Mar
17
Once I fell backwards from the branches of a willow tree, straight down onto my spine on a wooden picnic table in my best friend’s backyard. It knocked the breath from me in a painful whoof! and for a moment I couldn’t assess the damage, I couldn’t tell how badly I’d been hurt.
Almost every morning I scan through the obituaries. I look for people under a certain age. I look for birth dates close to mine.
Cancer.
Car accidents.
Heart attacks.
Passed away on. Her passions included. He will be missed by. Remembrances can be made to.
I used to love the stomach-dropping sensation of a plane’s takeoff, the moment all that metal and bulk is heaved into the sky and you can feel the immense strain and effort it takes. Now I clench my jaw and peer out the windows and think please and eventually oh, just get it over with. Go ahead and fall from the sky because you’re going to do it anyway, I’m tired of worrying about it. Just get it over with.
I don’t really mean it and the complicated mechanisms of flight don’t listen. They are busy. They have nothing to do with me, even when I’m convinced they have everything to do with me.
What will you remember, will you remember anything? A zipline across wild blueberries and tall green ferns in Michigan. The sound of surf and cold salt-spray on my lips in Oregon. My husband’s hand in mine the day we were married. My babies’ first cries, first smiles, first steps. Stop: rewind. Don’t go so fast.
The plane is going to fall and I don’t know when it will happen and I am scared it will be too soon. I am scared it will hurt. Will it be like falling backwards from a tall tree. Will my breath be knocked away.
Will, instead, it be slow and terrible. Will I become a burden.
Tick-tock, tick-tock. Shut up. Fuck you. I’m not listening. You’re the sly, rotted promise of hospital beds and oxygen masks and last-ditch medications and protruding bones and failing organs and the smell of shit, but I don’t believe in you. You’re not even real. You’re invisible. You can’t steal from me because I won’t let you. You can’t darken my life because I am turning on all the motherfucking lights one by one.
I look through the paper. (My name isn’t there.)
Mar
16
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My SXSW recap, in brief: good panels, fun town, spectacularly terrible American Airlines customer service. Let me just say this: the trip was worth my while, but if I could do it over again I would definitely have tried harder not to lose my fucking wallet on Saturday. Coming home from Austin with no money and no I.D. was . . . not a good time.
The interminable hours of asshole-laden air travel were tempered almost immediately by the two feetie-pajama’d imps who greeted me at the door last night, though. Riley was hopping up and down and loudly wondering if I’d brought him anything (no, but that’s what swag bags are for, am I right? An Adobe-branded iPhone cozy becomes a tiny toy-sized sleeping bag just like that), Dylan was making his gorilla-like BABY IS HAPPY hooting sounds and scampering back and forth, pointing with great interest at my suitcase (ha, you and TSA both, kid) and begging to be picked up.
Sometimes it’s nice to go away just to come back, you know?
I was so wiped out last night I could barely stand the thought of having to deal with wee-hour sleep training issues, and you know what happened? With the exception of a single short bout of unenergetic fussing which required no intervention, Dylan slept straight through the night. JB reports that on Friday and Saturday he went in just once and patted Dylan’s back a little, after which he stayed quiet until morning, so — well, I hesitate to say this for fear things will immediately take a Turn for the Worse, but it appears things are going well in the sleep department.
I have a question, though, because it’s inevitable this will come up, and probably soon: what do you do when you have an illness/teething-related sleep regression? If he’s waking up because he’s uncomfortable or sick, should I go back to our old habits (bottle, rocking chair) to help soothe him? I’m guessing that doing so would basically set the entire process back at square one, but I have yet to experience a sick baby in the middle of the night under this new regime of No Bottle/Minimal Comforting.
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