Ruminations on Parenthood
The plane was coming down, on our last flight of the day. Your dad buckled you in. You wanted your seatbelt off, and you started to shout and fight against it. So I told your dad, pass me the rainbow snake! And I snapped it like a collar on my own neck, “Oh no! Get …
Continue reading “Snake on a Plane / Notes on Mental Processes”
An addendum to The Two Year Old Thing: A year ago, Rebecca was in her magical communication phase. She wasn’t talking much yet, but she used things around the house to lay out her ideas or convey what she wanted to do. I called it magic because it invoked patterns via imitation and association, following …
My hands were covered in raw chicken when Rebecca asked for ice cream, so Vernon grabbed it for her. Rebecca was not happy. She doesn’t want the ice cream unless we follow the proper procedures. Likewise she’s unwilling to shortcut off the path to get down to the park more quickly. She wants Mommy to …
When the nights are longest and you wake up at the watching hour, the way your ancestors did on nights like this, and there’s no way that you’re going back to sleep any time soon and you and your mama are both sick of trying, then it’s time to snuggle in the dark and tell …
The last two times I’ve left Rebecca with someone outside our extended family, she’s gotten so anxious she’s puked. The first time was in August, and I was perplexed and not sure what had happened. The second time was in October, right after she turned two, and I felt like a failure as a mother. …
One morning at 6 AM, I tell Rebecca that she doesn’t have enough cat hair on her lollipop yet, and that I won’t wash it off (again) until she does. She’s not eating the lollipop, as far as I can tell, just using it to pick up cat hair. Rebecca loves the drama of messes …
I’m revisiting something old this week, for reasons that’ll become clear by the end of the piece. I started this at the same time as Remembering Tiamat, when Rebecca was eight months old, and all the time references are to summer of last year: I had a conversation stuck in my head all last month, …
One Monday morning at the end of January, I was standing at the new espresso machine making myself a cappuccino, when Rebecca came up behind me. She was holding a moka pot and a can of shaving cream, and broke into a huge grin when I saw what she had: Coffee with foam! Rebecca enjoyed …
I lost my momentum on the “How to Sleep Like a Baby” series when sleep turned into a problem for me again. It takes some chutzpah to post sleep advice when you’ve still got only one kid and (God willing) many more years of childrearing for things to go wrong in. It’s probably clear from …
Continue reading “I’m not tired, I’m just tired of you (Sleep Like A Baby #5)”
Sometimes I make a bargain with my life: I won’t be happy unless I’m happy with our workload distribution, with my day-to-day opportunities, with how I got here, with my level of control. As if I could only allow myself to be happy when I look out and judge everything good. As if I were …
Continue reading “Bargaining With Happiness: The Suck Stops Here”