Written when Tillie was 6 months, then interrupted by a sleepless night and 11 more months of chaos before I finally came back to publish.  

Dear Matilda,

Oh, little one, you are so delicious, your round arms, your stuttering ah ah ah cry when you want to nurse, the way you fall effortlessly between laughter and tears and back again. You are launching yourself wholeheartedly into this world. Your first days here you basked contentedly in my arms, in the air, in the sweet summer breezes. 6 months later and you are tasting the world in new ways. Sitting in your high chair at dinner, you place yourself firmly in the midst of the family activity. You dive toward my finger, mouth open, take in bites of squash, avocado, banana, soup, grab the water glass and sip then look up grinning, water dripping down your chin.

Your dimples in unexpected corners of your face. Your round little chin, your dark hair. I carry you on my hip all day, spin from room to room trying to tame the chaos, and you look seriously up at me, wondering, gazing. You drink me in too. We made a whole chocolate cake together today, you planted firmly on my hip, Finn on the stool at the counter. I measured while Finn stirred, and you reached for everything, your delicate fingers feeling the butter, the flour.

Your mornings start with a brother or two climbing into bed saying "look, she's awake! Hi Tillie!" even though your eyes are still shut. They are greedy for that first delighted smile when you see them. You cry now when they leave for school in the morning, and reach for them when they come home, for their tantalizing hair, their cheeks, whatever you can grab.

Oliver plays a game he calls Telesmile, smiling at you from across the room until you smile back. Just one fuss from you and he rushes over, dropping his building or drawing to comfort you. Finn is your entertainment committee of one. All he has to do is walk into the room and you start to laugh in anticipation--ready for a ball to fly, a funny dance or a new amusement.

We have quiet mornings at home together when they are gone. If I turn on the radio you look everywhere to see who is here, so I play music instead. This week we listened to Mahler and you got very quiet and still when the horn played those beautiful opening notes from the balcony. We vacuum and play, read stories and wash the dishes. You nap and I frantically make dinner, chopping vegetables into big uneven pieces and throwing them into the pot as fast as I can, because twenty minutes later you are up again, calling me. I pick you up and you grab my hair, plant your other thumb firmly in your mouth and rest your head against my chest.

 Oh daughter, the things you can do now! You can sit, so perfectly upright, and reach out a hand to catch yourself when gravity pulls at you. You can grab a toy, or a book, or my socks and bring them so surely to your mouth. You can screech and sing and babble. You can flip from your belly to your back like it's nothing, like you never lay there in frustration, kicking your legs and flailing to turn over.

Some scientists say we'll gain immortality by abandoning the body and placing our consciousness into more stable elements. Our bodies are weak, they say, just packages of meat that are destined to fail us. It is true that our bodies bring us suffering, but I'm not ready to dismiss the flesh. How can I? I've brought three beings through my own body into the world and sang them awake in that euphoric love drunk flood of words that is no different than the low baaing of other mammal mothers as they lick and nuzzle their young. I've held your slippery and tender warmth against my skin and watched you unfold into breathing being, into wonder and worry, watched pink suffuse your skin and your eyes blink and seek out mine. Your body is a wonder. You are a wonder.

Happy Chaos

Today was such a good day. I had a tough week, feeling sad after the death of a long-time coworker and friend, worried for the health of another long-time coworker and friend, remembering the devastating anniversary of Julia going into the hospital 2 years ago, and then all the trivial things that shouldn't matter but do: colds that keep coming and coming, boys that butt heads like loud little billy goats as soon we get home every afternoon, and the constant, constant demands on my time and patience.

And then today happened.

The mad rush to get both boys off to school was relatively peaceful. Tillie and I got to walk with Carrie in the beautiful autumn morning. I worked for an hour while the little one snoozed, and even remembered to feed myself lunch before she woke up. Off to pick up the boys, playtime at the park and then home... and the billy goats were nowhere to be seen. Instead, two boys unloaded and put away all the groceries while their sister cooed and kicked on the floor, watching them. I unloaded the car. Finn zoomed around the house with a sword defending us from imaginary foes while I nursed on the couch and Oliver snuggled next to me and knit three rows completely on his own. "I love this," I told him, and he answered "I love it too." Then we made chocolate chip cookies and nobody cried except Tillie, who fussed herself to sleep in the wrap on my chest, and the boys did dot-to-dots while the cookies baked. Alonso came home and held Tillie while Finn took a bath and I made dinner and Oliver delivered cookies to our neighbor. At dinner everyone ate and no-one dumped their water or threw any food on the floor or declared anything disgusting. Both boys tried arugula and couldn't believe I was eating it by choice. Tillie lay beside my on the floor while I did yoga and she practiced rolling over. Finn joined me for some twists and draped himself across me. "I love you, Mama" he kept saying. Everyone got ready for bed without protest. "This has been such a nice day," I told Oliver. "Why do you think it has been so nice?" "I don't know," he answered. "Maybe it's because I sat next to you to knit. You should have me do that every time I need to calm down. I wish I could knit myself to sleep." And then they read and went to sleep (without knitting) while I lay in the dark and nursed Tillie down for the night.

