Tonight it’s raining, drumming against the gutter. If I close my eyes, it almost sounds like
steady, hollow music of a tin roof. The
rhythm appeases my Aquarian sensabilities—the water bearer, the creative
spirit, the “heavenly bohemian.” I march
to the beat of my own drum. Trite, but
satisfying. Its baseline a steady thump
that keeps me on track. Its tempo the
pace of my daily interactions. I dance and
hope its hook strong enough to draw those around me into its chorus.
Lately this means I’m running on caffeine, idealism, and a
head full of ideas looking to escape onto the page or into the ear of the first
willing victim, be it human, feline, canine, or technological. I catch myself jotting the most random in my
phone. Reading the first line note
titles is like reading random sentence from the walls of Faulkner’s brainstorm
bedroom—a little crazy when you scratch the surface, but there is solidity,
cohesion beneath (I hope).
Quiet nights with my whole house sleeping, excepting my persistent
cream-point feline shadow, are a treat.
I should be sleeping, or finishing Raising Your Spirited Child, a
title that understates the comical and exhausting ins-and-outs of daily life
with Isabelle. She needn’t know that her
mother and grandmother were (are?) unruly, gloriously defiant girls, too.
Bedtime is one of my favorite evening rituals. She loves the undivided mama attention, and I
love the things she blurts out. My
little Scorpio goes out with a bang.
Tonight, she announces that she missed me. I was gone with a birth recently, so I told
her that I was working. She immediately
laughs and says, “No, Mama. Only Daddy
goes to work. You don’t have work
clothes.”
Got me there. Okay, so I just wear my regular clothes to my
work, no blue digicamis to guarantee the Navy will never find me if I end up in
the water.
“I help mamas having
their babies,” the oversimplified kid explanation.
“You’re a good doctor, Mama.” Strike two.
“I’m not a doctor, sweetie.”
“But you helped my eye feel better today.” Take that victory lap around the plates.
“Well, I am good at doctoring things sometimes.”
We rock for a while and she says, “You had me like that time
Will just came out of your tummy in the bathtub .” So she does remember those pictures. She loves seeing the pictures on our
computer. We pull up her baby pictures
and let her click around. One day we
looked up to Will emerging into the world with her delighted exclamation of, “Look,
a baby! Oh, it’s just Will!”
Tonight I tell her
that she was born in a hospital.
“Why?”
“Because Mama wasn’t brave enough to have you at home.” I finally have the opportunity to tell her
how much I wanted to give her that same start.
She is three, but she brought it up and is following her original idea
like a hound on the hunt.
“It’s okay, Mama, I just didn’t want to come out when I was
a baby in your tummy.”
Where did that come from?
Oh, little girl, you have no idea.
We evicted you. It wasn’t nice,
and I’m still sorry for doing it that way.
You showed us, fist pressed to your cheek at your debut. Possibly, there was a finger up, telling
everyone present what you thought of our ideas of what should be and when. Who could blame you.
I love her boldness.
I love that my passions are shaping her ideas about motherhood and the
amazing capability of a woman’s body. I
love that the qualities I nitpick the most in her are my own weaknesses, that
her intensity is most matched to that of my own. I love that the flood of emotions from her
birth still carries me in tow, that a tiny new life changed my course and fixed
my center all at once.
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