{my topography}

To be a mother means to kneel a hundred times a day; to kiss a damp and tousled head after a nap, or to rub away some sticky mark upon an upturned cheek (and to wonder, was that oatmeal, or something worse?) It means pressing my knees into the floor, so I can look into the wide eyes of a small person who knows how to press all of my buttons and also how to unlock inexplicable emotions in heart, and to explain where people go when they die, or about the tooth fairy, or that no, the lollypop displayed alluringly at checkout is not an option. Being a mother means perpetually navigating a fine line between the profound and the mundane—a line I’ve discovered is often at floor level… and it’s there where the tantrums get thrown.

To be a mother means that my hands are always full: with the soft-jelly limbs of my baby Sprout, or with the eager sweaty palms of my Bean, bigger now, perpetually on the brink of dashing out into traffic, or climbing over fences, or scrambling down rock strewn ravines. And just as it means that I am carrying things, it means that my hands magic. With my hands, I accept imaginary cups of tea, paint dozens of pictures, rinse a thousand dishes, type a hundred thousand words.

But maybe it’s really about this: being a mother means becoming adept at the imaginary; at telling stories about monsters, or fairies, or of mice that drive dump trucks…. and its this capacity to imagine that makes enormous, extraordinary, things possible for my children, because I dare to dream them. Just as it’s this same capacity that allows me to imagine a time in the future without sleep deprivation…when my short-term memory will return… (it will, right?) and I’ll have just a little more time.

It’s been twenty days since I launched A Field Guide To Now, and in those twenty days I have been more intensely creative than I’ve been in over a year.

I’ve been forced way outside my comfort zone. My word for the year was action, and this project has forced me to take action on behalf of my career as a writer and artist in ways I couldn’t have conceived of when I first took the plunge. I’ve had to learn how to query and research and push the limits of my ability to create at night after small boys go to sleep. I’m working on this book project, my novel, paintings, and a few other big projects that are under wraps with fingers crossed.

(I am also working part time, at a job that is pushing me to learn In Design and Photoshop, always under deadline. The child-free hours of my day are spent thusly: designing ads and view books and writing press releases. The rest of my day is spent juggling, with a single-minded focus pounding in my head like jungle drums.)

I am compelled, determined, wired, moody, thrilled, exhausted, inspired. When I sleep my mind is active in a way that is almost new to me. It’s frenetic and repetitive: gnawing away at the creative tasks I’ve left off from before bed. This past week I’ve begun dreaming of whales—and they’ve inspired some of the newest art for A Field Guide To Now. Here is a glimpse (in progress.)

Incidentally, when I looked up what it means to dream about whales, this is what I found: Whale reintroduces us to our creative and intuitive energies to show us a talent we’ve forgotten about or haven’t been aware existed. How spot-on is that?

I’ve had more coffee and less sleep; more wine, more sex, more dreams and less rhythm. I’m spending less time on laundry and dishes (and the house is in probable shambles because of it) and more time perched on the stool in my studio painting, with gauche on my fingers. Less time taking leisurely walks with my boys; more time trying to multi-task while they’re under foot.

It’s made me think about my identity, about who I am and how I define that. For a while, after Sprout was born, I slipped wholly into the identity of mother, and felt my world narrow to the small, domestic orbit of that life. It was restful, to be there. For a while. Sprout was such an easy baby that I enjoyed his babyhood in a way that I never fully did with Bean—who cried more and was more needy, just as I was newer and more anxious at the whole mommy thing.

But now, Sprout is walking. Bean is 5. The house is littered with legos (Sprout holds lego helmets in his mouth like a chipmunk. I’ve checked his diaper but he’s never actually swallowed one. Go ahead call me neglectful. YOU just try to keep legos off the floor with two boys in the house, four years apart.) There is a constant stampede of activity and peanut butter sandwiches and glasses of milk that get spilled. The vacuum is out all day long. Money is tight. Bean has outgrown all his pajamas. Sprout is starting to say words.

