Shape Shifters

Yesterday morning, my last morning at home before leaving town, I paused in the hall and silently watched Rooster eating breakfast at the dining room table.

Her legs seemed to stretch further down towards the floor than ever before. She sat straight and tall eating scrambled eggs and buttered toast.

She was, in that moment, herself in the present, her former baby self and a shadowy suggestion of the woman she will become.

I tried to memorize the way her legs poked out of her pink pajama bottom shorts trying to freeze a moment in time, to hold this girl still, this shape shifter of mine, who changes so drastically, it seems, every day.

Like his sister, The Mayor is in a constant state of transition. With every new day, he becomes someone more complex and capable than the day before. I never have time to know the boy he is on Tuesday, because on Wednesday he is more.

Both of them live in a state of eternal becoming.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, with the support of a floating ring, The Mayor jumped off the diving board.

After countless practice jumps from the pool’s edge in water he could stand in, he steeled himself against his fear, and jumped from the board into the deep end.

Later that afternoon, when K and I weren’t paying the strictest attention, The Mayor decided to jump without the float.

Someone must have yelled or called out. There must have been some sound that alerted us but I don’t remember it.

I only know that in a single instant everyone at the pool turned to focus on The Mayor's small splashing hands, the only parts of his body that were visible above the water.

The Rooster was wrapped in a towel on my lap, but my body was in motion before my mind understood exactly what I was seeing or what it might mean.

I was up out of my seat with the Rooster halfway down, when I saw K’s body flying across the water.

I mean it, I saw my husband fly.

Though the whole episode couldn’t have lasted more than ten seconds, time warped and shifted as if we had watched the scene through a fun house mirror.

K sat at the pool’s edge with The Mayor in his lap. Five feet away, I could hear my husband’s heart hammering in his chest keeping time with my own.

The Mayor wasn’t at all frightened.

Our instinct was to remain calm, not to frighten our son with our own fear.

K calmly explained drowning to The Mayor who accepted it as a matter of fact and went back to using the ring to jump in the pool.

Last night, The Mayor, Rooster and I went for a swim while K shopped for groceries to get them through the five motherless days to come.

I watched The Mayor as two boys coaxed him out beyond the roped off toddler area.

The Mayor followed the boys, but when they tried to tempt him to venture out to water that he knew was too deep, he turned without saying a word and returned.

“Look what I can do!” he said to me, smiling.

Then he spread his body out across the water and floated on his back.

To the best of my knowledge, he’d never done that before.

His arms were stretched out on either side of him and his toes stuck up out of the water as his body bobbed and spun on the water’s surface.

He relaxed into the feeling of floating and let the water carry and support him.

I watched him and his suddenly dog paddling sister and marveled at the way that everyday is an adventure of self-discovery for them.

I bear witness dumbstruck with awe.

Harsh

Despite all our effort to be politically correct, non-violent parents, The Mayor folded a drinking straw in half and started shooting it at his sister, The Rooster.

"We don't shoot at people, Mayor!" I told him, "Shooting isn't nice and it's dangerous."

"If you're going to pretend the straw is a gun, I'll have to take it away," K said.

"You especially need to stop pointing it at Rooster's eyes!" I added.

"Can I shoot at things besides people?" The Mayor asked.

Without missing a beat, The Rooster who is still only two, rolled her eyes and said,

"What, like little baby animals who are all alone?"

Flow

We went to my Ady & Granny’s house over the Fourth of July weekend for the first time since last October.

What struck me first was that the house smelled anonymous.

Every house holds the scent of the people that live there but now that my grandparents are gone, the smell that belongs in their house is slipping away.

It was strange to be in their house with their belongings sitting in their rightful places silently staring at me.

“Well then. Here YOU are, but where are THEY?” their things seemed to ask.

I found myself in the basement rummaging around for things I convinced myself I needed like a storage box full of yarn.

You know, because I’m a knitter now.

[SNORT!]

I looked for the old, broken Christmas crèche that everyone said I could take but didn’t have room for the last time I was there.

No one else claimed the poor, little, three-legged lambs.

[Who KNOWS how long they've been limping to Bethlehem!]

