Intention

So I see some people are making their New Year's resolutions. I tried it myself last year and, as predicted, failed miserably; unless you count the conception, gestation and delivery of the Boychen as the physical challenge I waxed poetic about craving, in which case I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations.* But for the most part, the first two sentences of last year's New Years post summed me and my year up nicely: I am a resolution-maker in spite of my better judgment, and I am a resolution-breaker. And yet. And yet the new year rolls around and the empty pages of a new calendar carry me off like white wings. I am ever turning over a blank page and covering it with my scrawls. It is either hopeful or pathetic, I can never decide, how I continue to believe in the blank page of tomorrow.

And yet I regularly fail at the big ticket Resolution with a capital R. Partly it's human nature, I suppose - many people fail at the capital R resolution - and partly it's my own particular failing. Over the years I seem to have lost the ability to keep my eye on a long-term goal. I was good at it back in the day; I trained all year for a single bicycle race; I would grind my way up Firehouse Hill in October all the while thinking of the track in April. But somewhere along the line the distant goal on the far horizon became less compelling to me. Hence the zero marathons I've run in all my years of resolving to run a marathon. And with a new baby in the house I think this is a year I need to be particularly gentle with myself in the resolutions department. This year I'm leaving the Resolutions with a capital R on the side of the road.

I do, however, like the idea of having a theme for the year (as seen at Profgrrrrl). A theme for the year seems like a good way of inviting a particular quality into my life, a quality I feel to be lacking while leaving open the specific ways that might happen. Rather than detailed resolutions I'm thinking of more broad-brush intentions for the year (as seen at Scrivenings). In fact, my intention for the year is Intention. I don't know what my year is going to look like; I still can't see what kind of baby the Boychen is going to turn into - he's covered both easy and colicky in the first seven weeks of his life and right now is at the peak of his disorganized needy early infancy. He could go either way; he's evolving so fast that every morning I wake up to a different person. But I do know enough to know that life with a baby in the house means stiching stolen blocks of time together like a patchwork quilt. There is never enough of any one material to cover the bed; the best I can hope for is fitting the scraps together into a sunburst. Knowing that, I also know that I can't take on a project that requires large consolideated blocks of time. Not yet anyway. I'm not even sure I can take on a project that involves counting on the same block of time every week. Not yet anyway. I do know I am going to have scraps of time, yellow and orange and solid and patterned scraps of time to stitch together.

What can I do with such crazy quilt pieces of time? I don't think I can plan big. I know enough to know that this new small person will take the carefully constructed jigsaw puzzle of my day and sweep it to the floor. I know that he'll scribble on my blank calender days, dribble paint on my journal leaving only a tiny blank corner for me. I know enough to know that for months I won't know what any given day will look like other than that it will have sunrise and a sunset. So I know that I cannot plan big. But I can plan deep. I don't know how many minutes a day I will get and I don't know how I want to spend them - writing poetry? catching up on sleep? photography? playing with my sons? - but I know if I spend them with intention I'll be spending them well.

I don't know if I want to run a marathon or publish a poem or play with my children this year. I just know I want to be present in my life. Those minutes I get here and there, I want to live them with intention. That's all.

That's everything.

* At the end of my labor - maybe 9 centimeters dialated, unmedicated, and battered by waves of contractions like so much flotsam and jetsam on the open sea - I managed to grunt out to R: "It takes a guy like Lance Armstrong 47 minutes to climb L'Alp d'Huez. I can do this for another 20." Yes, in labor. Seriously. Lance Armstrong. I know. I am such a dork.

Thoughts for a Saturday when my husband is home and I can think again

R is home for the weekend and I've got some breathing room. I wanted to write something about how different this pregnancy has been from my first. By "different" I mean both physically unpleasant and emotionally unsettling but also just different; frankly, I'm happy to see it drawing to a close. A friend of mine in the States has been pestering me for a belly shot and it occurred to me that I don't have any. I don't seem to have a single picture of me pregnant this time around. R and I are going to fix that tomorrow, but I think a good sum up of how differently I've worn these two pregnancies - or how differently they've worn me - is that the first time around I had studio portraits taken - and yes, some of them are the obligatory nude pregnancy photos and I have to say they're all fantastic - and this time around I don't even think we snapped off something with the digital camera. I'm sure there is something very telling in that, but I'm equally sure that whatever it says doesn't really matter. The baby. The baby matters.

Or I wanted to write something about how at some point in the last month wee faeries have apparantly visited my son in the night and turned him into a full-blown boy. One day last week in the park he went tearing away from me and suddenly I saw how very different he's become, different in some untouchable way. More sure of himself, more rambuctious, more...I would say more there, but he has always been so very there. But he's older and more confident and there was a moment last week when I saw a flash of something I'd never seen before and I wondered where it had come from and just how long it had been there and had I missed it before? Or had it really just happened, just that day, just in that moment did I catch out of the corner of my eye the very instant in which a page in my son's life turned? Did I catch, just once, the very moment he grew?

