the little bird

In high school, I had lofty ambitions. I dreamed of rock bands and tour buses, late nights and songs written on a napkin stained with coffee in a town I would forget. I considered a career as a tattoo artist, as a plain old regular artist, as a writer of heartbreaking fiction populated by girls wearing lots of black eyeliner and boots.

In college, my hopes expanded to include organic farms and roadside vegetable stands and my new husband, who would plant the garden and help me raise chickens in the backyard. We would eat fresh eggs for breakfast with black coffee and tomatoes plucked from the garden that morning. I would write in a sun room, revelling in the heat on a rare hot day, surrounded by flecks of dust that sparkled strangely in the sun, looking a little like mist or smoke.

There would be houseplants. We would have babies.

Now, my dreams are of a simpler, sweeter breed. They are wrapped up in this moment, where I make my own bread and granola and stay home with my baby and pray in the mornings. Every year I try to plant an herb garden and every year, to some degree, I fail, but still I have one rosemary plant that hangs on and from it I make fresh rosemary lemonade or rosemary bread that does not rise.

I meet my husband at work at the end of the day and we walk home together, our baby tucked up against one of our chests in a carrier, sleeping soundly.

None of this is perfect, but it is good.

We still hope for gardens and chickens and sun rooms, but we do not move toward some envisioned point, shining but obscured by the future. Instead, we rest in these moments, knowing that this is where God has placed us and wherever he sends us next will be better, not because we deserve it, not because it won’t be difficult, but because he is with us, shoring us up on either side and leading us boldly on.

Oh my. I’m still crying, I laughed so hard at this.

Occasionally in my prenatal reading, I’d come across a quote by some brand-new mom that invariably included the phrase “love at first sight,” as in, “I looked at my baby boy for the first time and it was love at first sight.” Often, these quotes were followed by a disclaimer assuring the reader that not every mother felt this initial shock of love and that different mothers responded to their babies in different ways.

And then there would be a little blurb about postpartum depression.

What I felt when I saw Lydia for the first time was not instant, heart-warming love, but a terrified awe - a beautiful, reverent, terrified awe. From her bleary eyes to her damp hair to her tiny, tiny toes, she struck me not as a sparkling being who quickly captivated me, heart and soul, but as a satisfying answer to the question I’d been asking for nine months.

Ah, I thought. It’s you.

I’ve never been one for love at first sight; I’ve never been one for romance. I knew Mitch for years before we ever exchanged a kiss, or looked at each other that way or talked of marriage (but once we did, whew! We did not wait around. I’m also not one for long engagements). When we did marry, I felt that same awe, as in, “I have known you all this time and yet - I have never really known you.” Since then, we’ve set out to truly get to know one another, in all our inconsistent, ever-changing glory.

I don’t expect us to reach the end of that particular road. I hope we never do.

So, I did not fall in love with my daughter at first sight, I know that now. Because now I have fallen for her completely. Sometime last week, when she started crying and her lip trembled just so and my response was not one of panic but one of sudden joy, I knew that we had made a few long steps down our own road, that putting some of the rough stuff of birth and breastfeeding and transition behind us, we are now able to lift our eyes a little from the path and look at each other and smile.

Ah, we both say, in our own languages. It’s you.

I have sun tea in my fridge. And homemade rosemary lemonade.

The sun comes out and suddenly, this town is full. Packed to the edge of the street corners with spaghetti-strapped, sun-screened bodies. No day shows this off quite as boldly as Saturday, when the Farmer’s Market is in full swing, boasting sights and sounds and scents so overwhelming that a girl could just sit on a bench all morning and take in the show with all five senses.

While I recovered from Lydia’s birth, camped out in a glider with infant and secondhand magazines, I looked forward to a Saturday like this one: setting out in the summer sun with Lydia in the carrier - snuggled up against Mitch’s chest, sleeping - all of us hurtling forward toward downtown just to browse and accidentally bump into folks we know.

These are the moments that make me feel like we really are a family. Removed from the context of our home and submerged in the loud, outside world, I see us as we must briefly appear in the eyes of strangers: new parents, sunburned ourselves and fretting over our daughter’s gentle skin.

After I kicked my high heels into the back of my closet and tumbled into bed, baby in my arms - after Mitch hung up his dress shirt and brushed his teeth and kissed me goodnight - it occurred to me that this, somehow, felt so adult. Dropping the baby off with the grandparents, dressing up, going to a reunion. At a casino.

Then coming home early, because we all need our precious rest.