Mostly I opened and closed boxes hoping to find one containing the concentrated scent of my grandparents so I could rest my head in it and just breathe them in.

My Aunt Nancy, who was also there, told us on Friday morning that she had organized a party for Saturday night and had invited all of our relatives from both sides of the family.

"I lost count of the guest list when it went higher than thirty," she told us.

[Then we held a little ceremony where we gave her an award for excellence in advanced notice and communication skills. Heh.]

Granny didn't really throw parties.

She only occasionally threw modest family get togethers and when she did she NEVER co-mingled guests from her side of the family with my grandfather's.

I think entertaining stressed Granny.

Aunt Nancy, on the other hand, is more of a go-with-the-flow woman. She ordered an enormous pile of BBQ and slaw, bought a ton of chips and drinks and then got busy enjoying herself.

I didn't count how many family members came, but the house was packed and the rickety back porch creaked under the pressure of bodies.

The front yard was full of people and pick-up trucks.

Every generation of family members was represented.

My children found their places in the large pack of young cousins circling the house with water guns.

There were water fights, chases and races.

The Mayor in particular, had a BIG time.

I can't describe what it was like to watch him run, play and laugh with a party full of people and know that he was related to every single one of them.

It was good.

My Great, Great, Granny used to call her descendants "the sands of the sea."

Standing there, watching The Mayor sneak up on and soak my Great Aunt Kate with his water gun, I focused less on the sand carried out to sea by the receding waves and more on the shore beneath my feet.

Things Fall Apart

I am having a hard time finding the thread of my own story lately.

Every day requires the complex navigation of set after set of high-speed, racing curves while driving a clunky station wagon built in the early 1970’s.

Every minute of my life is so full of responsibilities and obligations that they crash into each other like a massive highway pile up.

Tasks that I should attend to lay on their backs by the road side like over-turned bugs kicking their legs and refusing to die. As I go careening past them, they seem to call after me,

“You still have to do this, you moron!”

At work, a situation has arisen that I can only liken metaphorically to an oil spill of Exxon Valdez-like proportions.

Though I didn’t contribute to the creation of the mess, I find myself employed, day after day, for far longer hours that I usually work, wiping thick black goo from the individual feathers of once beautiful waterfowl armed only with a cocktail napkin.

[Oh, how effective and useful I feel!]

Every day at 4:30, I leave the flock of greasy, dejected birds to race to my own personal mom-a-thon and related duties, the foremost of which is the one where I endlessly repeat,

“Stop fighting with your (sister/brother).”

Yesterday evening, the kids and I careened through the farmer’s market trying not to hit the other patrons with our cart.

I didn’t have an actual grocery list because that would mean that I had time to think about groceries in advance.

I tried to think on my feet about what I might feed my family this week and simultaneously attempted to keep my two children from colliding head long into piles of produce.

I rounded the corner into an aisle full of melons when The Mayor, from way down the aisle, shouted,

“MOMMY, I KNOW BOYS DON’T GROW BOOBIES, BUT DO THEY GET KIPPLES? DO I HAVE KIPPLES? WHAT ARE KIPPLES?”

When the kids finally passed out in their little beds (or rather on the floor NEAR the bed in Rooster’s case), I returned to the endless bird cleaning and remained there long into the night until finally I couldn’t see straight.

These are my days.

Consequently, finding the space in my head to capture my usual blog-story-a-day has, like so many other things, fallen on its back as one of the overturned insects by the side of the road.

My blog waves its little insect legs at me each morning and I blow by it wistfully feeling like I'm being pinched in the kipples.

Cross Town Traffic

On my way to the office this morning I was stopped at a red light when I heard the man driving the van next to me honk his horn.

I looked around to understand what he was honking about and noticed a woman walking down the street and into the park.

The van driver was honking at her.

The light changed and I had to drive on, but I daydreamed an alternative ending to this story, one where I rolled down my window to speak with the male van driver.

"Psssst! Hey, you!" I would say.

He would roll down his window.

"What?" He would ask.

"I just wanted to make sure you knew that she's not a piece of meat. She's a woman who deserves your respect."

He would scoff and say,

"How would you know?

"Because," I would tell him, "it takes one to know one."