Or I wanted to write how Thursday night in the dim light from the nightlight I turned to him in bed - because of course he sleeps with me when R is away - and he looked like a baby, curled on his side one hand on his neck, sucking his thumb. He could have been nine months old, or nine days old. He bends the lines of time, growing in circles it seems, swinging from boy to baby and back again.

I wanted to write about how today is my mother's birthday again and about how it doesn't matter anymore. I wanted to write about how it's taken forever to get here but that doesn't matter anymore either.

Because it may have taken forever to get here, but I'm here.

Writing my own stories

My brother and I grew up with one foot out the door. It's not surprising, with our home life being what it was, that we were more than happy to play sports (all that practice time!) and get after-school jobs as soon as we could drive; in high school we took summer school classes and got summer jobs as soon as we were old enough. My brother took to the golf course. I let my bicycle take me miles from home. Home was where we did homework up in our rooms, ate dinner, and slept. We didn't have Family Game Night or bed-time routines or mother-daughter time. We weren't that kind of family. We were a family my default, we were a family because my parents got married- and believe me, the whys behind that are legion - and had children. I think they had children because that was what one did when one got married. I don't think they gave it a lot of thought; I don't think they even considered the possiblility of child-free living, though at the risk of writing myself - and thus Small Boy - out of existence it would have been the obvious choice for them. For my mother, certainly.

They belonged to a generation of hands-off and passive parenting, but they raised it to an art form. Why, exactly, would you have children only to proceed to have absolutely no interest in them or what they did or who they were and how they dreamed? One of my most vivid memories of my mother involves her telling me - me, the girl who started to write stories and poems the minute she could hold a pencil - that she didn't "give a shit" about writing. She couldn't seem to see us - my brother and me - as actual people with personalities. (Or perhaps she saw us all too clearly - she did have a nack for saying exactly the most hurtful thing. See above, writing, "don't give a shit.") She certainly didn't try to have a relationship with us. And so we grew up with one foot out the door and nobody should have been surprised that when the other foot was old enough to follow, follow it did. We did not, in the years before her death, have a relationship with her that surpassed obligation. When she died it had been six weeks since she and I had spoken and as last words go they leave a great deal to be desired.

My father, to his credit, did try, to the extent he was able, to forge something resembling a relationship with his children. Sports provided the bridge for him. He coached many of my brother's hockey teams and when I ran track in high school he came to every home meet. When I started cycling, we would watch TV coverage of the Tour de France (what little of it there was back then) and I would explain to him about team-work and drafting and strategy and why Greg LeMond wasn't going to waste his energy trying to win every day. I don't think he understood me, not really. But he could understand the cycling. He could learn the lingo. He could, approaching sixty and dying of cancer, become a fan of this strange new sport because his daughter was. I'm sure he found me a baffling girl and he must have watched in growing confusion as I grew into a baffling young woman. But he tried, in his clumsy born of a different generation ex-Marine quiet man way, to find at least one thing, a tenuous link between us.

Maybe that's one of the reasons I continue to believe in the transformative power of sports. It is surely one of the reasons I continue to hold a deep affection for the increasingly tarnished sport of professional cycling. As I went from a child to a young woman, something my father could only have watched with a growing sense of unease as the distance between us grew, there was always a new bike helmet to buy, a training session to hear about during the weekly call home from college, a race to look forward to. After he died, I met people at his memorial service - members of his AA group, people I had never met and would never see again - who knew all about me and my cycling and who to a person repeated how proud my father had been of me in the last race of mine he'd seen. He had, it seems, bragged about me. We might not have understood eachother across the distance of gender and years and personality, but he boasted. I was his daughter. I rode bikes. I was good. My father grasped at the one thing about me he could hope to understand - athletic endeavour - and he used it to cultivate something between us. He was quiet and clumsy in his love, as I think a lot of men of his generation can be, but he tried. Our relationship was limited and never touched on matters of the heart, I don't think he could have told his friends about the life I wanted for myself or the future I imagined for myself, but he could buy me a slice of pie and we'd be able to have a conversation while we ate.

