Morning Has Broken

Posted September 07, 2007

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Birdy and I are on the couch in our kitchen, snuggled under a blanket to watch the fog lift from the branches outside. It's a school morning, but the roasty smell of my coffee and the magic of the fog combine to make me feel like it's the weekend. And also like our trees are full of ghosts. Birdy is heavy and warm; she gazes up at me with her glossy brown flying-saucer eyes; she strokes my cheek dotingly; she says, "If I touch my booty with my finger then I should wash it because of germs." Ben looks over at us from the table. "If I had a time machine," he announces, apropos only his own ongoing interior/exterior monologue, "I would totally not bother visiting myself as a baby. All babies really seem the same." He cocks his head to listen to the CD: "Is this Mozart?" Mozart is pronounced with a hard and T-less Z, so it rhymes with Ozarks.

Birdy is sucking on the ends of her hair now, which she likes to chew into crusty points, just like I did at her age. The smell of her spitty head makes me almost woozy with love. It's the same way I feel when I peek in at her in the nighttime, and she's lying on top of the covers with her big legs and her enormous hand-me-down size 5 underpants. It's nothing you could exactly put in a scrapbook ("Giant Undies" and "Spit-smell Hair" all elegantly italicized in embossing powder) but right now it's what I want most acutely to remember.

Two weeks ago, Birdy was driving me a little bit crazy. Two weeks ago, I made lots of notes so I could write about all the annoying behaviors: the refusal to eat anything that didn't start life by spraying from the udder of a cow, for instance. ("No, honey, you can't have yogurt again for dinner," we had to say, every night, while she thrashed and grieved over her beans and rice, her chicken, her, uh, beans and rice again.) Or the way every time we got in the car and turned on the radio, she'd complain from the back, like a brat from a bratty cartoon show about brats, "No, Mama. Don't sing."

Or the way she suddenly began announcing, "I have to poop!" even though this announcement only very occasionally inaugurated any actual excreting of poops. It seemed instead like a handy way to say, "I'm bored and need you to screech the car over into the nearest gas station where, after 5 seconds of obligatory grunting and groaning and not pooping in the scary condom-machine bathroom, it will occur to me to ask if we can get ice cream." Or simply like a scatological cry for attention. (Not unlike the way you might happen to mention to a boyfriend with an emerging disinterest in you, "I think I might be pregnant." Even if you have only a hunch that, four days from now, when it's due, your period might be late.) Toward the end of summer, Michael actually had to lug Birdy from a beach bonfire up a steep and lightless sand dune to a revoltastrophic port-a-potty, because what are you going to do? Smoke her out in some kind of a boy-who-cried-wolf scenario and slap the side of your head when she turds in her pants? I didn't think so.

And now? No more. She eats her rice and beans; she permits me to croon along with Joni Mitchell hecklelessly; she has downgraded the Dung Alert from red to yellow.

And now? Now she lies in my lap, thinking. "His soft body's no good for eating," she whispers. "What?" I say, and she says, "For tasting in your mouth. Elmo's soft body. My little Elmo doll." "Mmm," I say, the way you do sometimes, when it's barely morning and the mist hasn't even lifted, and you haven't even had your coffee yet, even though it's sitting over there on the counter, and your child is lying in your lap telling you gentle, odd things. Birdy brightens now: "But you can lick his eyes!"

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Morning Has Broken

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Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Morning Has Broken

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