Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Aswim

Posted August 06, 2008
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Birdy is trying to explain something about the flower fairy she has just twisted together from pipe cleaners and silk petals. She cocks her head to the side, points to its floral skirt, and says, "It's just kind of like...you know? I can't really explain it? The way it is? You know." Um, like, I don't totally know? Because, like, you haven't actually said anything? But, well, okay.

She is a mystery to me, this little girl. When I go to make her bed in the morning, for example, her sheets are twisted into heavy, damp ropes, as if a laundry wringer has slept manglingly beside her all night long. I picture her cycloning through her dreams like a tornado - but then whenever you check on her, she is as still as an apricot. She is by turns sweet and fierce: bend down to her, and it might be like kissing a little iced bun, warm from the oven, or she might wrinkle up her nose, jut out her bottom teeth, and laugh, and it will be like kissing a demented cat - the kind that winds around your legs, purring, after hissing at you.

She does not act like a teenager, that Birdy, even if she occasionally speaks like one. But she is so determined in everything she does. My father always laughs appreciatively about the sure way she answers questions: she does want more bacon, yes please; she doesn't want any more eggs, no thank you; she never hesitates or second guesses. Plus, she has now taught herself how to swim, propelled through the water by the sheer force of her own desire. When her face cranes out of the surface of the water, you can read in it all the arduous commotion of the small limbs below.

Her brother, meanwhile, has always turned towards swimming with his typical mix of worry, dreaminess, and practicality. "I don't see why I can't just wear a life vest forever," he has been known to say, floating around various ponds and watching the clouds scud past overhead. "It's so relaxing." And yet, over the winter something shifted: he was transformed from a panicking flailer to a daring and delighted swimmer, as if he had spent those long, dry months metamorphosing within some kind of cocoon. How do you get better at something while you're not even doing it? I don't know. I just know that now he turns somersaults underwater, dives to the bottom of the pool for pennies, and shoots from the surface as drenched and broadly grinning as in a toothpaste ad.

It's another good reminder, in what has now been an almost-nine-year-long series of good reminders, that everything comes in time. I remember when Ben was not yet five, and we were at a birthday party at the local water park - not the kind with the mile-long coccyx-breaking slides, the automated canoe capsizers and water cannons, but just one of those little playground ones where various faucets and nozzles sprinkle intermittent showers of water over shrieking huddles of children. Ben preferred the cozy comfort of my lap, where he plunked his towel-wrapped person, to the wet and the spray and the crowds, and I felt nearly bereft with worry. "Look how much fun they're having!" I gushed. "Don't you just want to try it?" I coaxed. "You're really missing out," I scolded. And Ben was sorry to disappoint me, of course, but he just shook his sure head - really, he too has always known exactly what he's wanted - and cuddled closer. I wish (Oh the things we understand too late!) that I had leapt at the chance - the miracle of this tiny dry boy in my arms - instead of wishing him away into the fray, wishing him grown up, grown out, gone from me even in this small way.

We do want them ultimately gone, of course, in all the important ways: independent and capable and, when the time comes, out in the world. They will swim away from us, I know they will, and we will perch nearby, scanning the waves like the lifeguards we have learned to become. But I am trying still to balance holding on with letting go. Sometimes kids just need the familiar comfort of the shallow end, and the deep...well, the deep's not going anywhere. You know? The way it is?

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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