Even if things get heavy we’ll all float on

"It’s really striking me tonight how normal it feels to have two children, like our family has always had room for Isaac. Like we’ve hardly had to adjust to him...He’s so big and fat and wonderful and growing so fast. He has the widest eyes and the most expressive eyebrows I’ve ever seen. He always seems like such a happy little guy; I hope that means he’s always going to be mostly okay.” -- my journal, July 1, 2010

It is the eve of my son’s 4th birthday. As I do every year, I remember: the way I chatted with my sister-in-law shortly before midnight (the time I’m writing this, right now), feeling like I would definitely still be pregnant for awhile. The way I felt almost exasperated less than two hours later when my water broke dramatically all over the bathroom floor because I’d just gone to bed and was tired and was not particularly in the mood to be in real labor. The drive to the birth center after Morgan came over to stay with Suzannah, me singing “Float On” at the top of my lungs in between contractions:

Alright don't worry even if things end up a bit too heavy
We'll all float on alright
Already we'll all float on

Laughing less than four hours later as he was born into his daddy’s hands and lifted to my chest.

Holding him in my arms, kissing his nose, and falling in love.

Tonight he shrieked with laughter as he scooted his new Iron Man toy across the kitchen floor. He helped his Grandma Winslow make a pumpkin pie, and when Matt and I tiptoed into his room after our date tonight, intending to kiss our sleeping son, he opened his eyes and whispered, “Is the pie out yet?” He inherited his daddy’s big feet with the giant big toe, and he’s tall. But his baby fat -- the delicious chubby rolls I nibbled every day of his babyhood -- has given way to little boy leanness, skinny legs and knobby knees. But his belly -- that yummy round tummy! -- still pokes out underneath his pajama tops.

Sometimes when I see Matt’s socks crumpled on the floor in random places, I think, My house will be full of stinky boy socks forever. And then I can’t help but giggle at that absurdity. Someday, God willing, I will live with a teenaged boy who will likely be taller than I am. I won’t want to kiss his toes the way I still want to kiss them now, when he waves them in my face and hollers, “Smell my stinky foot!” I have these little flashes of hugging his stretched-out, grown-up lankiness and it is almost too much to bear, but it is also the thing I want most from this life -- maybe the only thing I really want. For my children to last longer than I do.

Last year, on the day my son turned three, twenty-six people -- most of them children exactly my daughter’s age -- were shot to death in their elementary school. I couldn’t eat lunch with my friends that day; I could only hurl my food into the trash and cry uselessly into my hands, trying to compose myself before turning on Ten Things I Hate About You for my seniors that afternoon and resisting, somehow, the urge to drive across town and take my children home and stay there. Forever. That evening, the kids and I drove to West Seattle to meet Matt after work. We ate a comfortable dinner together, the kids cheerfully oblivious, excited for weekend birthday festivities. I swung between desperate grief and desperate gratitude, and in a way, I feel I’m still swinging.

This afternoon I drove across town to meet my daughter at her classroom door, listening to news of another shooting at another school. This time it seems the only fatality is that of the gunman but I’m still shaken, and angry, and full of inflammatory thoughts that do not belong in a post about my son.

Last week I told one of my most trusted friends that part of me is terrified all the time because I see all the ways I could lose my children on an ordinary day. It’s not rational, and I know this. I found this tonight -- I wrote it when I was pregnant with Isaac, the day after I learned a former student had been killed in a car accident:

I've heard people say it's easier not to have children for this reason, and of course they're right. On so many levels. Birthing and loving and raising children is such a huge fucking leap of faith -- it's nothing I could ever have prepared for. Nothing I could ever have prepared my heart for. It's so hard. We screw up a lot. We can't ever go back to the "before" that existed before children, a time that seems so hazy and nostalgic to me sometimes (remember when we could just go out whenever we wanted, to a movie or to have a drink? Remember when we could stay up late to watch a movie at midnight and sleep in the next day? Remember when we could take off on a spontaneous weekend trip without worrying about where the baby will sleep?). But I wouldn't give them back for anything, and the risk of my heart breaking (my heart breaks every day) is a risk I'm willing to take, because this love is the thing in my life that makes me think I'm a little closer to understanding the meaning of it.

I don't always (ever?) know how to find meaning in loss, but I guess that's another leap of faith I have to take.

Motherhood is such an insane mix of grief and joy. Both, at once. I’m a little afraid all the time; mostly, I think, I have learned to gently remind myself that fears are not facts, but it’s there, under the surface of our lives. It’s not that I think about it all the time. But I’m also never not aware of what I stand to lose. I don’t know why some people have to, and I know there’s no reason it couldn’t be any of us.

This may seem morbid for a birthday entry, and it’s true that I don’t think I’ve ever written about Suzannah’s birthday this way, but she’s a springtime baby and so far her birthday has never been sullied with the darkness my son’s has now. And yet: I refuse to let that have the last word. My heart shattered last year, but at the same time I felt so full, full-to-bursting, of gratitude. Of that desperate grief, that desperate joy that fills any mother’s heart, I believe, on a cellular level.

Pray, said my friend. And I do, or I try, and I love my family joyfully and imperfectly, and I wonder why I get to have them, but tonight, tonight, I do.

Happy Birthday, Isaac.

Alright already we'll all float on
OK don't worry we'll all float on
Even if things get heavy we'll all float on
Alright already we'll all float on
Don't you worry we'll all float on

What matters

A couple of times a week, when it’s too dark or cold or rainy to run outside, I get dinner going and then, when Matt comes home, I head over to the community center and run on the indoor track there for awhile. It clears my head and gives me a little space to breathe, by myself. When I come home the kids are generally in pajamas already. The kitchen might be strewn with dishes still, and everyone’s teeth might not be brushed, but most of the time Matt very graciously grants me an extension of my breathing space -- or he tries to. I eat a plate of whatever it was I started before I left, and then I run a bubble bath. It’s never a long one, because I have children to tuck in or papers to grade, but I always hope to grasp just a few moments of relative solitude. A bath, a book -- two of my favorite things.

And then, of course, I read two pages. Maybe. The door flies open and my son says, “Hi, Mommy! We’re cookin’ some supper! What kind of pizza you like?” He holds a little notebook in his hands, pretends to write with a pen.

“What’s your favorite?” I ask, knowing he’ll beam and say, “Peppa-woni!”

“Well, that sounds good,” I say. “Should I have anything else?”

“How ‘bout salad,” suggests my handsome little waiter in his robot jammies. “And a dwink.”

“I would love a salad and a drink,” I tell him, and he says, all business, “Comin’ right up!”

“Could you close the door?” I call after him, but he is already trotting down the hallway, into the family room where he and his sister have spread out their restaurant supplies -- their pizza, ice cream, and brownie play sets. (They always insist that I have dessert. I raise them right.)

It’s not always a game of restaurant; many nights they just want to come in and scoop up a handful of bubbles, dab them on their chins, and lean over the bathroom sink to admire their new beards. They brush their teeth. If I’m late getting in the tub, they lean over to kiss me goodnight. By the time the bathroom door closes for the last time, I’ve read very little of my book and the water is too cold. But it doesn’t matter.

It has been a stressful week, and I found myself feeling pretty miserable about everything until I remembered that the week after Thanksgiving is always kind of stressful and miserable. I’m prone to flying off the handle and proclaiming that everything is terrible; I react. I know this. But I also know who to go to when I feel like this -- the people who talk me down gently, who remind me to look a little beyond the terrible moment, which is so far from anything truly terrible I should be on my knees with gratitude for it all. Tonight, I’m offering up a prayer of thanks for those people, and for a little perspective. It’s not that I think none of us have the right to feel stressed and miserable when things feel gross, but I also think it’s important not to drop anchor there. I’ve swung back and forth this week between feeling overwhelmed and frustrated and helpless and angry and things I can’t control and...a very simple realization, which is that none of those things will change the things that matter: those silly bubble beards, for instance. Those interrupted baths. The piles of dishes after dinner, the piles of laundry that cycle through my house each week. The daily rhythms of our lives. The totally ordinary things that just happen to be my reasons for breathing.

One week from tomorrow, my son turns four years old. His third birthday was the day of the Sandy Hook massacre, a day that found me crying alone in my classroom during lunch and wanting to leave, just leave, to drive like hell across town and grab both of my children in my arms. I felt totally broken in my gratitude that night as I ate dinner with my family, and totally helpless in the face of all I stand to lose. The terror of facing what I could not possibly survive -- and yet people do, every day.

How?

If only love could keep my children safe and keep the fear out of my heart.

It’s not enough, of course, but it’s what I have. And some primal part of me understands that if my children know that they are loved, totally and completely, if they are secure in that, then everything else is okay. Or I think of all the times in my life when I have breathed a deep sigh of relief -- after Isaac’s kidney infection was finally diagnosed and treated, after Suzannah ate a few bites of food after a few days of eating nothing when she had the flu, after seeing her face break into a grin when I picked her up after her first day of kindergarten -- and thought, if they are okay, then everything is okay. I hate that not all children are wrapped in that kind of love. I hate that it’s not enough to save anyone. But it’s what I have to offer, as imperfect as I am, and I hope it’s at least enough to shake me out of the moments when I forget that everything that matters is right here, in my arms, okay.

No regrets here, no ma’am.

Perfect days include things like waking up to the smell of pancakes, going for a run in the cold November sunshine, watching my daughter do some really impressive handstands at her gymnastics class (and squeezing in a little reading during that hour as well; I just started The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri), eating a perfect grilled cheese (my husband makes those!), buying a new bookshelf at IKEA, listening to my son inquire about “going to ‘Kea,” eating pizza at Piecora’s, exchanging text messages with my dad in which I pretend to know something about sports and he totally calls my bluff but seems to enjoy my effort, browsing at the Elliott Bay Book Company and crawling into the little castle there with my son where we read a Batman book together, and getting the kids to bed at a reasonable hour so Matt and I can watch Mad Men and eat chocolate.

