Res Ipsa Loquitor

It’s four years today since you died.  It’s so hard to believe, since your loss is so present to me even now.  I remember everything about that day, the shock, the disbelief, the stunning realization that you were not in that body laying in the hospital bed.  For years, I had worried I would occupy that position, standing next to you, with so many last words hanging in there, so much I didn’t get to say.

You’ve missed so much.  The birth of E, Z growing up, our family’s ups and downs, the day to day routine of how our life unfolded in Bellingham.  It was such a wonderful plan that you and B would be here to witness all this, and so bittersweet when it didn’t turn out that way.  There are many things about my life that are wonderful, so many people I love and who love me.  But the absence of you in my life continually strikes me as sharply as it did four years ago today.  It used to panic me when I would think about never seeing you again.  The panic has subsided now, but the surprise hasn’t.  Even still I sometimes pick up the phone to call you before I remember that my cell phone coverage just isn’t that good.

I’m still mad that you died and even still a little mad at you.  I know you didn’t choose it.  It just happened, people get sick sometimes.  But I feel robbed of something, robbed of what I hoped our relationship would become once you had retired and could spend time with our family, teach Z and E important things, take Z fishing.  When Z was a baby, sometimes you were the only person who could calm him.  That unflappable demeanor that sometimes drove me crazy soothed our colicky boy so that he could finally look around and take it all in.  He needed you.  He still does.

So, I know you’ll never read this letter.  But I need to say it to you, that I miss you and love you.  That as I go through my day today, I will remember everything I did that day.  There will be times today when I will forget what day it is, then be caught short by the realization.  And though that will hurt and I will cry, it will be ok, because I will be remembering you and thinking of you and talking to you.  

Miss you. 

This morning E woke up at 6 a.m., just as I was lacing up my running shoes to go for my morning run (read:  alone time).  I tried to convince her it was still nighttime, but though she was tired, she was having none of it.  So she got dressed, I bundled her in blankets, gave her some milk and a banana, and put her in the stroller.  Off we went, E half sleeping in the stroller and me “running” while listening to Morning Edition.  (Remind me to tell you how I now have Carl Kasell on my answering machine.)  

I say “running” in quotes because I have really struggled with my fitness lately.  I had some significant surgery two years ago and then had to have more extensive surgery at the end of August 07 that caused a chronic pain problem and all that has really thrown a wrench in my running.  

Before all these medical dramas, I ran every day, sometimes three miles, sometimes 20 if I happened to be training for a marathon.  I’ve run a few marathons, all prior to having kids.  I started running my first semester of law school as something that was just mine.  The first few times, I came home wheezing like a freight train and the next morning my quads would hurt so much I limped in the most pathetic way.  I struggled with my asthma, but eventually, I managed to get that under control and I kept running.  I started exploring Seattle, a new town for me, as I ran.  I ran in the city and in the mountains.  It just became a part of me.  I ran throughout law school and aside from my husband and my best law school friend, it was the thing that got me through those torturous years.

After law school, I got really serious about long distance running and started training for marathons.  I should stop here and say that I am not a very good runner.  I am dedicated and I have endurance, but I am slow.  I am no gazelle.  But I love it and I worked hard and learned how to train and ran long distances regularly. 

Then I had kids and didn’t have time to run my traditional loooonnnggg runs on Sunday mornings and I began shoe-horning my runs in between teaching or after the kids went to bed or before they got up or while they were up but would suffer the stroller for awhile.  But I kept running, rarely missing a planned run.

So the last few months have been hard since running has sometimes triggered my pain problem and made life miserable.  Before we moved here, I ran several days a week with my best friend.  Since moving here, I haven’t found a running partner and that’s been kind of hard since I have to motivate myself; when a possible result of a run is pain, it’s tough.

So lately, I’ve been walking and running, a mix.  It’s not nearly as satisfying as running and feeling strong, but it’s something.  It’s the time I have to myself and it’s a way I can feel good about my body even when I feel like I’m bit at war with myself.  

