L, M, N, O, P = Q

A Post in Numbers and Letters: Mom meets Dad

September 2008…we see each other in a Borders Bookstore


  1  month later…we started dating

14  months after that…we were married:  12.27.09

12  months after that…we were pregnant

  9   months after that…we meet you! (see Bears all things)

　

　
Dear Son,

Since I’m on a roll with blast-from-the-past letters, I thought I’d tell you about the time I met your Dad. I’m sure, in few years, I’ll get to tell you in person as many times as you'd like to hear it. But I wanted to write you here too because these are the stories that make us a family.

I first read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers in my first-year seminar class at Mount Holyoke College. The seminar was called “Growing up Southern.” I took it because I was Southern—at least according to all the girls from New England and Philly—and also considered myself a grown up on most days of the week. The seminar was a course in the English department, though, and I really had no interest in reading and writing then.

My memory of Lonely Hunter is tied inextricably to that gnarled New England campus and also to a sense of achievement (don’t worry, the part where I meet your Dad is coming—let’s just quickly skim over several years here, years when I wish I knew him, but sadly didn’t yet). So I finished the book, which I rarely did with books then. I enjoyed it, and my professor wrote some nice comments on my paper that I now can’t remember. And this is how it happened that I became an English major who agonized over many, many more books, papers and comments from professors that I do recall like “pyrotechnic syntax to cover up complete lack of substance.” (We've all got flaws, son).

Somehow after college, I ended up working in a bookstore where I often got lost in the M’s, picking up Melville paperbacks, reading the first lines of McEwen novels, and discovering McCullers’ collection of short stories. In the alcove of L, M, N, O and P is where I met your Dad—who was wearing a ball-cap and wondering what to read— and I recommended, since we were standing in the Ms, that he buy The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. For a moment he seemed put off by the “Oprah Book Club Selection” stamp on the front cover hanging next to a black and white photograph of a sad-looking woman with bangs, sitting in bunch of brush.

“I’ll take it,” he finally said. And I was so relieved, too, when he suggested that after he finished it, we could grab a coffee together (Though, I later found out that he doesn’t even drink coffee, which is just fine).

That night, after my closing shift, I went home and picked up my own paperback copy (without the Oprah sticker) and began reading to refresh my memory.

It begins “In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.”

Son, I don’t think I could have picked a weirder book. Maybe one day you’ll read it too and think the same. But your Dad came back after all, and thank goodness he didn’t wait until he’d finished it!

Your Dad and I must have seen each other before this exact instance in time (and we continued to see each other for many, many more instances), but this is how it will go down in family history. This is how I became an educated woman, a married woman and (you guessed it) a Mom. Thanks to Carson McCullers.

Always remember that you have parents who love each other (and you) very, very much; and that makes you one of the lucky ones, kid.

I hope one day, you find as much joy in books (and sharing them with someone special) as we have.

Love,

Mom

Taking Back Boredom

Son,

I want you to know that some days there just isn't much going on.  As I was thinking about what to bloggity-blog on here, you sat wearing only a diaper and your brand new sneaks (upon your insistence, of course) and endlessly dropping one of your toy tool-box screws through an empty paper towel tube.  I want to save this image in my head forever because (well, in part because as soon as you saw me with pen and paper your contentment with independent play instantly faded and you climbed into my lap to snatch the pen away) I know that someday you are going to tell me, "I'm bored!"

By the way, this is what you drew:

 

 

I remember most of my childhood (sans cable T.V. -read: Disney Channel- until my tweens) repeating the phrase, "I'm bored." To which my father would say, "What I wouldn't give to be bored again."  I didn't understand it then, but I do now.  When you are an adult with resposibilities, and perhaps children, there's no time to be bored.

 

 

So, does bored have to be a bad word?  Maybe it isn't the right word, but I want to remember the boring moments with you and Dad most.  I'm sure the internet is already rife with ephemera, and yes, I could write about more salient things like your miraculous birth story, your hospital stays and ambulance rides (when I got carsick), countless IVs and leads and monitors, your MRI, the good, the bad and the ugly of pediatric specialists, and all the worrying and waiting.  And maybe one day I will write about that (when I figure out how). 

 

But for now I will recount the boring moments when you were an infant and I held you practically all day long, when I brought you into bed in the early morning hours and we snuggled until a more decent hour (like 10 a.m.).  Or when you and me and Dad all sit on the floor and do, well, nothing in particular.  But there's laughing. Lots of laughing.  And now, my favorite part of the day when I sit on the couch with you and look out the window into the cul-de-sac and watch the winter sky turn from blue dark to black dark. 

 

 

Maybe I was never bored.  Nevertheless, one day, I hope you can find the joy in being bored.

Love,
Mom

What's your Story?

Dear Son,

Today is your half-birthday.  Happy eighteenth month (plus some) on this planet! We are very blessed to be here together.  Me. You. Dad.  You are such an observant child with big, beautiful eyes, that I'm often wondering what you're thinking. You are seriously eagle-eyed with impeccable attention to detail; just the other day you were pointing fervently at a vauge area in the corner of the house.

"Window?" I asked.

You shook your head.

"Hmm, light?"