Tomorrow it will start again, and maybe the peacefulness will last, or maybe the day will start with protests and tears. Either way, we'll have cookies, and a big pile of books from the library to read, a hike with friends, meals to cook and laundry to wash (always). And no matter what, another chance to find each other in laughter and love.

Letter from September

September, 2012. 
It is fall. Dusk comes while we are eating dinner, the last shaft of the setting sun briefly picking out the newly yellow leaves at the tops of the poplars. It was hot this afternoon, but the warmth drains quickly from the evening air and we tuck a blanket around the kids in the double stroller before we head down the street. A flock of Vaux Swifts has made a chimney three blocks away its temporary home, a resting spot on the unimaginably long migration from Canada to South America, and the whole neighborhood turns out for the nightly show. The birds swoop and dart across the sky, catching a bedtime snack of insects before some unseen signal sends them spiraling in tighter and tighter loops, perfectly coordinated, until they reach the tipping point and begin to pour into the chimney. 

Our lives are about to change in unimaginable and terrible ways, but right now there is this moment of perfection, of being together in the chilly air while a hundred birds become one unified swirl, a small tornado of dark wings against a pale evening sky. 

November 2014
More than two years pass before I come back to finish this post. One month after I started it, Julia King, my god-daughter, happy mud-taster, fearless ladder climber, little sunshine girl, went into the hospital where she stayed until her death in January. Only one more month from the swifts to hear her little voice, so clear, point to the night sky "moon!" Only one more month to see her boogie her hips when she heard music, only a handful of days to watch her and Finn look through books together, eat bananas together, ride in the car together, just the two of them, big siblings away at kindergarten. One month of her smiles to see those big kids come out of the classroom at the end of the morning, one month to sing together at music class. One month for "You are my sunshine" to be only a song, before it becomes one of Julia's songs, sung at her hospital bed, at her memorial service, printed on the plaque on her bench at the park,

Two years before I can come back to this blog. Ten drafted posts, but none of them really my story to tell.

And now it is fall again. The swifts don't come to our street any longer. The house has been sold, the chimney fitted with a bird-defying cap. The boys remember the swifts, though. They remember Julia too, both through their own memories and through the stories we tell each other. I carry a new baby through the fall days, one who will never get to walk down the street hand in hand with Julia, who won't get to know her in this world, although I suspect they held hands in the spirit world that she is so freshly come from. She comes with us now to visit Julia's bench at Ragle Park, where the boys and Amanda draw pictures of hot air balloons, read books she loved, and climb trees just because that's what they do everywhere they go.

Julia will always be a presence in Tillie's life, even though they didn't overlap in chronology. Tillie was born into a family that was cracked open in ways both good in bad, Our love is a little fiercer, our hearts more tender. We try to follow Julia's example, to be brave and to love life even when it is hard and frightening. We try to care for each other every single day. We want her legacy to be one of joy and laughter. We want to sing "you are my sunshine" at the end of music class, even if it makes me cry and hide my face in Finn's hair.  Remembering her is the sweetest pain, and she is everywhere, in every mundane and joyous detail of our full and blessed daily lives.

One Year Later

This one sat in the drafts folder for nearly two years. Some things need to bide their time a little while, I guess. November 7th. 2014

Spring 2013.
It has been almost a year since I posted on this blog. A year ago, in another Spring, when Finn was just finding his legs, Oliver was getting ready for the big preschool bike parade, and many days we meandered home from school with the King girls, a stroller parade with the big kids running ahead or stopping to climb rocks and hang from railings, while the little ones toddled behind, taking turns wanting to hold hands.

 

Even then, when we didn't know what was coming, it felt like a blessed and precious time.Now those days hang in memory like images from another age. I look back at us and I feel so tender for those people, those people who had no idea what was about to be lost. And then I feel so tender for all of us, in our fragile and tenacious humanity, all of us who will lose, and lose and lose over and over.

So now it is Spring again. We traveled through those days of beautiful mundane routine, when the most pressing question was where Oliver and Amanda would go to Kindergarten. And then it was summer, and we embraced the unscheduled days stretching ahead of us. We went swimming, we went camping, we played in the woods and at the beach. We had days of toddler storms and five year old tempests, we questioned everything we did, we snapped, we cried, we cuddled away hurts. And we had days that unfolded with gentleness and ease.

Oliver and Amanda started Kindergarten, and Fall came, and the rituals of apple picking and pumpkin gathering. Worry was with us every day, and waiting for news from specialists appointments and lab results became a new occupation, but still the kids played, and argued, and found new ways to confuse and delight us.

