What’s it like to have birthed someone who looks just like you? Rosie asked. I told her that it felt peaceful, which is true in a way, but also I don’t think he looks like me. I usually don’t think he looks like anyone.

I decided the other day that it’s like accents — if someone has an accent that sounds like ours, we don’t consider them to have an accent. I look at other babies and I distinguish their visual accents — that one has a nose that points upward, that one has thick eyebrows — but Henry has my visual accent. So he blends in with my sense of the world.

My body is my visual norm, my coloring, my eye shape, my mouth. And Steve and I look pretty similar. We aren’t surprised that this baby looks like he does. In some ways, I could have drawn him before he was born. I knew what the proportions of his face would be, and his coloring. I knew how his eyes would be shaped.

I didn’t know he would look so cute, though. I could — okay, I do — stare at his face all day.

May 11th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

May 10th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I’ve read that dogs make up games — give them a suitcase and a ball and they figure out how to roll the ball on the suitcase and make a game for themselves. Babies, too. Of all the things that might be learned first for evolutionary reasons — how to talk, or run away, or make a fire — babies play. This boy is in only his fourth month of life and what he loves is silly songs and being thrown up in the air.

If Henry’s crying in the backseat, now I can sing to him and he stops. He’ll just listen to me. But Three Blind Mice doesn’t work, no matter how animated I make it. He likes Old MacDonald. He loves it. He loves the e-i-e-i-o, he loves moooo and woof. If I’m back there with him I can watch it: his face lights up, he smiles with an open mouth. I made a CD of classical music, but he cries right through it. So at only 17 weeks into this life I am hamming it up for him, thinking of animals and making up animals to keep the song going.

He’s so little, if you sit him up he’ll fall forward or to the side or back, but what he loves is to be thrown up in the air. I spend my days wincing at the thought of him ever being hurt, but he loves the thrill of being momentarily suspended in air. I’m not ready for it. I still want to dress him in pastels and cuddle him close, but he wants to look outward, to not just be sustained but to play. Those two states of being are closer than I thought.

May 10th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

blooming in the northern Netherlands.

May 8th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Alice, I learned at 7:53 a.m., suffered two strokes.

Flowers with phoenix and stripes

Tulips, tulipa.

She mailed Henry a present: We can’t wait to meet him!

9:01 p.m.: her vital organs are shutting down. Last rights.

Their prayer, that the gates will open for her.

The sky is blue all day.

Henry crying in the backseat, I’m singing Old MacDonald,

a gray cat on the on-ramp with its organs on the pavement.

We are something holy made of meat.

SOMETHING HOLY MADE OF MEAT.

I told a friend something small, an aside,

and I got shamed. Language jumps.

The space between the two couches shrank.

Crying: I can’t breathe, I pull at a diamond earring,

I make swimming strokes with my thumb across my face like Henry does.

The boy who is most precious to me, I’m doing all that I can.

His hair wispy and there’s a wind this morning on the way to the doctor’s:

67% for weight, 73% for height.

I breathe slowly when the nurse puts the needle in my arm

as I read on the wall: Do kamikaze pilots wear helmets?

Henry stares at the leaves, I think. Layers of green in front of blue.

I get a letter in the mail:

You cannot prevent the birds of sadness from passing over your head,

but you can prevent them from making a nest in your hair.

That the gates will open to her, red hair and all her children.

I have sent my mother flowers with violet on the inside.

I walk the garden to learn how to breathe without tears.

My cat is alive under the yew, waiting for me to come back home.

