What a world

I took the kids to the splash park this afternoon. We’re under some kind of heat advisory for the next few days as temperatures soar into the nineties. This is hot for Seattle, and our house doesn’t have air conditioning. We have a large tree that shades the front of our house, a few fans, and a backyard with a hose and a sprinkler, but today they wanted a little more water than our little sprinkler could provide.

Honestly, I would have preferred the backyard. I wanted to sit on our patio under the shade of our umbrella, sip iced tea, maybe read a little. I could have easy access to the bathroom, the kitchen. On the other hand, I understood. So I slathered sunscreen all over the kids, slathered sunscreen all over myself, tossed our towels and my latest copy of The Sun into our beach bag, and we headed out into the sunshine.

The splash park was surprisingly uncrowded for a hot afternoon. We went a couple of times last week, and it was packed full of joyfully screaming children. Today, instead of staking out my tiny little corner between the water and the playground, I could spread out a bit, relax, open my magazine. I could glance up and spot my children right away.

While the kids ran between the water and the playground, I read an essay called “Three" by Chris Dombrowski, about a family adjusting to a surprise third child. It is a sweet, well written story (everything printed in The Sun is well written) and I was enjoying it, but then the author recalls an incident in which their third child, as a toddler, choked on a piece of apple. That moment when tension became panic as both parents tried to dislodge it from her throat. The stiffening body, the relief of her crying, their other children’s fear triggered by their own, and the mother’s subsequent breakdown once the danger has passed. All the huge what-ifs.

I get all that. Quite frankly, I know I spend an unhealthy amount of time with my head in the huge what-ifs and it makes me sort of mentally ill. But that’s not the part that really got me. The author describes a moment shortly afterwards, after everyone had calmed down and the parents had reassured the two older children than everything was fine. He notices that his wife and son are missing, and he finds them upstairs, just sitting on the floor together. His wife’s eyes are still full of tears, and she tells her husband that their son has just been sitting there with her on the floor with his arm around her, not saying a word, for twenty minutes.

What a world, Dombrowski writes. What a woman. What a boy, who, sooner than I can imagine, will be a man.

I read that line and remembered holding my infant son in the dark of his room, rocking him to sleep before I laid him down. He was big enough that he didn’t sleep in the bed with us anymore, but still so little, still with a bald fuzzy head and footie pajamas. He used to rest his cheek against my shoulder, sigh, and go heavy while I rocked and rocked. And he was heavy, such a solid little guy, nearly twenty pounds by six months, but I couldn’t ever bring myself to put him down right away. I remember feeling an awareness as solid as my son that I was somehow holding all of him, all of his ages, that someday, God willing, I will rest my cheek against his chest when I hug him.

I didn’t even read the next line before I was crying, right there in the splash park. No one noticed, thanks to my huge sunglasses and the bright sunshine, but I was. What a world. What a boy.

I managed to finish the story. Dombrowski writes about small moments: Making a snowman with a child who decides to sneak a few furtive bites of the carrot nose, for instance. Hosting Thanksgiving dinner without having time to shovel the front walk before guests arrive. Anxieties, little and big. Uncertainties. Revelations. He throws in a nice river metaphor; he’s from Montana, after all. It was all so ordinary, really. But these small stories are exactly the stories I depend upon and the kind of stories I try tell in my own fumbling way.

He ends with an image of his wife counting their three children’s “breathing bodies,” a ritual I know so well. It’s the last thing I do every single night, even though my children are eight and four, far from babyhood. (But not far. Not so very far at all.) I can’t go to sleep until I have tip-toed into their rooms, kissed their foreheads, felt the warm breath from their slightly open mouths and watched the gentle rise and fall of their chests. I brush Suzannah’s tangled hair out of her face. I trace Isaac’s cheek.

At the splash park, I tucked my magazine back into the beach bag just as my little boy ran at me, dripping wet.

“Mommy!” he shrieked. “Do you want to go through the circle thing with me now?”

I stood up, pulled my cover-up over my head, and dropped it on top of our pile of towels. I wanted to freeze that exact moment -- my son’s shining face, his wet hair plastered to his forehead, Suzannah running towards the zip line, and Mount Rainier rising in the background, beyond the rooftops, behind the bursting green trees.

“You know I do, Baby,” I said, and he took my hand. “I’m ready."

What a world. What a boy, what a girl. What they will become, sooner than I can imagine.