the busy heart

Emily Dickinson, who may have been amused, but probably not. Eleanor Roosevelt, who I do not think would have been amused. Yesterday I was teaching Emily Dickinson's poetry. I was so excited to be teaching Emily Dickinson's poetry that I felt like dancing right up at the front of the class. I had inadvertently assigned five creepy poems about death (which is easy to do when you're assigning Dickinson), but it didn't even matter because she's so awesome and I love her and I want to be her when I grow up and I think she had one of the most bizarre and most brilliant minds that has ever graced this planet.  We were talking about this poem , which begins "I died for beauty, but was scarce / Adjusted in the tomb, / When one who died for truth was lain / In the adjoining room." But when I went to read to it to the class, I accidentally said, "I died for booty." And then I couldn't stop laughing. I leaned over the podium, gripping the...

Henrietta no longer believes in bedtime. She believes in fighting with every tool available to her until she falls asleep on the couch, watching Scooby Doo  (known in this house as "Dooby") at way too late an hour. I'm not a big fan of this development, but we go through phases like this now and then, and things ought to change soon.   Until then, we're exhausted. Sam usually volunteers to stay up with her, but it's his turn to sleep. So it's 9:36, and I've been grading papers, and we've been eating popcorn, and she's been practicing reacting to the scary parts. She runs to the couch, looking behind her frantically, gasping, and saying, "Oh no!"  And now I'm done grading papers, and her head is on a couch pillow, and we're watching The Wizard of Oz, and she's practicing saying "witch" and I'm suddenly so happy to be sitting by her that I can hardly stand it.  "Wish!" she says.   "W...

At two, she seems poised on the edge of knowing, of actually meeting and growing curious about the planet. Sometimes now she seems so much like an alien: by which I mean, not yet of this world. She's the most gorgeous and funny alien I've ever met. On the morning of her birthday, I talked to her as we walked, pointing out all of the important stuff: trees, leaves, squirrels, the colors of cars and houses and flowers. She participated, repeating the words she knew (tree! sqwrrl! car car car!) and asking, occasionally, "What's that?" She asked that once when we passed an animal smashed in the road, and I said, "Oh, that's nothing, nothing." And kept strolling. I don't have to introduce her to that part yet. Please don't make me introduce her to that just yet. My heart was full of her two-ness as we walked. I carried all of the days of our acquaintence around with me, and I felt sure I would weep at something. But it wasn't the dead c...

As I made the two of us a smoothie, I noticed it began to rain. It was only sprinkling, but I rushed Henrietta out to the back porch, both of us still in our pajamas, telling her we needed to save the sidewalk chalk before it disintegrated. I picked up the thick sticks of chalk--already a little damp-- piled them in a bucket, and set it down inside the back door. When I turned around, Henrietta had climbed up into a patio chair, and was looking up at the rain. I pulled up another chair, and we sat together. It was gorgeous out, mild and misty and so quiet we could hear the sound of rain falling on the tall trees in our back yard. Henrietta was barefoot, and a bit concerned about the leaf debris on the bottoms of her feet. "Help! Help!" she said, showing me. And I did my best to brush them clean. She wore her jammies with the ballerinas on them, and a grey and black faux fur vest which she's recently become obsessed with and insists on wearing at all times. I loved her...

Yesterday, Sam and Henrietta and I went downtown to the Tucson Museum of Art, and we found a little pocket of downtown Tucson that felt like a real downtown. It wasn't just a sad whisper of Boston, but a genuinely hip part of Tucson with green space and cool restaurants. This was exciting. We looked up at the few high-rise apartment buildings and imagined living right around there, in walking distance to interesting shops and cafes and parks. We were walking down the block, trying to find a place we'd heard about with good reviews and good prices for dinner, and Henrietta was holding my hand. She's taken to holding my hand lately, really holding it. Her hand is so small, and she grips mine like I matter more than I sometimes suspect I do. I hold on tight, in case she decides to dart away, but she's not interested in running off (yet). She's happy to walk right with me, connected to me, seeing the world pass by on the sidewalk. In the crook of her other arm she...