And.

And in the midst of all this messy, simple, regular domesticity, I’ve begun to long fiercely for myself. For myself not as a mother, but as someone entirely separate from my children.

Truthfully, I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with the definition of motherhood, and now, more than ever, I am enjoying my boys and wanting to be distinct from them, in my own right. A writer. An artist. Right now my mind is preoccupied with the craft of writing, with images, and also about self-doubt, and longing…

How do you define yourself? Where does your definition of motherhood (if you are, or want to be a mother) shape you? What are the words you use to tell yourself the story about your life as it is at this current moment?

Little Sprout:

We danced today, you and I.

You wound your way between my knees, around my swivel chair, across my studio floor scattering things about, mouthing everything, drooling, laughing. And I, well, I was busy dreaming; stringing words together, watching sunlight, reading things and feeling hopeful. I was also trying to get just about a hundred things done. Eighty nine still wait, but so? We danced.

You unwound spools of thread and uncased CDs and pulled the contents of every low opening drawer onto the floor: mostly paper, some postcards, a pile of forgotten wallpaper from when we first staked a claim here, in this house. I watched. I reached for you. I picked you up. We twirled. You laughed.

I watched the havoc gathering on my floor and let it gather. I made paragraphs, and sought after things; I discovered, replied, and tried to cover my ears so that the simultaneous voices of optimism and fear would drown each other out. All day I kept going after the things that beg for words and time.

So much is happening right now, and it feels like the moment a crow lifts dark and sudden from a quiet branch, and all around it the air is filled with the sudden, invisible eddies of movement. That is what the moments are like right now. Like flight. Or perhaps the moments just before, when the bird is neither on the branch, or off it, but in motion, lifting off.

We saw a crow like this, later, running. We startled it from a pine; its feathers black and glossy in the sun. You wore a red fleece snowsuit, and hugged a raggedy stuffed moose in the stroller. I ran hard, feeling resistance from thighs that skied all yesterday afternoon. I almost quit a dozen times. The road was mud and slush, and you weigh no small amount, but instead I began to tell you how things go.

In panted breaths I told you how there is always this resistance; how there is always a whispered voice that taunts give up, and you might just fail. And how the only answer is so what?

So I ran until I could feel my heart thunking hard in my chest, and my hands were numb and my cheeks flushed bright red with cold and exertion, and I finished.

By then you were asleep, your head tilting, slack against your shoulder. I carried you inside, and in the sudden warmth you woke, eyes still dreamy, and looked about—smiling ever so slightly when your gaze landed on my face. And so we danced. I held you close, breathing in the fragrance of your warm, rumpled hair. You pressed your cheek against my shoulder, and pulled your knees up and tucked close as though your body still remembers when you grew below my heart, tucked just so.

And so the day went by. Things happened, things got done, your brother came home from his grandparents, the sun set, and dishes accumulated in the sink. And in between we shared the succulent sections of a ruby grapefruit.

You liked each wobbly gem colored morsel, the bitter skin removed, and mushed them in your little hands before sticking them into your mouth. I learned about clipping paths on Illustrator. You pushed a ball around the floor. And today, like every other day, we danced.

You are one year old. I love you so.

Last night, post workout, DH and I were both in the pre-dinner hunger coma stage of things, trying to pull together tacos, while Bean was insisting on coloring and baking the Shrinki-Dinks (aren’t they toxic or something?) he received in the mail from an aunt for his birthday, and Sprout was walking in circles (yes he’s WALKING!!) wailing pathetically. He’s cutting a new tooth, just in time for his birthday and he’s a snot river and his usually happy-go-lucky personality has been somewhat diluted as a result.

So anyway, you can picture the scene right? Well. Then picture this: Me pouring Sprout a sippy cup of milk and in the split second (everything happens in those split seconds!) I turned to reach for the top, he reached up to his high chair tray and grabbed the full cup and proceeded to gasp and gulp and sob–but not tip the cup upright again–as he poured the entire contents onto his shocked little face. (I’m not used to him walking yet–and didn’t even know he could REACH his high chair tray. Oh dear.)