At the end of my life, I want to remember totally ordinary days like this, and how happy they made me. I’ve read that “Top 5 Regrets” article once or twice now, the one people keep posting on Facebook -- the “deathbed confessions” people make to nurses or whatever -- and of course it was totally predictable; people wished they’d worked less and spent more time with their families and spoken their mind and been true to themselves. I didn’t read that list and feel like I was missing something important, probably because I speak my mind too damn much already, but there was one really simple thing like, “I wish I’d let myself be happy.” Sometimes I think the simplest way to do that is to just stay present in my life, which is perhaps why I write all these blog entries about very ordinary things. I also find myself much less concerned with what other people have (as opposed to what I have) or with what I think I’m supposed to want that I don’t have. That sounds so trite, and so obvious, but clearly this weighs on people.

Anyway, I did not actually buy any books this afternoon. I feel this should be noted, because it’s a rare thing for me to wander around my favorite bookstore without buying something, but I have a solid handful of really great books to read right at this moment, and I anticipate going back soon anyway -- it’s my favorite destination for a mental health day, and I think I might need one of those soon. This was a strange, emotionally draining week at school, and when I found myself losing my mind on Thursday afternoon one of the friends who knows me best gently suggested that I take a day off soon. Thing is, I’m not really trained for mental health days anymore, since I use those days to stay home with my children when they pop a fever or have horrible coughs and ear infections. But I realized that it is the end of November and I haven’t had to stay home with them yet this year -- a first. I mean, I haven’t made it to the end of November ever since I’ve had kids, and in the two years before that I was working on my master’s degree and taking classes on weekends, so I took a Monday off every month or two...anyway, the point is, I think I need a day off soon.

Of course what will probably happen is that I’ll take a day to clear my head and the kids will promptly come down with The Crud. (Then again, if that happens, I’ll feel more equipped to handle it with patience and grace.) But even those times bring with them a healthy dose of perspective; after talking with a friend about her sick child this week, I realized that the things that were weighing so heavily on me this week will ultimately take care of themselves, one way or another, and even if it doesn’t happen the way I want, I will still be left with days like this: pancakes, November sunshine, my daughter’s beautiful and fierce energy as she learns to trust her body in a handstand, my son’s requests to do puzzles or read Batman books with him, and these moments of watching my husband put together a bookshelf for me on a Saturday night.

And tomorrow I’m going to add the rest of our Christmas decorations to all that. Not the tree yet, of course, but the other things, and the Christmas music. I’m almost ready for my annual viewing (or three) of Pieces of April, which is the perfect Thanksgiving movie and one of my favorite movies, period, and once I’ve seen that a few times it’s about time for Love Actually. Matt might even grumble a bit tomorrow, because he believes no sign of Christmas should show its face until the day after Thanksgiving (and he’d probably prefer the second week in December, the big Scrooge). But he will humor me anyway and get down the bins I couldn’t reach myself on Tuesday when I came home from school feeling a little sad (though I did set up my Dickens Village houses; those I could reach), and maybe he’ll just be thankful that he didn’t come home to all the Christmas decorations in the living room on November 2, which is when I’m ready to put them up. Some arguments we’ll have every year of our marriage, and I hope we have this one about eighty times.

Housekeeping

We nearly drove to Seattle this afternoon; we have some passes to the IMAX theater at the Pacific Science Center, and it seemed like a good day for that -- cold and gray and so Novemberish. But in the shuffle to get out the door to gymnastics class, Matt said, “We could just stay home -- I’d be fine with that, too.” I paused for a moment, because I didn’t want the rest of the afternoon to be about stir-crazy kiddos whining about watching videos because it wasn’t quite nice enough to spend the day outside. But only a moment. It might have been a nice day to visit the IMAX theater, but it was an even better day to hunker down at home.

I ran four miles this afternoon. It was cold and windy but I had new music and I felt so good out there, running through the damp streets with the Saturday afternoon traffic pulsing around me. Matt took the kids out for a bike ride while I did that, and they came home red-cheeked and cheerful. We put together an easy dinner with the last of our weekly veggie box, and the companionable closeness -- Matt peeling and dicing turnips while I scrubbed sunchokes, the kids digging out some of their neglected toys in the family room -- is what I love most about these nights when we’re all home together.

We’ve been cleaning out toys, another November ritual. Four years ago, my parents brought out my fabulous Strawberry Shortcake dollhouse for Suzannah, complete with every other Strawberry Shortcake accessory I collected in my girlhood -- probably thirty dolls, plus the trolley, plus the tricycle...I was very pregnant with Isaac at the time, and I hoped that dollhouse would provide some engaging playtime for Suzannah while I was busy with her newborn sibling (or even before that, when I was too tired and cumbersome to be much fun for her. Also, the dolls made nice rewards for using the potty). I remember that house as such a clear part of my own childhood, and I was eager to pass it on to my own children, so it made a welcome addition to our little home. But four years later, both of my children have mostly outgrown it, and our little house just doesn’t have the space for it anymore. After clearing it with the kids, we packed it up and sent it back to my parents via my brother this weekend. It’s a little bittersweet, not so much because I’ll miss the house itself, but because it’s another reminder that my children are growing older, leaving their sweet toddlerhoods behind.

I have to say, though, that I do love that bit of extra space in our family room. It’s still very much a play room, dominated by toy bins and shelves, but man, that house took up some space. (How did we ever fit an exercise bike in here?) We’re also beginning our annual toy purge before Christmas comes. I don’t know how we accumulate so much stuff, much of which I swear we didn’t buy, but whatever, whatever. I love clearing out what we don’t use or need, and the kids enjoy rediscovering toys they haven’t seen in quite some time. They are blessedly cooperative about sorting through and bidding farewell to things they don’t play with much anymore (although this week Suzannah rediscovered this horrible little harmonica she hasn’t played in forever and she refuses to give it up; likewise, Isaac decided he cannot possibly part with a particular wooden toy composed of irritating little blocks that scatter everywhere, even though I’m not sure he’s ever really played with it).

Matt has been at a convention in Las Vegas all week (and has no desire to take us there for a family vacation, it seems, which is fine with me). Naturally, I found myself appreciating what a great team we generally make, although the kids were good to me this week, and we fell into a comfortable groove right away. They were sweet and cooperative, and I’m not sure we even had any real meltdowns. Meals were cooked, stories were read, bedtimes went more or less smoothly. It’s pretty great to feel that my kids and I make a good team, too. What was harder were the little things, like having to stay up late enough on Thursday night to let the dog out one more time even though I desperately wanted to go to bed as soon as the kids went down -- but if I’d let her out then she’d have barked me out of bed at four in the morning. And I don’t sleep well alone. The first night I felt like I’d hardly slept. When Matt is gone, I can’t relax; I prowl around the house checking and re-checking the locks and making sure my children are breathing, and then I crawl into bed and lie there, hyper-sensitive to any sound. If the kids wake in the night (which is rare but still does sometimes happen, especially with Isaac, who is prone to hollering at random intervals that he is thirsty or heard a noise) I am usually the one that hears them first anyway, but when we’re both home I feel pretty easy about it all. When I know it’s all me, it’s harder to relax. It reminded me of those rare nights when I’ve slept in a different room in our house because one of us is sick. Sleeping in a different bedroom, closer to the street instead of the backyard, is rather disorienting; I hear different sounds -- cars driving by on the street instead of the wind in the backyard.

I’d adjusted by the last night and slept fairly well, but I’m glad he’s home just the same. I keep a cleaner house when I’m the one running the show, but I’ll trade that for having my partner to laugh with, to have him floss our daughter’s teeth while I rock with our son, and to be able to reach across the bed in the dark and find him solidly there.

This life

If a sophomore boy near the back of class next to the window suddenly starts to snicker with one of his buddies, especially if that sophomore boy hasn’t bothered to check out the book he’s supposed to have for your class and so clearly isn’t spending this time reading it, be suspicious. Trust me, if he seems happy, it’s not a good thing. Maybe next time instead of merely raising your eyebrows at him (to which he shrugs dramatically and goes, “What?”) you might casually stroll over to his desk, and you will see his artwork before he stealthily tapes it to the window behind your closed blinds. And then you can just avoid the part of your day when the bell rings, the kids spill out of your classroom, and a student you know from another class pokes his head in and says, “Um, yeah, you definitely have a penis taped to your window.”

For the love.

So that was my Wednesday afternoon. I didn’t really have time to dwell on it, though, because conferences began immediately after school. I ran around gathering progress reports, a stack of papers to grade, everything else I planned to take home that evening, plus a cup of fresh coffee to sustain me through the next few hours. I burst through the library doors to claim my table.

“How’s it going?” asked a colleague.

“Oh, you know. Had a penis taped to my window this afternoon, but other than that...”

“A drawing, I hope.”

“Yeah. Not a very good one, though.”

These conversations actually happen as part of my day job. Be very jealous.

I’ve spent the last couple of days at school, late into the evening. Parent conferences are exhausting, but I secretly really like them. Those little personal connections matter, even if it’s just a five-minute conversation. I love that they can give me a completely different perspective on a kid I see every day in class -- or, for that matter, the parents of the kids I see every day in class. It’s a time when I really feel like we’re all on the same page. I think that, for the most part, parents see that I care deeply about these kids, and I think it’s good for us teachers to see that parents, even when they’re a little intense, really love them too, and everything they do or say is driven by that fierce love. That love makes us all a little crazy sometimes.

This morning, Matt and I found ourselves on the other side of the table at Suzannah’s conference. She is still so young that all I really care about is that she’s curious, that she loves learning. I care not one bit about her reading level or whatever, because I trust that she’ll get to where she needs to be when she’s ready. For that reason I never check her online progress reports; I talk to her teacher every single day when I pick her up and also trust she’d give me a clue if there were any real issues. I appreciate the things that are challenging for Suzannah; I also think it’s okay if some things are “really easy” (as she says sometimes) because I know she’ll be humbled soon enough. Basically, I try not to worry too much or let my own ego get in the way of her learning. That said, today when her teacher told us how fluent she is in reading and how well she does in math, I couldn’t help but feel a little thrill. I do so love watching her grow. (Suzannah is still quite shy at these conferences; she really doesn’t love to be the center of attention, or at least at the center of conversations about her. So I tried not to embarrass her too much.)