So this morning when E woke up and I took her with me, I felt a little peeved even though it wasn’t all that different–I still listened to the news, still got sweaty, still had a little “me” time.  I felt a little bad that I felt a little peeved.  And then I realized it’s more that I’m just frustrated with not having my body just do what I want it to do.  I just want to run.  I don’t want to run in the Olympics.  I’m willing to wait a few years to be able to have time to train for a marathon.  But I am yearning to lace up my shoes and run without pain, feeling strong and powerful.  

Despite the title, this post is not about how long one can retain one’s urine, which is a little game my children like to play.  As you might imagine, this usually results in disaster, but I seem to be unable to stem the tide of jokes related to all-things-potty, so the game of holding it continues.  (Of course, I exaggerate here–E is 3 and cannot entertain the notion of holding it to drive me insane, but she does hold it in order to continue playing and THAT results in disaster.)

Now, where was I?  Oh yes, what this post is ACTUALLY about.  A year or so ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who is a lawyer in town.  We meet for lunch every once in awhile to talk about our professional lives and we talk a lot about how to balance work and family etc.  Anyway, I was talking a class that I developed and now teach once a year (at least I did, since I may not continue to teach after my most recent experience with it).  The class centers around concepts of identity–ethnic identity, personal and group identity and more–and I approach the issues using narrative texts.  Though I sometimes use theory, I focus on narrative in order to get students to think about the value of story and the way in which our skill at telling our own story may or may not result in social change.  (The college I teach at has a mission of social change and social justice.)  Though I never intended this, the class has become a class in which students explore their personal identity in deep and very revealing ways, especially in their written work.  As a result, I learn painful, sometimes shocking things about my students.  It has become very overwhelming.

In addition, the work I do as a lawyer/judge involves me hearing the most difficult stories about people’s lives and that often includes children’s lives.  As a judge, my job is to think about how to make those people’s lives better and that means making very difficult decisions.  

At one time in my life, probably before I had kids, I could do those things and walk away and not have those stories impact my non-work life.  That skill seems to have evaporated.  I do have professional distance, but I worry about my students and the people I see in court.  But I can deal with the worry.

What I struggle with is what to do with the stories.  It’s become pretty much a matter of course that students divulge their drug addictions, sexual assaults, eating disorders, abortions, you name it.  Many of them tell me things they’ve never told anyone.  Much of it is enormously painful.  Often, I don’t discuss the writing these students are doing with the students; I give feedback and they write more papers, but they don’t talk about those things in class, for the most part, and they only rarely come talk to me in person.  

So, back to lunch with my friend.  At this lunch, she listened to me intently and then looked me straight in the eye and said “You invited it.  Now you have to hold it.”  And although I have not explicitly asked students to write about their personal lives, they have elected to do so in papers in response to reading the texts in which the authors do it.  So now I have somehow become someone who holds these secrets, who holds these deeply personal stories.  I know now.  I can’t unknow it.  I can’t stop holding those stories.  And I can’t tell them since they are not mine.  

Of course, she was right–I do have to hold the stories.  But I’m not sure how big the storage unit is, honestly.  After this most recent course, I just realized that I am all full and I am not teaching the course again (this is potentially a problem since there is always a waiting list and students rely on it for their course of study).  But I don’t quite know what to do with the sadness I’ve inherited from these students.   

You know, living in Bellingham is kind of like living with an abusive boyfriend (not that I would know directly, but you know what I mean).  Today it’s almost 70 degrees, sunny, no wind.  I spent the morning with the kids at a park by the Bay.  Birds were floating on the water (flocks of them) just sitting there resting since the water was so still and even.  People were getting their boats ready to go out for a sail.  Kids were riding bikes and scooters.  E and Z rode their scooters all along the paths, Z tearing the place up and E slowly scooting along like an old woman.  E got off her scooter at one point and stood on the grass looking at the boats and said, “This is incredible.”  (Thus making her three year old self appear even more like an old woman.)  I sat on a bench and took in the beauty of the sea, the happy sounds of the kids riding their scooters, the sun on my face.  And I forgave Bellingham its weather.  

