The weight of this day

I woke up early this morning, shortly before five o'clock. Immediately I had the very conscious thought that exactly three years ago at that time, I was laboring in my midwife's huge tub, close to delivering my son. Isaac was born at 5:05.

My son woke up happy, as he usually does. He gives the best morning hugs. He pretty much just might give the best hugs, period, of anyone, everywhere. I cannot fathom what it would be like never to feel those arms wrapped around me again, never to smell his slightly sour little-boy breath in the mornings, never to hear his full-belly laugh. I cannot fathom what other parents have to somehow survive, because I am quite sure that the loss of these things is unsurvivable.

I fully intended to write here tonight; it's just that I thought it would be a sweet little reflection on my son turning three, on the joy of mothering him and watching him grow. But I can't just write that entry. Everything about this day has been completely reframed.

It's been a difficult day. I don't think anyone will judge me when I say that when I learned about how many children were killed today, all I wanted to do was drive like hell across town and scoop my daughter right up out of class. I hunkered down alone in my classroom and ate exactly one bite of lunch before throwing it in the trash; then I spent twenty minutes sending messages to Matt and my friend Lauren. The general sentiment was Who fucking shoots children. I mean there really is nothing else to say, not right now. Later, maybe I'll be one of the people trying to say something wise, or comforting. Maybe I'll even be one of the preachy opinionated people, because even though we all know how insufferable that is, it's hard to resist. (Hint: I am not going to be one of the people voicing support for the right to own automatic and semi-automatic weapons, which, just, what the hell.)

I allowed myself five minutes of good crying in my classroom. I allowed myself ten minutes of sobbing later on, at home, when I watched President Obama's speech. This is all just completely unacceptable.

So basically: I am broken-hearted, and I am blindingly angry, and I am bewildered and disoriented. As we all are. As we all are. Here's what's tough for me right now: to resist the urge to lash out with all my ideas and opinions about why we are such a violent country. What's tough is to figure out how to direct my anger, to take a step back and calm down as much as I can, to stay present, to be compassionate even when -- especially when -- my emotions and adrenalin are sky-high.

I'm reading Help Thanks Wow and it's helping some. (Dear Anne Lamott, please post about this day soon. Like five minutes ago. Not that it's all about me, but I think I would feel a bit more okay about feeling very not okay. Love, Shari.)

So there's all of that: all of the violence, all of the grief, plus a sizable helping of fear and worry and even sheer terror -- that's the feeling that had me digging my fingernails into my palms today, telling myself that leaving school to go snatch my daughter out of a math lesson that involved graphs and gingerbread cookies was not actually rational or reasonable. But underneath all of that is something else: grace, and gratitude, and joy.

Because my son is three years old today, and my day began and ended with kissing his still-chubby cheeks. Because in three years, not a day has gone by without moments of pure joy. Because tonight both of my children tumbled into my arms at once for hugs. Because they were irritating each other in the car, squabbling over who was touching who, or who was too close to whose side, and all I could think was that tonight, even their bickering was music to my ears because I never, ever want to know what it feels like to know I'll never hear that again. Because I get to have both of my children tonight. Because that's not guaranteed for any of us, ever, whether our children go to public or private school, whether we walk or drive or fly, whether we lock our doors or only shop in the nice malls in the good parts of town or eat all our organic veggies.

Tomorrow we will have Isaac's real birthday celebration with his Uncle Aaron and Auntie Morgan, two more of his people. We will have cake and presents and there will be laughter and probably lots of silliness (my brother is not "Silly Uncle Aaron" for nothing), but tonight is just the deep comfort of being together and celebrating our little "Eye-gick."

Today has completely changed the way I'm looking at his birthday, because obviously I am a little bit of a mess, worried and broken and all that. But it's also full of gratitude that drives me to my knees, and joy, because joy is what my children are, they are joy personified, they are hope, they are everything that is right with the world.

Right now, tonight, both of my children are tucked safely into their beds. They fell asleep feeling loved. They fell asleep hugged and kissed. And I get to have them. Tonight, I get to have them.

Bailey's Day

"All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had.

But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

I wasn't thinking about anything in particular as I drifted off to sleep last night, other than maybe mentally running through the huge to-do list I keep revising. I slept fairly peacefully, though, something I don't count on when my mind is on its usual hamster wheel when I go to bed. And then I had an incredibly vivid dream of holding my niece, Bailey. Really, it was probably more like a memory, except that I heard a child's laughter as I woke up. I really did hear it, as clearly as the sound of my own children's laughter. And somehow I knew it was her. I don't even care how hokey that might sound.

I thought about her all morning, mostly just remembering what it felt like to hold her for that little while on the night she was born. I will never forget it. I didn't know her like her parents did, of course, but I am still so deeply grateful that I had a very real glimpse into the person she was. Bailey was a playful spirit in her mother's womb, I wrote back in September, and somehow it makes sense that I woke to her giggle this morning.

I didn't even realize until late this afternoon that today was supposed to be her due date. I knew it was near, in late November, but it wasn't until I logged onto Facebook this afternoon that I realized it's actually today, November 28.

She is still such a force in her parents' lives, as she always will be. And as I read their words today, I remembered not only what it felt like to hold Bailey myself but to see the very obvious and very beautiful way they were already so bonded with her when she was born. I have absolutely no doubt in my heart that Bailey knew exactly what she was doing when she chose them for her parents.

It's easy for me to be sad and angry, because truth to tell, I still think it's totally unfair that she's not here. But that's not the only thing I can feel, and it's not even the biggest thing I feel, because I really believe that Bailey herself delivered a little dose of grace straight to my heart this morning. I can only imagine the way she's playing in the very center of her parents' lives, fitting herself in exactly where they need her.

Bailey's birthday is in September, and sapphires will always belong to her. But today is hers, too, and all the days in between.

Election Day

I have been promising myself for weeks that I would stay off Facebook entirely on Election Day, for obvious reasons. However, I am a masochist who doesn't listen to reason and who does apparently love a nice shivery dose of nerves at 6:30 in the morning, which is when I broke my little promise to myself and logged on only to find, at the top of my news feed, a status update referring to "that Muslim."

I'm pretty proactive about blocking people who would write this kind of thing; normally, my "friends" are a pretty civilized and thoughtful group, even when they disagree with me and with each other. (I've blocked several friends of friends, though, because I don't need to read their vitriolic comments. I don't need everyone to see the world the way I do; I do need to trust that I won't read the N-word on my Facebook "friends" page. Seriously, some of y'all have really classy friends.)

Anyway, maybe I just need to grow a thicker skin, but seeing that on my page really discouraged me. And this is the second person I've taken off of my own friends list in as many weeks. Because how am I ever going to have a rational conversation with someone who refers to the president as "that Muslim"?

So, banned, blocked, whatever, but since then I've found myself unable to stop reading, and I'm seriously just the biggest ball of anxiety ever right now. Because this. This is where we are.

I was thinking today about the first election in which I was old enough to vote, in 2000, my senior year of college. I voted for Al Gore, in case anyone cares. And I was voting as a citizen of Montana, so it's not like it really mattered -- but it mattered to me, even though Gore ran such a disappointingly uninteresting campaign. I remember listening to NPR constantly, following local elections (in Minnesota and North Dakota, that is; even though I couldn't vote there, I loved learning about the things that would affect people who did). I loved filling out my ballot, even if I told myself that my teeny-tiny little vote didn't matter. I understand why people feel that way; I'm feeling frightened and disillusioned tonight in a way that I didn't when I was 21 years old. But still. Still. We're all really fortunate that we get to do it at all.

I've seen people who are voting for Obama and people who are voting for Romney post such sentiments today and I'm clinging to the desperate, shaky little hope that maybe -- maybe? -- sometime after tomorrow, we can remember what we like about each other. We can remember that people who are nasty on Facebook (did someone seriously call me a "libtard"? Why yes, someone did) are people who, face to face, would still stop and help us out of a ditch if we happened to drive our cars into one.

I don't know. I don't know.

I'm anxious in ways that I wasn't in 2000. And it's not even that I'm just scared of the possibility of living right smack in the middle of a Margaret Atwood novel; I'm also scared of what tomorrow will feel like. No matter what, a lot of people are going to be angry and heartbroken tomorrow. Obviously, I want my candidate to win. And I want the vote to go the way I cast it on my ballot for a handful of local issues that I care about very much. But even if that happens, I'm scared of the widening gulf between the people who voted one way and people who voted another. (The snarky Facebook cartoons that Make a Big Fat Point really help.)

I just hate feeling so angry and scared and helpless. But I also love the energy of the grassroots work carried out by passionate volunteers, and I love those who remind me that my civic duty certainly isn't fulfilled by voting, as if it's something you can check off. I love -- and need -- the reminder that it's important not to grow complacent, that even if our people win, we are going to need to roll up our sleeves and work hard and keep on fighting for the light with empathy and compassion.

At any rate, that's what I'll tell myself tomorrow. Tonight -- I'll be honest -- I'm just drinking wine. Because I've been a huge quivering ball of anxiety today, and because instead of distracting myself with the work of teaching I spent it at the doctor's office with my daughter. (We think it's a UTI; the last day or so has been sort of traumatic but she'll be fine.) Because if I'm home I'm pacing around my house and reading horrible things on the Internet and I can't seem to stop, so even though Suzannah had a "sick" day that involved a drive to the clinic in Tacoma, I haven't let us stop moving for longer than the time it took to eat lunch. We ran errands. We spontaneously decided to get our hair cut together. (Rather, I decided we needed that and proposed the idea, to which Suzannah agreed right away and suggested we add a treat at Starbucks to the outing.) I graded zero papers, I read three pages of a novel, I flitted restlessly around the house, I thought of things we needed to do, I fretted about the fact that we didn't get to see Suzannah's regular pediatrician (who always makes me feel a little calmer, and every time we have to see someone else I'm reminded of how much I love him). We went to the library. We went to Target.

