Paradise

3 meters behind me

I am writing from paradise.  We arrived yesterday afternoon.

Last night I dreamed the perfect next tattoo for myself.  Which wasn't actually a new tattoo, but was also probably the most expensive, time consuming, and painful thing I could possibly invent to have scratched into my skin and still have absolutely nobody notice that it was there.  It was to be done essentially on top of my old tattoo.

Waking up here, 14 months ago

Then I dreamed that I was meandering through a bookstore set in an ancient castle tower.  It was room after round room, stacked on to of each other, filled to the brim with old books.  I was wandering lazily through this store in the company of half a dozen authors, living and dead, talking about what made books so wonderful.  What made reading so important.  Which authors they loved.  And then I noticed that F. Scott Fitzgerald had grabbed a civil war novel off a shelf and was carrying it around, and it was written by my husband's cousin.  Who doesn't write, to my knowledge, but seems pretty full of a secret life.

And then I realized that I wanted to wake up, and I stretched gloriously and opened my eyes.  And I was at Guppy lake, with the early morning sun coming through the blinds in the corner bedroom.  And as I stretched, the covers fell away, and my gigantic, snoring, bear of a husband rolled over and hugged me, and just continued snoring.

And there was silence from the room next door, where I used to sleep as a small child but my own children were still sleeping now.

And I kissed my husband, and I grabbed his laptop, and got onto my father's wireless network in the middle of nowhere in paradise.

And now I'm writing, laying on a hammock under a crystal clear morning sky.  My view of the lake is blocked by the world's best climbing tree, but I can see glints of the sun bouncing off, and the occasional patchy view of the softly drifting greenness of it.  The birds are singing, and there's a lazy hum from the amazing machine that keeps the mosquitoes away, and every few minutes a dragonfly swoops past overhead of a turtle dives with a tiny "sploosh."

DD here last summer

Lots of things have changed in the last year, since our last visit.  The girls are children who run and play (with the same toys I loved my whole childhood), the main cabin is filled with the furniture from my parents' old house instead of my mother's grandfather's house.  There's a working shower that I just can't WAIT to try out, and during my almost-a-week here, I have a few items on my agenda.  All of which are pleasant and will result in the taking of many pictures.

But in the meantime, I'm just going to go inside, have a cup of tea, and get ready to help my children start the day in my absolute favorite place on earth.

Glaciers and Caterpillars

My children and their father

I should be asleep.  Or I should be studying for my exam tomorrow.  Or maybe I should keep playing with my shiny new Google+ account.  Instead, I'm going to write a little about one single half hour at the end of my day.

You see, I let my children stay up late to play with fireflies.

My children.  My children.  Two little girls, not babies, mostly verbal, with dirt scuffed knees and interests and practically hobbies for God's sake.

SI reading a book

My children.

I stood on the front lawn and watched as their faces shone with delight and fascination in the twilight, as they ran after lightning bugs, and they sang and danced.

...they sang and danced.  And I just stood there.  Drinking it all in.  Lost beyond expression.

How did this happen?  When did these changelings come in the night and whisk away my infants?  My toddlers?  When did their hair get so thick, their limbs so long and lean, and their interests so mature?  SI knows about 3/4 of the alphabet.  She reads people's t-shirts.  She spells her name.  DD talks constantly, and sometimes even in English.  She's pretty much capable of having a conversation.  She "reads" her favorite books to me.

And I'm suddenly so lost.  I don't know if it's that I've been away so much these last three weeks, or just that it is genuinely happening so fast, but it's indisputable.

My babies have turned into children.  As all babies should.
And now I get to watch my children grow up.

It's amazing how hard it is to say that.  That they're going to grow up.  Because babies don't grow up.  It's impossible.  I mean, just LOOK at a baby.  Just fall in love with a baby.  They have no connection to some mysterious, foreign adult.  They're just a baby.  Or, maybe, they're your baby.  And your baby might learn to walk and talk... but grow up?  Never.  Surely not.

And I stand by that.  Babies don't grow up.  But children do.  Children who have traits that you know will carry on through their entire lives.  Children who make you proud not by reaching developmental milestones, but by achieving academic, artistic, or moral successes.