And now the rest of the weekend is ours. Suzannah and I had a lovely mother-daughter day after her conference, mostly because she let me have a little nap before we did anything. (How wonderful it is to have a second-grader who can entertain herself while her tired mama steals a rest on the couch.) I took her to lunch, and then she sat in a salon chair next to me while I had my hair trimmed. We spent a good chunk of the afternoon at the library, where I worked on a poem for a workshop I’m taking and she worked on her reading log for school, and then she read and played a few games on one of the computers while I finished up my assignment and did a little reading of my own. We picked up Isaac a little early today, and back at home I changed into flannel pants and made popcorn for the three of us.

I love it. This life. These ordinary moments. Changing into pajama pants at 4:30 in the afternoon while my son changes into his (too-small, fraying, slightly dirty) Iron Man costume. Snacking on popcorn while I unload the dishwasher. Slicing sunchokes and layering them with purple kale and a bit of red onion in a casserole dish, covering it all with breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese and hoping it makes a decent dinner since I’ve never cooked this before. (It did. Matt and I topped our servings with fried eggs, slightly runny.) This is still my favorite time of year. The leaves are falling faster, now; yesterday morning a sudden storm tore them from the branches in swirls, and sidewalks are buried in damp red and yellow piles. Evening comes early. There is the sense of pulling inward, of hunkering down for the winter. I notice the lights in people’s houses as we drive by, the way they are framed against the dark of these November evenings. I hope our windows look like that from the outside -- warm, cozy, with just enough light to read by once we tuck our children into bed for the night.

Stillness

The fog settles heavily over our neighborhood in the mornings now, and at night. Twice this week I had to leave for school hours earlier than my usual part-time schedule allows, and my headlights could barely part the fog in the darkness. On Saturday mornings like this, I notice the silence and the stillness, even as day breaks. Our backyard is shrouded in mist. The air is dense, damp, cold. Sometimes the sun breaks through later and everything, everything is golden -- but for the last few days, the sky has remained heavily overcast.

And it’s beautiful. All of it. Yesterday Suzannah and I donned hoodies and took a nature walk after school, wandering up the street and through the lovely wooded park between our home and her elementary school. She pointed out the deep purple leaves of the trees lining the street and the red and yellow leaves falling from the trees in the park, shaken loose by squirrels in the branches and drifting to the ground before our eyes. We crunched through piles of those leaves, ran our cold fingers over mossy tree trunks, and breathed in the damp earthy smell of fall, the sweetness of slightly rotting leaves and the hint of woodsmoke on the evening air.

The other morning one of my favorite baristas at my regular drive-thru said, “Doesn’t the transition from summer to fall just feel so crazy busy?” And I thought, yes. Yes. It’s not just the transition back to school, although I suppose that’s part of it; it’s somehow just that our evenings and weekends fill so quickly. And mostly with good things, fun things, time spent with friends and family, but things. It’s also the season of Open Houses at school (mine and Suzannah’s), conferences, weekday evening gymnastics when we need to miss a Saturday class, weekday evening Family Literacy Nights or Math Nights, and so much pizza. Trips to the pumpkin patch. Halloween parties. And already we find ourselves caught up in this forward churning momentum towards November.

Years ago I remember scrawling in a notebook something along the lines of, It’s a good thing this is my favorite time of year or I’d be feeling more crazy than I already am. I didn’t have kids yet, but I was working on my Master’s degree and my professional certificate and teaching my first IB classes, so it’s safe to say I felt overwhelmed most of the time. These days, the rhythm of my life is entirely different -- no less full, but different -- and yet I find myself noticing and appreciating the same things: the heavy morning fog, the scent of woodsmoke, the way the colors stand out against the gray skies. I love the contrast between the cozy indoors and the chill of the outdoors, all the romance of fall, but maybe I also love the way the quiet foggy mornings create a space for stillness in my life. In my heart.

And now that I do have children, those spaces are as necessary as air, because otherwise it would be too easy not to notice the ordinary moments that make up this forward churning motion. Really, it’s the ordinary moments that knock my socks right off -- like, for instance, last weekend’s trip to the pumpkin patch with friends, which is something everyone in the world does in October. We met up with another family whose children went to daycare with ours, and the kids still love each other. We took a lot of pictures of them running around together, holding hands. Our firstborn daughters, their younger daughter and our son.

Things the kids loved: The “corn room” (literally a barn floor filled with a ton of corn kernels. Like a hay pit. Only with corn), the kids’ play area with a “cow train” and playground and mini bouncy house, the mineshaft tube slide, the hay ride, the giant jumping pillow, the tractor “rides” that were really pedal carts, the corn maze, the mechanical bull, the lukewarm hot chocolate.

(...Oh, hey, I rode a mechanical bull! Twice. I’ve secretly always wanted to do it.)

But the best part of the day, for me, was watching the two older girls tackle the the zip line together, harnesses and helmets and all. They weren’t the slightest bit nervous but were instead all fierce determined energy. Afterwards, they took off their helmets and shook out their hair and grinned their beautiful confident grins, and I thought, damn. My girl is a force in ways I definitely was not as a seven-year-old.

Sometimes I wonder why I write here, in this space that began as a place to share anecdotes about my toddler with her grandparents, the only people I assumed would be interested. I suppose we really do live a terribly ordinary life, in our little house in the suburbs. Our two kids, our dog, our jobs. I write about things like playing “Who gets to stay home today?” when one of our children spikes a fever or can’t hold down cough medicine, or what it’s like to apologize to my kindergartener when I’ve lost my shit. I write about the sheer elation in our household when a child masters pooping in the potty even though this is fundamentally uninteresting to anyone who doesn’t actually live here. Sometimes I write about feeling lonely, or struggling with labels -- part-time teacher, or part-time mother, or part-time everything. And sometimes, when I’m in a funk, I think who cares about any of this?

And maybe no one. But when I’m a little more clear-headed, I also know this: ordinary stories of ordinary lives resonate with me. Those small still moments, those spaces in which we notice the tiny bits that might easily be overlooked. Their lightness and their weight. The way two little girls shake out their hair after a ride on a zip line. A three-year-old’s sloppy and slightly aggressive but totally affectionate kisses. The way my children might decide, at 7:50 on a weekday morning, that they are baby penguins, and so while I am cleaning up the breakfast dishes and trying to make sure my daughter’s lunch is in her backpack and my son has his show-and-tell for the day I must also become Mama Penguin.

It’s the small stories I want to read, and it’s the small stories I can write. These are the moments that really connect us. At some level, I must really believe that, because here I am. Still.

I’m here for the weather (and for the libraries)

It feels more like November than late September tonight. I opened the sliding glass doors into our backyard earlier this evening to feel a blast of wind and rain right at my face. Matt had just returned from a run; earlier this afternoon we actually had a little break in the rain and he went outside to dig up the remains of our tiny backyard garden. But the weather really hit once darkness fell.

And I love it. I do. Nights like this remind me of Tom Robbins:

And it will rain a screaming. And it will rain a rawness. And it will rain a disorder, and hair-raising hisses from the oldest snake in the world. Rain will hiss on the freeways. It will hiss around the prows of fishing boats. It will hiss in electrical substations, on the tips of lit cigarettes and in the trash fires of the dispossessed. Legends will wash from the desecrated burial grounds, graffiti will run down alley walls. Rain will eat the old warpaths, spill the huckleberries, cause toadstools to rise like loaves. It will make poets drunk and winos sober, and polish the horns of the slugs.
--from Wild Ducks Flying Backward

I’m here for the weather, too, and I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks. Once I make my peace with the end of summer, I’m ready for the rain. I’m not really ready for it to be like this all the time yet -- I do love the golden afternoons with their yellow and red leaves against a pale sky -- but I do also love a dark, wild night. I suppose it says something about our household that I wasn’t really aware of the storm until I opened the door to face it, though. Our kids were playing mostly-happily in the family room, Matt was cooking his famous cabbage and potato soup, I was slicing pieces of the freshly-baked bread on the counter, and things felt comfortably warm. Not quite chaotic, but not quiet, either. The ordinary bustle of dinner and stories and jammies and bedtime negotiations masked the tempest outdoors. I find the contrast so cozy and magical -- maybe this is why I love this weather so much. I love hunkering down with a book and a mug of something warm to drink while the rain spatters the windows (this afternoon it was pumpkin spice chai and Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple). I love falling asleep to the sound of weather, which is why one of my favorite memories from our camping trip this summer is drifting to sleep in our warm tent while rain fell on the roof of our tent, and it's why I love Sunday afternoon naps best when the afternoon grows dark under heavy skies.

So here I am, at the end of my glorious agenda-free weekend. Agenda-free, but not activity-free. For me, the difference lies in the fact that everything we did required absolutely zero advance planning. A trip to the grand re-opening of the library. A trip to the Elliott Bay Book Company (new books, plus a few quiet moments to sit and write in the cafe with a glass of white wine and a plate of warm bread and butter). Dinner at Veggie Grill, which both kids claim is their favorite place because they have the best “chicken.” (Hah!)