Last night, in a fit of pre-election anxiety, I washed all the wood floors. Tonight I'm about to attack all the surfaces with Lemon Pledge and a dust rag. I may have suggested to Matt that I wouldn't complain if he picked up a bottle of gin on the way home from work.

I am going to breathe in and and breathe out and remind myself that every single one of us is a child of God, even the people who vote for (or against) things I just cannot fathom, and I am going to have a gin and tonic, and I am going to make dinner for my family, and probably just revert to the prayer I used to whisper in the night for years, as a child, as teenager, as a young adult when I couldn't find any other words: Please just let everything be okay.

Returning...

Sometimes writing is like this: silences say as much as words do.

But also, sometimes it just means that someone -- and by someone, I mean me -- has allowed herself to fall out of practice, at least in this space. And somehow, it is suddenly November.

Things have been crazy busy, but that's always true, for everyone, in every season. Things have also been mostly good. I still can't get over how different this school year feels. I love my students, I love a lot of things that are happening at my school, and I'm happier teaching there than I have been in a very long time.

Suzannah is loving first grade. Her other love is Star Wars, which really has become her thing -- I was never really into it all that much, and Matt is hardly obsessed, but our little girl is totally enthralled by it. She dressed up as Darth Vader for Halloween, which I thought was particularly awesome. The day we bought her costume, the guy at the store was all, "So...she is going to be Darth Vader? Really?" And I said, probably a little defensively, "Yeah. Yes she is." And he nodded slowly, looking at my little girl holding her costume and her light saber, and said, "That's actually pretty cool." Damn straight.

Isaac is going to be three years old next month. He is both so affectionate and so rough, and I find myself using the word gentle! quite often. He gives me these great, totally sloppy kisses and tight, tight hugs. He does this weird head-butting thing that reminds me of a labrador. He's terribly dramatic about getting hurt, which is so different from Suzannah (when she gets hurt, she doesn't want anyone to look at or get anywhere near the wound); the tiniest "owie" has him running to me for kisses. Suzannah is more practical. "Do you want some ice, Little Dude?" she asks. (She calls him Little Dude. How fantastic is that.) And she knows how to go to the freezer, get down the bottle filled with water/ice, and hand it to him. He holds it to his head/finger/knee/whatever for about three seconds before handing it back to her, and then he scampers off, as good as new.

He is also learning how to use the potty. The process hasn't been as quick as it was with his sister, but when he actually goes, he face totally explodes with joy and he screams, "It WORKED!"

It is impossible not to explode with joy myself in those moments.

November is a good month for gratitude, maybe especially in this election year when we're all at each other's throats and ruining relationships on Facebook and everything. (Will that get better or worse after Tuesday?) I love reading people's gratitude posts, and I try to do them myself every year, even though I never seem to keep up with them. Today I am particularly aware of the small moments, the ordinary blessings, the things that require me to stop and breathe and be present in my life exactly where I am. Of course I am grateful for my children and my family and my job and all the pieces of the big picture; what shakes me out of my moods and fits of self-pity or grouchiness, though, are the moments like I had this morning. Chocolate chip pancakes, a surprise from my health-conscious husband. Fresh coffee. An extra hour in bed -- I didn't sleep for most of that, but the time was still such a gift. Going for a run in the cool morning air, crunching through wet leaves on the street. (This is my favorite time of year to run outside, when the weather is cool and wet, when I can run through piles of leaves, sweet-smelling dampness at my feet.) Nothing clears my head quite like a good run when I'd rather just stay home, and this morning I realized (again -- it's a lesson I keep learning, over and over) that the things that stress me out or turn me into a cranky mama are really just reminders of things for which I am grateful: The kitchen messes. The Legos carpeting the floor in the family room. The noise on Saturday morning. The balled-up socks that never seem to make it into the hamper. The sources? My greatest joys.

Sometimes grace just slaps you silly, doesn't it?

The Dancing Pizza Guy (or, the Little Things...)

Many afternoons, when Suzannah and I are on our way to pick up Isaac and need to make a quick stop at the grocery store, we drive through a particularly busy intersection in our town. There are all kinds of things in this area -- restaurants and pharmacies and grocery stores, pizza places, fast food joints, apartment complexes.

And there's the dancing pizza guy.

At least, that's what Suzannah and I call him. He wears a neon green shirt and is presumably paid to advertise for the pizza place on the giant sign he's holding. But he doesn't just hold the sign, doesn't just wave at traffic. He dances, really dances, like he should be a member of a high school hot squad. As far as I can tell, he doesn't listen to music, doesn't have headphones. He just moves, grooving with his giant sign advertising large pizzas for five dollars. When the flow of traffic starts to move in the opposite direction, he pauses for just a moment to adjust accordingly, and then he's at it again.

"He actually makes me want to buy pizza," Matt said not long ago. Suzannah loves him. And mostly, he just makes me smile.

It's the little things.

I went book shopping this afternoon. We'd planned to all go to Seattle Children's Museum, but at the last moment Matt offered to drop me off at the Elliott Bay Book Company while he took the kids to Seattle Center. I really love watching our kiddos play at the Children's Museum, but also, I've been pretty low on energy and in rather desperate need of some recharging.

The last time I was the bookstore, just two weeks ago, I wandered around in a daze and didn't buy anything. Today I had to whittle down my choices so we can still afford things like dinner and clothing for our children, which is more my side of normal, and I wound up with Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie's brand-new memoir, and Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon's latest novel. Both signed first editions. Sweet.

And then I sat in the cafe and sipped a pumpkin spice latte and read Cloud Atlas, which I loved when I read it in 2005 and am enjoying just as much now, possibly more. And even though it's hard to feel anything but disappointed when wonderful books are made into movies because the movies inevitably fall short, I'm pretty excited to see this one next month. Or maybe I'm mostly excited about the idea of a night out with my husband.

When my family picked me up two hours later, the kids were bubbling over with stories about how they were pirates at the museum, and Suzannah told me a couple of jokes that made absolutely no sense (but that made them more hilarious than most jokes that do, of course), and then we all went out for pizza, and then we all went out for pie. And when we finally arrived back at our cozy little house in our quiet little neighborhood tonight, the kids were so happily worn out they didn't even fight bedtime.

The big things are hard, and mostly, these days, I kind of feel like whoever's in charge of the big things is not doing the most wonderful job. (As Anne Lamott would say, "If I were God's West Coast representative..." or as I would say, "If I were the one in charge, here...")

But the little things often feel pretty okay, and tonight I had new books and good pizza and a couple of glasses of nice wine and chocolate pie. And maybe there doesn't need to be any grand metaphor in any of that. Maybe it's just enough to live inside this one tiny moment for now.

Secure yourself to heaven

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” -- Joan Didion

Or maybe not dinner. Maybe you're driving to a friend's house on an ordinary Thursday night, and you're going to hang out and watch Lifetime movies and order Indian food, and suddenly you receive a phone call that sends your stomach plummeting to the floor of the car. Or worse, maybe you're at work, and the phone rings, and suddenly you're struggling to throw a bag together with the understanding that you have to be at the hospital within the hour and you don't quite know why or for how long or what you'll need or what will happen.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant.

On Friday evening, September 14th, 2012, my brother and sister-in-law became parents to a beautiful little girl named Bailey Rae, and I became an auntie. She had her mama's nose and her daddy's chin.

What is heart-stoppingly unfair about this is that this beautiful child did not survive delivery. She was perfect in every single way; she was just too tiny, and HELLP syndrome is merciless in its attacks. We are lucky we still have Bailey's mother with us; I am furious that we were not allowed to keep Bailey as well.

There was no almost about her and my sister-in-law and brother are not someday parents -- Bailey was, and is, very much their daughter. She made Morgan a mama, she made Aaron a daddy. They were so gracious to share her with me, and they are so strong in their love for her. I wish I could summon the words to describe what it was like to be in their presence. I cried more tears this weekend than I thought my body could produce, but somehow, when my brother placed my tiny niece in my arms, I felt unspeakable joy and, somehow, something like peace. This couldn't have possibly come from me since I am a little too broken, as we all are; I'd say it's all God, but I'm a little too angry at Him right now to ask.

She was just over a pound, but she also felt so solid, somehow. Her cheeks were adorably round; even her tummy was round. I kissed those cheeks, those eyelids, that soft little belly. She had ten tiny fingernails and tiny tiny toenails. Sweet little hands, kissable feet, round little knees. Her skin was soft. So soft. She had eyelashes and the most perfectly-shaped little lips. I just smile every time I think about what it was like to hold her; what makes me cry, still, is the memory of what it felt like to let her go, knowing I would not pick her up again.

Bailey was a playful spirit in her mother's womb, and somehow this came through in her face. Aaron and I, remembering our Grandpa Charlie (who is undoubtedly being given a run for his money by his great-granddaughter in heaven) are quite sure that we will encounter moments of hilarity for the rest of our lives, moments of total whimsy, in which we will know that she's somehow there. That's Bailey for sure, we will say.

There have been times in the last week when I've felt guilty for hurting like this -- what right do I have? When it's not my baby? But grief is messy, a trickster that doesn't respect boundaries, and what would be the alternative? How could I not grieve this child who was already so deeply loved by so many people? I saw my grief mirrored in my daughter's face, my own little girl who was so excited to meet her cousin. Suzannah crawled into my lap and sobbed when I told her that Bailey was too tiny to stay on this earth. When she cried, "Why?" I had no answer. Because there is no acceptable why.

Bailey broke my heart, but only to fit herself inside. When this happens too early it's not a gentle process, and it hurts. God. It's almost too much to bear. But our hearts are bigger now, and they're going to be completely new shapes when they heal around the cracks.