I know my father loved me, and I'm pretty sure he liked me as well. I am far from certain I can say the same thing about my mother. And, in fairness, that was a two-way street. I didn't like her. I didn't want to spend time with her as a child, and I didn't care to spend time with her as an adult. It's not a pleasant truth, but there it is. But I have friends who like their parents, who in their thirties make time to go visit them on long weekends, who go out to dinner and Broadway shows with them. These friends of mine are like Martians to me, but they are also guide-posts along the way. They show me that there is another way, that I don't have to recreate the family I was so eager to get away from. When I'm able to step away from myself and look at the way R and I are living our lives with Small Boy I'm able to have a certain degree of confidence that we'll continue to have a good relationship with him as he grows, when he becomes an adult. But it's hard to step outside of your own narrative, and there are many days when I'm pierced by the thought that when he's grown he won't want to be our friend, that he won't want anything to do with us, that he'll always have one foot out the door. It's hard to step away from a narrative like that, so posts like this, that remind me of all the things that are possible with my children, are like little blessings.

Because it may be hard to step away from a narrative, but it is just a narrative. I can write it however I want. It's what I learned to hold the pencil for.

A pledge

This post of Jessica's has inspired me to come out of the closet.

I write.

I write a lot more, and a lot more honestly, than appears on this blog but most of it remains locked between the black covers of my Moleskin notebooks. On occasion, in the past, I sent my writing out into the world, and on occasion the world welcomed it; usually the world failed to notice one way or another but the world wasn't completely indifferent, not all the time. But it's been a long time since I told my stories to somebody other than myself.

I believe I can use language well. I know I have a strong sense of place. I've created people out of wholecloth. But I'm afraid to share my stories; I find it hard to believe that somebody will read what I have to say. That comes from a childhood of invisibility, of not being listed to, from impatient parents who told me to hurry up and finish when I was trying to tell a story, from a mother who said to a daughter who started writing stories the day she learned to wield her first pencil, "I don't give a shit about writing." So I did what any child with a sense of self-preservation would do: I learned to hide my writing and to diminish what might have been a gift. It's a pattern so deeply ingrained that even though I blog pseudonymously I still have one (safe) personality for my blog another (riskier, more honest) for my journals, my journals that will never see the light of day.

But Jessica has inspired me. I don't know if I'm ready for a writer's contract, but I'm ready for a change. I'm ready to start exposing myself in my writing, to stop hiding, to stop listening to my mother who first of all was wrong and second of all is dead. I'm free, free like I was on those summer vacations to run wild and to play in the old barn of my imagination, to jump from the loft. I don't live in my mother's oppressive house anymore. I live in the old barn, on sagebrush hills, in an old innertube floating down Trail Creek. I live in West Yellowstone, in the Lamar Valley, at Oxbow Bend. I live at Henry's Lake with a strange stray loyal black dog who will always protect me and who will follow me anywhere. I live on the shores of Swift Current Lake with my brother valliantly hurling a piece of styrofoam into the wind. I live at the foot of the Swiss Alps, in the mineral green water of the Aare in full flow, on the cobblestone streets of the Old Town. I do not live in my mother's house anymore.

And it's time to stop writing as if I did.

Memory and meaning

I have been thinking a lot about memory and meaning; it all started when I ordered this book Christina blogged about. As often happens when I’m on the trail of something, clues appear everywhere and I find myself now with a small notebook filling up with quotes about memory, food for thought. I’m currently chewing on something I read in The Shadow of the Wind: “Few things are more deceptive than memory.” If our own memories are not to be trusted – and I think all of us have some experience in remembering in perfect detail something our partner, brother, or grandmother remembers quite differently – and third-hand information, about others or ourselves, is suspect, (“ ‘But that means we can’t be sure of anything. Everything we know is, as you say, third- or even fourth-hand,’” says a character in The Shadow of the Wind) how do we tell the story of our lives? Even those of us who journal obsessively and perhaps think we have an advantage in reconstructing the past might be surprised: I’ve been keeping journals since I was ten years old, and sometimes they are illuminating and sometimes they are remarkably useless.

For years I’ve known that my brother and I led different lives even while sitting in the same room, even while taking the same vacations. He remembers meals I swear I’ve never eaten, hotels I swear I’ve never stayed at, condos I swear I haven’t seen. He played games with me that I have no knowledge of. For example, my family used to rent a cabin at Henry’s Lake in Idaho. Across a field from the cabins stood an old abandoned barn where my brother and I used to play. To reach the barn we’d walk to the end of the gravel road and then cut across the field in which cattle sometimes grazed. I remember the barn. I remember the field. I remember the cattle. I remember being afraid of them and staying close to the stray black dog that shadowed us everywhere that summer. I remember how once we reached the barn we fashioned a ramp to the hay loft with a long wooden plank and I remember how the plank bowed beneath my weight as I hurried across the mid-way point. I remember how the dog followed us up into the loft, her claws splayed, her belly low as she inched up that plank, her inexplicable loyalty to us conquering her certainty that she was doing what no dog ought to do. I remember the cool shaded space of the hay loft, the speckled sunlight, the dust motes.