DD the fashionista

Children who draw you pictures and then tell you that this picture isn't good enough, and they need to do another one.
Children who want to help you with every single chore around the house.
Children who have very specific ideas about their clothes, their accessories (accessories!), their fashion identity.
Children who want to learn.  Who want to learn to be like you, because they love you.

I adored my babies, but they're gone.  I have children now.  Children who are getting ready for the full potty plunge.  Children who are learning to read, to count, to to form their own opinions and even make some decisions.

Children who get so full of excitement over fireflies that they can't contain it and keep running back to hug their mommy who let them stay up late and play outside with the amazing miracles of insect phosphorescence glowing around them.

Children who get so thrilled to see their daddy come to play that they jump and laugh and sing and dance.

And I mourn my babies.  I mourn them, because they're gone forever.  But it's a bittersweet sadness, because in their place they have left me children.  Amazing, incredible, inexplicable children.

And every time I watch them simply being children, I fall in love again.  With their dirty knees, with their tangled curls, with their habits, with their games...

I could say that every day they're less like the tiny, tiny babies that came home in oversized clothes to a house full of mysterious baby-oriented devices I scarcely understood, and it would be true.  But you can also say that every day a butterfly is less like a caterpillar.  Perhaps, but from the day it became a butterfly it was simply unlike a caterpillar.  And now, my babies have become something new yet still continuously changing.

Si is a Daddy's Girl

Every day they are more like who they are.  Every day I learn something about them that I didn't know, but that they did.  Like that SI loves bugs or that DD sings and dances.  I don't know how those amazing personalities made their way into my kids, my kids, but there they are.  Writ large and astounding as anything.

Were they the same people when they were babies?  I would have said yes six months ago, but now I've changed my mind.  They were a zygote of who they are.  They were, to quote Heinlein, "...only an egg."  And now they are hatched, they are formed, they are people.

Each night that I come home from class with my children already in bed, I fight the urge to pick them up and hold them, to wake them and ask them about their day.

I want to ask them if they missed me.  Because I missed them so, so much.

And instead, I go to bed.  Or I do homework.  Because you don't wake up your sleeping children to satisfy your personal curiosities about... what? 

And every morning that I leave the house before they see me, that I hear them waking and happy in their cribs but I sneak away so as not to cause a scene, I fight the same urge.  To ask them if while they were sleeping, something changed.

I want to chronicle every clue about the mysterious transformation taking place before my very eyes.  About the subtleties of my children growing into something new.  About the loss of the babies that I adored, and the emergence of these new people that I love just as much.  That I can't imagine my life without.  That I somehow hardly know.

I want to cry, to beg them to just please slow do because it's happening so terrifyingly fast.  But it's nonsense.  They'll grow up whether I like it or not, and I do like it.  I do want them to grow up, to become older children, to become adolescents, to become adults.

DD and Mommy's Shoes: A Love story

But I also want to kiss every banged elbow, to wipe every tear, to hear every new word, admire every new skill.  And there just isn't time.

I am like a glacier slicing valleys through the years of their youth, and they are children in every ephemeral sense.  I will miss things... I have missed things.  And my heart breaks for the things I've missed, and the things I know I must miss.  And I am bursting at the seams with pride in them, with awe and wonder and love.




...I love them so much.

And I am so glad that I got to watch them discover fireflies.

30 Lessons For My Daughters

I always knew I wanted to be a mother.  More than that, I always knew I wanted to have a daughter.  As I grew up, I made constant notes about what I would teach her.  When I was very small, I would commit to memory small events, moments that I thought were essential for when I was the mommy.  Things that seemed infinitely important, that held all of the weight of import that childhood is capable of placing.  The most crucial parts of my life as a new person.  I ferreted them away, cataloging them so that when I was the mommy, I could pass them along, make sure that my daughter was a bit better prepared for life than I had been.  By the time I was ten, I had a mental list of surprising specificity of my educational tasks for when I was a mother.

1. How to make cookies
2. How to sing (I thought my father the author of all James Taylor’s songs)
3. How to make quicksand in a pail, and to provide assorted dolls to slowly sink into said bucket
4. How to tie shoelaces (I myself never learned properly until I was in high school)
5. How to sew
6. How to remove a splinter
7. How to play the recorder, piano, and any other instrument that might fall into your hands
8. How to be brave when faced with such obstacles as gigantic freshly paved driveways
9. How to enjoy getting really dirty, even if it means there are bugs or thorns involved (my mother was an expert at this)
10. How to approach potentially terrifying wild or dead animals
11. How to build a snow fort
12. How to use the monkey bars

These weren’t always the most relevant things in my life, but they were the things I either got the most pleasure from or saw as important on some cosmic level.

