the busy heart

Her adorable lamb costume finally arrived in the mail at five this afternoon. The party was at six.  I tried to put it on her and she screamed and writhed, as I somehow knew she would. Long before today I tried to decide what she would be for Halloween, but I kept imagining her tugging at whatever I put on and saying "No like it!" It was sort of like that, only she just screamed and writhed on the floor.  So I abandoned the lamb and put on her pinkest, fluffiest dress. I thought about how grateful I was to the Target dollar bins for these wings I bought months ago. I told my inner feminist tough beans, and I called her a fairy princess.  This was the only picture I took, and it's not great.  I felt terrible as we left home for the church party. I felt spread too thin and not nearly creative enough as a mom. I felt so tired.  Luckily, a fabulous Halloween takes so very little when you're two. I'm pretty sure this was the best night of her life. At first she was c...

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...

I once told a woman I didn't know all that well that I was "trying" to do something. She immediately said, "You're trying, you're lying." And the rhyme was so catchy and she seemed so sure of this truth, that I thought she must be right, even as I hated her for saying it. But motherhood has changed my sense of "trying," and now I feel sure that this woman was wrong. To me, trying--especially when divorced from concern of outcome--is a noble art. And the most difficult and important one I practice as the mother to Henrietta. For Henrietta and I, it doesn't work to force it, and it doesn't work to give up entirely. It only works to come at it from somewhere in the middle, to approach it as gently as possible, as unemotionally as possible, yet still with a great deal of persistence.  Here's what I mean: Henrietta is not, sadly for me, an eat-everything-on-her-plate kind of girl. She's picky, and it seemed for awhile she was ...

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...

Contraband Pacifier + Lamb Henrietta does these three things that I find so charming. The last of the three is charming and deeply disturbing. You'll see what I mean. The first is that every time I change her top for any reason--to change her out of her pajamas, to put on her dress for the day, to change her dress when it warms up to 80 degrees in the afternoon--she waits until her head has popped through, and then says "Boo!" This on its own is plenty endearing, but to me what's even more endearing is when she forgets to say it right away, and then, with one arm partway through a sleeve, she says, "Boo. Boo." Quickly, almost apologetically, twice for good measure. This is so fascinating to me, as if we've signed a very serious contract that she must say "boo" while getting her shirt changed. We've signed no such contract, but it's lovely to me that this small thing matters to her. It amuses her, and she knows it amuses me becau...

Henrietta has been sick. She's happy, for the most part. It's not the miserable sort of listless sick. She's just had stomach trouble. Explosions in her diaper. Horrifying puddles on the floor. You see what I'm saying here? It's lasted a couple of weeks, as her pediatrician told us it would, and though at first I was surprised by how cool I was with it, it has begun to get old. I'm ready for that sort of event to not  punctuate our days, and I'd really like to take her places without worrying she'll pass illness to every kid in a mile radius of the park. One night last week, Sam and I both had trouble sleeping. I was up late working on a freelance project, and after that I couldn't settle my brain down. It was nearly three in the morning when I finally fell asleep, and just after three in the morning when Henrietta woke me up, crying. Or actually, it was Sam who woke me up, saying she'd been crying on and off for fifteen minutes, and maybe we...

Two months ago, I was in New York City to see some dear friends and meet their new baby. It was a whirlwind trip--in Friday, out Sunday. We had a lovely day at the Met on Saturday, and this is what I wrote in my journal once we got back to our hotel room. Pretty Hen at the Met Lovely day in New York. Here to see Arin and baby Alli before we leave the coast. We drove into the city from Westchester County and the she had on all of her jewels. I've never been here when the city was so green, the trees heavy with summer. We found a miraculous parking spot on the Upper East Side and walked to the Met. I pushed Hen in the stroller and she stopped people in their tracks with her cuteness, as she tends to do. She had a little foam W she was playing with and chewing on and she kept dropping it. I'd have a feeling she dropped it and I'd turn and see it there in the middle of the gallery, a security guard advancing to pick it up and return it to us. I held her hands and ...

My favorite picture. Possibly ever. There are two things you should know before I tell you this story: the first is that I'm a lousy sleeper. I'm one of the lousiest, and I wear earplugs, these ones, or I would never sleep at all. This allows me to hear the baby when she's actually making significant noise from the other room, and not just fluttering her eyelashes, which I swear I'd hear. And the other thing you should know is that our bed is broken in a sort of complicated way, so I can only sleep with my head where my feet should be or I dream that I'm sleeping on a mountainside all night long--really, that happened. But lately I haven't been sleeping much anyway. Not with earplugs, not with my head where my feet should be or anywhere else. Henrietta has been breaking records in the wake-up-at-night department. Gosh, it's been awful. She's teething, surely, but it's gotten worse and worse, and a few nights this last week she woke up 10-15...

When a woman delivered flowers Saturday afternoon--a giant yellow bouquet--and the card from Sam made me weepy, I thought, "Man, this Mother's Day thing is not bad at all." I know plenty of women who don't like this day much, or at least feel complicated about it (see this and this ), and though I can understand this intellectually, for a moment, I didn't really get it. But Sunday morning when Henrietta woke up at 4:30 and fussed her way to 6:30, I carried her into Sam and realized I understood at least part of the complication: was I supposed to be all mother-y because it was Mother's Day? Or was I supposed to pass her to Sam and get some sleep, since it was Mother's Day? Luckily, Sam agreed with the later, and I got a bit more sleep, but the whole day was kind of like that. I had a complicated day with Henrietta, while I think Sam had a pretty lovely day with her. In fact, the last thing she did before going to bed was climb all the way to the top of ...

Enjoying a restaurant spoon--a baby's best friend. Henrietta is hungry. I realized this after about a week of much more fussiness than usual, and waking up about 4,000 times a night. But let me back up to why this was not immediately clear. When I got pregnant, it felt like I was required to choose a mothering identity: would I have a natural birth, or a medicated one? And the identity spread out from there: cloth or disposable diapers? Breastfeeding or formula? Babywearing or the opposite of babywearing (whatever that is)? You get the idea. These felt like big decisions, decisions that didn't have to do with the decision themselves so much as who I was . I can say, six months in, that I've ended up rejecting the false opposites here and doing a little of both in almost every case, which is all well and good, unless you're me, and you long for nothing more than to pick one side of the spectrum and endorse it and love it and become it entirely, to enthusiasti...

At the mall, before she realized I was taking her picture. The first time I put Henrietta's car seat in the back of our Toyota, I understood minivans. It felt like an epiphany: Oh, that's why. So the dang car seat fits. I had the same feeling today, when I went to the mall for something. I put the baby in her stroller, passed the profoundly-out-of-my-pricerange shoes in Macy's, and realized, oh, this is what malls are for. Malls are for moms. It's pleasant. You can walk and walk, no matter the weather. You can look at pretty things. When Henrietta is older we can hang at the playground. And here's the kicker: if you need stuff from multiple stores, you don't have to get the kid in and out of the car seat 87,000 times. And heaven knows that limits my activity in the outside world. But at the mall, you just stroll on over, and bam! Whatever you'd like is right there. This mall even has a Target attached. I don't see that I need anything else ...