I just stood there not sure if I should begin wailing myself, or laugh (I chose the latter.) He had milk in his ears, people. In his eyelashes, down his shirt. You’d think it had been an entire gallon–the way the floor was covered.

So anyway, I know I sometimes get kind of serious and poetic here and I wanted to make sure no one’s getting any ideas that it’s totally zen and serene here all the time. Because it is so not. (As I write, Sprout has pulled a basket of toys onto his head. NOTE TO SELF: Stop putting things on shelves to get them out of his reach!)

And also: please, please go take a peak at A Field Guide To Now and back this project! I get between 5-10,000 unique visits here a month–which means if you, brilliant, awesome readers would each go and back $1 the funding goal would be reached. It’s all-or-nothing funding–which is a cool concept, but totally nerve-wracking at this point as I watch the number of days count down. (I want this more than anything.)

+++
PS: it’s Sprout’s birthday tomorrow. Can you believe that? A ONE year old. Sigh…

Doing: Whoa, it’s been one heck of a couple of weeks with both kiddos underfoot. Lots of sledding and cookie baking and general revelry. Not enough writing though. Or painting. Or time without the ruckus, giddy, non-stop noise making of two small boys.

Speaking of: Sprout is standing and almost walking. He’s thisclose. He’s hilarious. He plays hide and seek. He initiates chase games around the house and crawls pell-mell at top speed, then bursts into adorable peels of laughter. I tried to teach him to paint a few days ago–because I did with Bean at around this age, and it was an utter disaster. He ATE the brushes and got so frustrated when I’d take them out of his hand and try to turn them around so the bristles went on the paper. So not his thing.

Bean on the other hand is totally into drawing. He makes airplanes and houses with doorbells wired in to the walls. Tonight he drew a picture of our cat stalking mice. Each mouse had a lovely, loopy, curly tail. I can’t really believe that he is almost five and suddenly all cool and adorable: a big+little mashup. Yesterday he said, “When I’m big I’m gonna build robots. I’m going to design one to be a remote control that I control–and then another robot that the first robot controls.” He’s like that. Totally coming up with the coolest things ever. An engineer in the making.

Reading: it’s been haphazard at best this week. Mostly about the end of the world as we know it. Which really is rather unsettling . Though not entirely hopeless. I’m already thinking of what my garden will look like this spring.

Wishing for: a few solid hunks of time I can call MY OWN to get things crossed off the to-do list and sink back into writing and creating and feeling like myself again.

Eating: I’ve perfected pizza dough and a really great bread recipe. I’ll share both, but not tonight. Somehow it’s bedtime already. Where did the day go?

+++
Wondering tonight: what do you worry about? What are your greatest fears–the big, worst-case-scenario ones…and the little ones that nag and gnaw?

1. January
I quit my job. At the time I took a leave of absence, but already I knew I wouldn’t return. I was enormously pregnant, nesting, wistful, restless.

2. February
Sprout was born, after seven hours of labor, four days after his brother’s fourth birthday. I yelled a lot of expletives while in the shower, in labor, while in my head I kept seeing the image of a mountain–steep, serene and calm. And then. Then. This perfect boy that has filled my year with utter entire joy. We stared at each other. He lay on my belly and we just breathed. I counted his toes, kissed him, smelled him, nuzzled his soft head. He nursed, and looked at me, and was quiet. And so began our love affair.

3. March
Spring fever. Longing for green. And beginning to realize what the year would be. A roller coaster. In the dark looking through windows, everything blurry and unexpected and off-kilter, especially financially, but also emotionally.

4. April
Finally blossoms. Planting seed starts. Feeling the impermanence and indelible insistence of what it means to be a mother of two small boys. Realizing that nothing lasts, even when things were tenuous between us.

