siblings

Rambling heart.

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Steve Jobs said having a kid is like having your heart run around outside your body. The internet tells me he wasn’t the first (and wasn’t a model parent, as if there is such a thing.) That it likely was Elizabeth Stone, a professor at Fordham and the author of three books, who provided the anonymous quote to a friend for an essay in The Village Voice back in 1985.

“Making the decision to have a child–it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

We lived in New York in 1985. Maybe my mom read that and retold it to me, I’m not sure. I do remember her saying something like it to me one night when I was late coming home. Before the days of cell phones, when teenagers roamed free and parents just had to wait.

“You don’t get it. You girls are my heart. And you are out there where I have no idea where you are.”

I get it now.

I have three hearts walking around outside of me, spending more and more time out of my sight. My hearts are vulnerable–as far as I’m concerned. Not that they see it that way, of course. They are growing and exploring and taking risks.

They push boundaries and wander farther each day, with a rhythm that resembles mine but is not the same.

Tonight they were all beside me as we watched a Harry Potter movie. One with a horcrux–a black magic object in which a wizard places a bit of their own cleaved soul so that they can survive the death of their bodies. The wizard just might come back and escape death if the horcrux is deployed correctly.

There are no horcruxes in our world. No earthly way to escape death. But the concept still holds. The hearts we create, biologically or otherwise, they continue. They cause us enormous stress and joy, trepidation and light. They survive us and through them, we live on.

Remembering my mom’s words and the magic of her love and Harry Potter tonight, I’m stuck on this permanence of heart idea. That there can be pieces of us out there, even where we can’t see them. And even when we’re gone, how they remain. Walking, talking, singing your favorite songs, making their own hearts outside of their bodies someday if they so choose, and singing your songs to them.

My hearts are three beating drums in a sleeping band across the hall. I hope they always know how much they are loved, and that no matter how far they roam, their music will always be with me. And mine with them. It’s the real magic of parenthood. Of love strings that bind and stretch, and hold on. Paying no mind to concepts of matter.

Soggy metaphors for loss and love on the second day of summer camp.

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It tends to comes out of nowhere, when it is the furthest thing from my mind. And then it is there, my frontal lobe sending mom-soaked dopamine compounds throughout my brain. Making me stop for a moment in my tracks, just long enough to pass through a sidewalk sprinkler of memories and emotion. The moisture is barely noticeable, quickly evaporating on a summer day. I can choose to stand still and let the sprinkler hit me again, or walk on. Usually I walk on, the shock of it quickly passing. Sometimes it leaves me chilled, but mostly it feels good. Cool and warm at the same time. Like her.

When my mom’s death was fresh, raw and recent, it felt like I was standing at the shore break after a storm. Unevenly spaced waves were crashing around me, carrying tangles of seaweed and other harsh matter dredged from the ocean bottom. It was hard to breathe. I couldn’t move as the sand gripped tighter and higher around my ankles with each wave. My eyes stung too much to open, making it impossible for me to know when the next wave would break over me.

It sucked.

Now, almost 5 years later, it sucks less. I can breathe. My eyes are open and I am no longer stuck in the sand and waves.

Still sometimes, I am drenched by loss of her.

Today was the second day of summer camp for my 3 year old son.  Yesterday’s drop off was easy, but by pick up time he was sobbing.  This morning he was refusing to enter the classroom.  Asking for a new camp, asking to go home, yelling for “one more minute of talking.”

I was late for work already, my mind racing with thoughts of the thousand things that [still] need to get done.  I was tired from his mid-night calls for trips to the bathroom, sips of water, made-up songs about tall towers, and blanket adjustments.  I wanted to pick him up and drop him in the middle of room and run.  I wanted to scream.

I closed my eyes for a second and was hit by the sprinkler. Confusing and cool, the thoughts rained down. I felt her. I felt her perpetual calmness and infinite patience in all child-related matters. I sat down on the bench outside the classroom and looked at his tear-soaked face. I asked if he wanted to play with me for a while and he nodded. We played with imaginary cars and jet planes. Then we zoomed those cars into the classroom and I asked if he wanted to see where his sister sat when this was her classroom. He nodded, then audibly “ooh”-ed as he sat in the chair that was his sister’s. A minute later he waved me off with a quick goodbye and I left.

It was comforting to him to think that his sister once sat where he sat. It is comforting to me to think that my mom was once where I am. I am not her. I don’t have the tolerance that she had; but I still have her.

I have the ability to call upon her, or to have my subconscious call upon her. To splash myself with the memory of her, and let those thoughts work their sometimes sad but, now, mostly wonderful magic. To remind me to stop rushing, to breathe. To let my kid find his way in his time–just like she did for all of hers.  And to abuse oceanic and neuropsychological metaphors–just as she would have done.  Love and miss you, Mommy.

All smiles on the first day. Not so much on the second.

On Siblings and Fairness, and Cupcakes.

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Nothing is fair in love and war…or cupcakes and siblings.  Try as we might, we can’t provide the same childhood experiences to each child we may be blessed with (and I use the term blessed with all due respect owed to whomever and whatever Creator, omniscient being, doctor, partner, scientist, birth mother, surrogate, stork or dumb luck fairy you might believe it is owed).  I remember reading an article once about how these two kids who grew up with the same parents, in the same house, had drastically different recollections of certain of childhood events.  I remember thinking, “of course they did!”

We all approach each situation with different eyes and expectations.  We look at the same exact thing and see different things.  Eyewitness accounts vary greatly when people are interviewed after a crime is committed.  One saw a 6 foot ten, pasty twenty-something.  Another saw a red hat on a kid of about 5’ 7”.  Another saw a knife with a black handle and nothing else.  It is it any wonder that kids in the same house, experiencing the same thing recall it differently?  I have a sister.  She and I have not compared notes, but I am as sure as my face is freckled that my sister has a different recollection of our shared childhood on a number of major points. Continue reading →