CRYING WHILE WRITING
I Said I Wouldn’t Blubber About Wild Geese, But I Lied
Sending Two Sons Off to College and Our Littlest to Transitional Kindergarten — All in One, Bittersweet Swoop
“Something told the wild geese It was time to go. Though the fields lay golden, Something whispered — ‘snow.’”
-Rachel Field, in: “Something Told the Wild Geese” [external link; National Poetry Day]
It was the best of cries, it was the ugliest of cries.
Wes, our secondborn, left for college last week. It’s a natural part of life, and he was very excited. But I had feelings. Then, our baby — our last one, Andy — started elementary. Not so much as a backward glance from him. *Cue feelings.*
And as we launched our eldest yesterday, I was fine. I was fine. I was happy for Andy, Wes, and John!
That is, until I heard the song.
Joe and John were packing John’s car, I’d gone upstairs to fold laundry, and Bob Marley’s Is This Love? came on.
We used to dance to that song — John, months old; I, a depressed, barely-past-teenaged mother who was trying her damnedest. With his diapered little butt in one palm and the back of his head in the other, I held him and two-stepped. I tried to endure.
I should have tried harder to enjoy.
I thought of those words the old ladies — assholes, every one — stop you in the supermarket to say. Their goddamned warnings are true, after all.
“Enjoy them, enjoy them! My dear, ENJOY them. Because they really do grow up so fast.”
We experience time differently as parents. It’s not just that we’re older than our childhood selves, or that each passing year represents a smaller slice of our lives.
The reality is stranger: The act of caring for a child changes time. Physically. Neurally. Palpably — but far more so for us aging caregivers.
Why in the cartwheeling hell?
What would ad-hoc metaphysics say about this? Probably that our kid-shaped memories — keepsake memories — are so vivid they can thin-slice time. The brain blinks and unconsciously takes stock.
John’s downy newborn hair. Preschool-aged Wes, trying to pick up a frozen Butterball at Thanksgivingtime. Birthday cupcakes. Farting-dog books. Smells of syrup in their hair after breakfast. Sounds of small legs running impossibly fast, chasing each other in outgrown pajamas.
Wild “pet” frogs that were never ours to keep.
Bikes and balls and a million miniature cars. Tricycling in the nude and rocking with dollies. Co-op preschool paintings — single smears of yellow tempera, and that lawn mower toy they both obsessed over. Our secondhand swing set with the giant, plastic bubble that Wes used to lick for some reason.
An indelible memory in John’s mind, of when the cat chased a bird into the house and practically climbed the walls in pursuit. Fast, so fast.
Why didn’t we take these boys to Disneyland earlier, when they were tiny? They would have talked about the Cars ride for years — the way John recounted the kitty chasing the birdie.
Without wonder, our days are wiped raw as a snot-streaked cheek.
Thin slicing is a Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink thing [external link]. It lets us form judgments and impressions to make sense of the world. It lets us sense danger and choose.
Old ladies — thin and withered — stopped me at checkstands, sputtering their germs and unpleasant truths. Why, then, did I think I was immune?
The only sense I can make of this, the natural order of parenting, sits in the baby seat of my Costco cart and looks southward. It is there at the windowsill, enjoying the turning leaves. But above all, it circles back with the birds.
I wipe the snot from my face and look at the sky.
May our eldest two sons come home often. And may they all feel old warmths with each new season.
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