I do not remember jumping the twelve feet back to the ground, which is what my brother says we did over and over again.

He is sure that we did this. I have no memory of it at all but in the face of his memory I am unwilling to say that I wasn’t there, or that I just watched as he jumped. In the face of my blank slate I accept his version of the story, slotting one of his memories into my life story. But if I don’t remember jumping, does it matter if I did? Patricia Hampl writes that “we store in memory only images of value.” What then am I to make of all the things I don’t remember but have been told happened? Do I care? Are they part of my life story at all? What if my brother is wrong? What, aside from claiming the memory, makes him a more reliable witness than me and my lack of memory? It must mean something that I don’t remember it; I have to believe that there is a qualitative difference between memories we formed as children and information about ourselves we obtained second- or third-hand.

If Hampl is right, if we store images only of value, then our memories, our genuine personal memories, tell the true story of our lives – not merely what happened to us, but what formed us. What we valued. What we chose. Just as the holes in our memory might tell us a great deal about ourselves as well: what we chose to discard. Out of the forest of memory, this tree stands out because it meant something to me and that tree recedes into the background because it didn’t.

I remember the barn. I remember the loft. I remember the dog and her mysterious devotion to us. I don’t remember jumping. Twelve feet as a seven year old, you’d think I’d remember the fear I must have felt, or the exhilaration, if nothing else. But I don’t. I do however have a perfect image, as perfect as a photograph, of my mother giving that dog a pork chop bone on the front porch of our vacation cabin. I don’t remember jumping out of that loft, but I remember that small moment.

So did I jump? And if I did, which event holds more meaning, the jumping or the forgetting?

(The forgetting, of course.)

Grateful

I made the first of two apple pies for Thanksgiving today, using my mother's recipe, and my apartment smells like nutmeg and warm apple. I've criticized my mother a lot over the years, but I always gave her credit for being the great cook that she was. She made a leg of lamb with garlic pressed under the skin that was to die for; a rolled stuffed round steak that was sublime. I have several of her recipes, for coq au vin or chicken cacciatore, but when I make them they never taste as good as I remember my mother's. As a child, in the manner of children, I was simply unaware of how excellent the food I was eating was; I came to understand that much later. I don't think she took any special enjoyment from cooking, but she was wonderful at it nonetheless.

She did not, however, bake, not even the tollest of Tollhouse cookies, except for that apple pie at Thanksgiving and, if the heavens were smiling that year, Christmas. My birthday cakes were usually Pepperidge Farm chocolate and I'm not complaining - I loved those square three-layered Pepperidge Farm cakes into my teens. There must have been the occasional bake sale obligation, but I have no specific memory of any; if so, I'm sure we solved the problem with Betty Crocker cupcakes. But that pie! Moist and sweet and brimming with apples covered with just the lightest crumble. I have eaten that pie every Thanksgiving of my life for as long as I can remember. That pie is Thanksgiving.

My apartment smells like apple pie tonight, warm and sweet, like Thanksgiving. I have much to be grateful for, there is the Small Boy after all. And there are days like today when I remember that it wasn’t all bad; my mother was human and complicated and deeply flawed and the bad outweighed the good, but there were those pies, those moments when our house smelled like nutmeg and warm apple. They were rare. But they were there. And I’m grateful for that.

Scattered thoughts

A decade ago I scattered my mother’s ashes in Trail Creek, north of Ketchum, Idaho. As best as I can recall, this is the spot I sent her into the river, though it’s hard to be sure. I scattered her ashes in winter, and trout streams wear different faces in winter, snow and ice blanket and blur the distinctive curves and dips of their banks, half-frozen water changes the way the river runs, makes narrow what in summer is broad. But I think this is the spot – I remember that tree. I chose it because of that tree, because of the way the creek was slowly undercutting the bank there and carving a deep pool that in the summer would be shaded and in the autumn would be rich with rotting detritus. I chose it because I was trained to look at rivers with a fisherman’s eye and because when I saw that spot with the water undercutting the bank, changing what thought itself to be unchangeable, my heart said yes and my feet said stay.

So I scattered my mothers ashes in the winter chill, and with them I scattered the ashes of a letter I had written to her, a letter closing the conversation we never really had, a letter I burnt right there on the banks of Trail Creek. I scattered all my disappointment, all my anger – much justified, some not – all my self-pity and all my unfinished business. All the unsaid things, kind and unkind, I put in that letter, burnt to ash and sent downstream.