But tomorrow, it’s supposed to be 50 degrees and rainy and then it’s supposed to rain all week long.  And the honeymoon phase will be over and I will be back to scowling and cursing spring.

***

Well, I’ve given up the cloak of anonymity since it was just too complicated and confusing (for me, anyway).  Anyway, no one is reading this but me for now, so who cares?  I know who I am.  OK, well, that’s a broad statement, but let’s just say it works here in this context to say I know who I am.  Whatever.  Too much academia. Anyway, a good friend who is an international woman of mystery and thus shall remain nameless told me she recently re-read my posts (all three of them!) and had things to say in response, which jogged my memory thusly “Oh, right, I had a blog” (or, in LOLspeak, “I has a blog–let me show you it”  or “UR blog, ur doin it rong”) and so I thought rather than thinking about writing on it, I actually would.  I don’t know how people who write daily do it, but I could do more than write, say, bi-annually. I guess I keep thinking I ought to have something to write about or, alternatively, that if I had some time to write, it ought to be devoted to my academic writing (hello tenure!  would like to meet you someday), but now I realize all are excuses for not writing, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of the blog, which is to write.  Without pressure or guilt.  I’m really good at doing things without pressure or guilt.  Ha! Ha!  I crack myself up.I’ve been reading a lot of blogs about parenting and, more specifically, parenting children who are perhaps more challenging than most.  I don’t know that Z falls into that category, or any, really, but I do really relate to Mir and Susan who write beautiful posts about how hard it is to keep up with kids whose minds race and race in a way that we, as their parents, really struggle to understand.  When Mir wrote something along the lines of “there I was looking for it, waiting for it, expecting it, and I missed it,” well, I really related to that.  Being a mother shocks me routinely with how often I get blindsided, either by my kids’ reactions to things or my own.  I get so surprised by the depth of my own anger and the way in which I seem to have so few reserves when it comes to certain things. In my work life, I am totally empathetic to the struggles of my students, even of the people who come in front of me when I’m being a judge.  But when it comes to my kids, I actually feel myself thinking “I know that didn’t REALLY hurt, so get over it.”  I don’t say it, but the feelings are there and as a veteran of family members who didn’t say much but communicated a great deal with an arched eyebrow and tone of disapproval, I know my kids feel I sometimes don’t really mean it when I’m trying to soothe. God, report me right to the Parenting Police.

On the other hand, I don’t want my kids to feel like they need me to recover from every injury or insult.  I want them to have a reserve they can go to of their own.  Turns out my son does, but I worry that he’s going to feel that he must have that reserve because he’s not getting what he needs from us.

Earlier today I was listening to a radio interview with a woman who wrote a book about the science of happiness in which she said that too much introspection–rumination– creates unhappiness.  She wasn’t saying you should live an unexamined life, but that we can overdo it.  Maybe that’s what I am doing.  But then what if I’m ruminating on all the wrong things?

Ruminating.  UR doing it rong.