No.

"Oh, the trees outside!"

You squinted, still pointing.  By the time you gave me a verbal clue to what you were pointing at, I had convinced myself that maybe you had a sixth sense and did it just get colder in here?!  And, OMG, my son sees dead people!

"Hoo, hoo," you said.  Instantly, I saw the cardinal in the bare braches of the tree in our backyard. You have quite the eye, or maybe I need glasses.  I love guessing games, but I'm looking forward to some conversation.  I'm sure I'll hear from you soon enough, though some days it's hard not to let my imagination get carried away.  Anyway, I thought I'd take a little space here to tell you what I've been thinking.

When (if) I have some free-time, between three meal-times, snack-time, juicebox-time (hydration is key), peek-a-boo-time, general-run-around-the-house-time, story-time, laundry-time (you're a big help, really!), N-A-P-time when I pretend to sleep until you fall asleep, and finally bath-time, I sometimes like to daydream (or think about why, WHY? do all the girls on Teen Mom wear VS PINK sweats head-to-toe: coincidental bad taste or what?). But, seriously, I mostly think about us and how our lives have gone and where they will go and if I'm being a patient parent and if I'm living a life that sets a good example for you.

I hope that one day many, many years from now when someone asks you (in a non-awkward, think-y way): So, what's your story?, that you'll have plenty of good things to say.  I want you to know that we are all writing our own stories the best we can.  There is no greater entity like Fate or Destiny holding the ink pen for you, making all the character and plot decisions--that is ALL YOU.  Sure, there will be things that you want to cross out and people you want to erase, but that is the beauty of a story.  If ever in your life things aren't going in the direction you want, remember you are holding the pen.  And even though there are no re-dos, just keep on writing the right way. Can you tell we've been reading Oh, the Places You'll Go lately?

Even at 18 months you are a pro with the pen.  You always try to sneak them out of your Dad's pocket when he comes home from work.  So, I'm sure you'll know just what to do.  I hope you never write us out of your story, son, because we want to share our stories with you and see what all the chapters to come will hold!

Love,
Mom

Stay at Home

I always thought I’d be more successful by now, is a thought many women (and men) sometimes have at year’s end when it’s customary to consider what we’ve accomplished (bought my eighteenth pair of brown leather boots!) and, perhaps, have not accomplished (donated seventeen pairs of brown leather boots to a deserving boot charity).

I had a thought similar to this when attacking one of my New Year resolutions; well, actually, I was sharing a pop-tart with my fifteen month old—not a resolution, I’ll get to that part—and observing our surroundings. See, my undergraduate diploma hangs, there, on the wall above a gigantic teddy bear whose head nods whimsically atop his over-stuffed belly so that he appears constantly slumbering in hibernation.

Dreamy, I think.
Moo, says my son.

Ironic, is what I think of the unintentional design in my Office-converted-haphazardly-into-a-play-room. There’s tents and tunnels amongst ten or twelve variations of the Woody doll and also every size, color, and texture of ball on the market. Oh, and giraffes. Who doesn’t like giraffes? The room is seriously a couple of Duplo blocks away from an episode of Hoarders.

Anyway, I recently scribbled on scrap paper:

New Year Resolutions:
-Organize toy room.
Meaning, I had already surrendered the “Office” part. There it was in black and white: Toy. Room. Trying to create anything in this shrinking enclave of ink pens and a virus-ridden lap-top (due to neglect, obviously) is too stressful. Even the office chair, which served as the demarcation line, a clear symbol of this is office, that is playroom, had to be removed. The residents of Playroom were using it as a climbing wall. Now the desk on which the laptop sits serves as Playroom’s official Place-For-Found-Dangerous-Objects-That-No-One-Can-Reach-For-Now.

It might as well be called “don’t” and not desk: “Don’t pull on that drawer,” “Don’t touch those pens,” “Don’t crawl under there and yank out the computer cable (and all the electrical wiring in the wall).”

Over the months, the “don’t” collects old post-its littered with grocery lists, pen caps, and piles of unused or barely used journals. Leather-bound, floral, large, pocket-sized, lined and blank. Christmas gifts, impulse buys. Sometimes I kneel in front of the “don’t,” carefully open my lap-top and listen to it whirr, perhaps intending to do some vague form of work. But that’s as far as I get. The “don’t" is really just a relic like the Diploma written in Latin hanging ironically behind me.



The good old days?

No, I have the best of days ahead me. The work I do at home—supervising pudding painting (and eating), singing an off-key version of the Itsy Bitsy Spider with a few improved dance moves thrown in for giggles—is the most rewarding work I could ask for. Even the conversations I have at home that go: “Quack, Quack,” and then, “Quack, Quack, Quack,” are way more interesting than any water-cooler chit chat I’ve had the pleasure of hearing friends recount.

If work is not what makes us who we are, then I want my son to know I’m not just a stay-at-home-mom, I’m a stay-at-home-Molly. And, also, it’s not a “don’t,” it's a desk. Really. But let’s, me and you, put that part of life off for as long as we possibly can, kiddo.  To rephrase my opening thought, when I look at you, son, I’m more successful than I ever thought I’d be. And I hope you are too one day.