My mother was deeply, deeply flawed – alcoholic, in all likelihood self-medicating a very real depression; bitter and unhappy and incapable of watching happiness unfold its butterfly wings in her presence. I have pictures of her from an earlier time and she looks happy, but I do not know that woman. By the time I was growing up my mother was a storm cloud and the least little thing could seed her to rain. I learned to hide, to shrink and avoid, to keep my voice low – to this day R can’t hear something I say almost daily, and I am even quieter in German – and to head for the barn when I saw storm clouds gathering. But I have pictures of her from an earlier time and she is smiling, at Warm Springs, Idaho, she is smiling and oh! in one or two of these pictures she is lovely. Her loveliness surprises me; I did not know that woman, either. I do not know what happened to that woman, where she went, or why.

My mother should not, probably, have had children; or she should only have had one, being my older brother, so that I evaporate from this story like invisible ink leaving not a trace on the page. We overwhelmed her limited resources, the alcoholic daughter of an alcoholic mother. We were too much. I, the second child, was too much. I am hyper-aware of this as I wait to find out if I am pregnant, hyper-aware of my status as the second child of a woman who had one child too many, hyper-aware of my own shortcomings as a mother.

But I have scattered these thoughts already. I wrote this and said this to the winter air and burned this and scattered this in Trail Creek a decade ago. I have scattered all of this. But today is my mother’s birthday, my flawed, wounded, hurtful, hurting, overwhelmed mother’s birthday and I am waiting to find out if I am pregnant with my second child and out of the corner of my eye here in the clean Swiss wind I see ashes swirling where they should not be swirling.

I sent this downstream a long time ago, to slowly settle among the river rocks beneath the cottonwoods. Didn't I?

Family traditions

I seem to be unable to upload pictures in the blogger post page; I've been posting pictures by importing them via the Hello program. But when I do that, I can't intersperse pictures and text, and each picture appears as a separate post. The four pictures below are meant to be read as part of a single post. If you read the captions, you'll see that Small Boy and I returned to some old family haunts on this vacation - in fact, Small Boy is the fourth generation of my family, going back to my maternal grandfather in the 1950s, to vacation in Ketchum/Sun Valley, Idaho. He's also the fourth generation to visit West Yellowstone and Yellowstone National Park, though I suspect that is a less unusual family destination than Ketchum, Idaho.

I have to confess that I expected some sort of epiphany upon seeing my son on the banks of his grandfather's beloved Madison River. I expected some sensation, as if by squinting and looking into the sun at just the right angle I would see my father on the far shore. I didn't. And much to my surprise, I didn't feel the loss of it. I was too caught up in watching my son throw rocks and occasionally point up to the sky and say "bihr" (bird). I was too caught up in the moment to think about the past. That's a good change in me, and a much needed one. My son is, of course, my parents' grandchild. But he's my son and R's. And above all, he is his own self. We will make our own traditions and find our own special places. I will always circle back to the Rocky Mountain West, to those sage flats, to the cottonwoods, dragging Small Boy in my wake; I can't stay away for too long. But I won't weigh those trips down with emotional baggage anymore - I carried it out with me in September, but like Small Boy throwing rocks I threw it in the river and left it there.

The trip home was lighter.

An achievement quite ordinary

In "The Third and Final Continent" (from Interpreter of Maladies) Jhumpa Lahiri writes:

"While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."

I have such moments as well. When I walk to the Old Town, which I do almost daily, all I have to do is look up to see the Alps like a wall across the horizon and it hits me all over again: I live in Switzerland. It's easy to let go of that fact between the shopping and the cooking, playing with Small Boy and changing the sheets; I do all the ordinary things of life here in Switzerland just as I would have to do them back in D.C. From day to day, it's just life after all. The expat life can't be a stream of adventure forever; there are the groceries to be put away and the trash to be taken out and the bills to be paid. It's life. It's fun and it's messy and it's boring and for long days at a time it's nothing to blog home about.

Then I see the Alps on a particularly clear day or walk to the Münster (cathedral) on which building began 1421 or smile at the crowds of tourists waiting for the magnificent Zytglogge to ring the hour and I remember that it's a bit more than life. It's life here in this strange place with this strange language. Do you know that in five years I have gone from being a woman who couldn't order a meal in German to being a woman who can meet with her Reproductive Endocronologist in German? Although I do not speak dialekt I can watch a television show about PGD (Pre-transfer Genetic Diagnostics) in dialekt and ask R for the meaning of exactly one word (which turned out to be a term of art that the moderator asked the doctor to explain). I have come to know this city better than R., who grew up 20 minutes away. I have made a life here, here at the foot of the Swiss Alps.

An acheivement quite ordinary that sometimes takes my breath away.

The double meaning baptismal verse

Small Boy was baptised yesterday into the Swiss Protestant (Reformed) Church. It was a small affair, kept low key. R's brother is the Götte (godfather) and my friend RK is the Gotte (godmother). The baptism itself was performed by R's counsin who is a pastor in the church. When she baptised Small Boy, he pointed at the water and said "Wa-wa! Wa-wa!" (He also announced "all done!" every time the musician stopped playing - and during the middle of the sermon that he felt had gone on too long - and once pointed out the window at a cat and said "Meow" and generally was, um, animated. This, I imagine, is why most people baptize their babies as infants during what my friend P refers to as the "potted plant stage.")