Beginning again

A snapshot of our morning:

Isaac is busy with a puzzle on the floor; he is very into puzzles these days, and we have these great Melissa & Doug wooden puzzles stacked in the family room. It's adorable until he chooses one that is just a little too difficult, because then it's all "Need HELP" again and again and again, sorry if you were thinking you would enjoy a quiet cup of coffee or wanted to clean the kitchen right now. Although that's what I'm doing, for the time being -- just enjoying a quiet cup of coffee while he plays happily. The dog is snoring, the laundry is humming, and Suzannah is watching a video for a bit. The morning feels cool. We've been waking up to cloudy skies that give way to sunshine in the afternoon, and this fills me with deep contentment. And I'm actually looking forward to the rain, if it ever returns. We're going on over forty days without it.

Labor Day often finds me feeling sort of anxious; I always have school, sometimes the very first day of school, the next day. This year I have more of a buffer than I ever have. Tomorrow is another staff development day and I've heard lovely rumors that we'll get to spend quite a bit of time in our own classrooms. The day after that is technically the first day, but it's mostly for the freshmen, so really I don't meet my kids until Thursday. My first real week of teaching is only two days long, and then I have a weekend to process. Nice.

Also, we've had a really idyllic weekend. Friday was kind of chaotic -- I did lots of frenetic running around town for the first six hours of my day -- but we spent the sunny afternoon hours at the splash park, which felt like the perfect way to end our last week of summer. On Saturday, Matt and I both had the idea of getting out of the city, so he found a trail we've never hiked and we headed into the mountains. Both kids did so well; Isaac hardly even rode in the backpack, and Suzannah was so proud of her stamina. ("I think this is a very good hike for me," she said.) I just loved to watch her noticing everything -- the water, the moss on the trees, the shape of things. Rocks, or hollow logs, or spindly trees growing out of ancient tree stumps. We were on the trail for over two hours, and by the time we made it to one of our favorite haunts for dinner, we were all happily starving.

This morning Matt slipped out of bed at dawn, whispering that the coffeepot was ready to go. He's spending his morning hiking solo, and when he comes home we're all heading to the zoo for a picnic. And after that, Matt and the kids will play at the zoo while I sit at a nearby coffee shop and work on my lesson plans for the first few weeks of school. This sounds like a nearly perfect day to me, actually. I've taken the kids to the zoo plenty of times this summer, so I don't really mind skipping this round, and also, I just really love lesson planning. It's creative work for me, and I find few things as energizing as thinking about literature I love and ways in which I can share it with teenagers. Even if they don't all love it, the challenge of creating meaningful experiences for diverse groups of kids is really exciting to me.

Anyway, I'm in a good place right now. I've told people I'm about a hundred times more relaxed than I was at this time last year, and it's true. For one thing, I'm not sending my beautiful baby girl off to school for the very first time. I already know she'll be fine; I already know that we love our little neighborhood school, and I'm pretty confident that we'll slip back into the familiar rhythms of our day. For another thing, I'm also pretty confident that this year I will not receive a phone call on a Sunday night a few weeks into the school year informing me that two of my classes are flipping to something entirely different, giving me less than 24 hours to prep for a class I haven't taught in years -- with the extra fun of knowing that kids will trickle in a few at a time for an entire month, so I can't really start a real unit until, what, mid-October? November? And then what I didn't know is that I would spend the rest of the year with two classes that made me absolutely dread going to work every single day. Let me tell you, after last year I was genuinely worried that I wouldn't ever recover, that I was damaged goods who didn't even belong in a classroom.

But we had a wonderful, restorative summer. Apparently, it worked. This is why teachers need summers, in case you were wondering.

This is my twelfth year, and I know that there will be times -- in January, say, or March, which is often kind of a dreadful month -- when I'm going to be disillusioned and frustrated and exhausted. But it's good to know that in this golden September before my twelfth year of teaching, I'm still in love with it, and I still believe, deep down, that the key to saving the world lies in the connections we make in the classroom. I still really believe that poetry will save us in the end.

If I can, I choose sweet

It is late afternoon, late in August. The day is overcast and the air feels cool. I'm listening to the sound of my children destroying their markers by coloring roughly over a long cardboard box that, two days ago, contained all the pieces for the bookshelf that was assembled (by Matt) and filled/organized (by me) on Sunday night. I should probably tell them that their frenetic scribbling will smoosh the tops of those markers right down, dry them out, and otherwise wreck them, but they are having so much fun "decorating" together that I can't find it in me to be too bothered. This is a favorite game of theirs. They will scribble and scribble and scribble until the box is completely colored in, and then it will become a fort of some sort, and I will tolerate it until I can't anymore. I might be able to let this one go until the weekend; Saturday mornings are good for building structures out of cardboard, our dining room chairs, couch cushions, and some blankets. But this box is too long for me to allow it to take up half of my living room for more than a few days.

My children are talking to each other and mostly cooperating, but my house seems quiet all the same. It's the gray of the afternoon, the quiet that seems to fall over my neighborhood on such days. It's a cozy little prelude to fall.

There comes a moment late in August when I feel a palpable shift from something like Sunday afternoon anxiety to something else -- a combination of optimism and excitement and anticipation of September, the beginning of fall, my favorite season. Maybe it's just that I love the turning of the seasons, and that's why at some point I stop mourning the end of summer and look forward to what comes next. It's a peaceful sort of resignation, I guess. We had a perfect summer, really, full of outdoor play and sunshine-filled weekends and a fabulous family vacation. I read a lot of books and ran a lot of miles. My children are lean and tan. So it's not at all that I wouldn't want to prolong that; the end of summer is always a little bittersweet. It's just -- you know, nothing gold can stay and all that, and I feel like choosing to be all grumpy about the end of summer is only going to make these last days more bitter than sweet. If I can, I choose sweet.

I wrote this last year:

September is nothing like Monday. September is golden, optimistic, hopeful. September is warmth and crunchy fall leaves and the transition from shorts to sweatshirts. September is a huge box of markers my students haven't yet ruined, it's new shoes, it's stacks of crisp white paper. September is kids who haven't grown too comfortable or too complacent yet. September is settling into a rhythm that hasn't yet become routine, hasn't yet become drudgery. September is falling in love with my life all over again, the way I do every autumn even when I am stressed and overwhelmed and seriously doubting my own competency.

Yesterday, I opened a card from my mother and read this: I'm thinking of you as you get back into the routine & anticipate the start of school, the delight at a fresh start & fresh materials to work with -- blank pages, sharp pencils and crayons, new pens -- enjoy it all!

I'm grateful to have people in my life (my mother, my children, the teacher friends who return to this job again and again with energy and hope instead of grumbling) who know how to tap into this simple joy and encourage me to do the same. It carries me through the first weeks of the school year. And it is sweet.

Home again, home again...

On Sunday night -- well, really, Monday morning, well after midnight -- I signed online, unable to settle into sleep. It's like that, at the end of a road trip. We'd tried to make the last day of our vacation an easy one, going as far as Spokane on Saturday night. Before we had children, we never would have considered splitting the drive from Bozeman to Seattle into two days, nor would we consider such a thing at the beginning of the trip, all anticipation and eagerness to put in as many miles as possible. But after nearly two weeks of travel, from Washington to Montana to Canada back to Montana, after a couple of colds, after a trip through Glacier National Park and a day in Yellowstone, we thought a nice hotel room halfway on the last day, in a city we enjoy, would be a nice way to stave off post-vacation blues and prevent total meltdown from one or more members of the family.

And it was great, really, a total luxury to sleep in on Saturday morning and then go for a four-mile run with a view of the mountains and then pack and then enjoy a nice lunch with my parents and then hit the road only to stop in time for dinner and a semi-reasonable bedtime. Suzannah snuggled into her bed in the hotel and fell asleep on her own. Isaac willingly went to bed in his pack-n-play (which is a Big Deal; he started the first few nights in bed with me, and my sweet son does love to snuggle but sleeps like a pinball, so if I was hoping for a cozy little temporary return to co-sleeping -- which I was -- I was in for a rude little surprise, plus some happily kicking feet right in the kidneys). Matt brought me a drink from the hotel bar, and we stretched out and read our books in the peace and quiet.

I'll just gloss over the part about how when we arrived at our hotel, after trying unsuccessfully to use our room key like a thousand times and then having it reprogrammed twice (or whatever they do with those dumb little cards) and then having some maintenance guy up to the room, we learned that the main reason none of us could get inside was that it was actually occupied already. We learned this because when the maintenance guy finally got into the room, a pissy voice called out, "Someone's in here, dude." So he called down to the front desk, and they insisted that the room was still assigned to us.

"Well, that's interesting," the maintenance guy said. "I wonder who's in there, then. Either they made a mistake, or someone scooted in there after housekeeping finished up and locked it. They do that sometimes. We've had guys try to make off with a coupla TV's." We were led to a new (unoccupied!) room and given vouchers for free breakfasts in the restaurant for our trouble.

We had all these ambitious ideas about heading out early the next day, but we lingered over our awesome free breakfast -- Matt really rocked the huckleberry pancakes -- and took the kids swimming in the pool so Suzannah could get just a little more mileage out of her new Spiderman kickboard. (She has come a long way in her swimming this summer, and this mama is proud. And Isaac just loves the water, loves to be tossed, loves to jump into it without bothering to look and see if we're actually ready to catch him. Little Dude will be in real swimming lessons next summer, for sure.) After we checked out of our hotel, we stopped for a quick visit to Riverfront Park because we cannot pass up the carousel. And as it turns out, we cannot pass up the Riverfront Rotary Fountain either, especially when it is at least two hundred degrees at noon.

We didn't leave Spokane until three o'clock in the afternoon. The kids, post-splashing and post-lunch (where there may or may not have been some overtired whining and one almost-tantrum) were passed out in the back before we'd finished filling the car with gas. Matt turned to me and said, "I'm just gonna drive until I need gas again, is that cool?"