Sidenote: This has nothing to do with my weekend, really, but I’m going to throw it out there anyway -- I’m kind of amazed at people who expend so much righteous energy ranting about things like new libraries. In my experience, most of the people who comment extensively on news stories or whatever just need someplace in which they feel like their righteous indignation is heard, but my word. Apparently, some people don’t like the new design or look of the library, and this is accompanied by lots of ranting about tax dollars. (It occurs to me that these are probably the same people who talk about paying my salary with their tax dollars. If I give you the three cents, will you be quiet for a little while?) What if I do like it? At the risk of ridicule from all the haters, I must admit that I kind of do. And I pay taxes too! Matt isn’t in love with the design, but -- so what? We love libraries. We are a family who uses them liberally. I will happily support them with my tax dollars, with my presence, with my cheerleading, with whatever I can. Libraries are important. Also, I read a comment in which someone ranted about the “dumbing down of America” because the children’s section is now grouped by subject instead of by author’s name. To which I say: Find a real thing to be upset about. Also, as the parent of a three-year-old boy who loves books about fire trucks and rockets and cars and airplanes, this is fantastic! We check out approximately eleventy billion books each time we go to the library. Do you think I know who authors each book that strikes my children’s fancies? No clue! But my son can walk, on his own, into the section labeled “Things That Go” or whatever, and he is in heaven. I just let him go, and he chooses a bunch of books that look interesting to him. Sorry for not caring about whether he can navigate the Dewey Decimal system yet. “Dumbing down of America”? What is wrong with people? Why are we getting so pissy about children’s books in libraries?

Anyway.

I had a hard moment of Sunday Blues earlier, but that moment was short-lived. Today gifted me with everything I want from a Sunday: the best vegetarian pho in town for lunch, new flannel pajama pants (which I put on immediately after finishing my pho), a little quiet(ish) reading time, a nap -- a lovely, cozy nap in the living room that was mostly respected by my family, homemade soup and bread, one-on-one bedtime reading time with both kids, and a little cozy couch time with Matt. (We’re binge-watching season 2 of Homeland on Netflix right now.) I haven’t added piles of grading to my Sunday evenings yet, although that’s about to change (for the next...hundred months or so). It’s an ordinary night, full of things that, when I remember them years from now, will probably be indistinguishable from many, many other ordinary Sunday nights. But if this kind of coziness characterizes my memories from this time in our lives, I will hardly complain.

A little love letter to friends, books, storms, and afternoon naps

Earlier this week, Becca posted, “How is it still September? September has been happening FOREVER.” It feels true -- summer seems so far behind us -- but still, the weeks spin crazily by. Last Sunday night I found myself looking so greedily forward to where I sit right now. This Friday night, this couch, the kids asleep, and the promise of an agenda-free weekend, something we haven’t seen in what feels like a very long time. We’ve packed our days lately. I don’t regret any of our full weekends, because they’ve been full of spending time with people we enjoy, but also, I haven’t yet figured out how to emerge from that kind of weekend feeling well-rested and refreshed. Going to bed at a reasonable hour would help, but that particular habit has grown a bit rusty since last June. Also there’s this crazy teaching thing I do on the weekdays. That’s the part that always makes the time speed up. The endless motion, the ebb and flow, the rhythms of the days. It’s energizing and exhausting, both.

Tonight I went out to dinner with Kyanne and realized I haven’t seen her since I’ve been back in the classroom, and we had so much to process. Earlier this week I had a day in which I felt so down and discouraged, a day in which I listened to all the wrong voices, and I sent out a distress call of sorts. It was answered immediately. I had some good coaching, you might say, and by Wednesday my head and my heart were back in the game. May I never take for granted the teacher friends I have who get it, who carve out space for me to feel all the messy feelings, and who remind me exactly why I have chosen this. May I always carve out space in return.

So September has been very, very full, and lacking in Sunday afternoon naps, which is why I’ve had my sights on this weekend for about a month-and-a-half. Tomorrow we’re planning a trip to the Elliott Bay Book Company so I can buy The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri and Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood, followed by dinner at Veggie Grill for some of my favorite comfort food. And on Sunday -- which promises heavy rain and wind, according to the weather reports -- I am going to take an afternoon nap, and woe to anyone who dares to interfere. Our house will feel a little chilly because we haven’t yet turned on the heat, and I’ll curl up under my favorite blanket on the couch in the semi-dark of our living room, lulled to sleep by the sound of the wind and rain. October, I am ready for you.

Fall, and finding my groove again...

Yesterday afternoon the kids and I came home to discover one of the neighbor’s dachshunds had escaped from their yard. I was busy unloading our school things from the car and herding the kids through the back door when I heard the barking behind me. I know that bark, but it sounded awfully close. I turned around to see that sweet but rather shrill little girl wiggling with pleasure right there in my garage. So I scooped her up and carried her next door to her grateful owners, who had no idea their gate had been left open a crack, and somehow I wound up with their three (human) boys in exchange.

No, it was fine -- their oldest is Suzannah’s age, and the youngest is Isaac’s age, and there’s one in the middle, so they make pretty great playmates for my children. It’s just a lot of energy for a sunny afternoon at the end of a week, so I was grateful both for the weather and for our fenced, kid-friendly backyard. I was happy to host, but I was admittedly a much more cheerful host when I could tell those five energetic children they needed to find games to play outside rather than in the family room, where they tend to make short work of dumping every toy in the house onto the middle of the floor.

Yesterday, I thought, would be the last truly warm and sunny day of the season -- a fitting end to the week and a nice way to greet the fall. The news promised rain today, and mostly, I’m fine with that. Fall always feels like my favorite season, although I love the turning of every season. Still, when I woke to sunshine this morning, it felt like a blessing. Matt would be able to finish mowing our wildly overgrown lawn, and it was a beautiful morning for a 5k. The kids at my school put on their second annual Colorsplash 5k, and I ran it for the second time today. It was a ton of fun, as it was last year -- you want to keep me going on a run, especially one with some hills, then line the route with high school kids cheering. Especially kids who know me and throw brightly colored powder all over me. I’m telling you, my next ordinary evening run through the quiet streets of my neighborhood might feel a little anticlimactic.

Seriously, though, while I had no hand in today’s event other than showing up and running it, it reminded me that I work with really fantastic people -- both the adults and the teenagers. The teenagers were there at absurd o’clock on a Saturday morning to pull this off, and everyone had a fantastic time. Teachers, administrators, people running with strollers, people running with pets, and tons and tons of kids -- kids I don’t always get to see outside the classroom, kids who seem to be involved in everything, kids who I honestly didn’t expect to ever see at a school event that didn’t strictly require their presence without the threat of detention. I ran the race today with all of them, and it was a privilege.

I’m slowly -- slowly! -- finding my groove this year. I’ve been back in the classroom for a couple of weeks. I haven’t managed to settle into a routine bedtime, unfortunately, and I don’t do well with long stretches of not-quite-enough sleep; it colors everything. However, I get to work with a really great student teacher and a lot of absolutely fantastic students this year, and in the first two weeks of school they have filled me with joy and laughter and hilarity and absurdity like only teenagers can. I also have some challenging kids -- some of them (most of them) are really lovable. Some of them break my heart. (Often, those are the same kids.) Some of them make me want to drink wine straight from the bottle. All of them deserve the best I can give them, and those are the kids who inspire and require me to truly be at the top of my game.

In other words, it’s back to business as usual.

My girl

Me, during bedtime reading: Suzannah, you’re GREAT at reading. Why don’t you read to ME tonight?
Suzannah: Fine. I’ll read ONE page. Maybe two. But only two.
Me: But my throat is really tired! I’ve had to talk so much in the last two days!
Suzannah: Well, I’ve been working TOO.

The thing I forget every year is how exhausted my voice is after those first few days. How my throat aches. Look, I talk a lot, and I talk fast. I know this. But somehow, the first few days of classes are different than my normal wind-bagginess. Meeting groups of teenagers for the first time, getting to know them, introducing myself to them, talking to lots of people at once, all day long -- it requires an entirely different sort of energy.

I finally met my classes yesterday. We start late, after Labor Day. It seems that all of my teacher friends in different districts or different states have been back at this for awhile, and in the last week I’ve gotten antsy, mostly because I’ve been at school every single day for the past two weeks anyway. But in the end, I appreciated that my first day back was freshman orientation -- a planning day for me this year, since I don’t teach freshmen or have a freshmen advisory -- and my first day with my own students fell on a Thursday. For two days I’ve been on in a way I haven’t had to be in quite a long time, and if my first on day had fallen on a Monday, I think I’d be comatose at the end of the week. As it stands, I had grand plans for my first day back; I was going to spend my evening doing things like cooking a healthy dinner and going for a run before stories and bedtime. I thought I’d feel energized. What actually happened was that I made it home with the kids, decided we were having boring old spaghetti with jarred sauce instead of a recipe that made good use of our CSA veggies, changed into comfy clothes in which I had no intention of sweating, and poured myself a glass of wine while I settled the kids on the couch to watch something on Netflix. At first I was like, wow, I’m Mom of the Year, but then I decided that if any day calls for extending a little grace to myself it’s the first real day of teaching, and yesterday that grace looked a lot like a box of spaghetti and a bottle of wine.

Sometimes it’s hard to be your own friend. I’m working on that.

Suzannah started second grade this year. It’s nearly impossible for me not to write that in ALL CAPS. Second grade! Second grade is wonderful. I remember the summer before she started kindergarten; I pretty much felt like I was on the verge of tossing my cookies every day just worrying about it. Would she be okay? Would she miss me? Would she make friends? Would her teacher love her like I did? I am forever -- forever -- indebted to her wonderful kindergarten teacher, who did indeed love her, and who also had the gift of calming an anxious mama like me. I knew immediately that she would be fine, and I will always love her teacher for that. Last year I didn’t worry at all. We had a glorious summer in which I did not obsess over my daughter’s teacher or whether or not she would be okay; I knew she would. And I loved her first grade teacher just like I loved her kindergarten teacher. Truly, it is because of those two that my daughter loves school and has blossomed from a very cautious, shy girl into a confident young lady. (Okay, she still seems to feel terribly self-conscious about reading aloud; even in front of Matt and me she’s pretty quiet about it, her voice dropping not quite into a near-whisper but close. This is so interesting to me. Even though I teach English, I really firmly believe in not pushing “literacy” on young children, and so while we’ve read to and with our children since birth, we don’t drill them at all in reading and writing themselves. And it just happened. When my daughter picks up, say, a Star Wars book and reads it to me, I’m always a little surprised that she just flies through it and corrects me if I mispronounce something. Currently, she’s reading this awful R.L. Stine book she picked out for herself at the University Bookstore in Tacoma. But she still seems shy about people hearing her read.)

