our lives.

Practically, I know nothing about aperture on my camera. I mostly just shuffle the settings until I find one that makes things look like they look to me in real life and then I snap the picture. It likely would make a real photographer shiver and cringe, the way I recklessly adjust the dials and numbers on my EOS 20D. Trial and error. Happy go lucky. Without any real clue at all. But it’s all good, because the thing is, it’s what we all do with our lives.

We’re all just catching a glimpse. Everything adjusts, shifts with the light, changes depending on how we look at it.

So. Bean being sick for so long forced something to shift in me. It made me slow the heck down and question my motives. It made me stop being as distracted, as hell-bent on accomplishing a hundred and eighty-nine things all at once. It made me realize that these few years, right now when my boys are little are really just that: a few years. I’ll be in my mid thirties and they’ll be self-sufficient big kids before I know it and then I’ll have all the time in the world (well, at least a lot more time.)

I have written before about how restless I am. How I have a reckless hurdy-gurdy heart that sends me off kilter, yearning for a Vespa, for wine drunk from jelly jars under a sky on the opposite side of the equator, for balconies and cobble stone streets, for night clubs with throbbing music, for gallery openings and indie plays, for jazz in cafes. If I let myself, I become heartsick with this crazy kind of wanderlust for another life. But I’ve begun to think that if I were in that other life I’d likely be wishing for this. Begging for it.

This: the sky is dappled, indigo and gray. The clouds are rent, gold seeps through. The sun is setting. It is spring and the soft earth is tattered with scraps of green and early blossoms. Yellow and pink. On his bike, Bean is a blur. Mud on his jeans, cookie dough on his cheeks. DH is this lanky silhouette running ahead of me, scooping Bean up as he tumbles. Now they’re both laughing. Close to my chest, sweet headed Sprout, asleep and warm.

I wanted this, but I didn’t imagine it. I didn’t imagine the details: these storm cloud days of early spring. Making mouse ears out of paper and scotch tape for Bean; baking kitchen sink cookies and building Lego rocket ships. I never imagined the all-consumingness of being the mother to young children. I didn’t imagine the wild, fierce, heady love. Then suddenly I was in it, and I was terrified. Like I was sure that if I just let this time be enough right now, if I adjusted the aperture so that my two little boys were in focus, I’d be giving away some part of myself.

And maybe I am. The jury might be out on that one. But in the end, so what? I think we’re always giving pieces of ourselves away. We’re always picking the aperture. We are always deciding how far we’re going to open ourselves up to the life we’re living. I’m beginning to understand this. Now is never what we imagined it would be like ten years ago. We are not capable of imagining the exquisite capacity of our hearts.

Today: maple blossoms, catkins on the gray birches, spring rain, the red stained hills, light through the clouds, an hour at lunch to write, static electric hair and balloons on the ceiling, nap-headed little boys, cookie dough and bittersweet chocolate chips.

What was your today?

Also listening to this. Have you seen/heard it? Bean and I couldn’t get enough this morning over breakfast. We’re both jazz lovers. The boy falls asleep to Miles’ Kind of Blue album every night. I have always secretly wished I could play the sax. He wants to be on drums.

I’m working on a long post for tomorrow. Aperture. View. The way we look at this right now. This life. Is you expected it to be ten years ago the life you are living now? How is it different?