It is traditional for the parents to select a "Taufspruch" - a baptismal verse that will be Small Boy's "special verse," a verse chosen because it speaks to us about him. We selected the 139th Psalm verses 13 and 14.

Du hast meine Organe geschaffen, hast mich im Mutterleib werden lassen. Ich danke dir, dass ich so herrlich geschafen bin. So wunderbar, staunenswert sind deine Werke. (Psalm 139,13-14)

For the English translation we took the Revised Standard version for the 13th verse and the King James for the 14th, so we ended up with:

You formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvellous are thy works.

Is that not a great verse for an IVF baby? To those in the know, it gives a secret nod to the wonder of the science that allowed us to join sperm and egg while also making it clear that like every other child, Small Boy too is part of the magic of everything that happens between conception and birth. Dr. L and Herr G may have brought sperm and egg together in a petri dish, but the mystery of what happened after that is as old as time and it is a wonder. To be part of that wonder, to be counted among god's works, is Small Boy's inheritance, his birthright as a child of the universe and with this verse we claim that right for him. He is not a science experiment, not a freak or contrary to god's plan for us because we couldn't do it without help, not a child that "should not have been." He is a wonder, an ever changing wonder that makes my heart stop. He is as touched by god as any other child.

And how marvellous are thy works!

Velcro love

When my son was born, the first thing I noticed was how very present he was. It surprised me, frankly, to see him so awake and so alert, so intent on fixing his gaze on me. I had only seen fake newborns on TV, and on TV they are always wrapped in a blanket and their hands and faces are always scrunched up and they always seem to be squinting through half-closed eyes. My son’s face was smooth and open and his deep blue eyes were wide to the world, and the world was me. He was wide awake and he stared long into my face as if to memorize every detail, as if to put a face to the muffled voice he’d been hearing all those months through Thai-food-flavored amniotic seas. His eyes stayed on my face: this is the face, he seemed to think, that will shepherd me through life; I’d better remember what she looks like. He looked at me for what seemed a very long time and then must have approved of what he saw, for he rooted around and began to nurse. That gaze, though, took me by surprise. I hadn’t expected him to be so very present so very fast. It was conscious, that gaze, it was full of discernment and wonder. It said, So you’re the one.

Sometimes, in the morning after he wakes and we take him into our bed for a little while, I catch that look in his eyes still. He spoons up against me, his little rump tucked into my belly, my nose brushing his hair, his hand reaching up and back to hold my neck, sucking his thumb; then he cranes his neck and looks around at me and his eyes search my face. It is a gaze direct and frank and simple, as simple as childhood. Not even R has ever looked at me with such astonished wonder. So you’re the one.

He is attached to me in the extreme; we are two strips of velco. Sometimes I long for space; when it’s hot and I’m sweaty and he crawls onto my body and lies on my chest and sucks his thumb sometimes it makes me itch and I have to breathe deeply and slowly to find the physical patience to let him stay. Sometimes I know with bittersweet certainty that this time is coming to an end; when we go to the park and he runs laughing away from me, putting more distance between us than he or I have ever known. He runs away laughing, stopping now to look quickly over his shoulder, is she still there? before carrying on. He always circles back to me, a little planet in my gravitational pull, he is attached to me in the extreme, but his orbit grows ever so slightly larger with each pass he takes. I foolishly allow myself to think too far out into the future, he is leaving for college already, he’s broken orbit and found his own path. I have to pull myself back to these days to the here and now, to these days when I am the sun in his universe and he is the sun in mine.

To these days when our eyes meet in the morning and we think, So you’re the one.

The glider is still

R and I have a simple bedtime routine with Small Boy. It doesn’t take very long, and R does most of it – he washes Small Boy’s hands, face and feet; cleans his teeth; does the final diaper change; and puts Small Boy in his pj’s. There is usually, but not always, a pull-cord music box playing and R plays with Small Boy as he gets him ready. From the next room I always hear Boy Giggles and when they reach their peak I know that R is smelling Small Boy’s feet and making faces and saying peeeee-eeeeeew! Only at the very end, when Small Boy is all ready to go to sleep, do I come in. I take Small Boy, sit in the glider in the corner, and nurse him before I put him to bed.