5. May
Spring for real. Collecting tadpoles. Taking walks with Bean. Running. Weight lifting. Systematically breaking personal records. Faster, harder, farther. Rhubarb in the garden and snap peas. And also, we slept and dreamed and become something greater than the sum of ourselves this year.

6. June
It was a summer of give-and-take, of us coming face-to-face with the consequences of a life lived pell-mell, with gusto and ambition and also arduous domesticity. We were in the thick of sleep deprivation and summer’s heat and rain. Endless rain. Also rainbows. And lettuce in the garden.

7. July
Evidence of the intangible. Feeling on the cusp of things. Starting my novel. Running hard. Breaking my own records. The first tomatoes. Too much rain.

8. August
Sprout was 6 months old. I started doing freelance copy editing. We went on a horrifically funny camping trip. I received several rejection letters in the mail. Berry picking. Baking. The tomato blight killed most of the tomatoes in the garden. More rain.

9. September
The beginning of all sorts of things…Bean started in a new school… our ten-year anniversary, and laundry. A 10 hour car trip with both boys to Maine. A week with my best friend. Apples ripening. Glorious late summer sun (finally, no rain.) Also: two weddings, the last two of my dearest girlfriends were married.

10. October
A post at wishstudio, getting a new job, noticing the light, having things speed up. Exquisite foliage. Also morning poems. Pumpkin picking. Digging up potatoes.

11. November
All about noticing what we have. Navigating a part time job, NaNoWriMo two boys. 50K words. Sort of. New friends. Dinner parties. Moodiness. Teething. Sprout started standing.

12. December
Now. It has been a year of noticing moments. Making cookies for Santa with friends + sledding. The most glorious snow.

When I first started looking back at the year, I could hardly remember it. Blink. The entire year happened. And then I took a breath.

It was a year of intensely lived moments, pervasive financial stress, and newborn sleep-induced forgetfulness. On one hand, I accomplished nothing. On the other: I’m here. We are. We’re in love, big time. I have a novel that I hoard, obsess over, gloat over, feel terror about. I have two boys. I can make bread without a recipe. I can run a six minute mile. I can do a pull up. I’ve begun to paint again.

What about you? I’d love to hear what you are proud of from this year… what you learned or accomplished.

I always pictured this, and yet I could never have imagined how it really is: life with boys. My house is always a ruckus. Things are always flung, spun, twirled, jabbed. Sticks are essential. So are rocks. Forts are made everywhere. The couch is a launch pad. Trees are dangled from. Boxes are magic. They become boats and cars and rocket ships; they are played in and fought over and sawed into with serrated knives.

Each morning I wake up to the full catastrophe delight of little boy energy. Inevitably I get a finger in an eyeball, or an elbow to the ribcage. “Mommy! MOMMY LOOOK!” But by the time I do, Bean has already dragged a giggling Sprout out of my room, down the hall and into his bedroom, where I can hear thumping and banging and more laughter.

Bean is growing tall. He grew 3/4ths of an inch in the past month! Sprout is standing on his own, cruising everywhere, cutting teeth. He is hilarious. He does things purposefully just to make us laugh. He loves to bang on things: pots, cupboards, boxes. He loves music. He loves his big brother, and he beams whenever Bean enters the room. But he’s also a tattle tale—already. He makes this particular fussy sound whenever Bean takes something from him, or even just gets close enough that he might take something from him. He is absolutely, one-hundred-percent a Mama’s boy.

My sweet second son. We’re so smitten for each other, and truthfully, every single day I still kind of wish he’d stay small for a lot longer. I love to snuggle with him. I love the sleepy moments just before I tuck him into his bed at night. I love when he first sees me after I’ve been gone for the morning. I love how he gets such a kick out of everything: standing, eating, sticking his hands in the dirt.

That said, I’m much less of a wimp with him. I want him to sleep through the night now. He’s huge (really: as in, 18-24 month clothing is snug on him. SNUG.) and he has no reason to wake up four times just to tap into a boob for five minutes, although I can’t blame him for trying. It must be nice, little man. Sorry to cut you off.