Crazy weekend traffic just west of Ellensburg added probably an hour to our drive time, but Matt didn't stop until we were nearly home, and then only because we needed a few grocery essentials so we could at least get through breakfast the next morning. I didn't stretch my legs until I climbed out of the car in my own driveway.

I can't describe how much I love the smell of my house after we've been gone awhile. Every time we return from someplace -- not an afternoon away, but a real trip -- the smell of our house reminds me that coming home is awfully sweet.

That feeling lasts for about five minutes. Then the study fills up with luggage and the previously clear kitchen counter fills up with everything that was in the cooler and our snack bags, and I begin to despair about the state of the back seat of the car and its handfuls of crumbs. I am too tired to unpack, but no way can I leave the suitcases until morning, so somehow, in between getting the kids in the pajamas and putting together a late-night supper, I put all their clothes away and stash their suitcases. I unload the duffle bag with Isaac's blankies and Twilight Turtle and Suzannah's Twilight Ladybug and all the sunscreen and beach towels and extra diapers and Suzannah's kickboard. Somehow, I kept putting things away but the house still seemed to be strewn with stuff. So much stuff. (I have never, ever been able to go to sleep after a trip until I've unpacked at least most of everything and put it away.)

And then the blues set in. I wasn't quite ready to let go of this vacation -- I hadn't really felt quite ready to drive out of Montana the day before. I had a really gross sinus infection for a good part of this trip, but in almost every other important way it was a really healthy time for me. I stayed off Facebook entirely (good grief, I seriously need to do that more often) and only logged in to my e-mail three times in twelve days, because the thought of tons and tons of messages just piling up in my inbox made me a little nuts. I connected with people I love a lot, people I don't see often. I filled my lungs with the best air in the world, I dipped my toes in my favorite mountain lake, I went for solitary runs along quiet highways, I watched my children experience Old Faithful for the first time, I saw once again how loved and lucky we are, I had a long-overdue date night with my husband, I read good books. My cup was filled.

It's always a little strange, trying to settle back into normal. Especially late at night, with remnants of our trip sort of scattered all over the house, when I'm still feeling a slightly sticky layer of sunscreen on my skin, applied in a different city. When I've slept awkwardly against a car window and gotten a little carsick trying to read as we wound around over the pass.

So I was just sort of puttering around, unable to settle down and relax. I signed online, frittered around there for awhile. Glanced at the news. Learned that conditions were perfect for viewing a meteor shower after midnight.

I grabbed Matt's hand and said, "You have to come outside with me." And that's how we found ourselves lying on our backs on our rotting old (soon to be replaced) deck in the middle of the night, gazing up at the stars. Our neighborhood is quiet, but I could hear soft laughter from a few streets away; I wondered if people were out there with the same idea.

I tried not to think about spiders in my hair as my eyes adjusted to the night, and then I wondered why I don't spend more time lying on my back on my rotting old deck gazing up at the stars. It wasn't quite the same as appreciating the stars under a wide-open sky in the mountains of Montana, of course, but it was its own wonderful thing, framed by the outlines of the huge trees at the edges of our yard. And after a moment, I saw the first meteor, streaking across the inky sky.

We didn't stay outside long. We watched a handful of those meteors, those sudden little blazes of light, there and then gone. And then I sat up, rubbing my bare arms, kissed my husband, and went inside. Sometimes all it takes to beat the post-vacation blues is to notice something wonderful quite literally in my own backyard.

Storms

We woke to the sound of thunder at dawn, real thunder, shaking-the-house thunder, followed by a flash of lightning that lit the room. My children slept through it, but I couldn't fall back asleep. I'm not afraid of thunderstorms -- I love them, actually, and it's one thing I miss, living here in Seattle. We have plenty of rain, but our thunderstorms are weak. I peered out the window and watched the rain lash the trees and crawled back into bed, where I did not sleep. I felt unsettled. Sometimes storms have that effect.

Or maybe it's just unsettling to wake to the rain when the rest of the country is trapped in an unrelenting heat wave. Maybe it's that I didn't know whether to feel grateful or glum.

We had a quiet day: swimming lessons, lunch, a little too much Dora the Explorer in lieu of backyard play. We were at the zoo on Wednesday, a new splash park the day before that. Yesterday, Suzannah and I had a picnic and mid-afternoon walk at a quiet, hidden place near our home. Mentally I tally up all the things we've done, legit summer things, to alleviate the Mommy Guilt over hitting "play" on the Dora DVD one more time while I unload the dishwasher or refresh CNN one more time.

I did that a lot today. I can't stop reading about the massacre in Colorado. I can't stop wanting to pick fights with people on the internet who were so immediately ready to jump in with criticism of the parents who dared take a baby to a midnight showing of a movie, because yes, now most certainly is the time to break out the judgements on people's parenting. That's what's wrong with this country, and not the fact that we can absolutely expect this kind of violence to continue; we certainly do love our guns.

My husband brought me flowers today, as a surprise. I have a vase of crimson gladiolus springing from the center of my dining room table, which, this evening, could not be more perfect. All day, the skies hung heavy with clouds. The air felt warm to me, humid, almost tangible -- like I could have felt it clinging to my fingers if I'd waved them around a bit. The flowers stand out, the way colors do when the sky is gray.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere, but tonight I am too tired to find it.

I've hardly heard adult voices all week, and while I love, really deeply love the summers because of the ways time slows, because of the ways in which we can break out of our routines, because of the sweet, sweet time I get to have with my children, it's also too easy to focus so much on them that I forget to leave a little room for myself. And the moment when I realize that -- well, it's lonely. And this week, that realization came in the middle of a project that keeps Matt up working until the wee hours, which means I don't get to unload all of my words on him at the end of the day, either. (I tried once.) Literally the only adults with whom I've had anything resembling conversations in the last three days are the barista at Starbucks, the guy who made my sandwich at Jimmy Johns, and the very nice woman who gave my young son his second-ever haircut tonight. (Which, by the way, is so cute. Rather, he was so cute, grinning and giggling at her because it "tickled." I kind of thought he'd freak out and refuse to sit in the chair the way he freaks out and refuses to stand on the scale at the doctor's office. I thought I'd have to bribe him with a sucker the way I did with his first haircut, but the place that gives out suckers while kids get to have their hair cut while sitting in a chair that looks like an airplane is gone, and we had to settle for Mastercuts. It was fine. I mean, I may have bought him a brownie pop as bribery beforehand, but still, he did really well.)

Anyway.

Tonight, the gladiolus. Tonight, a dance party with our two goofy children in the family room, and a totally haphazard but cozy dinner of leftovers. Tonight, a couple of gin-and-tonics, a couple of episodes of The West Wing because we want to hang out together but don't have the attention span for an actual movie.

It's been a strange day. I've felt -- oh, not exactly melancholic, but quiet. Every time I refresh the CNN page, or reread Jill Lepore's article in The New Yorker I feel a lot of other things that don't fit in this box. Every time I tip-toe into my children's rooms after they fall asleep I feel even more. And sometimes I'm just not quite sure what to do with it all.

Summer

One of my Summer Resolutions was to update this blog at least once a week; obviously that hasn't happened, although here in the Pacific Northwest we start our summers later than the rest of the country, so while it may seem that we're halfway through, in truth summer decided to show up here only a week ago. Before that, I was at a conference in Colorado, and before that it was chilly and rainy and anyway I was curled up in the fetal position trying to process the end of a tremendously stressful school year.

So, here we are.

Maybe a few decades from now I'll think of summer as a time to go places, as a time for big trips, for getting away. And it's not that we don't go places, because we do love our summer trips, but right now they're always to Montana or Minnesota or both. There is no regret here for me, no wishing that we could be somewhere a little more grand, a little more exotic. Our families are in those places, and we have deep roots there, and we want our children to feel those connections, too.

So we have our annual road trip or two, and my love for road trips is well documented. But what I think I'll remember, what I want to remember about these summers in the Pacific Northwest with my little family, is how content I feel to just be present right here, where we are right now. I'm so happy, every day, just to feel the sun on my shoulders and smell sunscreen on my children's skin. What I want out of the summer is this: to sit on our falling-apart deck (our next home improvement project!) and read and watch my kids run through the sprinkler. Is there anything more perfect than the way an arc of water catches the sunlight and breaks into a million shining droplets as a child throws her body through them? What I want is to feel the sweat on the back of my neck, knowing there's nowhere else I need to be other than right here, or maybe right over there in the little wading pool because Suzannah has invited me to dip my feet in. She promises it will cool me off. What I want is to watch my son dig in the sandbox, where he sits and takes off his crocs and pours sand out of them, where he shakes sand out of his hair. He marches back and forth between the sandbox and the pool with a little plastic pail, because a sandbox filled with mud is a child's paradise. What I want is to watch Suzannah play with the neighbor boys in the yard, inventing games with complicated rules I can't understand; Isaac tries his hardest to keep up, covering his eyes and shouting numbers when one of them is counting for hide-and-seek or simply balling up his fists and shaking them with glee, stomping his fat little feet, totally just caught up in the moment. And when the game is just a little beyond him, he is happy to just stand in the middle of the action -- in the middle of the little inflatable pool -- with his arms outstretched, and holler, "MY pool! MY POOL!"

We welcomed summer on the Fourth of July with a picnic at Pike Place Market last week. This might become a Winslow Family Tradition; we did it last year and discovered that the market is surprisingly chill before lunch on the holiday. We bought piroshkis and baguettes with brie, shared chocolate croissants, picked up interesting sodas at the deli, and carried our little feast over to a sunny patch of grass across from the market, overlooking the water. From there we drove to Discovery Park, where Matt and the kids romped at the playground and I ran the Loop Trail. Back home, we grilled veggie burgers and corn on the cob and I sipped a gin-and-tonic and the kids played in the yard. It was all totally ordinary, and it was perfect.