During the next five years of my life, I became an avid reader of sci-fi and fantasy and began to live a very vivid private life.  I wrote constantly when I wasn’t reading, and at the same time began to develop a wide circle of friends for the first time in my life.  The whole while, in some small part of my brain, I was collecting a to-do list of things that I would have to teach my daughter whenever she was old enough… whoever she might be.

13. How to stand in the middle of a thunderstorm and feeling the electricity in your soul with your barefoot feet on the soil
14. How to cry until your chest is empty of the painful feelings you thought would never leave
15. How to wrap presents so that they look magical
16. How to paint
17. How to wear clothes that make you feel like yourself
18. How to tell your friends that you disagree with them
19. How to write what you really think and make it more eloquent than your own confused mind
20. How to deal with your crazy curly hair
21. How to find music, artists, and authors to devote your attention to
22. How to try every new food, within reason
23. How to always be willing to fall in love, despite how teenagers are complete idiots

Again, I never mastered some of those skills, but I had this gut feeling that someday I would, that someday I would be an adult and all of those things that were so difficult for me at thirteen would just somehow be better.  And unlike my own mother, I would find the way to teach some of these invaluable skills to my own daughter.

During the rest of my teen years, the list of things I must someday teach my daughter grew slowly.  I was busy thinking about things that were much more important- the present.  I was so focused on my friends and my boyfriends and my wild, youthful experimentation… the idea of being a mother took a back burner.  I was much more concerned with not becoming a mother in the foreseeable future.  Still, more items made my little list.

24. How to tell your parents if something horrible has happened to you
25. How to keep horrible things from happening to you
26. How to let go of the horrible things that happen to you, once it’s too late anyway
27. How to know the difference between a good idea and a bad idea

Then I went out into the world to seek my fortune.  For many years I felt I failed, wandered from place to place and thing to thing, and never finished anything.  Over the last decade only a few lessons were added to my list.

28. How to go somewhere, anywhere, with a purpose
29. How to stay connected to your roots, your faith, and yourself
30. How to lose with dignity

And then I fell in love, and I got married, and fate granted me not one, but two daughters.  So far I have taught them none of these things.  They are still too young to even begin to understand, and I must confess that I am afraid of trying to teach them so much of what I believed they must learn.

My granny once told me a story about her own childhood.  Her mother, my great-grandmother, grew up in a household where her own mother never cooked.  All her life she wanted to make fudge with her mother, and was determined that when she grew up and had little girls, they would make fudge together.  Well, she grew up and had two daughters, my granny and great-aunt, and they hated fudge.  It wasn’t until my own mother was born that she was finally able to live out that particular dream.  But with her granddaughter, not her own children.


I have never been able to imagine a life where I didn’t have a daughter, where she didn’t love playing in the dirt, baking cookies, making music, and learning about the world around her.  I have never been able to imagine a life where I didn’t create a child who was essentially like me.  Who had the same needs that I had, who had the same desires that I had, and who had the same pains that I had.  I never doubted that I would become a mother, and that I would have a little girl, and that I would teach her all the things that I wished I had learned, and that I had loved, and that I had treasured.

I worry that part of why these lessons were so important to me was that I had to learn many of them for myself.  I remember learning to make quicksand from a library book, and taking out that book week after week, to keep making buckets of quicksand in which to slowly sink my Barbie dolls, and from which to rescue them heroically.  I remember removing a splinter ALL BY MYSELF as my family was house hunting the year I was five, feeling so full of pride I could burst, and having an understanding that showing the splinter to my mother and boasting of my accomplishment would somehow diminish it.

So I maintain my list.  I secretly treasure it, waiting for the days that I can pull it out and pass on my very important knowledge to my infinitely more important daughters.  I know I will never be able to teach my children to use the monkey bars, I’ve always sucked at that.  I know I am incapable of teaching them to avoid the horribleness of being a teenaged girl.  I know that I may be unable to teach them to play piano or paint or sing if they have no interest, and I will not force them.  For the first time, I have doubts.  I have daughters and doubts, and I had always believed that so long as I had one, the other must simply not exist.

