Summer Word Salad

updates and a blackberry corn cobbler revisit

Moonie writes down the time I expect her home on tiny scraps of paper she tears from the notebook that lives in the kitchen. The notebook that I tear my own scraps from for Lunch Box Love Letters. She’s overflowing with independence and a certain swagger that rides with it as she packs her backpack with crayons, a sketchbook, a tiny stuffie, and the orange piece of paper with “2:10” written boldly, as though she wrote it in the way I said it.

She’s one foot in asking to sleep in our bed and one foot in The Untethering. I am excited and scared for both of us.

It’s the first time she’s been fully entrusted with her own self- outside and away from the length of my arm, any adult’s arm. I watch her round the corner of the driveway at 2:08. She tells me she didn’t want to be late.

xxx

I see my own childhood anxiety in her and I hate it. I hate myself for sewing that into her cells. I hate that she has to know that gnawing feeling. She has it. I hate it. I do my best to teach her tools and to be reassuring. I cry about it and the useless guilt I feel when I’m alone.

xxx

Italy stained my skin with the sun and Campari from one million spritz. It stained the youngest and softest parts of my brain and heart with red poppies growing in the ditch and food that was unfussy because it was just food and meals and dishes prepared with the simplest but most pure, quality ingredients. I went there to that place that was once unattainable. I went there with a love that holds me well. I went there to eat and to drink and to watch and to soak and to love. I did those things, with that love. I’m not sure I will ever recover and for that I am grateful.

xxx

Little started pulling his hair when he’s angry. I know that’s me, too. Just like I gave her my anxiety, I gave him my temper. My rage, rather.

And I have been full of rage.

I watch his tiny face and mouth- the one that is now full of teeth. Do you know how weird that is? To see someone so infrequently frequent, someone you gave birth to, that you notice how many teeth they have and all the varying stages of growth? It’s weird, I can tell you that. Anyways, that face he makes when it turns from sad (actually frustration) to angry (actually embarrassed) to rage (actually sad) and his eyes are my twin. I can’t stand him in those moments and really I know it’s myself that I can’t stand. Actually, I want to pick him up and hold him and tell him over and over that he isn’t bad. That he’s good. I don’t just see my eyes on his face I actually see him. I see that same kid as me. I know that kid. Do you remember your four year old self desperate and searching? Do you remember feeling that misunderstood simply because you don’t have the language or words? I do and I can’t decide if that’s a blessing or a curse.

I do pick him up most of the time and perhaps you might think that in doing so I am coddling him or encouraging this type of behavior- the rage or the shouting or the throwing. But I don’t see it that way. I see myself looking at my own kid-face square in the eye and more or less saying, “I’ve got you.” It isn’t that I want to encourage the rage, it’s that I want him to see there’s a different way. That’s the point after all, isn’t it?

xxx