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Learning and trying to be kind and living my life as fully as I can stand it.

Thursday, August 16, 2018

Here we are and there they go

Yesterday was our last day of summer vacation. The kids and I have spent almost every day together these past couple months in a mix of lounging and hustling, adventuring and hanging out at home. The house as been a complete disaster for most of that time. We've eaten home-cooked meals and grabbed random handfuls of whatever snacks happened to be in reach. We've been bored and restless and found our way out of it. We've been blissed out and awake. We drove into San Francisco many times, Barted once or twice, jumped into pools many times and exclaimed over discoveries big and small. We've created lots of art, built many towers and a tree house, done tons of laundry and mowed the lawn never quite often enough. We've watched lots of TV, tried camps for the first time, celebrated birthdays and grown inches. We've had lots of grandparent times, play dates at friends' houses, bee stings, playground visits, ice cream truck celebrations and not many naps. We've paired up in every way possible, snuggled in, laughed, tantrumed, fought and loved. We've been together, talking and wondering and playing and expanding. It has been good.

My big kids started kindergarten today. Yesterday we were in San Francisco visiting my dad, their Poppy, in his new apartment. He lives a couple blocks away from the hospital in which they were born and we drove by it yesterday, pointing things out and telling our stories together.

That's the corner that I ran around, holding my big belly and scaring the people on the sidewalk who got out of my way as fast as they could.

That's the apartment where Lily and I lived by ourselves for three weeks while we waited for Cyrus to be ready to get out of the hospital.

I didn't feel like drinking a bottle so I stayed there a while.

That's right.

I wasn't deep in nostalgia, I wasn't deep in emotion, I was in another place. An in-between place of deep awareness. The human inability to truly comprehend the passage of time because it is a mix of fast and slow, holy and excruciating.

They take my breath away with their long, strong limbs and their bright eyes. Their funny observations and their great vocabularies. Their pride in accomplishing new tasks. Their kindness and their resilience.

"I'm not a baby," Cleo told me at dinner last night.

"That's right, you're not," I replied.

"But you call me Baby," she said.

"I do. Do you want me to stop?" I asked.

"No. I want you to keep calling me that," she said.

"Good. Because I want to call you all that forever, even when you're grown-ups." I told her.

My babies. I think about holding Lily and Cyrus on my chest together for the first time, weeks after their birth. I was filled with so much gratitude that they were both alive and that I got to be their mama. When we first got them home eight weeks later we swaddled them up and put them in the same crib, an ocean of mattress between them because they were so little.

We took a quick picture this morning, the dog tied to a pole a few feet away, their little sister sitting in a huff against the wall. We wandered around trying to figure out where we were supposed to be. We found our place and got in line for Room 11, surrounded by kindergartners and parents, wide-eyed taking it all in. The line started moving, we got to the front door and were greeted by the principal and then they were gone.


1 comment:

  1. Many thanks for sharing this prose poem. So immediate and specific and evocative.

    ReplyDelete