 Julia was feeling less and less well, but she still loved to come over to play. We read piles of books, ate together, sang songs and chased the cats and chickens.

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And then, late October, the walls came tumbling down. A hospital admission, a transfer, phone calls and texts that seem even now impossible to believe. Learning that you can feel like a gutted fish, and still walk, talk and breathe. Knowing what I felt was only a fraction of  what Carrie and Glen were enduring, I watched in awe as they weathered--weather-the worst of days, of weeks, of months. Amazing Julia chronicled Julia's struggle to overcome a brain tumor, a stroke, infections, complication after complication, and finally her passage from her body as she left this life on January 24, 2013. These were months of the deepest tragedy and despair, of pain and heartbreak, but also of laughter and fun, companionship, a community rising to the occasion, hope, compassion and the kind of love that enfolds us in the gentlest and strongest of embraces, that carries us forward, that holds us together when we have broken into a thousand pieces.

Now it is Spring again. Julia is gone, but with us still. I slide Finn's feet into his sandals and see Julia's purple shoes. Finn does his silly walk across the kitchen floor, just the way Julia taught him. I walk into the gymanastics studio and am slammed with the memory of Finn and Julia playing with the lockers here last year. I dream often that I am searching for a missing child.

Oliver has seen her a couple of times since she died, he tells me. Once during her memorial service, when "I saw her in the sky. She looked bright-eyed and happy. She whispered something in my ear, but I don't know what." And once when Amanda, Audrey and Beatrice were coming over to play, and Oliver told me that Julia was planning to hang out so she could be part of the fun too. He insists that we have the right portions of treats so we can include Julia. He grapples with why she died, and how, and what it all means. And Finn. Finn asks to see pictures of Julia. He plays with toys that used to be hers and calls them Julia Toys. He has decided his toddler bed looks like Julia's crib in the hospital and says "I go hopital" when he climbs into bed. He is the age she was when she went into the hospital. Soon he will be older than she ever will be, a fact that still feels like broken glass in my heart.

And we go on.  We put in the garden, we plan camping trips and swim lessons, we fold basket after basket of laundry. We worry about mundane things again.  We get annoyed at the kids, and short-tempered, but we try to say yes a lot too, try with new fervor to enjoy what we have right now, this moment. Sometimes lately an ordinary kind of happiness has crept in and settled in my heart, right next to the deep well of sadness that I carry with me always. I am trying to be OK with that too, to say yes to enjoying the sun, friendship, laughter, to celebrating the kids' new milestones, even if they are reminders of everything Julia won't be here to do.

When Oliver was born, I felt broken open, exposed, vulnerable. The beauty of the world shone brighter, the horror was more real and much more terrifying. Holding this tiny life in my arms, I'd walk through town in a dream, feeling like I was missing a layer of skin I'd never known I'd had before. Losing Julia broke me open again, peeled away another layer. I feel open. I feel like I know less than I've ever known. Humble. More afraid than I've ever been, and more courageous.

New Book of Poetry in the Family

My brother-in-law, Marcos Soriano, has a new  book of poetry out for the Kindle. Suck Nectar Vomit Honey stands out for its direct writing, haunting imagery and gritty realism that never strays into self-pity or emotional manipulation. Although the topics are often bleak (cancer and its accompanying horrors; birth defects; disasters both natural and man-made), the message isn't one of despair. Instead each poem reads as a letter from a place anyone of us has been before, or may be headed next, a kind of Lonely Planet guide to life's darker days, or a field guide to nature's less glamorous creations. Who has not felt:

Black-dog days
and starless nights.
The body turned toward sorrow
like a dial tone drones in A.

These are skillfully crafted poems whose language illuminates rather than obscures, and are at times achingly lovely, perhaps all the more due to their sober content.

Here's a poem I love for obvious personal reasons, as well as on its own merits. Enjoy, and then head over to Amazon to get your own copy:

My Brother, Sleeping

The eyes twitching back and forth
under the lids, the pupil like a fist
moving beneath a sheet. The breath
puffing out through the mouth
with a different rhythm, a different pace
than it does when he's awake.
As if his sleeping self
is not the same
as his self awake.

Asleep on the living room floor,
his hands folded over his congested heart.
One son throwing blocks;
and the other, just born,
breathing his own tiny breaths
with his sparrow lungs-
so tiny, those breaths,
they move less air
than prayers do. 

From Suck Nectar Vomit Honey by Marcos Soriano, 2012

Letter from February

Oliver's development has always been a full-tilt run into the future, barely captured by the click of a camera shutter. Watching Finn master new skills is more like time-lapse photography of a flower opening. Each petal unfurls at its own pace, at exactly the right moment, one by one, until the wondrous whole emerges.