I see myself more in my daughters every day, but in different ways.  In one, I see my enthusiasm for learning and my constant need for approval and affection.  In the other I see my willingness to put aside my fear and just get dirty, and hints at something akin to my creative streak.  I have a hard time picturing one of them standing beside me in the rain, with our eyes closed and our feet bare, while the thunder shakes the air around us.  The other, I can’t imagine her sitting still at the piano day after day, learning to make beautiful music.

Perhaps I have been granted two daughters so that I might actually be able to pass along my full list, divided though it may be.  Perhaps we all come into the world with different needs, and different desires, and as completely different people.  Perhaps we are all essentially the same person, and me and my great-grandmother and our need to pass along what we see is an important part of being a daughter or mother.

Or perhaps we might all simply be cursed to live confused, single lives.  And our duty is to protect our children from all of our own memories of the confusion of being young, being a human being, and having endless faith that one day we will be exactly who we want to be.

The Terribles

Out with The Terribles

 There were two little girls.  Who had some little curls, right in the middle of their foreheads.  And when they were good, they were very VERY good.  But when they were bad, they were HORRID!


It's amazing to watch babies turn into people.  More and more, we're reaching these landmarks that tell us for certain that we have gone from having babies to having children.  Last weekend, we rearranged our house quite a bit.  Instead of having the safe area we referred to as "the grubling cage," we now have a new enclosed space= "the Daddy cage."  The girls have free run of the house, with the exception of a gated area that encompasses M's computer desk, the door to the balcony, and the DVD player.

But this comes with a down side.  They are now aware of the limitations of their own tiny bodies.  They are aware that I have far more power of their lives than they.  They are suddenly lashing out at both of these humiliations.

SI's motto: If you can't beat 'em, destroy 'em

I know people refer to it as, "The Terrible Twos."  I think of it as just plain terrible.  Suddenly, SI will decide that the fact that she's having difficulty fitting a puzzle piece together is a grave injustice.  She is filled with a rage untamable by man or beast.  Her anger is mighty, and terrible to behold.

DD doesn't get angry at the cruel joke that fate has played upon her.  Her tiny hands, her awkward fingers, these are not cause for ire or wrath.  They are the great tragedy of her life.  She becomes inconsolable, pounding her tiny fists on the ground, bashing her head into furniture.  Anything to make the incomparable pain of her little existence seem less all consuming.

They both try so hard to assert their independence.  DD says "No!" to anything and everything, even if she really wants it.  She has to be in control, if only for a moment.  SI simply does things her own way, determined that she'll MAKE IT WORK, until the building frustration reaches its peak and she instead decides that if she cannot make it bend to her will, the only other option is to destroy it utterly and completely.

On one side, a toddler determined to outsmart or decimate her environment.  On the other, Emo child.

And then there's me.

I alternate between laughing at them, soothing them, or desperately trying to distract them.  The freedom they now enjoy in the house, being able to move freely across our entire shotgun flat, makes this so much easier.  If we're in the living room I can suggest a cup of juice or a cracker, and by the time they've made the commute to the kitchen all is forgotten.  If we're in the kitchen, the suggestion to watch cartoons sends them scurrying so far away as to escape all memories of the previous frustration.  But it's an endless game.

DD the little girl

They want to learn so badly.  It's inspiring and exhausting.  And they're more and more aware of how much they still need to learn in order to learn.  Before they can master the alphabet, they must become more verbal.  Before they can put their own shoes on, they must learn to navigate their fingers more dexterously.  Before they can brush their own teeth, they must acquire a better sense of spacial reasoning.

They want to learn.  And they want to behave.  But it's hard.  And that means that where there's an obvious solution to a problem, they want to SOLVE it.  The wrist-leashes I put them on when we're out, for example.  If they just TAKE THAT OFF, they could go farther.  See?  Solution!  But they don't understand that the real problem is that they need to stand still and just wait in a damned line.

They're still remarkably easy children.  I still can't imagine what I'd do if they stopped being easy children.  But it's exhausting nonetheless.  And I find it really saddening.  They're just going to keep finding new things to rebel against.  And I'm probably going to be the one they rebel against for the next decade plus.  And I don't particularly like being the villain.

