Dalai Mama Blog

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

It's late. Michael's out watching basketball with a couple of friends, and the kids are asleep in our room, which is still where I put them to bed when it's just me; they drift off so happily on either side of me, as if the very fact of my ever having nursed them still hums like a lullaby in the air. All I have to do is lie there with the headlamp on, reading, and I hear their breathing slow, watch their lips fall open. Then I can sneak quietly away, even though I have a novel I'm eager to return to: Out Stealing Horses, which is so understatedly lovely that I can't shake images of the dappled Norwegian forest out of my head, even though here it is all sultry New England midsummer, the living room damp and darkly blue and droning with cricket sound when I come in to tidy up.

It's the usual, down here. Ben's been drawing zoetrope film strips — the kind you spin in a little slotted wheel to see a simple, repeated movie — and so there are paper scraps and sketches everywhere, including rejects, like the man who was supposed to shift from frowning to smiling, only you could never notice his changing mood, so distracting was the fact of his head growing accidentally skinny and then wide again. There's tape and markers all over the place, the books Zen Shorts and Painting the Wind, an Athleta catalogue (sigh), hole punchers and a paper cutter, the paper skirt pattern I traced from my friend's copy of The Alabama Stitch Book (I have now sewn and given away six gorgeous skirts, all made from Salvation Army t-shirts!), a pincushion and embroidery floss, the (excellent) game Rumis, a mysterious pair of underpants, and lots of empty glasses from the procession of icy drinks that wove its way through our day.

And also, my favorite thing: a drawing, obviously Ben's, of a pink-chip ice cream cone, with the words "Tastey and Refreshing!" arcing above it.

This creative mess, this drawing — it's almost like a metaphor for how life feels to me right now. I am usually so angstily reflective, so doubtful and worried and melancholy. But for some reason, these days, I'm just...happy. No. Not just happy, my god. I mean, it's still me here, after all. I still experience the daily stabbing pain of the future perfect — the time when the children will have been small, will have lived with us, but are or do no longer. In the college pool I hold Birdy in my arms, and her cheeks are so fresh and sleek and ripe that water literally beads up on them, as it would on the skin of a plum. I bite them gently and she protests and kisses me.

But something has shifted for me — the balance between thinking about life and living it, perhaps. Is it because the kids are so grown now, that there's more space for doing the things we all love? These rainy summer afternoons, where we are all together, but each person working on his or her own creation? Me whispering curses into my sewing machine and sipping happily from a glass of ice tea, Ben hunched over his fifteen-panel film strips, Birdy drawing her daily picture for whichever blessed animal spent the night in her bed with her ("Oh Squeaky was the lucky one!" she sings quietly while she colors a picture of herself, the stuffed penguin, and, always, a potted rosemary plant). I impersonate my own gracious mother by bringing the children drinks that I know they'll love: pomegranate juice and sparkling water with lots of ice and a mint sprig, or iced peach tea sweetened with honey, and they say, "Oh, Mama! Yum!" and are so delighted that, for that moment, my life feels like a storybook from the past (You know, those lovely old storybooks where the mother yells, "You forking arsehole!" into her Singer's recalcitrant bobbin case and then lies down on the floor and groans before wadding up her project and popping the top from a bottle of beer.). Later, we'll eat dinner at the picnic table and then, when the sky has gone cobalt, the children will light sparklers and dance barefoot across the lawn, screaming.

I've been working on a piece for Wondertime about the book Becoming the Parent You Want to Be — one of the best books I know. And it's not that I have become that parent, heaven knows. Far from it, what with patience still dangling out of my reach some days like an apricot high in a tree in the neighbor's yard. But sometimes I feel something more peaceful creep into my day. Somethine more like being the parent I want to be, perhaps. Although I will confess that at a friend's birthday party on Saturday, I watched a first-time mother with her baby — a true newborn with its grimacingly hilarious face, its tiny limbs doing the constant hurky-jerky — and I felt the most uncomplicated pang of longing, even when I saw her cram into the baby's mouth a nipple the diameter of a dinner plate. But don't worry — I know better than to wax publicly nostalgic, than to wear my ovaries on my sleeve while my capable children romp nearby with their immodestly strong necks, their immodest absence of shrieking for no reason. So instead I said to her, "Oh man, it gets so much better than this. This part totally sucks." And she laughed with that crazy kind of despair and hilarity that I totally remember, and said, "Thank God."