I joined a gym this week. My morning walks around my mother-in-law's neighborhood were great, but last week, after running into a snake and a neighbor's unleashed doberman who gave me a little nip (among other terrifying wildlife), I was done. I went in really just to a get a few days of working out for free. I didn't expect to love it. But surprise: I loved it. I dropped Henrietta off at the gym daycare, got on the treadmill, rocked out to my music, watched the news on closed caption, and started a couch-to-5k program using an app. Endorphins flooded me. I forgot how much I love those endorphins. And this morning I went to my first water aerobics class. I'm not yet brave enough to try the other classes, though I will get brave enough soon, and this was the perfect reintroduction. Water aerobics is ideal for a post-pregnancy body. Really, I think water aerobics is just ideal. There aren't any mirrors! No one was competing! Someone told me my swimsuit was gorge...

Not the first, and not nearly as wide as the first, but close to the first smile of the morning. (P.S. Aren't humidifiers beautiful?) Sometimes in the early morning, when it's clear that Henrietta is not interested in sleeping in her crib any longer, I bring her into bed with me in hopes of getting a bit more sleep. She nurses while I try to doze, and eventually she nods off too. After awhile she wakes up and wants to nurse again, and I help her latch, and this time she's ready to be awake for the day. This is how I know she's ready: she pulls off,  and when I look down to see why, and she's smiling at me. It's my favorite smile of the day. Later smiles are silly and squirmy, but this one is quiet. It's wide and deeply content. She's a strange little creature then, a bald and armless green glowworm in her swaddle. In another context, I'd be sure an alien was sucking the life from me, smiling maliciously. But it melts me when she smiles that ...

I didn't hear about the storm until my neighbor mentioned it Wednesday evening, and then I heard about it everywhere. There were flashing warning signs on the side of the highway on Thursday, and my phone did a special alert bulletin (which I didn't know it was capable of), in case I had missed the memo. But even late Thursday, there was no real sign of it. The skies were blue, though a slightly brooding blue, if that's possible. And everything felt sort of calm, as the cliche goes. We went out to get a couple of things from the store, and the shelves were nearly bare of essentials. Everyone was hunkering down. We, on the other hand, were buying items for fish tacos with mango salsa--unseasonable fare for the night before a giant blizzard, but oh they were delectable. Friday passed, mostly in waiting. It was snowing, but not earnestly. Sam kept the fire going, and I started a quilt, and we stayed indoors, thinking this thing wasn't going to be that big of a dea...

photo by the lovely and talented jen gibson, at London Bridge Creative I'm not beautiful. I mean, I'm not ugly. My looks do nicely enough. But I'm not drop-your-jaw and turn-your-head, look me up and down, holy wow, how-is-that-creature-walking-this-earth?, sort of pretty. I'm okay with that. I don't think I'd like being that kind of beautiful. It appears to be sort of a hassle. Lately though, I feel like I'm getting a taste of what it might feel like to be that beautiful, though the attention I garner is in its most innocent form: I have a beautiful baby. She turns heads. Or maybe it's just that I have a baby, a little baby. And though she absolutely is beautiful, there's something about her being a baby--any baby at all--that softens the world, makes it turn and coo and exclaim and comment. I walk into a store, and an older woman holds the door open for me, exuding sympathy for my awkward maneuvering, as if she's momentarily pr...

I've been thinking about a day over a year ago, when I found out I was pregnant for the first time. I'd later lose that pregnancy thirteen weeks in, but mostly when I found out, I was terrified. I mean, I was excited at first, but on the heels of that excitement came the holy-wow-what-on-earth-am-i-doing feeling. They say when you have a baby your life is changed the instant you give birth, and that's true of course, but in a way my life changed then, the first time I found out. I almost instantly felt eclipsed, like I was disappearing, like I'd never be "me" again. I worried about the baby, about the things he or she would have to go through, about all of the sadness and struggle involved in a normal human life. I worried I wouldn't know how to help, or that the sadness of his/her sadness would overwhelm me beyond my capacity to function. This wasn't an unreasonable fear: incapacitating sadness is something I'm familiar with, and there have been...

Greetings, Earthlings. We're developing a routine, the lady and I. Would you like to hear a slice of it? Though she wakes up at various earlier points, she's generally ready to join the world around eight, and she cries to say so, and I creep into her bedroom and peer over the side of her crib, where she's flopping around like a green fish in her green swaddle. And at some point in her flopping and wailing she'll see me standing there, and she'll stop, and she'll look up at me and grin and flex her legs in joy--the full-body smile, my dad calls it. Obviously this is the most significant world event of the morning, this smile. I scoop her up and feed her and change her and pick out her outfit--another favorite task--and bring her down to the kitchen. She kicks and talks to me (so to speak) from her throne--a baby seat I put up on the kitchen island--and I tell her about the day ahead, talking her through the ingredients of my green smoothie and details o...