I always knew I wanted a rocking chair. Before I got pregnant I always imagined myself rocking the baby in some old handmade Shaker rocking chair. After the infertility diagnosis it was the one concrete image I allowed myself to hold on to, that I would one day sit in a rocking chair in a darkened corner of a quiet room rocking a baby. In the event, I did get pregnant and we bought a glider, rather than a rocking chair, which to my mind is the same thing and I don’t have to worry about pinching the cat’s tail. My glider is nothing fancy, no handmade one-of-a-kind chair, but if you put it in a row of identical gliders I would find it. The frame is blond pine, and the arms have been burnished warm by my resting forearms. It is upholstered in a speckled blue, the blue of approaching dusk, of certain deep lakes, of Small Boy eyes; it has a matching footstool, and Small Boy and I have spent countless hours in it.

In the beginning I only nursed him in the glider. Even in the middle of the night, for reasons that made sense at the time but now seem like the decisions of the sleep deprived, I would take him to that glider and nurse him, even though he slept in a bassinet one inch from my side of the bed. Small Boy’s room back in Small Village was at the back of the house and it was always perfectly still, and we would sit in the glider and nurse and I would stroke his hair and his ear and his fingers. For perhaps two months, day and night, I nursed him in that glider in his room that he didn’t use yet. R had painted the walls sky blue with fluffy white clouds; along one wall, arching over the crib, a rainbow bloomed from one corner to the other. The ceiling was a rich dark blue, the blue of night, of crushed velvet, of Van Gogh, and scattered with plastic glow-in-the-dark stars forming the constellations – Orion, the Big Dipper, Cassiopia. I would sit in the quiet room with Small Boy in my arms, rocking, listening to the stillness and nursing my son. At some point I started to nurse him in bed overnight, and at some point – certainly by the Giro d’Italia in May – I started nursing him on the couch, but that glider has always been our special chair; Small Boy won’t sit in it with R.

In that glider, Small Boy and I end the goodnight routine. When he is ready to go to sleep I come into the room; Small Boy is in R’s arms and he leans towards me, holding out his arms. I take him and we go to the glider where he nurses briefly before I put him in his crib. Recently, however, he hasn’t wanted to nurse. He points to the glider and we go sit, but then he pulls my shirt down as if to say, put that thing away! After sitting there a minute or two he points to his crib, and I put him to bed.

Wednesday night, when I took him from R, Small Boy pointed directly to his crib. I made for the glider anyway, but he protested and pointed again to his crib, so I put him to bed. It happened again last night. I put him straight to bed with a glance over at the glider in the corner, still, waiting faithfully to be set into motion.

My boy doesn’t want to nurse before bedtime anymore. My boy doesn’t want to rock in the glider anymore. He is outgrowing these things of his babyhood.

My glider is still.

Waiting.

Keeping accounts

I learned to keep basic household accounts by watching my mother. She used old fashioned financial registers, a new one each year, and filled in income and expenses in her neat little hand. She never rounded figures up or down, and on any given day she knew where every penny that passed through her hands went. I think she probably knew where every penny that passed through my father's hands went, too; I suspect that my father, on the other hand, had only a general idea of our overall financial situation. He would have been lost financially, confused and at sea, had she been the first to die. My father handed over his paycheck twice a month, and my mother stretched his policeman's salary, later augmented by her receptionist's salary, to send two children to college without student loans while always making sure we could afford those summers along the way.

My mother taught me two things. Always pay yourself first - if you can't afford to save something every month you need to search and search for the expendable luxury until you can save something every month. "Something" being in the neighborhood of ten percent of your monthly income. She also taught me to keep meticulous accounts. Over the past two years I have become rather more general in this regard. I know what R earns, I know what we spend, I have a good idea of where we spend it but not exactly. I have a good idea what kind of vacation we can afford to take this year and I'm confident we'll be worth more on paper at the end of the year than we're worth right now. But it's all a bit...general. Had my mother chosen burial over cremation, she'd be spinning in her grave.

Because I grew up watching my mother entering figures into those register books, I'm partial to them myself. I discovered at Thanksgiving that my brother uses them too. Over the years I have tried computer programs to keep budgets, but I'm most comfortable the old fashioned way. A register book, with a page for each budget item in the front and a page for each month in the back. Entries made by hand, with a sharp mechanical pencil. Last night R and I tweaked did major surgery on our budget and I wrote out each budget item at the top of a page of a fresh accounts book. Here are some things I never thought I'd be factoring into an annual budget:

frozen embryo storage
public library annual fee
television and radio reception fees
documents and bureaucracy

Frozen embryo storage. Well, what young adult learning about annual budgeting and recurring expenses ever thinks they'll be writing that in their budget books?

The public library fee - 50 Swiss Francs per year if you live in Big City, 80 if you live in a surrounding suburb - really steams me every time I pay it. I thought the point of a public library system was to make reading and educational opportunities generally available, particularly for those families least able to purchase these items themselves.

