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.