All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child

I'm curled up on the love seat in the family room. My children are tucked into bed; both of them desperately needed baths tonight, but by the time we got home, it was long past bedtime. All through dinner I said, "I don't care what time it is when we get home. You two stink. You are showering." Suzannah rolled her eyes and said, "Okay, Mom." Isaac just grinned.

We left for Seattle straight from Suzannah's soccer game; she changed in the back seat, peeling off her cleats and sweaty socks and shimmying into jeans and a fresh shirt on the way to the Elliott Bay Book Company. (For the record, soccer cleats at the end of a season do not smell wonderful, especially in the confined space of a car.) I had a half-hour alone in the cafe to write while Matt read with Isaac and ran around the corner for a bag of coffee beans; I picked up a few very necessary books; we went to dinner. No one was grumpy. No one threw a tantrum. I made a few bitter comments about the fact that my children reek to high heaven after Matt said, "It's going to be late when we get home...how about they shower tomorrow?" because I washed and changed all the sheets in this house this morning, and now they all want to slide their stankin' little unwashed bodies over those sheets. But by the time we actually made it home, full of our favorite dinners and pie at our new favorite pie place, I didn't really want to deal with bathing tired children, either. We tucked our tired, grubby, stinking children into bed, and they went to sleep immediately.

My children are no longer babies, but every single night I tip-toe into their rooms after they fall asleep to kiss their soft cheeks and, yes, reassure myself that they're still breathing. Something about watching them sleep shatters me a bit. (In Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels wrote, "All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.")

And now I'm watching Pieces of April. It's one of my absolute favorite movies. I watched it years ago when it first came out and loved it, and then about five years ago I found it at Easy Street Records for about four dollars. I watch it every year around Thanksgiving at least twice. Usually, we watch it the night before Thanksgiving while Matt bakes pies; this year I'm enjoying my first viewing a little early while Matt cleans his desk in the next room (a significant undertaking). I imagine we'll watch it again together next week. Matt isn't a big fan of watching movies again and again, the way I am, but every year we watch Pieces of April and Love Actually together.

The plot is simple: April is an estranged daughter living in an tenement apartment in New York City who decides to host Thanksgiving dinner for her family, possibly the last one, as her mother has advanced breast cancer. The entire movie focuses on the process of her preparing for them (April needs to rely on the help of her neighbors to finish the dinner on time), alternating with scenes of her family traveling from suburbia. We learn about the family from both perspectives, bit by bit, and it is fierce and funny and heartbreaking. The ending leaves me in tears every single time.

But the real theme of the movie, stated by April herself as she tries to explain Thanksgiving to her immigrant neighbors, is this: Once, there was this day...this one day when...everyone realized they needed each other.

My children slumber on, and I can't stop crying.

This world.