I have tried to be patient with you, Bellingham, but I think I may have reached my limit.  Two weeks ago, I went outside without a coat, with short sleeves, in fact, and began cleaning up the garden.  I welcomed the start of spring, gently caressing the small shoots that poked up out of the ground destined to be daffodils and tulips. And now, Bellingham, here I sit next to my sliding glass window, next to a roaring hot fire, watching the snow accumulate, watching big, honking flakes come down from the cold, grey sky.  Oh it sounds romantic, I know.  But I’ve defended you long enough, Bellingham, and I no longer see the romance in fires in June and I no longer see the fun in one-week-its-spring-the-next-dead-of-winter again.I’ve defended you to friends and family who’ve come to visit, told them how much you have to offer, how much there is to do here, while they peer out from beneath rain drenched coats, blinking the drops out of their eyes.  I’ve parked in scenic spots above the bay and pointed out to the grey nothingness where the clouds and the water meet and said “When it’s not cloudy/rainy/foggy like this, there’s water out there, and a bay, and kayaks and boats!”  I’ve wandered out onto the tide flats in knee high boots and raincoats to look for sea life when most people would be inside with tea and books. No more, Bellingham.  I can no longer pretend that you’re anything but a sea of disappointing weather.  A tease, really, a taste of summer that fades into a rising damp.  A taste of sun by the sea fading into foggy drizzle. So I guess this is it.  The rose colored glasses are off and I now recognize you for what you are, Bellingham.  A lovely place to raise kids, lots to do, many things that speak well of you.  But I’m through pretending that the weather isn’t so bad.  The weather bites and I need some blankets and a trip to Hawaii.  And a light machine.  And some prozac.  Cause, baby, it’s cold outside.

Well, it’s been a long time since I posted.  Since last posting, I had some surgery that took the wind right out of my sails. Or my blog.  Whatever.  Anyway, I remember feeling very grouchy when Miss Doxie disappeared for the entire summer, right after posting how sick her father had been.  I thought something terrible had happened and also missed having her hilarious stories break up my day.  But I don’t think that’s a problem here since I have yet to de-lurk to the Blogosphere and advertise my presence.  So, dear reader (hi Mom!), I have returned to my blog and expect to update more frequently.

 Lately I’ve been mulling over things like age and aging and my age and What It All Means.  Perhaps it’s because I’m almost 40 and am beginning to see that number with some suspicion, like Susan.  (Hey!  Check me out with learning how to link!)  It may also be because my body doesn’t behave as it did, say, 10 years ago.  Yeah, that’s it.  Trying to heal from my surgery and finding it to be exceedingly difficult has been a real downer.  Also, I’ve recently realized that most of my students are 20 years younger than I am, but are still adults.  This is a shocker.  I’m not a peer anymore (not that I would want to be–I’ll take adulthood over early adulthood any day).

 Being laid low has given me a lot of time to think about this and reflect on where I am versus where I expected to be versus where other people think I should be versus where others my age are.  In most things, what other people think of me and my choices don’t matter much and, in fact, don’t register a whole lot on my radar screen anymore (thank you thousands of hours of therapy!).  But watching television and reading magazines, as I have been doing a lot of since I’m mostly loaded on lots of pain medication, I’ve found a lot of my contemporaries profiled as people who have Made It.  And it makes me wonder whether I have Made It.

 So I’ve been wondering what it means to me to Make It.  When I was in law school, I imagined myself wearing fancy suits and being a fancy lawyer in a fancy city.  I didn’t go into law school imagining that life, but so many in law school craved that life that I began to see myself there.  I did it, to an extent, and found it to be less glamorous than it had seemed from the outside.  It was a lot of work, a little fun, a lot troubling.  I bailed, for a whole host of reasons, and found a great job teaching in a law school for awhile and now I’m at an undergraduate institution with a great deal of academic freedom to do whatever I want to do. 

One day when I was sitting in my office at the law school, a lawyer who owned a Fancy Law Firm with lots of Fancy Clients came by my office to offer me a job with her.  She sat down and said “Teaching is beneath you.  You belong in the practice of law.”  She gave me her card, told me to call her, and left. 

 That little episode stuck with me–I mean, what a nerve, right? But I was amazed by her certainty, her confidence, her absolute sense that she could say whatever she wanted to and I wondered if she was the kind of person I ought to be.  To see that in writing, well, it’s obviously silly.  I’m confident, with a helping of insecurity and a dash of “I’m a fraud,” but I’ve managed to show a confident face than that to the world (thank you thousands of hours of therapy!).  But this lawyer, I think she goes to bed every night without a shred of self-doubt.  (Now, of course, this also means that other people go to bed every night hating her guts, and I would like to avoid that as much as possible.)