Still, at the end of the day, they seem to forget just about all the wrongs I've inflicted upon them, from not picking them up while I grate zucchini to closing the bathroom door.  Each morning they wake up somehow oblivious to the fact that their worlds are filled with a million little frustrations.  Every day is a new day, without any of the baggage of the day before.

I could really learn a lot from them.

Half Birthday

My girls at 2 days old

My kids are 18 months old today.

I know, it seems like this has to be some sort of prank.  There's no way that it's been a full year and a half since two tiny, helpless, hungry little monkeys were pulled through a hole in my belly and started a whole new world of exhaustion and joy for me and M.  It's got to be a joke.

But no.  My children are children, they walk and talk, they occasionally pick out their own clothes and foods, they jump and laugh and play with the cat... they're people.

People that M and I made.  People with thoughts and feelings that I cannot even begin to understand.  People with unlimited potential.

Almost exactly 18 months ago to the minute

They're my favorite people in the world.

Things have been very, very hard.  School is hard.  M being gone all the time because he's in school and working a job he is painfully overqualified for is hard.  Having all of our family living two states (or an ocean) away when we just kind of want to be around them is hard.

And raising twins is hard.

So this has been a very difficult year and a half.  And no matter what I say in polite company, it doesn't get easier.  It just gets different.

We sleep a hell of a lot better now than we did eighteen months ago, but then on those nights that we DON'T sleep it's all the more painful for being out of practice.

SI and DD at 3 months

My neck isn't constantly killing me from craning over three to five times a day to spoon food into two uncooperative mouths.  But my entire spine is on fire from my almost-daily routine of lugging sixty pounds of excitable toddler down three flights of stairs.

I can clean my house more effectively, thanks to my children being happy to watch vintage Sesame Street and Dr. Suess while I tidy up a few times a day, but then they ACTIVELY trash it again- leaving it in just a ridiculous state.

They constantly amaze me with how adaptable, how helpful, and how cheerful they are.  Our mealtime routine includes them cleaning their own trays with a wet washcloth.  It's amazing.

DD and SI at 6 months

And then if feels like this has always been my life, like I've always been the mommy, and there have always been these little people around, watching my every movement and somehow learning something from it.

And then, suddenly, it feels like it never happened at all.  Like I just woke up, and those tiny little infants that terrified me just by being in the car on the way home from the hospital are PEOPLE.  REAL PEOPLE.

People who want to sweep the floor and eat with a fork.  People who prefer striped socks.  People who sing, and dance, and shower me with hugs and kisses every morning.

DD and SI at 9 months

And I just want to go back and do it again, because I know I've missed something.  I know there's something profound and important and it happened some time during the last eighteen months.  Somewhere in there, I became a mother.

It was all I ever really wanted to be, from the time I was in pre-school and both my parents and my teachers feared I was being indoctrinated when they weren't around.  All I wanted to be was a mommy.  To me, it was like wanting to grow up to be a wizard, or a spaceship.  It implied something fundamental and unchangeable about the very nature of who you were.  No matter what else it might be doing, a spaceship is always a spaceship.  And a mommy was always a mommy.  And somehow, now I am a mommy.  And I just don't know when that really happened.

SI and DD at one year

So they're sleeping peacefully (thank GOD) and they were perfect angels when we were out for the afternoon (as usual), and while I pushed the stroller through the light rain, with my sleeping children tucked into their sweaters and hats and blankets, I thought to myself how I have no idea what on earth is coming next.  What will change when DD is constantly speaking in complete English sentences?  What will I do when SI (as she inevitably will) dismantles her crib?

So how am I supposed to cope with the grublings that I swore at constantly as they pulverized my internal organs becoming children who will, do doubt, find even more sinister methods of driving me insane?  Ways that might be every bit as uncomfortable?

I don't know.  And that's the hardest part.  No matter how difficult establishing breastfeeding was, or the sleep deprivation, or the switch to solid foods from nursing once we were finally getting good at it, the worst part has always been the just not knowing.

DD and SI at 15 months

I know that now I'm supposed to say that I can't wait to find out, but that's not entirely true.  I am anxious to celebrate every change, every landmark development, every moment that I'm so full of pride I could burst... but that's not what I'm really feeling right now.  What I really want is to go forward in time, just for ten minutes, and see what's coming.  See- if only for an instant- what the future is like for my perfect kids.