At 15 months, Finn stands poised on the threshold between baby and toddler. He is right on the brink of so many things: he crawls as often as not, and when he does walk still toddles from one safe harbor to the next with hands held high for balance. Language, too, runs just below the surface, the occasional crystal clear word, "hi" or "duck" bubbling to to the surface then subsiding in favor of the gestures and babbles that convey his intentions so well.

He is enthusiastic about food, but relies on nursing as the mainstay of his diet, telling me it's time by laying his round cheek against my shoulder. When I ask "Do you want to nurse?" his whole body nods and he makes sure there is no confusion by adding " yeah! yeah!", then plucks my glasses off my face to make sure I can't go anywhere without him and pulls off his own shoes and socks so he can be perfectly comfortable.

Coming home tonight after a late-afternoon meeting, I stepped into the kitchen to a flurry of welcome. Oliver greeted me in mid-sentence, so excited to tell me a story that the words fought to come out of his mouth in a jumbled stream. Finn heard my voice from the living room and screeched toward me, towing Alonso for balance and maximum speed. While Oliver filled me in on all the happenings, Finn gazed into my eyes, snuggled under my chin, wrapped his fingers in my hair and held on tight.

Life is so good and so very, very busy right now. We are in the midst of investigating kindergartens for Oliver. Work hums along with a steady stream of meetings and projects, and the dry and mild winter allows for plenty of garden projects. Two full beds are planted with peas and Oliver enthusiastically started 1/2 an ounce of lettuce seed in 6-packs--the seed sowed so thickly, the sprouts are lifting the entire surface of the soil as they grow. There are permanent piles of jackets, library books, garden gloves and lunch boxes on every surface, their height limited only by their structural soundness. I lost my car keys for three days recently. And it's almost spring.

Out in the garden

It is already the middle of September and a harvest moon rose behind the poplars tonight. The trees are still green, but a hint of yellow is creeping along their shimmering edges.

A year ago I waited for fall the way I counted the days to Christmas as a child. Now Finn is nine months old. He is here with us to celebrate the turning leaves, to taste pears for the first time, to wear a costume and play with pumpkin guts on Halloween. Tonight he stood in the bathroom, holding on to the edge of the bathtub, and watched Oliver play in the water. He holds our hands to walk everywhere, and demands a taste of anything we eat or drink. He crows and claps his hands when he hears music; he tolerates the vacuum cleaner; he cries when I chop nuts in the food processor. He loves to be read to, rides in his stroller with his feet propped up on the toy bar like an executive lounging at his desk, and pets the kitties with glee. When we are out walking and I show him flowers, he gazes at them with great intensity then lets out a little laugh, like the world has offered him the gentlest of jokes. He is not partial to the man who sells goat cheese at the farmer's market. When I pick him up, he plants kisses on my cheeks or chin. He is completely opposed to being on his stomach, and thinks crawling is a terrible idea. He knows Oliver is the funniest thing he has ever seen, and laughs uproariously at his antics, especially when they are in the car together.

And Oliver, my sweet Oliver. "I just turned four!" he tells everyone we see, even now that his birthday is a month behind us. He seems more settled, joyful, a bit more resilient than he did at three. He can swim now, climb trees, help himself to a snack from the kitchen, and carry on a full conversation on the phone. He loves to do science experiments, think of new creations, push the boundaries of his world. He inspired us to coin a new rule: no hanging upside down from anything higher than your head. He remembers activities we did last year at this time and asks to do them again--"Mom, can we go on walk to collect leaves and glue them on paper?" He calls me Mom now, not Mama. We spent over an hour playing board games during Finn's nap today. He sleeps like a rock most nights, wakes sobbing from nightmares occasionally. "I was floating, and then I had the feeling that I was caught." He carries two baby dolls around with him, changes their diapers and nurses them. He was nervous before his first day of preschool, but when the time came for me to leave him he didn't even look up to say goodbye. It takes every ounce of his concentration to remember not to run when it's his turn to leave the circle at pick up time, so eager is he to tell me about his day. He watches old episodes of Mr Roger's and talks back to the screen. He wonders sometimes what Mr Rogers is doing right now, and I tell him I don't know--which is the truth, although not all of it. He want to be called Oliver Mr. Rogers when he grows up.

Back to tonight's harvest moon--I was out in the garden to see it rise, cramming in a few minutes of work between dinner and bedtime for the boys. The chickens pecked and scratched in the bed at my feet, pouncing on bugs and worms as I pulled out the spent corn stalks. I dug carefully to avoid their feet, my mind already thinking ahead to next year's garden, making plans that might be slightly out of reach for someone who still celebrates when she manages to both take a shower and eat breakfast on the same day. Oh well. So my garden grew a bumper crop of weeds this year and my to-do list is gathering dust somewhere. I'm busy watching my boys unfurl their wings, and there's nowhere I'd rather be.