Running

I feel like writing.

I don’t have anything that earth-shattering to share, not that I ever really have. The stories recorded here are so ordinary, but they are mine and so I read them again and again as I wander my own archives on a Friday night.

There are posts in which I say I will never forget a certain moment…but I do, until the instant I read about it, as if it happened to a stranger.

The first months of Henry’s life were so hard on us. All of us — me, the mister, our firstborn and even the baby. I can never forget the terrifying 48-hours spent with him in the hospital just five weeks after he was born. But he is so sturdy now, if still breakable, and such a joy in our lives.

Tonight, after mowing the lawn, my husband suggested we go for ice cream. We grabbed a burger and headed for the custard stand. As we ate our treats at a rough-hewn picnic table it began to pour, big fat drops falling from a still-sunny sky. We scrambled for the benches inside the store, hands sticky from the melting ice cream.

The kids sat together on a bench, giggling and making a mess with their custard. Emmie poked herself in the eye and Henry got dye from his M&Ms all over my new pants. Their dad pulled the car up under the slanted roof so we wouldn’t get wet and we bundled them home for our night-time cuddles.

Henry has learned to escape his crib. Generally, he is stealthy, but tonight the wooden joints of his crib betrayed him. We heard a squeak and a crack, and, when his father opened the door to find the child rummaging in his toy box, a sad bleating cry.

“I was scared!” he wailed. Then, he paused.

“I’m not TIRED!” he yelled.

He should have stuck with scared. At least he had the pity factor going for him.

I laid with him for awhile until he sent me to bed, thank you very much, and I obeyed. I sat on the queen mattress that enables a new marital harmony previously unknown when the double had residence on our antique bedframe and I pondered.

I pondered the girl, hair freshly bobbed for summer. She is a person all her own now. She looks to me still, but I know my days as her North Star are waning. Soon there will be other girls to consider, girls of influence. I hope she is strong enough, I hope I have shown her enough, for her to stay strongly anchored in her own orbit.

I worry about her, in ways that I don’t worry about the boy. But I know she will also come home to me. The baby pulls at my heart until it tears, with my understanding of how he will one day grow hard angles and whiskers and become alien to me in so many ways — or, at least, I will be alien to him.

So I kiss him on the mouth whenever he offers it to me, pug nose pushing against my own. Sometimes, I watch the girl watch me loving him and I feel her cool jealousy on my skin. But she will always be mine in some fundamental way. She and I will cleave forever.

The boy, though…I feel he will leave me.

I wake up some mornings twisted in my sheets. I’m running, but from what I don’t know. All I know is that I am exhausted half the time, even after nine hours of sleep.

The words bunch up in my throat and then, poof!

They are gone.