Since then, I've tried to recreate that feeling -- that totally relaxed, content feeling that comes from being present and awake in the life I'm living, exactly where I'm at -- every day. Sometimes I feel the self-imposed pressure to do things with our summer, so I make plans to take the kids places -- the zoo, obviously (we have a membership!), or the Pacific Science Center, or a really great splash park. Other times, though, I remember that our backyard usually provides more than enough entertainment for two young kiddos and that more often than not, they are happy to play right here. Inflatable pool? Check. Swingset/slide/fort/sandbox? Check. Three boys next door who are outside about as often as my kids are? Check. Easy access to snacks, shade, and check-ins with mom? You got it.

I love this. Morning coffee I can drink slowly, and then, if we want, an afternoon walk to Starbucks for a cake pop. The whir of sprinklers in our neighborhood, the smell of charcoal on weekend afternoons. Eating berries by the handful.

So the paradox is this: time slows, delightfully so. Morning fog slips into afternoon sunshine. We follow simple routines. Sandwiches are made, sunscreen is applied, the pool is filled and emptied and filled again, naps are taken (maybe), stories are read. I feel like I have written a version of this very post at least once every summer since 2007, when Suzannah still fit in the sling on my hip and we walked through Metropolitan Market on hot July afternoons, sampling slivers of peach or eating strawberry muffins. Metropolitan Market closed shortly after Isaac was born -- I never once even carried him inside -- but the feeling is the same.

On the other hand, it moves so fast, still. I want to notice everything, everything. I carry my journal with me everywhere and scribble down lines, little things my daughter says, try to capture where we are and what we're eating and drinking and what we see. Isaac surprises me every day with new phrases, sentences, delights, new ways of becoming the person he is. Suzannah is six, seemingly verging on teenagerhood some days -- and then again she is still my little girl, still my baby, and the boundaries between us are still so nebulous somehow in the ways she reaches for my hand or leans against me when she's tired or bursts through the bathroom door totally casually when I would really prefer some alone-time. At the end of the summer I know I am going to look back on these moments and wonder where they went, all the while marveling at these two fantastic little people who make these moments. At the end of the summer, I'll have a first-grader and a little boy much closer to three than two. Today, I just want to hold them where they are -- not to stifle them, not to hold them back, but to notice them, to be with them, and to be awake enough in this life to see it all.

Just Breathe

“One thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of -- and then you do, you love him even more.”
― Anne Lamott

I did not expect to feel so emotional -- maybe even strangely heartbroken -- on my daughter's last day of kindergarten.

Her first day of kindergarten, sure. I spent all of last summer in a perpetual state of wanting to toss my cookies over the thought of sending my baby girl to kindergarten; I full expected to feel like a wreck that day. (Was it already a year ago that Matt and I left our daughter in a classroom with her new pink backpack and all her school supplies? Or, to be more accurate, were gently shooed away by her teacher after we'd taken pictures and grinned so hard our faces hurt, trying to be brave for our daughter? And staggered across the playground afterwards, slumped against each other, towards our car, towards the absurd real world that required us to go to work after that? It seems like that just happened. And yet so much has happened since then.) But we truly could have not asked for or been granted a more wonderful first year of school for our daughter. On the very first day -- before that, even, on the day of orientation, when we met her teacher -- I knew she would be okay. I knew she'd love it, I knew she'd be loved. I knew she'd just absolutely rock kindergarten.

So it has been great. I'm just blown away by the growth I've seen in my little girl this year, and I love her teacher and student teacher, and it's possible I may have been just a touch too effusive when wrote each of them a card a few days ago telling them just how grateful I am for everything they've done and for being so wonderful and nurturing and putting me instantly at ease way back in September. (Still, I'm also a teacher, and that kind of feedback means a lot to me, so.) It's possible that a part of me believed my daughter could just be in kindergarten indefinitely, with these wonderful teachers and this great little class and I wouldn't ever have to worry about her schooling ever again. I've been looking forward to the end of the school year for myself rather desperately, but I really didn't think much about the inevitable end for my daughter as well, and so this week that reality kind of punched me in the gut.

Both Suzannah and I had a short day on our last day of school; mine ended an hour before hers, so as soon as my day ended (at ten in the morning) I raced home to grab the camera before I walked to school.

I took pictures on the way, by myself. This is the path through the trees we've walked so many times this year. This is what it looks like on my girl's last day of kindergarten, the sun filtering through the leaves, shadows dancing on the ground. This is the huge, moss-covered tree she likes to touch. This is the little clearing where she picks tiny white flowers for me. I wanted to capture, somehow, the moment -- the afternoon, the sunshine. The moment that contained so many other moments.

I waited outside her classroom, squinting in the sunshine. When the bell finally rang, I actually felt tears pricking at my eyelids. I forced them back; they would have confused my daughter. They surprised me, a bit. Instead, I put on my brightest smile, I hugged my girl, and I took pictures of her with her teachers. We exchanged knowing glances. We made it!

(The end of the school year is always so bittersweet. Some years more bitter than sweet. I had a hard time saying good-bye to my seniors this year -- I really, truly loved that class. With any luck, though, I'll have my favorite juniors again next year. I'm so ready to let go of the rest, to get some distance, to recharge, to breathe.)

Ultimately, it's a good way to feel at the end of a year. It's good to feel the ache. It means it mattered. And it did.

***

In less important news, we are nearing the end of a kitchen remodel. We've both saved for and put off this project; it's never felt like something I needed, really, because increasingly I feel that it's far too easy to "need" things just because someone else tells us we need them. (This is why I love that my children don't watch real TV yet; I can still control, to some tiny little extent, the amount of children's marketing they encounter.) But also, it was time. Our kitchen was fine when we bought our house as eager young newlyweds moving into our first real home; nearly ten years later, I'm so ready to get rid of the awful wood veneer cabinets, the scratched-to-hell porcelain sink, the floor that's peeling up around the edges. Originally, we talked about the floor. Then about the counters. Finally, we just went ahead and decided to do the whole thing, because, as Matt said, we don't want to look back in a few years and wish we had.

It's going really well. I listened to far too many horror stories about kitchen remodels before we actually started. It would cost three times as much as we budgeted for! It would take at least twice as long as we expected, and probably more! They would trash our house! There would be dust absolutely everywhere, and we would spend the next month cleaning in the aftermath!

Fortunately, none of that has proved to be true. While we're tearing out pretty much everything, we're not reconfiguring our kitchen, we're not knocking out any walls, we're not messing with the plumbing or electricity -- it's pretty straightforward. Our contractor is a neighbor of my brother's, and we've enjoyed working with him. They tore out the old cabinets on Monday. New cabinets were installed on Tuesday and Wednesday, along with an over-the-range microwave that is going to pretty much double our counter space. Our new countertops went in today. The new floor will be installed on Monday. One week! Start to finish! And they haven't trashed our house! I'm so pleased with it; I know everyone always talks about how the kitchen is the most important thing in terms of resale and all, but we have no plans to move out of our cozy little home anytime soon and I really just want to love the kitchen in the house where we live. It's in the very center of our home, and I spend an awful lot of time in it, so this matters to me. And I'm so grateful we're able to do this now.

Also, I am really, really tired of eating out. That got old fast. It's funny; I kind of love eating out in general. I do. We do it about once a week, generally on Saturday nights, and I totally look forward to it, it's this totally self-indulgent thing for me or something, but we've been eating out (mostly out, with a few takeout meals eaten here) since Monday, and I'm sick of it. If this project had taken any longer, I'd plan more and use our slow cooker or the microwave, but I also hate the idea of washing food-crusted dishes in our bathroom. I can't wait to cook a real meal again. But I also get that this isn't a real problem.

***

So summer has begun, officially, even though today was cold and rainy. Both of my kiddos are a little under the weather, Isaac especially, with nasty coughs. Especially at night. Two days ago I was up with my son from two o'clock to four o'clock in the morning; he'd settle into bed only to wail for me five minutes later, and all he really wanted was to be held. So I rolled out of bed, again and again, wishing fiercely for the days when he still shared our bed and this was easier yet still, somehow, through my fatigue, cherishing the moment -- lifting him, feeling his arms around my neck, his breath on my cheek, rocking him, soothing him back into a fitful sleep. Late this afternoon he seemed so worn out, so content to lie on the couch with his blankies and his Raggedy Andy and one of the videos Suzannah chose at the library this afternoon; then, after pizza (delivery night, since Matt stayed out late with some of his coworkers) he revived, building an elaborate train track and a tent out of an old sheet with his sister. Both of them went to bed too late. But tomorrow is Saturday, and I do not have to grade any papers this weekend, and even if it is cold and rainy and my living room is full of my kitchen and my dining room table is covered with paper plates and our dish rack and coffee maker and a hundred other things, and even if we've had too much pizza this week, and the kids have runny noses and coughs, I can breathe.

I can really breathe.

The Weekend of Everything

(Written Wednesday night)

When the kids and I came home this afternoon, we found a note in the door -- an acknowledgement of Isaac's baptism, which was exactly two year ago today, and a reminder to light his candle.

The day of his baptism was chosen largely for convenience, a day when all our family members could be here. Truth be told, I would have rather had it on the night of Easter Vigil, my favorite church service of the entire year; maybe part of me was worried that having it so close to Suzannah's birthday would make it an afterthought, too easily forgotten, lost in the bustle of the long weekend, of the birthday celebrations, of the ordinary chaos that comes at the end of a school year.

After all, though, it wasn't forgotten nor an afterthought; I remember it today, remembered it tonight when I rocked my young, sturdy son in my arms before tucking him in bed, feeling grateful that he was born into our family and has the love and support of our church family as well. My heart filled and overflowed two years ago, and that day felt huge and important to me even while I realized it was all so much bigger than me. Tonight I'm feeling a little quiet but no less full. Perhaps even more.

We're back to some sort of normal here, at least for a few days until Suzannah's birthday party with her friends. My little girl turned six years old on Monday. Six. And she is so aware of being six years old, so proud. It is almost more than I can take.