I asked her, the night before her first day, if she was nervous. She seemed perplexed by the question. “No, of course not!” she said.

“Are you excited?”

“I’m so excited!” she said, and grinned her gap-toothed grin. And she was. The next morning it was all Matt and I could do to convince her to walk over to the school so we could take pictures -- she would have preferred that we just drop her off in the car line so she could jump out and get on with things. We met her teacher last week, and Suzannah liked her immediately. That, in addition to the fact that most of her first grade class is in her second grade class (they are a sweet little group) and she knew that going in, made for a pretty easy transition. And when I picked her up at the end of her first day of second grade, her grin was just as big as it had been when I left her that morning. She flew into my arms and we walked, hand-in-hand, across the school lawn. She turned back.

“Wait!” she said. “I forgot to say good-bye to my friends! And I have to go say good-bye to my teacher! Can I go back?”

At home today I looked through the papers in her green folder, the note her teacher gave her about her three terrific first days of school, the pictures she drew and the “About Me” paper on which she wrote that her favorite subject is math (it’s true -- she really likes it and is really good at it, and I take absolutely zero credit for this) and she has a little brother and her favorite thing about summer was camping, and my heart filled right up with gratitude for this terribly ordinary thing, this transition we’re learning so well. Second grade. It’s not even a rite of passage, really, like a confirmation or a graduation. But somehow my daughter has become so much more -- and so beautifully -- herself, and it is such a privilege, and such a joy, to witness.

And when she ends her day by running back across the lawn to give her teacher a good-bye hug, I know in my deepest mama heart that we’re gonna be okay.

Settling into August

And then there comes a day when you take your children to a water park, and your daughter tells you she wants to go down one of the water slides -- one of the big water slides, let’s be clear -- and you are torn between heart-bursting pride and just the tiniest wish that she was a little more afraid of it. And finally, finally, you relent, and you climb the wet stairs to the top with her. It is so high up there. You can see the entire water park from the top of those slides. Your son is throwing himself down the little slide in the kid’s pool, wild with joy and totally confident that a grown-up will keep him from drowning should he hurl his little body into deeper water. Your husband and mother-in-law are standing guard; you are often glad that you married such a tall man, because he is easy to spot in a crowd. You can also see the surrounding neighborhoods, which seem so quiet on this hot afternoon in August. Everything is green -- the urban forest of Minneapolis and its suburbs. For a moment you are vaguely disoriented, caught between the peaceful surroundings spread out before you and the chaos right there in front of you.

And you’re about to watch your daughter go swirling down into the midst of all that.

She steps up to the top of the slide when her turn comes, and she turns attentively to the lifeguard, waiting for his signal, just like you’ve coached her. He nods impassively. She hesitates, just barely, just enough for you to notice, and the lifeguard says, “You can go.” And before you can blink she’s pushing herself off, and you watch from the top as your seven-year-old slides away, down and around and around. She doesn’t attempt to slow herself by bracing her legs against the side, the way she did so long ago on those slides at the playground. She’s sailing now, and at the very bottom she plugs her nose and you catch your breathe just a bit as she shoots into the pool, pushed completely under the water.

She emerges, dripping and triumphant, and swims towards the edge. And when she finally sees your smile she can’t contain her own.

When you ask her if she was a little nervous she says, “No, not at all!” and you remember the first day of first grade nearly a year ago when you asked her the same question and she gave you the very same answer.

This is your baby girl, your firstborn, your beautiful little fish.

***
Years ago, in college, when I traveled to Ireland, England, Wales, and France on a May Seminar, my professor talked about recording the “hard kernels of memory” from each place. Last night, I returned from a week-long trip to Minnesota with my own little family, and when I sat down to write tonight, the hard kernel of memory that came to mind was this: my little girl on that water slide. Which surprised me a bit, truth be told, because while our day at the water park was incredibly fun, I didn’t expect it to be such a moment. And yet -- and yet. The moments in which I am completely overcome by the spontaneous joy of parenting these two children of mine tend to hit me upside the head when I am least expecting it.

Of course there were other moments as well: watching the airplanes take off at sunset while we waited to board our own flight from Seattle, and hearing Isaac shriek, “Oh, look! A plane!” Tucking my children into bed with the Star Wars blankets their Grandma Cindy made for them. Running up a quiet highway in northern Minnesota one muggy morning, dense trees on either side of me. Waking at three, four, five o’clock in the morning to claw desperately at my mosquito-bitten feet. Playing board games with Matt’s cousins late into the night (or what feels like late into the night for me these days). Watching my daughter hug every single person there -- aunts and uncles and cousins -- before she would consent to going to bed. Isaac’s temper tantrum on a napless afternoon when he realized he didn’t have his Legos at the cabin and responded by throwing himself down on the grass and screaming about it. The lake, always the lake -- splashing at the water’s edge with Isaac, swimming out a little deeper with Suzannah, and the way it felt when I plunged in myself, the surface closing over my head like a cool curtain. (One evening, I went by myself shortly after a sudden rain sent us scattering inside after dinner, hurriedly gathering up the last of the plates. The clouds parted just a half hour later as the sun began to set across the water. I swam back and forth for forty-five minutes. The lake was perfectly still and reflected the orange light and pink clouds moving across the sky. I was completely alone; I could see the odd campfire through the trees on shore and heard distant bursts of laughter and conversation. Closer to me were the loons, swimming near the reeds. Their eerie cry, that sad crazy laugh, is one of my favorite things about the lakes in northern Minnesota. I swam until the sun dropped behind the trees, obscured by the last of the rain clouds, and the lake was glassy and dark.)

There were more moments back in the Twin Cities, after we packed up most of our belongings (there is always at least one forgotten t-shirt) and returned to Matt’s parents’ house -- making pizzas in the wood oven, experimenting with beets and goat cheese and trout. Walking to the local library in our swimsuits before the water park opened. My deep-in-the-gut panic when Suzannah threw up a couple of times 24 hours before we were scheduled to fly home, tapping into my deepest anxieties (flying, flying with a sick child, the fear of all of us finding ourselves similarly afflicted during the night; thankfully, she was fine the next morning, so we chalked it up to too much heat, humidity, activity, and greasy food for lunch that day). Watching my children tear around the play area at the airport and thanking God that such a thing exists, for our flight home was delayed a couple of hours. On the plus side, I had time to go have a glass of wine on my own and breathe a few quiet breaths first.

We’re home again now, settling into some kind of late-summer normal for a couple of weeks before back-to-school preparations begin in earnest. I spent most of July feeling a little desperate, which, I’ve learned, is what I do; it all moves so fast, these summer days, even when they’re filled with languid afternoons running through the sprinkler in our own backyard. But then we usually take our family vacation in early August, and by the time we return to our home in Washington, I am ready to make my peace with the end of summer.

This year, we returned from a long weekend in Glacier National Park (one of my oldest and truest friends was kind enough to get married there, my very favorite place in the world) a mere four days before our Minnesota trip. And that trip was wonderful as well, because I love weddings and because my parents were there too and because every time I visit Glacier I feel like I am visiting every self I’ve ever been, at every age. As soon as I breathe the air I start to hurt, because I know my time there has to end. I can’t explain it, really; it’s just so physical, so visceral. It is the most perfect place in the world. The shore of Lake McDonald brings me more peace than any other place I’ve ever been in my life, ever. We tried camping with the kids for the first time, and while I admit I approached this with a certain amount of anxiety, I can tell you that my hard kernel of memory for that first attempt was falling asleep in our new tent, a soft rain spattering the roof, knowing that we were all safe and warm and dry and everything important in the world was contained right there in that cozy little space. I hope I always remember how peaceful I felt in that moment.

So it was a lot of summer in that last week of July and in this first week of August, a lot of swimming in lakes, a lot of reconnecting with people from my past, a lot of deep breathing, a lot of gratitude. And that is what allows me, in some form, year after year, to settle into the golden afternoons of August. Vacations are behind us, and just enough of those lovely languid summer afternoons lie ahead. The light has already shifted. A month ago, my evening runs were hot and sunlit; tonight, the shadows stretched across the sidewalks. I’m beginning to make notes about lesson planning, the new books I’m going to teach soon. I’m filled with the earliest twinges of excitement instead of dread at the end of summer. It’s a cycle I know, and I’ve learned not to fight it. Summer is sweet because it doesn’t last forever.

Swimming Lessons

Our mornings, for the past two weeks, have centered around swimming lessons. The kids wake slowly these days, stretching and rolling around in their beds before emerging sleepy-eyed and rumply but smiling because they know that they can stay in their jammies for awhile, through breakfast, and instead of putting on real clothes they get to put on their swimming suits. Suzannah informed me on day one that she would be doing a pattern -- the purple suit one day, the star suit the next. Isaac wears his Thomas the Train trunks for swimming lessons every day. His shark ones are for running through the sprinkler at home. The goggles are also a big deal. Suzannah’s are purple with dragon eyes; Isaac has spiderman. I found out just how big of a deal the goggles are this morning when we inadvertently left Isaac’s at home.

“Where my ah-goggles?” he demanded in the car. The kids like to put them on as we pull out of the driveway, but he didn’t mention his until we were nearly there with no time to spare. I’d left them in the car the previous day precisely to avoid this situation, but last night Matt gave him a bath and he wanted them.

(Sidenote: “Ah-goggles” is the way Isaac says “eye goggles.” I don’t know why he calls them eye goggles, but one of the beautiful things about parenting a toddler is the way they pronounce things the “wrong” way, and indeed it is a bit of a heartbreak when, for instance, they start to say video instead of mideo or thank you instead of mink you. Right now I particularly love the way Isaac substitutes a t sound for the f, as in, “Oh, tine,” as he stomps to the table to eat his vegetables before he can have dessert, or “Mommy, tickle my teet!” as he waves his toes at me. It makes even his unreasonable moods endearing when he crosses his arms and frowns as hard as he can and says, “I don’t wanna have tun.”)