The television and radio fees we pay quarterly. If you own a television or radio, you owe these fees. I had friends who, before leaving Switzerland, sold their television at the beginning of the quarter so that they didn't have to pay this fee. An agent tracked them down to verify that they had, in fact, sold their television. Then he asked if they owned a car. Yes, they said, we do. Well, he replied, if you own a car you own a radio; here's your bill. Now in all fairness I watch the evening news every night without a single commercial interuption; a movie will be interupted once for about five minutes of ads half way through. Skiing is shown live and they show all the skiers, not just the winners; they might break for a commerical during the pause after the 15th skier, but not always. When we actually get an American show like Desperate Housewives or 24 they show the whole thing without a commerical break. On the other hand, Swiss-produced TV programs (entertainment division) is, um, er, bad. Really really bad.

Documents and bureaucracy. Between the three of us we have four passports, two national identity cards, one Niederlassungsbewilligung, one Aufenthaltsbewilligung, a Familienbuchlein, and a partridge in a pear tree. At some point this year surely one of those things will need to be renewed or amended or altered or addendumed. Surely.

On and on I went last night, labeling pages, entering numbers in my Haushaltsbuch in a neat little hand, finding this small and strange patch of common ground with my mother. All those neat columns, all those tidy rows. There was very little about my mother, about our relationship, that was neat and tidy, and I'll take what nostalgia I can find where I can find it.

Income. Outlay. Balance.

What a difference two years makes. Merry Christmas, Small Boy.

R. and I spent Christmas 2003 in Washington, D.C. We had spent November of that year undergoing standard fertility testing and getting our results, which were, in a nutshell, "sans medical intervention you two will never have a biological child together." Well. Right then. Merry Christmas. We decided to spend the holidays in D.C and see some old friends and then go on to NYC for New Years. If you go to the right parts of those cities you can go for days on end without seeing a child. When you have been told you may never have your own child, not seeing other people's children for days on end is a good thing.

But at Christmas 2004 I was pregnant. Believe me when I tell you we did not expect our journey through IVF treatment to be so fast. So, well, easy. It's embarrassing, actually.

And now it is Small Boy's first Christmas.

Sometimes when I look at him tears prick my eyes. Who am I kidding? Often. The very idea of him, so improbable, so unlikely, takes my breath away. That he is even here at all. We have a photo of him as an embryo - he is either the two-celled or the four-celled embryo that was transferred into my uterus. One of those two held on, and turned into Small Boy.

I cannot believe my great good fortune. The grace that came into my life. The sheer stupid dumb luck of it all. This boy. This very boy and no other. There are no words for this, nothing in the world could have prepared me for this. After all of that, to end up here with him. To be mother to a Small Boy. To this precise Small Boy and no other, this Boy who hates carrots and loves Os and has six teeth and an outie belly button. To this Boy who points. Who calls the cat Eh-DAH. Who pulls my hair and grabs my glasses and who bangs on his high chair if I feed him his Kalbfleish-Kartoffeln too slowly. This Boy like no other.

This Small Boy. I look at him and my heart refracts like a kaleidoscope and I see his image everywhere. This wee Small Boy.

A river runs through it

Re-reading my essay, it's clear that I don't just need to tweak it, I need to cannibalize it. When I wrote it, I thought that I was writing about my father, about the choices he made and about the choices that he couldn't make. I thought I was writing about how my father lacked the freedom to follow his heart out to the headwaters of the Madison River - about how the things of life (my brother and myself, to name just two, and my father's deep belief that his number one job was to send us to college) made such a choice too risky, but also, if I were to be honest, about how he lacked the courage and the imagination to really dare to find out if it would have been possible. I thought I was writing about how my father lived out his life many miles from the place his heart called home.

I sort of did that.

But I also wrote a lot about all the summers of my childhood, summers spent bathed in the light of my father's long love affair with the great trout streams of the American West. About how I have inherited that love. About how the waters of those rivers - the Yellowstone, the Big Lost, the Big Wood but above all the Madison, God's most perfect river - are in my blood.

I was packing too much into one essay, and as a result I did justice to neither theme. And for right now, it's the second essay that I want to write. Because the other night, I was watching my son sleep, and my son looks so much like my father. And I realized that those rivers are in my son's blood too. They are his legacy, a gift from the grandfather he will never know. One day I will take my son to the headwaters of the Madison River, and I will say to him "Your grandfather was a fisherman. He fished this river until this river was in his blood. This river is in your blood. This river is your birthright." And my son will roll river rocks in his hands, the way I did as a child, and although he will never meet the man, he will grow up bathed in the light of my father's long love affair with the waters of the American West. And in that way he will come to know my father, who he resembles so strongly. And the circle of generations will be closed.

And that's the essay I need to write. Because I need so badly to believe it can be that way.