Because the worst thing about not knowing is not knowing how you're going to screw it all up.  And I'm still confident that I'll find a way.  But I just want to know that in another year and a half, no matter what dumb mistakes I've made, they're still just like they are now.

Only completely different.

SI and DD at 18 months

Baby Birthdays

DD and SI eating their first cake

A little over a week ago, my darling daughters celebrated their first birthday.  I threw them a big party- the biggest we've had since M finished his chemotherapy.  The girls behaved beautifully, our friends and family seemed to have a really lovely time... all in all it was a fabulous party.

The girls seemed to know that it was an important time.  During the week that included their birthday, DD learned to walk, SI started making animal noises, they both cut new teeth, and caught their first really nasty colds.

I had thought that when they turned a year old, I would mellow out a little bit.  I thought I'd relax about toys in their cribs, about blankets they want to sleep with, and about them staying safe and asleep in their cribs through the night. 

SI and DD opening their present from Mommy and Daddy

I hadn't counted on the inexhaustible potential of the internet to make me worry and essentially freak out in every way.  I learned just after their birthday that a dear friend of mine lost her niece.  She was eleven months old, and died of SIDS.  I found out through my friend's journal, and it has tormented me.

I can't even begin to describe the emotions that I've been running through.  I had it in my head that if my girls made it to their first birthday, that was sort of... it.  They would be done being babies, they would be safe.  They would start walking, begin talking in complete sentences, and I could rest assured that from then on they would grow up peacefully.  I somehow got it into my brain that when they were a year old, the whole phase of constantly worrying that I was going to open their bedroom door in the morning and find them dead was OVER.  Only little babies die of SIDS, not toddlers... right?

DD on Daddy's shoulders

My heart has been breaking for my friends' cousin.  To lose a child... I can't even begin to understand the kind of pain that family must be going through.  I know how much I loved my children one month ago.  I was already planning their big party, inviting their grandparents and aunts and uncles and everyone who loves them.  To have lost one of my girls a month ago, just one month from that huge landmark birthday... it's too horrible to contemplate.  It was such a shock to my system- to my mommy mentality that had just been glowing about how big and strong and smart my kids were.  Wasn't that little girl also big and strong and smart?  Wasn't she also learning to walk and talk, to play more complicated games with her parents and give less slobbery kisses and pick out favorite toys and foods?

Aren't all of our kids big and strong and smart?  It isn't until the child starts to really assert their independence, pursue their own interests, and generally disagree with their parents on who they ought to be that they stop seeming like a perfect angel.  They're perfect potential, a tiny vessel of love and learning and joy.  Having a baby- not birthing, but having a baby- is a truly spiritual experience.  You get to watch a human being created from nothing- from a blank slate to an entire person.  And you can see how some things are your doing, how they learn skills that you've taught them, how they have your crooked smile, or your wonky little toes.  And then some things are entirely their own.  Somehow magically a part of this amazing person that was never there before.

I had thought that after their first birthday, I would rest more easily.  Instead I find myself checking their room as often as I did when they first got here, making sure that they're still breathing peacefully.  I quietly try to roll them back onto their backs in their sleep, which is an entirely fruitless endeavor.  I make sure the air is circulating, that I can hear them shift in their sleep through the baby monitor.  I think the whole time about my friend's cousin, and her daughter.  And in the morning when I see their beautiful faces so happy to see me, I want to weep with relief, and with sorrow for everyone who's discovered that they'll never see those smiling faces again.

SI playing with Poppa

In the past year, I've been truly blessed to watch two new people grow into wonderful little girls.  People who love to play, to read, to learn new things.  I've done my best to love them the same, to treat them the same, and to raise them into what I think are good little people.  And they haven't hardly needed my guidance in that.  But they are two completely different people.  They have their own ideas about themselves, about me and their daddy, and about each other.  My expectations about them have been met and exceeded and proven completely off.  And I end every day amazed that I have them in my life, grateful that they are here and they are so good, and sad that another incredible day has been lost, never to be revisited again.

One year and eight days ago, I woke up in the wee hours of the morning certain that my water had broken, and discovered to my horror that the bed was soaking in blood.  Seven hours and an emergency c-section later, I was holding the two most wonderful people I have ever known in my arms.  And they were perfect.  Tiny, tiny, perfect people.