We could have had a monster of a meltdown when Isaac realized his ah-goggles were not in the car, but I managed to brush it off quite lightly and cheerfully, reassuring him that there would be goggles on his face when he went into the water. His sister’s, of course, because her lesson comes before his, but I thought, when he’s right there at the edge of the water and his teacher, whom he loves, is calling to him cheerfully, is he really going to stop to freak out over which exact pair of goggles are on his face or is he going to want to just get on in that water?

And he was fine, really. We had one moment, ten minutes before his lesson began, when he saw another little boy in his class waiting nearby with his goggles on, and my son burst into tears and wailed, “I want my ah-goggles!” I plopped him onto my lap and kissed his cheek and said, “I know, Baby, but today you’re going to be a dragon. You’re gonna breathe fire.” That intrigued him. He stopped crying and practiced his fire-breathing right in my face and then shrieked, “DID I SCARE YOU?”

Whatever it takes.

Swimming lessons go like this: Suzannah peels off her shorts and drops them onto the bench next to me. I call after her, “Walk, Zannah!” because she is so excited to get in the water. She manages to slow to a trot. When she reaches the edge of the pool she jumps right in, all the way under water now. Last year she enjoyed her lessons -- she always has -- but not until now has she decided she wants to do this, to hold her breath and be underwater, all on her own. To move her body through the water, without holding on to someone’s arm or even a kickboard. It’s like so many other things -- not necessarily about ability, because that’s been there for awhile, but about desire, about that little click in her brain that’s all, I am going to do this now. She goes under, again and again. She pulls herself through the water, practicing, her face fierce and determined. She is swimming -- a bit awkwardly, but she is doing this thing, and from here on out we will not need to coax her.

Isaac sits next to me on the bench. I’ve been packing along Suzannah’s Leapster Explorer so the kids have that to play with if they get too bored during each other’s lessons. Now, though, in the second week, Isaac seems more content to sit next to me on the bench, his little feet crossed, and just watch. I’ve been reading a bit, because while I love to watch my children swim it’s also a solid hour of essentially the same thing every day, and miraculously, both kids have been chill enough to let that happen. Every now and then I look over at Isaac and run my hand up and down his back. His skin is still baby-soft, and the curve of his cheek in profile, along with those little feet swinging above the cement floor by the pool, is more than I can resist. His baby chub has turned into little boy leanness, but I still love the way he jogs, flat-footed and rocking back and forth a bit with excitement, when it is his turn to get into the pool. They trade places after Suzannah’s lesson. She climbs out and I wrap her in a towel. She folds herself onto the bench next to me, shivering a bit. She does these ridiculous things like casually shaking water out of her hair, crossing her legs, very un-toddlerlike. How did we arrive at this moment of her seven-year-oldness? I remember her first swimsuits when was all rounded belly. I remember piling her hair on top of her head for her very first lessons and it might still be mostly dry when she climbed out at the end. Now her ponytail drips down her back and her legs are long, lean, tan. The other night she surprised me by vaulting into my arms for a hug, and it was actually hard to lift her, to heave her into the air so she could wrap those long legs around my waist. This morning when she hugged me in the kitchen I did not have to bend over very far to kiss her face. She is proud of her height, proud of how strong she is becoming. Last week we went on our first mother-daughter run over at the middle school track, the first of what I hope are many mother-daughter runs, and the way she pumped her arms and slowed to a walk at the end, wiping a wrist across her forehead before reaching for the water bottle -- it gave me glimpse of her beautiful future self.

The pool, though, is the perfect place to just be in the moment, even though I am so aware of this process of growing and becoming. Time is suspended for that hour. The chlorine-filled air contains the essence of summer and the essence of childhood -- the slap of flip-flops on concrete, the echoes of the swimming teachers’ voices, the splashes as the kids jump into the pool and cross it on their own in varying stages of ability and grace. That much hasn’t changed since my own childhood, and it is a gift of time to exist in that hour with my own children now, that warm and humid and -- despite the chaos -- beautifully still hour.

These days

Three is a difficult age. Ask my son; he’s deep in its clutches right now -- feeling all the feelings without having developed coping mechanisms to deal with them yet. Mostly, I can weather the stubbornness and the tantrums and the unreasonableness with good humor. For one thing, last time I had a three-year-old child I also had a newborn and I was developing coping mechanisms right along with her; this time, I have the remarkable advantage of not being postpartum and hormonal. For another thing, while three-year-olds are often quite insufferable, they are also prone to moments of unbearable sweetness and hilarity, often several times a day, and those are the moments I fall back on when I am tempted to call my current three-year-old a Little Shit in front of his gymnastics teacher.

He’s a contrary little guy these days, though. No matter what we’re doing or where we’re going, he voices strong opinions against it. “I don’t wanna go there.” “I don’t wanna do that.” “I don’t wanna go potty.” “I don’t wanna eat lunch. I not gonna eat.” “I don’t wanna swim.” “I don’t wanna go to my ‘nastics class.” When he’s feeling particularly grumpy, he might just resort to “I don’t wanna go somewhere.” Once, I don’t remember what Suzannah said exactly but it was something along the lines of, “Isaac, do you wanna be_________?” and he just furrowed his little eyebrows into a point and said, “No. I don’t wanna be.” That’s some heavy stuff for a preschooler.

And it’s trying for his mama, but I also know how I feel sometimes when everything is terrible or I’m tired, and I’ve got a few decades on him -- so I feel a little protective of his toddler angst when I perceive that certain attitude from people who are not parents of three-year-olds, people who have surely forgotten how hard it is to have so little real control over anything, really. Add to that the lack of perspective that grown-ups have when they are stuck in a car, or when they are hungry or exhausted; a little one doesn’t completely understand the concept of time well enough to get that this too shall pass. (Can you tell we just weathered a very fun but occasionally trying road trip? Hours upon hours in the car, irregular sleeping schedules, overstimulation, and a general absence of predictable routine took its toll upon my little guy. But he is also resilient, and this week he has expressed quite loudly that instead of coming back to our house to take a nap he wants to go back to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.)

Our summer days now have a rhythm to them -- something I need, although I also love the slowness induced by sunshine and heat. For me to be my best self I need to write and read and exercise at least a little bit every day. Both kids are taking swimming lessons right now, every morning. Suzannah is ready to get serious about them, which is beautiful to watch. She gets this fantastic expression of total, fierce concentration on her face when she’s ready to go for something, whether it’s tackling a cartwheel in her gymnastics class or taking a few strokes through the water all on her own. Isaac just loves to play, but he’s getting comfortable in the water and I don’t have to be the one in the pool with him now, which is exactly what I wanted out of swimming lessons.

In other news that is exciting to probably no one except me, last week we bid a not-so-fond farewell to our rotting old backyard deck and replaced it with a concrete patio. When we met with our contractor I was like, “Look, all I want is something I don’t have to maintain and something that is not ugly.” Pressure-washing a patio once a year I can handle, but I do not ever want to stain a deck again, and I most definitely do not want to try to grill dinner in our backyard only to spend the entire time hollering, “No, no! Don’t step there! Careful!” I can’t wait to spend the rest of the summer in our backyard, doing what we do (kids in the pool or sprinkler or sandbox, me reading on a lounge chair), and not worrying about some child -- either one of mine or one of the neighbors’ -- stepping through a hole in the deck. The guys did a beautiful job that exceeds all my expectations, and they were very sweet not to ever roll their eyes at me when they’d say, “We could do this, or this, or this...?” and I’d smile brightly and say, “Sure!” Finally I was all, “You guys just...do what you do.” So they did, and I love it. Bring on the rest of the summer.

Home, again

Last night at this time I was driving east on I-90, Kyanne next to me in the front seat, kiddos sleeping (or nearly sleeping) in back. We’d stopped for the last time in Ellensburg for Chinese food and a bathroom break, and as we hit the road on that final stretch, the sky pinkened over the mountains and cast a lovely, soft light over the hills. It is my favorite time of day to drive through beautiful country.

One week ago at this time we were all heading east, the sun setting in the rearview mirror as we drew closer to Bozeman. When we rolled into the driveway, crunching over the gravel, my dad was sitting on the front step waiting for us. I stepped out of the car, stretched my legs, and breathed the most beautiful air in the world.

This evening, I stood outside one of my favorite places in Seattle, waiting for Matt and the kids to come and pick me up. They’d dropped me off for a little alone-time while they looked at camping gear. The air was warm and smelled nothing like the mountain air I breathed in yesterday morning; instead it was a combination of coffee, food from the cafe next door, and the faintly marine scent from Puget Sound not far away. People milled around me, relaxed. I clutched the book I’d just bought, a memoir by the writer who’s leading my workshop this summer, and thought about where I’ve been in the last couple of days, about how I left one mountain state for another, and how both places are so deeply home, something I’ve written about again and again.

I talk about going home, and I mean it both ways.

Leaving Montana is always hard for me. I used to choke up a little as I drove out of town, even when I felt homesick for my little house right up the street from the Sound. It’s not that I don’t love where I am now. In fact, I still remember returning to Washington after Christmas during my very first year of teaching; I remember the feeling of coming home to a land of wet and green Januaries and feeling like I belonged here. I still feel that. Matt drove us across the West Seattle bridge tonight and I felt the same thing. I watched the soft evening light settle over the water, and I thought, I love this city. But a piece of me is planted in another state, too. Sometimes I wonder if my children, who are Washingtonians by birth, will feel that in their blood.