We really had a fabulous weekend. Suzannah has been lucky enough to have at least one set of grandparents here for her birthday every year; this year it was my parents, as my in-laws are in Europe. We kicked off the birthday festivities with a Girls' Day Out -- a trip to the American Girl store with my mom, my sister-in-law, and my aunt. This was Suzannah's "big" birthday gift.

And okay, I am going to be completely honest here and admit that I have been -- and still am -- hugely ambivalent about American Girl and all the marketing, about the fact that it's such a brand name now. I really can't put into words how much I loathe marketing to children. But there are times when I have to weigh my ambivalence against my daughter's unfettered joy and just let her have this experience, free of my own baggage and opinions.

Suzannah really had no pre-conceived notions of American Girl; she's never even seen a catalogue, and unless she's seen a friend with a doll or something I'm pretty sure she had no earthly idea what American Girl even is. I suppose it helped me to remember that when I saw my little girl's eyes light on "her" doll at the store, the one who looks like her. In that moment, all I wanted was to give my little girl her first very special doll. She chose her little slip of paper with such serious deliberation -- you take the paper that corresponds to the doll you want and carry it to the front counter -- and after that little paper was in her hands, she just couldn't wait. I thought we might look at some outfits first, for instance, or some books, but she just wanted her new friend in her arms. And of course I understood. Of course I did.

There were other little girls getting their first dolls as well, and I saw the same look in their eyes, that same reverent awe. More than once I exchanged these sudden knowing looks with their mothers; their faces were mirrors reflecting my own love, maybe nostalgia, maybe even a strange bittersweet joy in my girl growing out of childhood but also more deeply into her girlhood -- one in which she is celebrated for being who she is, I hope, and not one in which she feels she has to fit some sort of mold for what is beautiful, what is feminine. And for all the pink in the American Girl store, and for all the products, for all the ways there are to spend lots and lots of money, I still felt that we'd entered a space that existed solely for a wonderful kind of wish fulfillment. I mean, I can tell you right now that I would have loved an experience like that when I was my daughter's age. I would have loved to have lunch in a little bistro where my doll was given a chair right next to mine, and her own little cup and plate. I would have loved to have my doll be treated as my friend, would have loved having my imagination be so honored. I've never been to a store like this, but I did appreciate that the adults spoke directly to my daughter, like she mattered (because of course she does), and not just to me.

In the end, I was simply grateful. It doesn't make me a good mother to be able to give this to my daughter; it simply means I'm a lucky mother. A lucky woman, really. A lucky daughter, sister-in-law, niece. I can't speak for the other women in my family, but I had such a beautiful day with all of them; mostly it was about celebrating this little girl I love so much, but it was also about all of us spending time together and my fervent hope that my daughter always has women in her life who will nurture the beautiful, fierce, gentle, funny, imaginative person she is.

The rest of the weekend was lovely as well -- brunch on Sunday, hiking at Mt. Si with my parents, visiting the glass museum with the kids for the first time, grilling burgers and hot dogs and eating cake and opening gifts at our house on Monday evening. There were a few thwarted naps (Isaac's, mine), and laundry that didn't get folded, and papers that didn't get graded, but those things are just background noise.

And now we're back to business as usual, although we're also baking brownies for Suzannah's special birthday treat to share with her kindergarten class, and we're also getting ready for her birthday party with her friends.

(She wants a Star Wars cake. Confession: I am not all that into Star Wars but I cannot tell you how much I love that my girl wants a Star Wars cake. She's so matter-of-fact about this, so sure.)

So we're juggling all of these things, these fabulous growing-up things, and somewhere in there we managed to score a date night to celebrate the fact that in addition to everything else -- our daughter's birthday, Isaac's baptismal birthday, the business of the long weekend -- this weekend marks the ten-year anniversary of the day I told Matt yes, I would marry him, and the twelve-year anniversary of the day he first kissed me across the ocean in St. Malo. Memorial Weekend is about a lot of things, really, and it occurs to me tonight that for me it's going to kind of always be about everything for our family. In a way, it's where we all started. It's where we come from. It's where our family was born, in so many ways.

Tonight, I'm feeling a little strangely melancholy, feeling the weight of all of this -- the way my heart feels both heavy and light. It's the inevitable passing of time, I guess. The awareness of it, the bittersweetness.

Tonight I am remembering every age my daughter has ever been, thinking about the way she entered our lives so furiously, so fast, keeping us delightfully surprised for six years and counting; I am tip-toeing into her room after she has fallen asleep to smooth her hair off her face and kiss her forehead, her cheeks, just like I kissed them the day she was born and every day since: I remember.

Tonight I am holding my son in the dark, his arms wrapped tightly around my neck, his cheek against my cheek, against my shoulder, his sweet toothpastey breath reminding me of his sweet newborn smell even though it's an entirely different smell now, toothpaste and sweat and toddlerhood, but it's that intimacy, that familiarity of a mother's body still belonging somehow to her child's even after the child no longer depends on her for nourishment, even after he has left her bed at night. And I'm thinking of the day two years ago when I held the weight of my child in my arms and thought, God, he's yours, and I don't know how to let you have him, so I am going to need a little help: I remember.

Tonight I am so painfully conscious of the ways in which it is possible to lose each other, and of the ways in which I offer up my own children to a world, to a God, that is so much bigger and greater than me, and the ways in which I feel I am not quite up to the task of trusting the universe with them but also I take comfort in the fact that this task of loving and raising them and ultimately letting go of them -- how? -- is not all up to me alone. I think about the ways in which my heart has never been so vulnerable and raw, and I think that six years into this parenting thing I probably haven't even scratched the surface of the joy and pain it can hold. And all I can really do, I suppose, is try to hold each moment, remember it, and let go -- to unclench my fists and fall a little, and open myself to whatever comes next.

One year

Sometimes I wish my husband wrote a blog, because I would love to read his take on his day as a "Watch Dog" volunteer at Suzannah's school this week. (Watch Dogs is an initiative that focuses on providing positive male role models; Dads/uncles/grandfathers/father figures volunteer in all sorts of different capacities.) Matt took Thursday off work to spend the day at the school, where he spent the morning volunteering in another kindergarten class and spent the afternoon in our daughter's. Also, he had all three recesses plus lunch with her class. Suzannah was so excited about this, as you can imagine. I so wish I could have watched a little of it.

I just told Matt I'm writing about the end of our daughter's kindergarten year, which seemed distressing to him.

"I'm not ready for that," he said. "Can't she just stay in kindergarten forever?"

In some ways this has been a very long year, so maybe it shouldn't have given me such a start to read that kindergarten registration is happening this month. It did, though, because I still remember so vividly the evening we took Suzannah to her school for the very first time and sat in the gym with the other families and (mostly) shy almost-kindergarteners. Suzannah was not even quite five years old -- is that possible? -- and she wouldn't speak above a whisper. I'm not sure she actually spoke to anyone besides Matt or me at all, actually. I remember chattering away at her as we waited for the principal to speak to us: Oh, look, isn't this neat, this is where you're going to play, and look at those pretty art projects on the wall, won't it be fun do do those, and oh, look, there is the lady who will be your teacher over there, and isn't this all so great? I must have sounded desperate or insane or both. Suzannah sat next to me and held up one hand and said, "Mommy, don't talk to me right now." She was all, I am HANDLING this, thank you.

One year later, I'm waiting at her classroom door at the end of the day and before she will allow me to hug her, she says, "Mom, you need to sign a permission slip in my folder because we're going on a field trip," or "There are some important papers in my folder, so make sure you read both sides." ("We can tell Suzannah anything and we know she'll tell you!" her teacher said this week. "She remembers everything!")

Or I'll ask about someone she plays with at recess, and she says, quite nonchalantly, "Oh, that's Luke. He's my boyfriend." And then just ahead of us on the sidewalk a round-faced little boy waves and says, "Suzannah! Hideout tomorrow!" (I was a little concerned about my daughter holing up in some furtive little "hideout" with a boy during recess, too. I mean, WHO IS WATCHING THESE CHILDREN. But then I learned that the "hideout" is in the middle of a field, so, not so secret. But they have constructed some interesting rock and leaf piles there.)

One year later, and my daughter sits down to write words she knows just for fun, and she draws elaborate and detailed pictures and tells me stories about them. Last summer I could not cajole this child into writing her name; I thought it was because she was left-handed and therefore more easily frustrated with the physical act of writing. Really, it's just that it wasn't her time. Now is her time. And her writing is really beautiful, actually, and she enjoys it, and while I think it's wonderful that her writing and drawing have blossomed like this I think I've probably learned the bigger lesson here, and I think that will continue to be true.

One year later, I'm watching my daughter casually write sentences when I think she's just coloring after school. One year later, and when I meet my daughter at her classroom door she immediately says, "Did you walk to school today?" When I say yes, and she gives a gleeful little whoop and scampers off to the playground with a friend or two, kids who also have the luxury of lingering on the merry-go-round or the swings as the afternoon sun slides across the asphalt while we, the mothers, the older sisters, the baby-sitters, smile indulgently. Later, walking home along the tree-lined path, my daughter tells me about the games they played in P.E., about the books she checked out during Library, about how they had "Big Reading Buddies" today because it's Friday, and also her Big Buddy waved at her when she was a crossing guard, and did I remember that?

I did.

It's been a long year, for me. But in a lot of ways, I hate to see my daughter's kindergarten year come to an end. It's like any other milestone; it's bittersweet. I spent a good portion of last summer feeling like I was going to toss my cookies just because I was so nervous about sending my little baby daughter off to kindergarten. Would she be okay? Would we? How could I possibly take her to school and then drive all the way across town to teach my own classes? And let me tell you, that first day was no picnic for me until I picked her up and saw her little face break into a grin. But she loves her teacher, and I love her teacher, and she seems to have such a nice little class, and she seems happy, and she is learning and growing so much. So much. And she is having all these great experiences separate from what I can really provide for her, she's kind of doing her own thing, but she's doing her own thing in a place that fosters this growing independence while still nurturing her -- in a place I trust. I cannot emphasize enough how much I have come to value this -- that I can walk her to our neighborhood school, that we are putting down roots right here in our community. That we're grounded here. That we can walk to the park and see her classmates there. I've come to realize that this matters to me.