In any case, I think that there are many people who would look at the career I have and the path I am creating for my place in the world as being, you know, reasonable and interesting and not anything to complain about.  And I am not complaining (maybe whining).  What strikes me is how so much of our country is based upon this “Look at what these people have!  You should have this!  You should be this person so you can have her life!”  And if you see & hear that enough, it sure makes an impression.  Especially if you are easily seduced due to the pain medication.  (I’ve found myself thinking of getting a tattoo, which is evidence of my current lack of judgment given the fact that I basically hate tattoos. With some exceptions.  You know, like for you, if you have one and are reading this!  Hey, way to pander!)

I think that what I would like to say I have and don’t, yet, is financial security.  I was reading this article about Mitt Romney and it discusses that his father (Mitt’s father, George) raised his children to have financial security first before running for office.  Seems reasonable (the only thing I could find that seemed reasonable about Mitt Romney, but I digress).  What struck me about this is that Romney just went out and did that.  One of those people who makes millions of dollars before 40.

I don’t need millions of dollars (although if my lottery ticket hits the jackpot, I wouldn’t turn it down).  But I would like to stop being worried about how I am going to manage all the daycare bills (Hi Nanny!  Can I knit you a sweater?  Write your will?  Write a boring, erudite article about nannies?).  I can’t quite figure out how to achieve financial security in the professions I have chosen.  (I have an idea and I am working on it, but it still seems out of reach, despite the fact that I have a business plan and business partner and so on.) 

In every other way, though, I feel very lucky.  I have a wonderful family, a loving, supportive partner, jobs that I enjoy, a lovely place to live.  And I have looked out from this particular window of privilege and surveyed the world around me and realized that I have tremendous affluence when compared with most of the rest of the world.  Things in the country have gotten so distorted in terms of what’s considered success.  You need the fancy car, the right clothes, the right school for your kids.  I don’t think I need those things.  I think the drive for those things makes me crazy.  Ultimately I want less stuff, not more.

 It’s weird how being so exposed to popular culture makes me question my own choices.  I attempt to teach many of my students how to insulate themselves from those messages.  And yet, here I am, watching What Not to Wear and thinking “Wow, I better get some of those comfortable 3 inch heels!”  Because according to Clinton and Stacy, if you spend $600, they actually are very comfortable. 

Even if your conscience isn’t, I guess.

A year or two ago, I heard about the website Post Secret (http://postsecret.blogspot.com/) on NPR (because I am always listening to NPR)(and was recently on an NPR show, gratuitous self-promotion avoided unless you’ve already un-anonymized already, in which case, nevermind, but I digress).  Post Secret started as a piece of performance art, (a genre I generally don’t get and don’t have much time for, frankly, but I digress), in which Frank Warren asked people to anonymously send in secrets to him.  Secrets were to be on postcards only and should be works of art (liberally construed).  Since the first posting, Frank has received thousands and thousands of cards, published three books, toured the country with a travelling art show of the secrets, and, according to many, saved lives. 

I’ve been fascinated by this website.  Each week, Frank posts a few new secrets (on Sunday mornings).  It’s one of the first things I do on Sunday.  I read the secrets–sometimes they are funny, sometimes they are heartbreaking, sometimes infuriating.  I sent out a link to the website to a few of my nearest and dearest, but found that most of them weren’t captivated by it. 

Obviously, many people are, otherwise this Post Secret thing wouldn’t be the phenomenom it is, but I wondered why it didn’t capture other people the way it did me.  I don’t have an answer to that, but it’s made me think.

I’ve realized over the last year or so of looking at the website that I have never been tempted to send in my own card.  In fact, I’ve wanted to do one, but I’ve found that I don’t seem to have secrets.  This seems odd to me, since I tend to be pretty reserved out in the world, even though I do a lot of work that is very public.  But I have pretty much told someone in the world all there is to know–which is not to say I’ve told everyone all there is to know.  It is to say that I don’t have any deep burning secret that I haven’t been able to tell someone. 