It was a beautiful week. Kyanne was a fabulous road trip partner and I found myself wondering how we’ve been friends for a decade without experiencing this until now. We took the kids to the splash park, made our own solo trek to the Lewis and Clark Caverns with a side trip to the Heritage Headwaters Museum in Three Forks, checked out the Farmer’s Market, drank a lot of coffee, hiked to a waterfall, watched some pretty spectacular fireworks, and saw some even more spectacular sunsets. Not a bad way to kick of July. Kyanne weathered lots of hours in the car with two children who were not her own, and she didn’t seem too ruffled when they became overtired and whiny and unreasonable. Instead, she took pictures of them when they were a.) adorable or b.) asleep.

Strangely, I think one of my favorite memories of the trip is one that doesn’t have much to do with the mountains or the sunsets or the sweet, sweet mountain air. On the Fourth of July, my parents’ neighbors invited us to a barbecue in their backyard. Matt and I went a couple of years ago, when Isaac was just a baby. They have a little girl just about Suzannah’s age, so we thought that might be fun, and Suzannah remembered that. This year we arrived to several kids tearing around the yard, playing in a large inflatable pool and jumping on a trampoline (with a safety net. Every house but ours had a trampoline when I lived there, it seemed, and none of them had safety nets and someone was always nearly breaking their neck on them, but now people surround them with these nets and therefore I didn’t mind if my children were allowed to jump with abandon).

“Do your kids have bathing suits?” our hostess asked.

My kids had spent the afternoon in bathing suits already as we’d recently returned from the splash park. I briefly thought about walking them back over to Grandpa and Grandma’s house and wrestling them into their cold, damp suits -- and quickly decided that they could just get their shorts and t-shirts wet, if they wanted. I stripped off Isaac’s t-shirt and he spent the next three hours tearing around the lawn, throwing himself in and out of the pool. A couple of the older boys, experienced big brothers, played with him good-naturedly. Suzannah went nuts on the trampoline. The kids set up a sprinkler underneath, so they jumped in squishy, wet, delighted joy. I sat on a lawn chair, munching my mom’s fruit pizza, and watched my kiddos run around like wild things, so unselfconsciously themselves, so in the moment, and I thought, this is everything wonderful about summer.

Later, we wandered over to another neighbor’s house for a fireworks show that rivaled the one at the fairgrounds. It began with a free-for-all with the kids; they shot off a bunch of those parachute things, followed by about a half an hour of unlimited sparklers. Then things got real. The only thing missing was the accompanying radio program, and afterwards we only had to walk back across the street. This is Montana, people.

I will not write about how my son screamed, “I don’t wanna go inside!” as I carried him across the street, or about how he refused to put on his pajamas and thrashed around on the floor, bare-bottomed and wailing and just done until absurd o’clock that night. I sat with him on the floor in my parents’ bedroom, speaking quietly, waiting him out, reminding myself that in a few days I would be able to hand him off to his father and be all, “You take this one for awhile!” Eventually, he turned to me pitifully and said, “Where my jammies?” He allowed me to put them on, and then he crawled grumpily into bed.

And it’s funny, isn’t it -- how in the moment, I was frazzled and exhausted and wanted to howl right along with him, but a few days later I think of that moment with something resembling tenderness, both for my overstimulated little son and for my desperate mama self. And I love that moment, that snapshot. This is the absurdity of parenthood -- that we look back on those moments that take us to the edge of our sanity, and we fall even deeper in love with the fierce and funny little people who threaten to push us over.

Everything, just everything

I always feel a little disoriented at the end of a school year -- a little blue, even. This year, the end-of-the-year blues struck harder than usual, possibly because this year I actually was not counting down the minutes until the end. Last year, I think I started my “How many more Sunday nights are left” calculations sometime in March, if not the beginning of second semester. This year was markedly different in so many ways, not the least of which is that I loved all of my classes and didn’t spend approximately one night per week crying to Matt that we had to figure out some way for me to quit my job. Last year, I couldn’t get away fast enough. This year, I’m spending my first week of summer teaching a morning IB credit retrieval course for students who need a little extra help, and I’ve appreciated the fact that it’s easing me away from school a little more gently.

But I do love summer. I love the slowness of everything, the long shadows across the sidewalks when I go running in the evenings, the way the light catches the leaves along the streets near my home. I love picnics with my kiddos, afternoons spent in the backyard or at the splash park, the way they come home smelling like chlorine and sunscreen with their hair stuck to their sweaty foreheads. I love summer reading lists, the anticipation of the road trips we’ll take, keeping my toenails painted, and the sound of the fan in our bedroom at night.

We have all kinds of plans this summer: first, we’re tearing out our old, rotting deck and replacing it with a patio. I’m looking forward to not slapping a coat of stain on those old boards every year, and it will be lovely not to worry about, say, my three-year-old or one of the neighbor boys falling through one of the holes when they’re tearing around the yard. We grilled veggie burgers and ate outside tonight, and I had to say, “No, no -- don’t jump there!” half a dozen times.

Next weekend, the kids and I are road-tripping to Bozeman with my friend Kyanne. It’ll be like bringing home friends during breaks in college, except with car seats and children in the back. Later in July, one of my oldest friends is getting married in Glacier National Park, which is my favorite place in the world, and we’re definitely going to that. And in August, the Winslows are flying to Minnesota for a week or so. This is a good summer line-up. And in between these trips there will be gymnastics (for both kids), and swimming lessons, and picnics and running through the sprinkler and trying to coax our little garden to produce tomatoes and peas and herbs.

I’m also taking a writing workshop all summer. It started last weekend, and I can already tell it’s going to be really, really good and necessary for me. I always make ambitious writing goals during the summer, but since I’ve had children I haven’t been great about letting it out of the pages of my notebook. So I am doing this thing, finally.

In other news, I have a second-grader now.

And this is probably why the end of the year felt even more disorienting to me this year. I have this kid, this lovely little girl who is so aware of her second-gradeness. Two years ago I was pretty much constantly on the verge of barfing all the time, I was so nervous about her starting school -- and now here she is, seven years old, running around with all of these kids on the playground, deeply involved in all of these games that are totally separate from me, bringing home portfolios full of this gorgeous writing and art that burst forth from her own mind with no prompting or assistance from me. It is a beautiful, wonderful thing, but it leaves me spinning. Out of nowhere not long ago she said, “When I’m in twelfth grade, I’ll be seventeen.” And I was all, “Um, that’s...true, but maybe let’s just enjoy first grade for today?” Because what?

It has been a month of birthdays and birthday parties, of her Show Week at The Little Gym, the culmination of a year’s worth of gymnastics. It has been a month of first-grade concerts and end-of-the-year celebrations. Isaac, not to be left out of all the excitement, decided to poop in the potty this week. (Little Dude has been peeing in the potty since last fall -- we don’t even give him treats every time he goes anymore! -- but he staunchly refuses to poop there, preferring instead to hold it until he falls asleep at night, and aren’t you glad you’re reading this?) And on top of that, my seniors went and graduated on me, and one of my best friends is moving to China in a month, which meant that I did some hard, ugly crying in her classroom the last week of school. It is all just entirely too much, and it probably explains why I collapsed fully-clothed on our bed at eight o’clock the other night, fully intending to get up five minutes later and wash Suzannah’s hair before bed. What actually happened is that I fell asleep, dimly aware of Matt closing the bedroom door and saying, “Let’s let Mommy sleep, okay?” I woke up terribly confused at 9:30, and Matt was like, “You know, you could just go to bed for real,” and I was all, “Now?” Because that hasn’t happened since about 2005. But it sounded like a blessedly good idea. And it was.

Happy Birthday, my little carrot.

Tonight, driving home from IKEA with my mother and my sister-in-law and my beautiful daughter on the eve of her seventh birthday, we reminisced about the time she was born -- about how sick I felt the night I went into labor but refused to admit I was in labor at all (since she was born a month early), about how sick with jaundice she was after she was born, about how overwhelmed and scared I felt. There were other, happier bits in the storytelling too, of course, but tonight I keep thinking about that because of what came next.

“How long was I sick?” she asked.

“You were really sick for about a week,” I said. “Remember those pictures we have where you’re tucked into the bili box right on top of our kitchen counter? We had a nurse come out to our house to check on you every day.”

“But what day was I better?”

“Well, you spent about a week in those blankets,” I told her, “but you looked like a carrot for about three weeks after that.”

She burst into peals of laughter. “A carrot! Mom, that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”

She was just delighted. A carrot! How absurd!

And suddenly I wished that I could somehow go back in time and give my new-mom self a huge hug. I remember -- and not fondly -- sitting in the brand-new blue glider, rocking my daughter who wouldn’t nurse off my rapidly filling, rock-hard breasts, wondering how I would get her to eat or how I would manage to take a shower. I bathed us both in tears, and every time some well-meaning person reminded me to enjoy every moment I felt a little more of my sanity drain away. Somehow it gives me a little comfort to imagine the mother I am tonight whispering to the mother I was seven years ago, “Someday, your daughter will want to hear every single word of her story.”

(Eventually, of course, we figured it out together. She learned how to nurse, and then eventually it stopped hurting. I learned that we both slept better when I brought her into bed with me. We learned each other’s rhythms. I tried to write it all down, even the messy parts, the hard parts, the parts that didn't go in the pastel-colored baby books. Those were the stories I needed from other mothers, because they made me believe that I could fall fiercely in love with my own, imperfect as it might have seemed at times.)

She’ll be seven years old in the morning. Seven. She’ll have memories of her own, memories of me, of this time in her life, of our family, and I realize that she really is the author of her own story. Not me. It’s a humbling thing, really, to realize our separateness long before she probably will, but I take it seriously. I struggle with how much of her life to share publicly now, because it really is hers. I feel so plugged into her psyche sometimes it terrifies me, even in -- especially in -- our more challenging mother-daughter moments, but at the same time I struggle with projecting myself onto her. One of my friends once wrote about how it’s only natural to see our daughters as idealized versions of ourselves, but that can be dangerous territory. I can see myself in my daughter, but she is not me. Nor do I want her to be. I wish I could put into words what I feel sometimes when I look at her now, when she doesn’t realize I’m just watching -- maybe she’s just brushing her teeth before bed, all long-legged and slim and slightly tan, and she leans over the sink to spit, gathering her hair in one hand and holding it back all by herself so she doesn’t get toothpaste in it. It’s such an ordinary, heartbreaking, wonderful thing, to watch this beautiful girl just be.

