#16 / Sometimes
June had wings. Some nights, the boys ate more than Kris and me. Two full plates each. Axel asked for two servings of sweet potatoes and three servings of sausage. Soren, three servings of red beans and rice, three servings (six slices) of polenta. A warning, when they’re hungry like this: next week, they’ll wake up taller.
I had three work trips. I always opt to fly home late after the final day of work, just to be there when the kids wake up, even if it means a fifteen-hour day for me. Axel is learning his various forms of measurement, sort of. “I’m so thirsty,” he says, “I could drink a pound.” “I am a trillion kajillion miles fast.”
“I don’t want to miss an inch,” as he would say.
There is a pile of dead ants in a corner of his room, under the window. When he first pointed it out, we vacuumed them up, not feeling the need to treat for anything since they were all very obviously dead. The next morning, the pile was back. A bit of research tells me that a few days after ants die, their corpses release a chemical, oleic acid, that alerts the living ants to dispose of the bodies. Ants are hygienic creatures, and when something kills a bunch of them, the remaining ants remove the dead from the nest and drop them in “graveyards,” to help keep the colony safe from potential disease. I don’t know what to say about this, besides that it is something fascinating that happens in the world, which I didn’t know about until now. There is a lot of that, with young kids.
Twin boys live in the house across the street. When we moved in six years ago, they were the age Soren is now. Today, they’re teenagers. In five years, they’ll be adults.
Kris and I had a fight – the only one we ever have anymore. We used to fight about two things: this thing, and money. We don’t fight about money anymore (although that is a fragile truce which could be broken at any moment by a hospital bill, a necessary car repair, some other uniquely American malady). But this other thing rebukes resolution. The closest we’ve come is recognizing that it’s a price of admission, that we’re going to fight about it every few months, we’ll stop talking for a couple of days, until eventually one of us will cave and offer affection at which point we’ll agree to move on until next time.
We taught the boys to say “agree to disagree” so they’d stop arguing about shit that (to an adult) does not matter – except now they scream it, racing to be either first or loudest, fighting to see who can agree to disagree more. A resentful ceasefire. This fight feels like that.
The boys are in their various summer camps, none of which span the length of the work day, and are at different locations with different drop-off and pick-up times every week. As Axel would say, “I’m double-triple exhausted.”
The twins across the street are home this summer, too old for camp or childcare. Coming and going on bikes, bouncing basketballs down to the neighborhood park. I wonder what they talk about. They still look little to me, but I bet that’s not true for their parents.
In May, Derrick Brown wrote this, about how so many artists seemed to anticipate (or even manifest) their own endings. I thought about it for the entire month of June.
What if you can manifest the wrong things by overdwelling? Not by wanting them, not exactly. But by loving the candy of sorrow? By returning to the same dark images so many times they start to feel like a personality, like the most interesting thing about you, like home. Like a dark home that is the only warm home to you?
Do you believe in fate-foreshadowing?
Jeff Buckley went into the Mississippi River on May 29th, 1997. Fully clothed. Singing Led Zeppelin’s a whole lotta love across the dark water. He was thirty years old, and it was a warm night, and he waded in from the bank near the harbor, and a passing tugboat’s wake took him down, and he was sucked under? And was gone. Five days later they found him. Behind him, he left one studio album, twelve songs, and a growing fan base. I couldn’t help but search his catalog deeper, and I found more water imagery than any coroner would call coincidence.
I couldn’t wait for the nightmare to suck me in and pull me under, pull me under. (So Real)
He sang that three years before the river obliged him.
In a conversation with a friend after we’d both become mothers, the topic of intrusive thoughts came up. She shared how she’d be sitting on the couch breastfeeding, and would look across the room at the poker hanging by the fireplace, and she’d start to think what if the cat comes in, and jumps off the coffee table, knocks over the plant on the mantel, and I jump up to catch it, and accidentally kick the poker off the hook, and the baby falls onto the poker and dies??
Okay, I remember thinking, well THAT is crazy. Meanwhile, my own intrusive thoughts run the gamut from school shootings to airplane crashes to every type of cancer imaginable, secretly, aggressively progressing inside me or my kids or both. One type of intrusive thought is less likely, sure, but the other is arguably more out of our control, so who’s to say what’s actually the more rational fear?
Sometimes I think it’s brave to look the intrusive thoughts in the face, sit with them, then gently coax them out the door as if they were a kid I’m trying to get to school on time. Others, like in the weeks after reading Derrick’s essay, I wonder, what does it mean to even entertain such thoughts? To feel the anticipatory grief of something that may never happen? What might I be calling in?
“I have the opposite of a fear of heights,” I used to say. I loved airplane rides, peering over the highest cliff edges, bungee jumping, sky diving. Getting into cars with ill-advised drivers, hanging too far out the windows down Westcliff, arms outstretched over the pavement and ice plant. That was in the earlier 2000s, BC. (Before Children.)
When I was pregnant with Soren, I called my mom after my 20-week scan. “Things look good! I’m still a little scared, though.” “Oh, honey,” she said, “You’ll never be not scared again.”
Once, I was fearless. Now, I am happy. At times I think those two things may be mutually exclusive.
But then I look at my own kids. Climbing high in trees, jumping into freezing water, romping through wooded campgrounds well after dark. They have no reason, yet, to be afraid of anything. “Mama’s job is to keep us safe,” they say, and they believe wholeheartedly in my ability to do so. Sometimes I do, too.
June flew, while we ate blueberries and basil from the backyard. We swam in the ocean. Axel declared it to be “the happiest day of my life” with an almost humorous frequency. On our last camping trip, we watched an osprey catch a fish while we sat on a paddleboard 10 feet away. Slow circles, steep dive, splash, swoop. Our mouths open in awe. It felt close enough to reach out and touch.
Oops you did it again. One of my favorite things you’ve written. And no, I don’t say that to all the girls.