I'm feeling a lot more relaxed about my daughter's transition to first grade. I think she'll be just fine. I don't think I'll spend most of my summer on the verge of throwing up from anxiety, and that'll be lovely. All the same, I'm just not quite ready to let go of this -- this sweet first year of school, with teachers my daughter loves, in a school in which I feel deeply, happily invested.

Still, I guess that's the best way to feel, isn't it? To appreciate something so much that it's a little hard to let go is infinitely preferable to the alternative, and for that, I have nothing but gratitude.

The trick is to keep breathing

The smell of lilacs and rain made me cancel my gym membership.

I've been running later in the evenings lately; when Matt gets home from work there is still plenty of light. I don't think anything clears my head better than a jog through the quiet streets of my neighborhood. The area in which I live is thick with trees and doesn't get much traffic, relatively speaking, and the air has been intoxicatingly full of spring these past few weeks. When I really feel like pushing myself there's a hill I tackle on the last mile or so of my run, depending which route I take, and the reward is not only a satisfying burn in my legs but the scent of lilac bushes growing thick along the sidewalk. If I stop to pause anywhere, it's here -- ostensibly to flip through the selections on my little music player, to find the best songs to power me through the last leg of my workout, but really it's to spend a few moments breathing in the scent of those lilacs.

I nearly skipped my run on Friday evening. A light rain was falling, and Matt was cooking dinner, and it would have been awfully cozy to stay inside and put on sweats and just skip straight to sipping wine and anticipating the weekend. At the same time, the air was so quiet and still outside, and the promise of forty minutes of solitude, of fresh air and soft grey light, led me to lace up my running shoes, blow kisses to my family, and head out the door. The wine would wait.

(I think I like writing and running for the very same reasons: it just feels so good when I stop. But there's always a moment, after the initial resistance, after all the excuses, after the slow start, when something catches -- my breathe, the pen, the keyboard, the page -- and I fall in, and suddenly I'm not even really there anymore, I'm just movement. Miles are run and words are written, and they might be slow and clunky, but something really good is happening to my body and my brain and so, despite the awkwardness/slowness/belief that I'm not really a runner and my writing is just a total sham, I continue to trust the process.)

Several months ago the gym I went to rather grudgingly for nearly eight years closed, and our memberships were transferred to a bright and shiny new gym much farther from our house. I was not at all pleased about this, because I've learned something about myself in the last year-and-a-half of jogging fairly regularly a few times a week:

I hate the gym.

And it's not that I hate working out. I mean, I don't always want to do it, of course, but I always feel great when I do. Even when I go to the gym and run on a treadmill. When I ran a few miles and then hopped on the elliptical for awhile afterwards, I'd go home feeling all the same adrenaline highs I feel anywhere else. But after Isaac was born and I started making running a conscious part of my Weekly Sanity Rituals, I realized that what really felt good to me was running outside, breathing fresh air and feeling the pulse of the world around me. I needed to be going somewhere. I needed to be able to choose a different street, a different hill. Sometimes I even drive a few minutes to the boardwalk and run along the water, which is arguably not much more interesting than jogging on a treadmill except that the boardwalk can be an interesting mix of bustle and solitude, of tranquility and energy, depending on how many people are out, on whether or not the tide is in and the water is slapping the boards underneath my feet or whether I can go and walk on the sand if I choose.

I guess, in the end, it's that going to the gym felt like work. Good work, to be sure, healthy work, but work. It was a total drudge for me. And I realized that there was just no way I would be motivated to drive fifteen more minutes to get to the shiny new gym clear across town when I was going to the one near my house once a week at the most. Matt bought me new outdoor running gear last fall, and unless it's just pouring, or our sidewalks are buried in snow (which doesn't happen much here), I'll happily run all winter long outside.

I think what I love about running outside is not so much that I can pat myself on the back for getting in a good workout; it's more about finding a space in my day in which I can be truly present. I'm not distracted by people on machines a few inches away (which always makes me feel stupidly competitive); I'm just breathing, letting my thoughts go where they will, and finding my quiet center. Last week I posted this as my Facebook status:

When Isaac was a newborn, 7:00 or so was his "witching hour" every night -- he fussed and fussed for awhile, just processing all the crazy new things he had to absorb. It occurs to me that my urge to jog in the evening is the same thing; I can run in the sweet evening air and let all my crazy thoughts rattle around in my head before they finally fall out on the street somewhere, or I can sit in my house and fuss for awhile. And let's be honest, no one wants to see that.

This is probably why running "works" better for me in the evening. Saturday morning is a much more convenient time, but I'd much rather drink coffee and eat waffles and play with the kids. Letting the stress of the day -- even just ordinary stress, ordinary stuff, nothing earth-shattering or horrible -- build up a bit drives my desire to get out, to move, to let it go, to breathe, to find my way quietly back to myself.

And so we quit the gym.

It was just after a cool, lilac-scented run a week or so ago that I burst through the back door into the noisy warmth of my kitchen, sweaty, spent, a little more clear-headed and able to approach the chaos of dishes in the sink and trains on the floor and the exuberance of my children (who just get louder and louder the closer we get to bedtime; why is that?) with patience and good humor. I appreciated the contrast, even, and the fact that this blessing of solitude exists literally right outside my front door, that these moments of serenity -- however fleeting they might be -- are moments I won't find on a treadmill. I suggested to Matt that we stop kidding ourselves with the "Well, we should probably try the new gym a few times" and go ahead and admit that we just weren't going to do it, so therefore we should stop paying the membership fee even if it was such a great deal. He agreed. I might miss the treadmill in the dark of winter, when it's tougher to get outside in daylight hours, when I'm feeling trapped by weather, but I've also learned I'm tougher to keep inside than I realized -- so I think I'll be okay.

Little things are big

What I am about to write will interest almost no one. No, truly. Matt and I are terribly excited, and Suzannah was happy to cheer along with us, and possibly our parents will cheer along with us as well, because grandparents put on a good show of being interested in everything having to do with the grandkids (or at least they just call up those memories of what it was like to be in our shoes and play along politely). But to most of the rest of the world, this will not be all that interesting, even for people who like reading about other people's children and/or other people's experiences of raising them. Still, I feel I must record it for my own sake.

Isaac peed in the potty tonight!

My little baby son!

The scene: Friday night, post-bath. I had just come in from an evening run and was eating dinner while Matt finished bathing both of the kids (sidenote: good grief, they're noisy in the bath). Isaac usually gets out first while Suzannah plays a little longer, and I heard the slap slap slap of his fat little feet on the hardwood living room floor. I watched as my naked little son trotted gleefully towards me. He paused next to the dining room table, gave a few cheerful stomps for good measure, laughed at me as if to say HA! I am NAKED!, and trotted back down the hallway as Matt called, "Isaac, get back here, you're making us nervous." Nervous indeed, because this little boy, when left bare-bottomed, has no problem casually peeing on the floor. (This hasn't happened in awhile, but the trust isn't real high. I mean, he doesn't particularly care when his diaper is poopy, either, and doesn't take kindly to our insistence that we change it if he is busy playing.)

So Matt managed to wrangle him into his pajamas and I grabbed his toothbrush. Teeth-brushing has been hit-or-miss; sometimes we have to pretty much hold him down, and sometimes he is quite jolly about playing "Show Mommy your teeth!" Tonight he pushed my hand out of the way and said, "No...potty!"

I have to admit here that I did not take him seriously, because he actually does like to sit on the little potty next to the bathtub sometimes, especially when his sister is sitting on the big potty. (And yeah, Matt and I say potty way too much now, even when we're just talking to each other, which I guess is what happens when you have two children under the age of five?) Once, a long time ago, he squeezed out like three drops of pee at the same time, but I'm pretty sure that was a fluke. Anyway, it was way past his bedtime and I really didn't feel like playing his "let's pretend I'm going potty" game because he always wants to take off his diaper and I just wanted to put him to bed already so I could take my own bath. But he insisted. So I stripped off his diaper and he plopped his chubby little bottom down on the little potty seat and I left the bathroom to do something else for a minute. I don't remember what.

The next thing I knew, though, he was hollering at me. I thought I'd just go in and put his diaper back on and brush his teeth and waltz him off to storytime, but when I went back into the bathroom, he stood up and showed me that he had actually filled up that little Bjorn potty with actual pee. Oh, my word, the cheering. Matt and Suzannah and I went nuts with all the ISAAC! You went POTTY! GOOD JOB! WOO HOOOOO!

He stared at us briefly like we'd just entirely lost our minds, but then he broke into a terribly pleased grin. He grinned and grinned and said, "I did it!" And we were all, "YOU DID IT! YOU WENT PEE! YAY!" Especially Suzannah. What a great little cheerleader.

So Isaac got a little treat for peeing in the potty, and we brushed his teeth and read stories and tucked him into bed, and then I stood in the middle of the kitchen and said to Matt, "I am actually a little sad about this." It's not as though I adore changing diapers, but it's just one more milestone that carries my baby right on out of babyhood. It's all a little hard to take. I thought Isaac would be my little nursling until he was at least three (really), but he tapered off all on his own sometime in the last month. And I hadn't even considered the possibility that he'd be interested in the potty yet, although I suppose I shouldn't be surprised because he wants to do everything Suzannah does; he wants so much to be a big boy. It's strange. On one hand, I kind of hate this, and yet watching him grow -- watching both my children grow -- brings me so much joy, the greatest joy of my life.

It's a wild ride, this motherhood stuff.