So last night there was more fussing and less sleep as he adjusts to going back to sleep himself. He was indignant at first, but a trooper, and figured out how to find his pacifier & snuggle in and go back to sleep after a couple minutes of fussing. And already it was easier than the night before. By the end of the week I think we’ll be where I want us to be (as in, one or both of us will be getting five or six hours of sleep at a go!)

Aside from the whole sleep deprivation bit, which gets old, I admit, I’ve been having so much fun this month with my boys. All three of them. And even though money is tighter than it’s ever been, it is quite possible that I’m enjoying the holiday season more than I have in years past because it’s been all us, as a unit. Without the pressure to buy things—the holidays become all about shared activity, small rituals, adventures, crafts, and food.

We’ve already made a batch of gingerbread cookie dough; strung oodles of lights; and cut more than our share of snowflakes. Bean loves to do paper crafts. He memorizes the folds easily and delights with cutting each snowflake and then opening it up—each one a glorious surprise of symmetry and pattern. Sprout watches, delighted, trying to eat every paper scrap that falls to the floor.

Each morning we all look forward to the excitement of Bean scurrying out to see what the advent fairy has tucked into a little box for him: a tiny slinky, some balloons, a golden chocolate coin, a small crystal, silly putty, umbrella straws. It’s a lesson for all of us to remember: how much delight comes not from the actual gift, but from the suspense and mystery of each small box. It’s all about the ritual, the gesture of fun, and the small delightful moment of surprise.

What are some things you do as a family together this time of year?

We make paper airplanes. A fleet of them tossed into space after dinner, twirling, looping, landing on the hardwood, on the couch cushions, on the edges of ledges and windowsills. Our hearts on our sleeves, laughter filling the living room, as the cold autumn night crowds in around at the windows and Sprout chases after each one, newly crawling, hands going fwap, fwap, fwap across the floor. This is my life, I think. These boys, these moments. What does it matter that I’ve missed a deadline I wanted to meet, or that tiredness makes me stupid some mornings? Everything that really matters is in this room tonight.

“Here, I’ll show you how fold one,” I say to Bean, not really believing that he’ll be able to follow my lead, and remembering second graders I’ve taught who have burst into tears with frustration, not able to follow the same sequence of folds.

“Really?” he grins. Then he sits on the floor with a stack of paper, his legs folded behind him on the floor like a little frog.

He watches intently, copying every fold.

First a rectangle, then the nose folded in to make opposing triangles, then the whole thing in half, then the wings folded down. Symmetry and sequence matter now. He breath is shallow, intent.

“Let me try it again,” he says after we toss our new planes high and watch them land. Sprout squeals in delight. A candle still flickers on the dinner table. Night is here, making the window glass into mirrors that catch our grins.

I watch him as he makes another, all himself. The entire sequence of steps folded from memory, after only being shown twice. And his plane flies beautifully. It lifts improbably, air pushing up under the flimsy paper and carrying it up to the ceiling before it swoops down, twirling in arbitrary circles before landing at his feet.

His grin is bigger than the room.

My grin is bigger than the room.

This boy, this beautiful boy of mine, teaches me so much. He challenges me at every turn to grow, to become more organized, more intentional, more prepared. He is my mirror, revealing the fragile and haphazard parts of my being that dangle and drag like dropped stitches. Where I am weakest, this is where parenting him forces me to grow the most.

I can’t coast, parenting him. He never gives me the chance to sit back on my laurels and get comfy. He questions everything. He is always pushing me to the edge of my comfort zone. He’s a kid who seems porous to me: the entire environment saturates his little being. He soaks everything up. Watches everything. Asks about everything.

He sees a thing once, and remembers it, classifying it with other similar things: the makes of cars, the inner workings of tractors, street signs, logos, maps. He has a particular obsession with learning new words and he insists on using them again and again until they blend into his daily vocabulary. Words like scenery and astounding, and investigate.