I really can’t write her story anymore; I can only write my own. There’s a loss in that, I suppose, but even on her first birthday I wrote that I would never wish her back to babyhood, as much as I ultimately loved it. Watching her become her own beautiful self, whatever I might wish for her -- that is my life’s greatest blessing and my deepest joy.

The month of May

I love this time of year in the Pacific Northwest. Recently we had a week of weather so lovely I wore skirts and sandals every single day. Cherry blossoms have settled in pink piles along the sidewalks after weeks of landing in my hair as I ran by, shaken from their branches by the slightest breeze. Now the clouds have returned, but the rain is light, soft, warm. I ran through just such a drizzle this morning, and the smell of my neighborhood on this spring Saturday morning filled me right up with gratitude.

May in the Pacific Northwest arrives just in time to keep me from running screaming into the woods, because while it is the beginning of the loveliest time of year, it aligns perfectly with the worst time to be a teacher. Everyone is done in May, just so done. This year, though, I’m so aware of how deeply unhappy I was at school last year, and so deeply aware of the difference. Even on a less than stellar day. When I look back on the last seven or eight months I’m not sure I can think of the last year I’ve just loved my job and loved my kids and felt really, really good about it all the way I have this year. My school has seen a lot of changes in the last four or five years. So have I, really. I seriously considered taking an entirely different direction with me life after Isaac was born, for a lot of reasons, but right now I feel like I’m doing exactly what I’m called to do. That isn’t to say it’s perfect, because nothing ever is, and when I’m stressed out I’m still prone to bursting into Becca’s room during her planning period and shouting, “Everything is terrible,” but now when I do that I’m usually referring to something that can be fixed with a little perspective, a little breathing space, a few items crossed of a to-do list, and a small bite of chocolate.

So things are really pretty good right now. I had somewhat of a frenzied, disappointing week, to be honest -- I felt overwhelmed and a little sad and tired -- but now, on Saturday night, cuddled up with my husband and my pug, sipping a drink and watching a movie, it’s easy to let go of specifics, to stop having hypothetical arguments in my head with people who don’t exactly know they’re participants, and to try to extend a little grace to people who’ve managed to ruffle my feathers. (Which, as we all know, is so hard to do.)

Ten days from now my little girl turns seven years old. All of her grandparents will be here to celebrate. I watched her run and climb and tumble at her gymnastics class today and wondered how in the world we made it to this point so quickly. Last night we all drove home from West Seattle, and Suzannah and Isaac played the “Smell my feet” game the entire way. I kind of hate the “Smell my feet” game, especially in the car, especially at night when we are all tired, and because also ew. But at the same time, it sent me spinning into this weird space -- I have spent so many moments kissing my children’s feet when they were babies, even toddlers. I have loved those little feet, and even now there is something so heartbreakingly sweet about, say, Isaac’s feet kicking above the floor when he sits in a chair. And I know there will be a time, not long from now, when I will remember my children screaming joyfully about their own stinky feet in the back seat and waving those feet all over the car, sticking them in each other’s faces, in our faces. Probably I will roll my eyes at the memory, a bit. I know I will think of it fondly, as we always do in hindsight. And maybe that’s why I write it all down now -- to try to keep and hold each moment, the hilarious, the absurd, the wretched, the sweet -- because I’m all too aware of how quickly it passes. The moments aren’t all sweet; please don’t remind me to enjoy all of them. But they’re all part of our story, and I do love our story.

The Beautiful Now

I don’t remember what I was doing the other night -- probably settling into the couch to watch an episode or two of Friends (I just bought season 3; now the only one I don’t have is season 1) to unwind before another too-late bedtime. Both kids had been tucked in for awhile, and my brain was just shy of functioning. So I didn’t hear Suzannah right away. By the time I did, her cry had taken on the urgency that accompanies real fear. It had the panicky “I’m going to throw up” sound to it, to be honest, although Suzannah rarely throws up. Still, the cry meant business.

“Shit,” I mumbled, scrambling to my feet. Before I could reach her she’d already made her way to the kitchen. She pointed tearfully at her mouth.

“Did your tooth come out?” I asked her. She shook her head. “It’s bleeding,” she whimpered. Sure enough, her top front tooth hung by a thread from her bloody gums. This was the same tooth she knocked loose in her fall several days earlier. She doesn’t work at her loose teeth, so they have the potential to remain just barely attached for quite some time before they come out. But while my daughter is a pretty tough kid, she finds the sight of her own blood quite upsetting, and that, combined with the unsettling feel of a barely-there tooth, was too much for her.

“Do you want to try to pull it out?” I asked. She shook her head. “Do you want me to try to pull it out?” She nodded.

So she perched on the lid of the toilet seat, and I tried to pull out that tooth. I’ve never tried to do that before, and as it turns out, small baby teeth are slippery and not easy to grip. I tried with a washcloth, but after a tug, Suzannah gave a little sob and pulled away.

“It’s okay, Bug,” I said. “We don’t have to do it tonight. Let’s just rinse out your mouth and leave it alone for now. It’ll be fine.” I wrapped my arms around her and she rested her head on my shoulder. She let me rock her like that for a long time, and then I tucked her back into bed.

It was such a small moment, really, but it was also unspeakably sweet and kind of heart-wrenching in a way that defies words.

Fast forward a few nights. Shortly past three o’clock in the morning, I woke to our daughter standing beside our bed.

“My tooth came out,” she whispered.

I sat up. “Where is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Did it fall on the floor?” Shrug.

“Do you think you swallowed it?”

“I don’t know.”

I sighed. “Okay. Why don’t you climb in here for a bit.” So Suzannah crawled under the covers in our bed, and I spent the next ten minutes blearily searching through the folds in her sheets with no success. I crouched down on the floor and ran my hands over the carpet. I reached under the bed, thinking only about the spider my husband had allowed to escape behind the bookshelf in her room a couple of months ago. (Suzannah does not like the sight of her own blood, but she is remarkably unconcerned about spiders in her room. Obviously she hasn’t considered the possibility that the spider her father allowed to escape has since become a grandmother, probably, to lots of other horrible spiders that are waiting for a night like this in which to scurry over my hand while I’m searching for a lost tooth.)

It felt kind of absurd and surreal -- this crawling and groping around on my daughter’s floor, searching for a baby tooth at three o’clock in the morning -- but also, the one perfectly clear, coherent thought that came to me was that this is the very essence of motherhood.

I did not find the tooth.

I returned to our room and said something about writing the tooth fairy a note, about how she would understand that the tooth was lost but would see the gap in Suzannah’s mouth and get the message and probably leave her a little something anyway. Suzannah accepted this and allowed me to usher her back to her own bed. (“Do you think she could have really swallowed it?” Matt mumbled in the dark, sounding worried.)

A couple of hours later, after my alarm jarred me out of sleep but before I showered, I crept into Suzannah’s room once again and left two quarters in her tooth pillow. Two quarters is the going rate for teeth in our house these days. It was also, as I recall, the going rate for teeth back when I was losing them, so probably she is supposed to get more money or bigger presents or whatever, but really it’s not about that -- it’s about the shiny coins. It’s the symbolism. It’s about the satisfying plink of those coins dropping into her piggy bank. So two quarters it is, despite the fact that her friend Kathryn apparently gets, like, five dollars per tooth. (First graders compare such things, it seems. For the time-being, though, Suzannah seems blessedly unperturbed by the difference.)

(Later, Matt -- still worried about the possibility that Suzannah had swallowed the tooth -- searched for it himself. He covered the same territory, obviously, but seven-thirty in the morning is decidedly different from three-thirty in the morning, and he emerged triumphantly from her room a few moments later. “Found it,” he said, more relieved than proud. He really was worried about the potential swallowing. I thought it was unlikely, but also, it must happen, right? No one ever hears about first graders needing actual medical intervention because they swallowed a tooth, right?)

She lost another tooth the following night. This one had been loose for a long time, prior to her fall. She seemed concerned about losing two in such quick succession, but we hugged her and high-fived her and made jokes about turning into a jack-o-lantern, which made her giggle. The tooth fairy nearly forgot to visit the second time, so when Suzannah woke up nearly an hour earlier than usual to check her pillow, I managed to convince her to go to the bathroom first -- I told her that the tooth fairy likes to visit just before she wakes up, and she had other houses to visit and it was a busy night and she might not quite be ready and I don’t even know, it was ridiculous, and Suzannah looked at me skeptically but humored me anyway, and by the time she returned to her room there were the two shiny quarters! Like magic. I love that my daughter indulges me like this.

It’s not a big thing, really. Kids lose their baby teeth, and it becomes routine, like so many other parts of growing up. And I suppose it’s like any other milestone -- potty training, for instance, or eating solids for the first time. In other words, interesting only in the child’s own household, even though the parents’ friends will pretend to be interested and excited on their behalf. I really do understand this; I was fundamentally uninterested in these things until I experienced them myself. But this is the essence of parenthood. It’s not really about the milestone itself; it’s about the tiny moments contained within. It’s rocking my daughter as she perches on the toilet seat, marveling at how she seems so vulnerable but also so grown. It’s crawling around on her bedroom floor, squinting against the light at three-thirty in the morning, searching for this tiny little chip of a tooth without questioning why. It’s improvising these little stories for her (and for me), it’s framing these experiences in intentional ways so that she feels safe and valued and finds the joy in them, as we do.

That’s where the joy hangs out. And so we celebrate our little gap-toothed girl, who still delights in discovering quarters in her tooth pillow, who can still perch on the toilet seat without her feet quite reaching the floor and let me hold her, just hold her, and I know that what matters is not the tooth and not the quarters but the noticing, the remembering, the staying present, the juxtaposition of the baby and the girl and all her future selves. The moment. The beautiful now.