This has been somewhat of a startling realization for me.  Something Frank Warren says is “There are two kinds of secrets:  the ones we keep from others and the ones we keep from ourselves.”  That kind of worries me.  It nags at the same worry that I think most people have that we might be one of those Annoying People and not know it.  What don’t I tell myself?  But over the last 15 or so years, I’ve really worked hard to be upfront with what I am thinking and feeling and doing.  No secrets, so far as I know. 

 Anyway, in one of my classes last year, I asked my students to look at the website.  The next class meeting someone asked if we could do the same thing and put the secrets up on the wall of the room.  We did it.  I was astounded at the disclosures.  You never know if the secrets are true or not, but I was amazed at how sincerely troubled many of my students were.  I never expected the confessions of drug addiction, self-mutilation, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of being “found out” about one thing or another. 

 It made me feel very sad, that so many of my students were in the midst of such enormous pain.  Perhaps that’s the job of college students; certainly my early college years were a mass of confusion and trying to figure out how to be a grown up.  Certainly there were times in my life where I felt I had no one I could really tell the truth to about what my inner life was like.  I thought I was the only one who felt that way.  Eventually, I discovered a few people who became true friends and who have been with me for years now, but before them, I think I felt pretty at sea. 

I think what I find so compelling about Post Secret is the complexity of people’s lives.  We all do our daily rituals of getting up, going about our day and it often looks pretty mundane.  For me, Post Secret shows me that ordinary people are not ordinary.  It reminds me to look closer.

On the Post Secret website, Frank suggests that people who like the site link to it, so that’s what gave rise to this post.  Given my somewhat overwhelming experience of receiving the secrets of my students, I am amazed at how much Frank has to hold within him, now that he knows the secrets of so many.

I don’t have a whole lot of clear memories of my childhood–I remember places we lived and travelled to, but not much about day to day life.  But one thing I’ve been thinking about lately is my mother’s occasional outbursts of “No one appreciates me around here!”  I can remember not really understanding why that was so frustrating, though I think she was right a lot of the time.

 My mother didn’t work “on the outside” until I was a teenager.  She took care of me, my father, and the house, the cooking and cleaning, all the things that are required to keep a house running.  She also did tons of volunteer work in different capacities.  Looking back, I can see her boundless energy, something she’s always had.  I know that I took her presence at home was something I took for granted–it never occured to me she wouldn’t be there and she always was.

Now, as a mother myself, I understand her sense of frustration in a way I don’t think I could have if I hadn’t become a parent myself.  The energy it takes to keep things running is a kind of stamina that’s hard to empathize with until you’ve done it yourself.  At least that’s the way I’ve experienced it.

There’s that old joke that you promise yourself when you’re a child that you’ll never do “x” or “y” that your parents do or you’ll never say “x” or “y” like your parents do, and then the decades pass and you find yourself saying “BECAUSE I SAID SO!” when your five year old asks why do I have to wear a coat outside? and why can’t we have ice cream for dinner? and why do you always say no? and why can’t we watch a video?  It happens to the best of us, which is why we laugh about it.

Grey is really intent right now on making sure that everyone knows that he doesn’t need adult help for anything, because he already knows how to do it, by god, and he doesn’t need the likes of YOU anymore!  This is, of course, problematic when he does not yet know how to swim but insists that he does and then leaps into the water and sinks like a stone.  Because, of course, it is YOUR FAULT that he’s got the water up his nose and in his lungs and even though he can hardly breathe and is coughing up half a lung, he does manage to tell you that you should have taught him to swim before you let him leap into the water.

And you swallow hard, desparately trying to keep the words “Dammit, I told you not to do that because you DON’T KNOW HOW TO SWIM AND WON’T LET ME TEACH YOU!” inside, even though you want to shriek them from the side of the pool, which you can’t do because you have to hold onto him and nurse him through the coughing and hacking, and do so with grace and love and aplomb.

Not that this has ever happened to me.

So last night as I was sitting on the couch folding laundry after the kids had gone to bed and thinking about how much work I have to do this week and writing a list of the things I didn’t do this weekend, I found myself feeling kind of sorry for myself that as hard as I work and as hard as ML works, Grey and Grace will never appreciate it.  (This, I know, is not true, because already they both do have their moments when they recognize that it’s not an invisible prescence that does their laundry and makes their peanut butter sandwiches and teaches them how to use a glue gun etc. etc.)

It was my mother’s birthday this weekend.  She’s very low key about her birthday, so we just had some cake and sang happy birthday and gave her a card.  But really what I wanted to give her was this:  I appreciate all you’ve done for me and ML and our kids.  And thanks for rescuing me when I jumped into the pool after you’d told me not to and then sank like a stone.  I’m glad you taught me to swim.  

That’s all for now.

For many years now, five, I suppose, other parents have said these words to me:  “Enjoy it.  It goes by so quickly.”  These words have haunted me because I felt so often like time just dragged along, sometimes minutes seeming to be hours.  I remember sitting on my couch at three o’clock in the morning during one of many middle-of-the-night feedings, with my son happily nursing and thinking “He’s only three months old…and I am already so tired.  It’s still a year before he’ll start talking to me and maybe two before we actually have conversations.  How is it that this goes by quickly?” 

 On my daily runs, I listen to audio books and plays that I’ve downloaded onto my MP3 player.  This past week, I’ve been listening to Julia Sweeney’s plays “Letting Go of God” and “In a Family Way.”  They’re all funny and insightful and incredibly thought provoking, but one thing in particular had me doubled over laughing.  She adopted a baby girl from China after many years of struggling to figure out how to become a mother (she was single and had had a hysterectomy due to cervical cancer).  Over her years of waiting to be a mother, she had many daydreams about what she’d do with her daughter.  Finally, her daughter was home with her and she tells this story of taking her child to breakfast at Denny’s, going to the grocery store, rollerblading and swinging at the park and then says “And then we’d come home and I’d look up at the clock and find it was 7:30. . . . . a.m.”

Some people thrive on the baby years and some don’t.  I think I’m someone that really struggles when they’re tiny babies.  The first 18 months of both my children’s lives are a blur.  Thankfully I wrote things down, but I don’t remember much about our day to day lives, other than frantically trying to balance work and home and generally berating myself about how I did neither well. 

As I’ve said before, our children couldn’t get more different from each other and that was evident in their early months.  Now, though, they are really kids rather than babies.  It’s hard for me to see that sometimes.  But just the other day, Grey, who has just learned to ride his bike without training wheels, zipped away from me at the park, doing loops along a trail that goes around the playground where Grace was playing.  I looked down for a moment, looked up to see where he was on the loop and for just a moment, I saw him the way the rest of the world does–as a little boy.  He has lanky legs, spindly long arms, and a face that has lost any trace of the big cheeks of his baby and toddler-hood. 

 And then my husband showed me some photos he had taken of Grace and one popped up on the computer screen.  It’s an exceptional picture of her, and again, I saw her the way others do.  She is breathtaking, one of those little girls that you can look at and immediately leap forward to the teenage years where you see yourself erecting 10 feet high chain link fences around the house to keep out the hoards of admiring youngsters.

So I’ve realized these kids of ours are no longer babies, not really at all.  Everyday they grow more and slip away from me, ever so slightly.  And I look back at the last five years and think, wow, it all goes by so quickly.  And then I find myself saying that to my friends who have six and nine month old babies and they look at me, with those bleary eyes of the sleep deprived and they smile at me as if to indicate assent, and I see in their eyes that question:  “What is she talking about?” 

That’s all for now.