When I did finally turn off the lights tonight, after we'd read our stories and he'd hugged everyone, he held out his arms and I picked him up. He wrapped his arms tightly around my neck and rested his head on my shoulder, and I just breathed in his soft still-baby fresh-out-of-the-bath scent, and we swayed back and forth in the dark of his room. I know that tomorrow he'll play hard outside and start smelling faintly of potatoes behind the ears, and he'll be demanding and too rough with the dog, and he'll holler and laugh and be very much a little boy. Tonight's milestone was one more exciting (if bittersweet) step into childhood, and every day he becomes more and more his own little person, entirely separate from me. But I'll hold these nights for as long as I can, these moments when he wraps his chubby little arms around me and sighs his baby sighs against my neck, and even though I can almost feel the future -- his grown self -- in a real and visceral way, right there in my arms, I'm so grateful for these moments in which the boundaries between baby and boy, or between mama and baby, are still a little blurred.

Desperation and Grace

I've been mentally writing an entry here for days. I keep trying to say something profound and compassionate and wise about mothering sick children for days on end, about how it's brought me to the edge of my sanity, as well as all the ways my family has been shown incredible love and grace by some really wonderful people.

But then what I come up with is all blah blah blah, everything is doomed and none of us are ever going to be healthy again and we're just going to keep passing around the same horrible viruses and I will lose my job because I miss so many days staying home and also now is my spring break and I'm still home with sick kids and I don't have enough mom friends here who understand how truly lonely I feel and Suzannah has got to be sick to death of me by now and this is all very, very terrible and DOOM FOREVER and whiiiiiiine.

Today was the first really decent day after thirteen or fourteen consecutive days of illness here, which is mostly why I've been so quiet. I know it must seem like I'm always writing about my children being sick; it's really not that they're sick so terribly often, it's that it feels so consuming when they are. This one has been rough. Suzannah especially has had us worried; she went from feeling fine one day to a fever of 102 and total lethargy the next. She ate hardly anything for several days and it was all we could do to bully her into drinking a few sips of water or grape juice or orange juice or anything. She even admitted that her throat hurt, and for my little girl to admit that something hurts is pretty significant. So I took her to the doctor, where she tested positive for the flu. Wonderful. I spent the rest of the day in varying states of total distress -- how would I keep my young son from catching it? How would I keep all of the rest of us healthy? How would I handle staying home from school the week before spring break when I've already missed so much time with my classes due to the senior IB orals, which took over a week to finish? And then I couldn't get her to even take the Tamiflu, because she threw up her first dose (straight into my hands, which meant I did not need to clean the carpet -- a victory!) and the sight of the bottle made her cry after that.

It wasn't difficult to keep her away from Isaac, really. She was so sick that she had little interest in doing anything other than lying in her bed or on the couch. She had her own bag for her used tissues. I disinfected everything constantly, and I've been washing my hands so often that my knuckles are bleeding. After crying in defeat on Saturday night, I managed to rustle up just the tiniest bit of optimism over the next couple of days when the rest of us appeared to still feel perfectly fine.

But Suzannah didn't get better over the weekend, and last Tuesday her fever was still holding steady at 101-102. I stayed home with her on Monday; Matt arranged to stay with her on Tuesday and Wednesday. I took shameless advantage of this to head out for wine and appetizers after school Tuesday -- I needed it. Some honest conversation, some adult company, some camaraderie. But as I headed to my car, I received the call I'd been dreading: Isaac had a fever and apparently rivers of green snot, so could I come and pick him up? I called Matt and nearly sobbed this unfortunate little update.

"I'll go get him," he said. "You should still go out." He sounded tired, too, and resigned. He was, I think, just being generous and considerate -- he was home, he was five minutes away from Isaac anyway and it wouldn't be such a huge deal to buckle Suzannah into the car and pick up her little brother. Of course, what I actually heard was something more along the lines of, "We are completely effed, so you might as well go enjoy a couple glasses of wine."

When I arrived at home a couple of hours later, Isaac was actually in pretty good spirits, acting more or less normally. Suzannah was passed out on the family room floor. Snoring. Would you care to guess how many times my little girl has fallen asleep on the floor? The answer to that would be zero. It was deeply unsettling. The next day her fever was holding steady and she was refusing food; she couldn't even be persuaded to play The Ladybug Game, which is her new favorite board game and for which she can rouse herself from near-death. On Tuesday, she still wanted to play The Ladybug Game.

So we went back to the doctor. He wanted to rule out secondary infections -- pneumonia, obviously, or strep. And just for fun, we had Isaac tested for all that stuff, too.

Sidenote: Isaac really dislikes nurses right now. He watched his big sister step onto the scale, and I thought that when she did not burst into flame he could be coaxed into copying her. Instead, he backed away, his eyes filling with tears, until he backed right into a cart or a table or whatever was behind him in the hallway. I sat him on the baby scale instead, and he sobbed as though I'd plopped him in a bowl of scorpions. Afterwards he clung to me, eyeing the nurse with great suspicion, his lower lip jutting out in a truly spectacular pout. If I hadn't been so worried and exhausted I'd have found it funny. (What was funny was that later, as we were leaving, we passed the same nurse -- who, incidentally, was fantastic -- and he waved jovially and said "BUH-BYE.")

Isaac tested negative for the flu. His ears were fine. His throat was fine. He didn't even have a fever, actually, so the verdict was "just" a virus. Suzannah's throat was raw -- possibly from coughing -- but the strep test was negative, and her lungs sounded fine. And yet, she was still so sick that she didn't even have enough energy to walk from the doctor's office to the car. She went to bed as soon as we got home, and after that I paced around and around our study, crying into my hands. It isn't that I thought she was so desperately ill, although it was beyond horrible to see her so sick, so listless and miserable and so not at all herself. It was just that I was exhausted, and I felt utterly powerless. I couldn't do anything to make her feel better. Bullying her to take her medicine resulted in tears, for both of us. Convincing her to drink anything was almost as bad. Worrying about Isaac was all-consuming, and worrying that we'd get sick as well just filled me with a deep, insidious dread. And worrying about how in the world we could keep everything going -- our jobs, obviously, but also stupid things like cooking dinner and keeping up with the laundry -- made me want to lie on the floor and sob.

Isaac's illness, in the end, was less worrisome in that he wasn't completely listless or completely miserable to the point where he just wanted to sleep all day long. His fever went up and down, and his appetite went up and down. He did worry us one night with a fever of 103; he just laid down on the living room floor with his blanket until we put him to bed. That was not at all normal, and I hated it, but his fever broke overnight and he seemed so much better the next day. The day after that, he spiked another fever, possibly had a febrile seizure (which would have worried me more except that I know what they are and have watched other mamas go through them with their children), and wandered around with dark circles under his eyes. Finally, finally, a week after his first sign of illness and nearly two weeks after Suzannah's, I'm beginning to believe we'll come through this.

People suffer so much worse, and I know that. More than once in the last two weeks Matt has wrapped his arms around me and said, "We'll get through this. Because people do." He sounded so sure, and mostly, I believed him. But I still posted a semi-hysterical Facebook message about how overwhelmed and despairing I felt, because I just needed those feelings to go somewhere. What happened after that, though, was that a handful of people sensed my desperation and asked, immediately, what they could do to help.

I can't even begin to describe how much that actually meant to me. It's very, very difficult for me to ask for help.

But even as I continued to not really ask for help, the offers came: a wonderful lady from our church offered to go grocery shopping for us (which she did, and delivered the necessities along with a delicious pasta salad and loaf of zucchini bread, plus treats for the kids), and a few more friends made us dinners and delivered them to our house on Friday and Saturday night. Real food, comfort food, with vegetables, cookies, a plant, fresh bread. It was such a huge, huge blessing not to have to think about cooking for a few days but still nourish our weary selves with something other than, say, three days' worth of pizza or reheated Thai food. Love and grace taste exactly like those dinners.

Somewhere in there, I realized how much time I've wasted wishing for other people, or other relationships, whatever they are, to somehow be better or more than they are. I've really driven myself crazy doing that sometimes and probably allowed myself to hurt more than is strictly necessary. And not only that, but the sad truth is that once you start dissecting all the ways other people have failed you, or all the ways they somehow haven't come through like you may have hoped, at some point, you have to come right back to yourself.

Children are really mirrors, in so many ways, and these experiences -- like, say, parenting children through illness, among other things -- show us the best and worst of ourselves. It's so much easier and more gratifying to focus on the worst in other people; I can be all self-righteous and wounded and blame other people when I'm hurting or lonely. However, when I try to talk this over with Jesus in the midst of my more visceral "Please, just let everything be okay" prayers, I tend to want to leave the conversation, because who wants to be told that she should probably work through her own sh*t a bit more before she becomes the expert in everyone else's?

I really think Jesus must be pretty exasperated with me quite a bit of the time.

(By the way, I would like everyone to know that I wrote "sh*t" instead of the actual word because my husband may have expressed just the tiniest bit of discomfort at my casual use of the word "fuckup" in my last entry, mostly because our parents read this blog, and then I accused him of censoring me and suggested that he go and start his own blog for everyone to read, and then he insisted emphatically that he was not in any way censoring me and that I could write what I wanted, that he was just feeling a little weird about it, and I said good, because that was the only appropriate word in that context and if I'm not going to be honest I might as well just shut this whole thing down but I said I would try to be good in the next entry.)

I feel like I may have started writing this with a point in mind, but I'm sure I lost that a long time ago. Maybe just this: that the last two weeks have shown me (again, because I never learn things the first time) that it is an incredibly freeing thing, to put down the burdens of my disappointments. Of my expectations. Those things shut me right down, make me just want to curl into my own tight little ball of worry and hurt. When I can leave myself open, when I can accept the deep kindness of others who took the time from their busy lives to show us a little grace when we desperately needed it, I'd like to think I'm more equipped to show that kind of love and grace as well. And that's really what it's about, isn't it? Helping each other through this life when we can?