May 6th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

When you were a baby you would fold your hands together as you ate. Your fingers interlaced without any pressure as if you were holding a bird inside. You would open your mouth comically wide when you were happy. Sometimes the wide mouth meant you were smiling, sometimes it meant you were excited to eat, sometimes we couldn’t figure out what it meant, but it always was a sign of joy. You wanted to eat the world. Everything went in your mouth. Many people said you were a really oral baby — always suckling on my breast or on my fingers, drawing all objects toward the vortex of your mouth. Your scalp grew a few weeks after you were born and so for many weeks you looked bald at the top. More hair grew in, but the hair at the base was always thickest so you looked sort of Roman with thin tufts of hair curling from the back toward your eyes like a low crown. When you were sick your eyes would get puffy underneath and you’d wake up making snorting sounds like a horse. We’d know you weren’t feeling well because from the start of the day you wouldn’t smile. Though even when you weren’t feeling well you’d still often smile — you were a content baby. Though not boisterous. You would study the world, careful and solemn. When we were out in the world, you would smile rarely because there was just too much to see. That’s a deep stare, people would say. Your eyes would track them across the room. Especially right after a nap, you’d smile with so much joy that I couldn’t help but laugh. I’d never laughed so much before you. We spent most every hour together, doing what seemed sometimes to be almost nothing. I would put you in your baby carrier where you could eat some and watch some and sleep some, moving fluidly from one state of being to the next. You cried rarely. Your tears would come if you were in the back of the car in your car seat, alone, facing away from me, and I couldn’t blame you for that. I would know it was time for you to sleep because you’d stop making sense — suddenly you’d start whining when seconds before you were fine, or you’d smile widely and then start to fuss and rub one eye or move your hand across your nose. Then I’d lay you on our bed and put the blanket I made on top of you. You would open your mouth and flap your arms like a bird, knowing what was coming next. Then we’d turn toward each other and I would feed you, your eyes already starting to close or lose focus. If I read, you would turn your head away from me to see what I was doing, and so I would put my book down. You would find my hand and grip it very tightly as you filled up your belly and fell asleep.

May 5th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

May 4th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

We all got in the car to drive Jack home on Sunday morning on the way to church, and we were late. If we don’t get to church on time, we lose our pew in the back — and then if Henry cries, we have to walk past a hundred or so people to get him to a place where he can eat or scream or move around or whatever he needs. I was in the back of our Subaru Outback with Henry to my right, and Jack was on the other side of Henry. Rosie was in the front, and Steve was driving. I had my iPhone in my left hand tucked under my thigh so that Jack wouldn’t ask to play with it — I often let him play with it, but I just didn’t want him to this morning, I didn’t want to encourage the video game energy, and I didn’t want Henry to see him playing with it, and I wanted him to look at Henry and not at the screen, but I didn’t feel like explaining all that so I just kept it out of sight. I was behind Steve, and he has long legs so his seat is back as far as it can go, and I’m squished. Really squished. Claustrophobic and feeling like a child. I have a coffee in one hand, and a baby sling on my lap, and the big red diaper bag on my lap, and my big black wallet in my left hand beside that iPhone, all in two square feet of space.

We’re late and Jack can’t buckle his seatbelt. The female part of the seatbelt is tucked underneath Henry’s carseat, and it’s  i-m-p-o-s-s-i-b-l-e  to buckle. It takes three hands. Jack was trying, but he was also talking and losing his train of thought, then trying again, then thinking of something else, and we were all four impatiently waiting for him to buckle up.

Then I tried helping him, but I wasn’t much help. Steve told me it would be best if I got out and helped Jack buckle from his side of the car. I was claustrophobic and we were late. I handed Steve my coffee, then I literally threw to the front seat my wallet, the baby sling, and my big red diaper bag. I stomped out in my fancy boots, went around the car, buckled up Jack’s seatbelt in ten seconds, then stomped back, slammed the car door, and asked for my coffee back. We were off.

Five minutes later I couldn’t find my iPhone. I looked everywhere, my voice becoming increasingly higher-pitched and my knees feeling increasingly squished up against the back of Steve’s seat while sticking my right index finger in the baby’s mouth to keep him from crying.

We drove back to the house and there was my iPhone beside our driveway in the middle of the road, squished.

The screen was cracked, the glass shattered, but! It still worked. That’s pretty amazing, Apple, that your product can get run over my a car and still work. I backed up my stuff and took my iPhone to the mall and found out that I could pay $199 to fix the glass or $199 for a new iPhone with video-taking capabilities. Henry has a grandmother, I need the video camera. (I bought it, though I found out later that the newest iPhone is coming out in June, so I’ll return this one and use the cracked one until then.)

And we’re getting a caravan. Weekly trips with a 6′3″ adult male, a 5′10″ adult teenager, a nine-year-old boy, a baby in a mammoth carseat, me, two dogs, and the hope for one more kid (and its accompanying mammoth carseat) in the next two years: I am the last one to admit that we have outgrown our Outback.

May 3rd, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

May 2nd, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment