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  • Ok but ALSO:
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  • You can’t go home again
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  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

I’m reading a story (begrudgingly, because I’m not enjoying it but I rarely give up on a book, even the terrible ones) about a mother and her teenage daughter. The mother is hair-tearing over the daughter’s eye-rolls and secretive pot stashes and general state of repugnant teen angst while the daughter is constantly strutting around in jeans with three-inch zippers and doling out blowjobs and everyone’s just miserable all the time.

I don’t much care what happens because I’m so irritated by every character—go ahead, kill off the daughter! Impregnate her, give her an STD, fell the hand-wringing mother with a stroke, leave them all weeping on some blackened beach shore after bombs decimate their city!—but I also find myself grimly reading it in bed at night and after some particularly rebellious scene in which the daughter causes more heartbreak I want to sit up, toss back the covers, and go creeping into my sons’ bedrooms in order to inhale their innocent sleep-sighs. Curl around them with that oddly comforting smell of pee and pajamas, ruffle their soft hair and whisper that they should never, ever grow up and away.

The children no longer exude the pure animal need of babies and oh, I’m so glad to be done with that. They’re still bottomless in what they will take, though. You can pour in energy and attention until you’re teary-eyed with boredom over playing Legos or lining up stuffed animals for an endless squeaky-voiced tea party and they will always want more, more, more.

It isn’t lost on me, though, that this time is drawing to an end. Right now they want nothing more than for me to focus on them, play with them, give them snacks and listen to them. They allow me to hold them, kiss them, fold them into my arms. They crawl over me like puppies, giggling.

The other night the boys were getting ready for bed and they ran shirtless from one end of the house to the other and I realized that Dylan’s baby pudge is long gone. He’s still irresistibly soft to the touch, his skin a pillowy expanse over those funny rounded joints toddlers have, but his belly is lean. His legs are getting longer, his butt is a tiny sideways letter B with no dimples in sight.

And Riley, my god. I stared and stared at him—not, obviously, seeing him unclothed for the first time, but somehow really seeing his small body, how he’s suddenly looking so different. The incipient V-shape of his chest, the tight navel, the actual dents and visible fibers of his muscles, the tender cords of his neck. The only infant-esque curves left are the planes of his face. He’s made of bones and blood and perfection and a thousand paths that shoot off in all directions. I don’t know where he’ll go. I’m terrified by it, sometimes.

There are times when I feel nearly crushed by the gravitational swirl of being at home all day, the children siphoning away my last bits of patience. Those times are real and valid and can’t be dissolved by cross-stitched reminders that I should cherish every moment, feelings can’t be ordered around that easily. But there are other times when I want to spread my arms wide, float on the surface of this fleeting year of us being home and together, just us, before school and friends and sports and music and everything else. While they still want all of me, any of me. Before they grow up and away and maybe I, too, am a helpless mother tearing out her hair and hoping to God that everything works out in the end.

Here you are, 36-almost-37, everything bulging and crinkling at the corners and collapsing into folds. Jesus, you’re as exciting and mysterious as a carefully-packaged kitchen sponge. Once you were red in tooth and claw, made of reckless heat and fluids. Now you move slowly, no rhythm, no swing. Like someone avoiding a sandworm. You speak in ridiculous staccato bursts. Okay I—. Hey watch where you’re. Can you— GUYS. HEY.

You wear sensible shoes and you have a financial advisor and you happily google for the best methods of removing streaks from windows.

It is what it is and it’s all pretty goddamned good, you wouldn’t trade it for the etcetera. But come on. Don’t you miss it, some days? Don’t you miss being young and fucked-up? On fire, all the time. Up and down. Your heart going ba-bum ba-bum over the stupidest shit.

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