It's been a one year and eight days now, and I haven't fallen out of love with them.  I still look at them and wonder, "Is that my smile?  Are those my eyebrows?"  I still wonder what each little action means- does SI's love for the little keyboard mean she'll be a musician?  Does DD's love of books and reading mean she'll be a scholar?  Are they learning to walk soon enough?  Should I worry that SI loves chocolate ice cream so much?

I get the feeling that this is just the state of being a mother.  Constant worry, constant joy and pride, and constant disbelief.  Constant disbelief that there are people in your life you can love so much.

Happy birthday, my beautiful little angels.  Happy first birthday.

October 1, 2009

Becoming People

More and more, I find myself shocked and amazed at the idea that my babies are becoming children.  It's a confusing thing- when I started thinking about getting pregnant, I could picture myself the mother of children.  I could picture all the things I would do with them, how I would interact with them, how much fun I would have... from about the age of 18 months onward.  I had been a nanny and babysitter off and on for a long time, but never for babies.  My experience with tiny humans under the age of six months was absolutely minimal.  Small children though, those are small people I understand.

Then I got pregnant.  I started picturing, for the first time really, what it would be like to have a BABY.  Not a child, but an infant.  I had no idea what I was getting into.  These days I can't imagine my life any differently, I am so comfortable with my role as the mother of my little baby girls.  But I'm starting to catch glimpses of the developments to come, I'm starting to wonder about the reality of being a mother to little children.

I always knew it was something I wanted, and it was always something I could envision.  Now, though?  Now the idea that my babies- those itsy bitsy people I made- will turn into real people is almost alarming.  What on earth could that be like?  How could it happen?  I only had babies... nearly a year ago?  How long do babies last?

Not long enough.  Too long.  Exactly as much time as it takes for it to stop.

Today I had a moment that I'm sure will replicate itself over and over again.  As I washed the dishes, I noticed that I couldn't hear my daughters making any noise.  I looked back into the dining room, where I had left them playing in their exersaucers (before you panic, our home is entirely on one floor and fairly baby-proof), and they were gone.  Nowhere to be seen.  A brief investigation turned them up, DD had gone off in search of adventure on the other end of the house, and SI had gone off after DD.  But they were off on their own, completely oblivious of me, completely on their own steam.

You cannot imagine the whirlwind of emotions that followed.

First, a moment of panic: Can they get those pictures off the wall?  Can they get into the bathroom and fall in the toilet?  Will they pull down the laundry on the drying rack and stab themselves with a hanger?

Then, a moment of reassurance: Of course they can't get the pictures, and if they could the pictures would fall onto the floor which they can't reach in their saucers.  They can't fall in the toilet, they have no way to get out of their saucers.  If they do pull down the laundry, they aren't going to kill themselves playing with a plastic hanger.

And finally, a moment of a confused sadness:  How did this happen?  How did they get so COMPETENT?

I realized immediately that I was experiencing something that I had only brushed the surface of before- motherhood.  For the first few months, I didn't feel like a *real* mommy.  I didn't have to discipline, I didn't have to say 'no' to anything, I didn't have to run around after my kids, nobody called me "Mommy" without any understanding that I had another name.  I wasn't exactly a real mom.  Yet.  Not to me and my absurd standards of accomplishment.

And there I was, watching my children sort of walk away from me, happy and laughing and exploring and... well... being kids.  There I was, doing the dishes, prepping the ingredients for dinner, planning the next day's meals, and being the very vision of motherhood I had aimed for before getting pregnant.

I realized something, it isn't just my children who are becoming real people.  It's me, as well.  I never really thought I was done growing, done becoming who I am.  But just the same you never expect to suddenly see yourself in the mirror and say, "Who the hell is THAT?"  That person is me, not me the perpetual student, not me the artist, not me the wife, not me activist, not me poet... it was yet another me.  Me the mom.

I'm a mom now.  I'm not just a mom in that I've procreated, I'm a mom in that everywhere I go I have a bunch of little snacks in my bag.  I say things like, "Why don't you put the banana in your mouth instead of your eyebrow?"  I consider sitting around reading the same two 20 word long books over and over to SI or rolling DD all over the bed ALL AFTERNOON a wonderful day.

And I'm still all of the other things.  I'm still making art, I'm still writing (and thank you all for reading!), I'm still cooking, I'm still learning.  And I am becoming the person I always wanted to be.