OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Disaffected

February 20th, 2008

You know the blog is neglected when the phone starts ringing, people checking, since you haven’t posted in a while, that you’re ok.

I am. Ok, I mean.

It’s just — February. It’s rawness and in this week when spring seems almost within reach, you want to tread carefully. February is so brief, so fast, that all life seems much too much of a flash, and I find myself reducing life to what absolutely has to be done.

Like making Valentine’s day cards.
I apparently have recovered sufficiently from two years ago when Xander’s first grade teacher assigned as his homework in December a handmade card for each classmate and in February a handmade valentine for each classmate, with a cheery note about cocoa and craftiness and enjoying our kids, which was just not how things played out with a three year old unspooling all the ribbon and the six month old crawling through the glitter and trying to put scissors in his mouth. But this year? When my increasingly media savvy kids ask “What’s Scooby Doo have to do with Valentine’s Day?” and take pride in the handmade-ness of their cards, when the older three each designed their own lino stamp and Aodán even carved his own, helping me print them out
and Søren lit up picking a unique one out for each classmate, burbling about how “This is a holiday to celebrate love and everyone is going to be kind” with a Charlie Brown poignancy, it was completely worth it.

But, yeah, that was a week ago and doesn’t explain the silence since then. My parents came and we spent a lovely President’s Day Weekend enjoying sunshine and mild weather and cooking together, visiting the Columbia River gorge and even the OHSU tram just south of downtown .

But, honestly, that is not why I haven’t written. I have been with my family and still sneaked away to write. No, I’ve been blank, unsure of what to say. After I took my parents to the airport yesterday morning I came home and crawled into bed and slept most of the day away, letting Raven be responsible for the whole house and there was something almost poetically right that I have this cold that had reduced my voice to hoarse croakiness.

And this morning I woke ready to be here again, ready to parent my boys again, ready to write again. To write about how something flutters inside me when I see how impossibly small Søren is running across the schoolyard when I drop him off in the morning, dodging the clumps of older boys with their basketballs, obliviously missing the soccer ball caroming across the yard right behind him, and still, stopping every ten paces, to turn and wave at me one more time, a self-possession twice the size of his small body. To describe how there is this peculiar maternal solipsism that strains credulously at the notion that he who was once so tiny, so helpless is now so separate from me, has this reality completely separate from me, and, how this disbelieving part of me, on the other hand, knows that this is a doomed mother son romance where, in the middle of changing into his pajamas, he runs back into the dining room where I am sitting in order to show me ‘I love you Mom’ written in magic marker on his arm. That this affection must be turned elsewhere, that I’ll get nods of acknowledgement instead of the running full-tilt across the schoolyard to fling himself into a full-body hug when I come to pick him up at the end of the day, that I will, once again, have to learn to listen with a cool, respectful interest when he talks to me, without belying my own intense missing of his baby-self, to laugh when he tells jokes older than he is (than I am) as if I am hearing them for the first time. They don’t make valentines to express the welling up of a desperate need to just stop time a little as my children seem to go hurtling away from me. I feel I am watching a stop-motion film as they spring up around me, reminding me that I am getting older more quickly than I imagined I could, back when getting older seemed to promise respect and being sure of yourself all the time, and limitless freedom. They don’t make cards to catch the rightness of having the boys racing ahead of me on a trail, my parents holding hands, behind, and that middle-ness, that precariousness of this being a moment that perches there long enough for you to appreciate it, and then flies away.

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