When I got pregnant again, I began to long for stories, for people to whisper in my ear what this felt like, so I could check it against my own feeling, and open up the experience for me. I didn't exactly know I was craving this until I found these three books and felt myself relax into them, and hold them dear in a way I haven't held books dear in a long time. In case you're in the market for a pregnancy read, or really just a good book, all of these were wonderful. Magnificent even, in some spots. * Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother by Beth Ann Fennelly.  I've read (and really loved) Beth Ann Fennelly's poetry, so I was excited to discover this book, which is a collection of letters she wrote to a young friend and former student who was pregnant and far away from family. They're loose letters, meandering through her own experiences as a mother to a young child, and her memories of becoming and being pregnant (as well as of a miscarriage). They...

I'm pregnant. And I've thought of all sorts of big flashy ways to say so, but mostly I just need to say so, if only so I can start recording some of my thoughts in this space. It seems anti-climactic to report, since I'm 20 weeks along now, and I already announced to Facebook and I don't have a picture for you, and really 20 weeks is not that interesting, though I thought it would be, and I would have given my right arm to make it to 20 weeks last time. Here's what no one told me: though people post cute pregnancy pictures at all sorts of early weeks, you can't really tell I'm pregnant yet unless you know you're looking for it. No one told me that I'd just look, well, increasingly chubby for over half my pregnancy. And there's this odd thing that happens, where I'm impatient for my body to announce it for me, impatient for the real evidence to proceed me in social situations and manifest with flashy glory all of the weird changes my body ...

Thank you, really, to all of you who commented and wrote me emails.  They really mean a lot to me.  And mostly I'm just checking in to say I'm feeling better.  The way I came to feel better seems important, so I thought I'd record it: *I prayed, and it wasn't pretty.  This was flat on my face, weeping aching praying, saying, over and over again, "You have to fix me.  You have to heal my heart."  (Yes, precisely in those words.  I can get a bit sassy and demanding in my praying.)  I felt broken and I felt like I spent all day trying to fix it and everyone else was trying to help me fix it, and no one could do it.  I wasn't asking to stop grieving, just to be functional and believe in good things again.  I felt deeply then, more than perhaps ever in my life, that there was this gaping hole in me that I needed God to fill. And, after many days of praying like that, and a turning point conversation with Sam (up next!), something lifted, sh...

On Sunday we had the best weather of the year.  Sure, it rained, but it was also 77 degrees and mostly quite sunny, so we did the only logical thing: we took a walk along the Charles River.                                  [i didn't get a good pic of sam. he'll thank me for not posting a not-good one.] [boats. we have big plans to ride one of these boats very soon.] I love spring here.  I wish it would feel more springy and less wintery already, but the trees are blooming, and I'm remembering how obsessed I get with them.  When I'm walking downtown, I have to be careful not to run into buildings or cross streets without looking both ways, because all I want to do is look and look at these incredible trees.  I love how dark the bark looks, and how green the green looks--like the freshest thing in th...

Remember the friend who made the miraculous quilt ? She's teaching me to quilt, too.  I thought I was just going to learn to use the sewing machine I got for Christmas, that maybe we'd make a skirt or something equally simple, but when we got to fabric store, E had a plan.  "A quilt," she said, "is the best way to learn to sew. All straight lines."  And so we picked out fabric, went back to my house, and while the husbands played guitars and talked about music, and sweet potatoes roasted in the oven, we cut out little squares and spread them out according to a chart that E drew up in about ten seconds.  This is what it looked like, spread out (with cat). (This is the thing about cats: they seem to get quilts.  When you even suggest you might make one, they know we're dealing with a potential blanket right off, and commence utilizing it.) I found something fascinating once I got the hang of putting those rows toget...

Our friend E makes quilts.  (That link will take you to a bunch of her quilts, including ones that have won awards.)  She's unbelievable.  She dyes (some of) her own fabric and whips these puppies out like nobody's business.  Last summer she offered to make us one, and we could hardly believe her generosity.  But we came to believe it, and she told us to pick what we wanted.  Sam and I spent days discussing this, finally settling on a strange system of discussing color schemes: we each brought each other books with covers we really liked.  Except that didn't really work.  Because I liked stuff like this: And stuff like that made Sam feel like he was bleeding internally.  He was looking for something a bit simpler.  Finally, after stacks of books were on the kitchen table, we agreed that we both LOVED the colors and vibe of a particular region of Brian Kershisnik's "Nativity"--the part with Mary and Jesus:   We showed that t...