He is never content with the simple answer. He is always full force, full throttle, determined. He is fragile. He is allergic (to dust, grass, pollen, pets.) He is picky. He is persistent. He is easily overwhelmed by sensory stimulation. He exhausts me.

And I’m starting to get it: this boy of mine might be one of the most profound teacher’s I’ll ever know.

So. I think my short-term memory and my general ability to hold my shit together may be forever altered by the permanent lack of sleep that has become a fixture in my life, post babies.

Exhibit A:Last week I left my cell phone on the roof of my car and drove away. I watched as it flew off and did a lovely flip in the air before landing on the road behind me. I pulled to the side, cursing, with Bean wide eyed in the back seat, and threw on my emergency blinkers (do they have some other word? I’m sure they do, but I cannot remember it. See–shit has been lost, people.) I then dashed back to retrieve it, hoping that at the worst it would be scratched but still functional. But of course, it landed in the effing middle of the road and an SUV ran it over just before I was able to dash out into two-way traffic to rescue it. SMASHED beyond repair.

Bean kept muttering, “This is terrible. This is soo terrible.” All the way home.

Maybe this happens to everyone, and perhaps it is what some people gently refer to as GETTING OLD, but I’m only THIRTY ONE, people, and I and should have more of a capacity to remember things and generally keep my shit together than I have recently demonstrated.

Exhibit B: This morning I put my coffee cup on the roof of my car.

You’d think I would have learned, right?

Nooo. I drove off in oblivion only to slam on the breaks and come to a lurching stop at the bottom of our rather steep driveway as my coffee cup hurtled down my windshield. What the eff? Then I had to listen to Bean mutter about how his view was ruined by my frozen coffee splattered across his window.

It’s a little bit more than my view that’s been affected, BUDDY.

Exhibit C: While I remembered HIS jacket and hat and mittens for school this morning, I somehow managed to leave the house without so much as a vest, and it was COLD this morning. As in the first frost of the season happened last night. This situation was then made worse when I went to buy bagels and proceeded to spill the entire contents of the worst latte of my life (from here–don’t ask me why I even ordered one!) onto my lap.

Cold? Check. Wet? Check. Shit completely lost? CHECK.

Please tell me this changes. Please.

It seems like it was just a couple of weeks ago that I was clipping Bean into his ski boot bindings for the first time and sending him down the driveway. Now the first leaves are already golden and orange. Where has the summer gone?

The crickets know that snow is on its way. In the garden, fat pumpkins with girths rounder than Bean’s hugs. My Bean, who has started a mixed-aged (Waldorf) kindergarten program, and comes home singing. My Bean who tells us about the enormous imaginary kangaroo that lives upstairs. My Bean, suddenly a big-little kid. Four and a half. Mischief around every turn. He is my favorite forever.

And then my baby boy, my little Sprout, coming up on 7 months old, impossibly. He is a chunk. Pure love. Grins always. He’s been surfing the floor the past week or so, trying to crawl. In between attempts he’s pleased as peas to sit in the center of a circle of pots and spoons, banging things and grinning. He’s always cracking himself up. There are so many times throughout the day where I’ll look over at him and feel my heart catch and then expand. He’ll be smiling at me, watching me from across the room as I do things in the kitchen or fold laundry or type. He is my little Buddha. My reminder to be right here, now, in this precious, precious moment. He is my favorite always.

Also, some weekly blog crushes to share:

2 or 3 Things, Bliss, Le Love (can’t help going here and smiling), listing quirks over at Cupcakes & Cashmere…(a quirk DH pointed out tonight while we rocked it in the basement gym—3 miles in 24:15 minutes—is that I love to watch bull riding. Really.)

Also, these houses (still brooding over treehouse plans, as you can tell.) This gorgeous little party. This amazing installation. It’s how my heart feels, sometimes, lately. Overflowing, made of feathers, of air, of fragile things.

What are some of your crushes right now? Share please.
Also~ what are you looking forward to this week?