That evening, we clinked glasses with people we hadn’t seen in all ten of those years, with folks whose blogs we followed, whose kids we knew, whose lives we’d dropped clean out of. The playing field felt suddenly level, and it hardly mattered what elaborate ties had been made or broken or sordidly tangled over the course of those four years - after ten, they were all sorted out.

There were people I’d looked forward to seeing that I hardly spoke to, because I stumbled into conversations with people I’d forgotten about, people I hadn’t expected to see at all, and those conversations were engrossing enough to eat up entire hours.

Three more years and it will be my turn. Will that make us doubly grown-up?

O, how well I remember this room! The sink, a concave foundation for towers of dirty dishes, each one boasting the remnants of past meals! Once these dishes were delicious, homemade things, but these days it’s not unlikely to find knives crusted with frozen pizza sauce or seven bowls with corresponding spoons bearing evidence of granola - eaten for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Other people’s dishes have found their way into this sink, having been emptied of their tasty gifts and left at the edge of the counter, waiting mournfully to be cleaned and returned to the kindly lands from whence they came.

The oven, recently replaced, has been left to collect crumbs from cheese sandwiches, assembled in a hurry on the stovetop after the counter became cluttered beyond use. We have reheated some things in this oven, and I have made batches of granola every so often, if only to keep myself dimly familiar with this kitchen and what it does. For the most part, though, this oven remains cold, unused.

Alas!

This week, I couldn’t take it anymore. There are still stacks of dishes in the sink, but now they bear the battle scars of a “zesty” edamame salad, Orangette’s Busy Day Cake, topped with Artisan Sweets’ Balsalmic Strawberries and, due to my inability to follow a recipe combined with the bare bones state of our cupboards, a dish I like to call “lemony tuna casserole with elements of potato ham bake,” though one couldn’t help noticing that neither lemon, tuna, potato nor ham made an actual appearance in the dish.

Delicious.

Of course, it’s been ten years. If it had been nine years, or eleven, we wouldn’t have received an invitation by mail for Mitch’s ten-year high school reunion, right? But we did, so one can only assume that ten years has actually passed since Mitch graduated, that year of commando missions and swimming at the lake by night and band practice in the garage and drama.

Ah, the drama.

Fortunately, Mitch and I went to the same high school (his senior year was my freshman), so I won’t be at a loss for folks to socialize with. A few classmates dropped by the other night for beer and burritos, and of course the yearbook was unearthed and the pages, sodden with signatures, were turned as we looked for forgotten names and remembered faces and told the same worn stories again and again. This was, we joked, the “reunion pre-game show.” We were doing our homework.

And so, tomorrow night we will take off for our first sans-baby evening since that fateful Mothers’ Day, I in my high-heeled shoes and Mitch in his slacks and best tie. We will eat dinner, drink cocktails, do adult things! Remember those? Things that don’t involve spit up or diapers or sweet baby smiles or cooing or snuggling or…

I am understandably apprehensive about this. Excited. But apprehensive.

Tonight Mitch gave Lydia a bottle in preparation for her evening at my parents’ and she took to it vigorously, grinning at him as if it was the best thing since, well, breastmilk, that her dad was feeding her. Like, the two best things in the world! At the same time! Also, she laughed. She smiled at him and gave him the sweetest chuckle, bestowing upon him the first of what I hope will be many chuckles.

I was too smitten to bother with jealousy.

Recently, our daughter discovered the classic infant art of spitting up.

Yes, I know, those of you who have children are laughing, shuddering and nodding your heads knowingly while those of you who don’t are wondering why on earth I’m even posting about this.

I need the therapy. That’s why.

As Lydia’s most popular canvases, both Mitch and I are finding this a difficult art form to endorse. For the most part, she adorns us with wee dollops of regurgitated lunch (or second breakfast, or elevensies, or midnightsies - really, there’s a variety of meals to choose from), with the occasional foray into larger scale projects that involve soiled clothes and sponge baths and barely withheld curses.

Nothing so far has come even close to Sunday’s masterpiece, an eruption so sudden and huge and unstoppable that Mitch actually used the words “waterfalling” and “cascading” when describing what, exactly, Lydia’s work did while it ran down my belly and puddled in my lap. The kid soaked every single article of clothing I had on, and when I say “soaked,” I am not exaggerating: I had to peel them off of my grossly damp skin as I ran for the shower. And when I say “every single article,” I mean underwear and bra included (I was not wearing socks), and just for good measure, let’s throw in the cushion of the chair I was sitting on.

The event so traumatized Mitch and I that even the daintiest burp sends us running for cover. Give us a hiccup and we’re on the alert, burp cloths at the ready, just in case.