More, more, more

Everyone should clean under and behind large appliances at least once a year. Or, lest it be thought that I actually do this, a person should clean behind appliances when and if a child (not to be named) pours nearly half a gallon of milk (the expensive kind) on the kitchen floor. The milk then makes its way like a stream, a milky stream, to the most logical and downsloping place in the kitchen--beneath the refrigerator and beneath the stove, leaving me to wonder which would be worse--the stench of the dried and soured milk if I do not clean it properly or the debris, the dusted, crusted food that has accumulated over four years.

I chose to go where no man or woman has been since the purchase of our home and I was not disappointed, the terrain lovely, the crust the finest quality, and the dust sculpture enough to make any woman long for more--more pools of milk spilled on kitchen floor, more crusts of bread lodged between cushions of couch, more of the dried, more of the solidified and petrified. Oh the richness of color.

More. Give me more, more, more.

Not a turtle

For some reason this gets me right in the place where people get gotten.

And by the way, according to Aidan, it's a dinosaur not a turtle.

For Want

Time. There is little of it. Seems, for some, better to do something without care, than nothing at all.

What does it mean to care for someone, to be cared for? How many ways to listen, or not? To say the same thing, saying nothing?

Nothing at all.

He's a man you don't meet every day

This morning my brother called. He called to tell me that I'm a good mother, that he'd watched my interactions with my daughter for a couple of hours during our recent visit to Utah and that yes indeed, I'm a good mother, despite and perhaps because of comments about my daughter being a book s-l-u-t (of course I always spell it, what kind of a mother do you think I am?). Book s-l-u-t because of the way in which she sidles up to ANYBODY, ANYWHERE who is reading a book aloud. He was sincerely touched by Aidan's intense desire to be present, right next to him, while he read with his theatrical flair Manners Can Be Fun by Munro Leaf, a book that my grandmother read to us in childhood. If you haven't read it I recommend getting yourself to the nearest computer (perhaps the one in front of you) and ordering up a copy if only for the section on "whineys" and "me firsts," and to see the large lump in the whiney's throat and the sad state of the "me first" who "wore his arms off grabbing things first and wore his legs off pushing in every place first..." Smash, Rip and Ruin, Touchey The Snoopers, and Yawner are also very funny and worth the $15 the book might cost.

This call may not sound like a big deal, but it is and here's why. I never know what my brother is going to do until he does it--which--in spite of my love for whims--is not a joy. I've spent too much not-well-spent time waiting for a return call to one of 10 that I've made, or for him to show up for a lunch date or a wedding. I've wondered, more often than I thought possible, whether he's alive or dead. And most of the early morning calls I receive from him are desperate pleas to be plucked from misery--so that talking to him for 45 minutes this morning, delightfully lucid, about parenting, Mormon homophobia, and the Netherlands’s Black Peter celebrations, made my day. It fucking made my holiday, my Kwanzaa, my Hanukkah, my winter solstice, my Christmas, my New Year's and all of the holidays that come before, after and in between.

Bananas, death and love

At 6:40 this morning Cole climbed onto my bed and pressed his cheek to mine and said, "Wake up sleepyhead." After a minute or two of snuggling and love he said, "Do you want a "manna"?; translation--banana or Amanda. I took it to mean banana because for a few weeks now I've been eating one banana before I get up to try to quell nausea resulting from, um, pregnancy (the first time that I've said this here). I answered, "yes" and "please" and then Cole walked downstairs to find a banana, climbed upstairs and onto the bed with the banana and asked, "Mama, you die?"; translation--Are you dying? Aidan, now in the room and listening said, "Honey, she's not dying, she's just sick because she's going to have a baby." Cole said, "oh" and that was the end of it.

I have a couple of questions here: First, how does a two-year-old know, without prompting, to ask his nauseated mother if she wants a banana? Second, how does a four-year-old know to explain to her two-year-old brother that his mother is not dying--that she's having a baby, though I've hardly talked with her about it? And how does my two-year-old know what dying is? No one he knows has died, except Henry and he slept through that. And I haven't killed anything in his presence, on purpose, yet.

Last, and aware that I've asked more than two questions: How does a mother keep from crying uncontrollably over beautiful, perfect moments such as these? How does she? Not even the screaming and fighting over a raw, wagon-wheel pasta necklace a few minutes later can stop it--the emotion, the fiercest of motherly respect, and the not-oft-enough realization that these little beings are wise and loving in a way that a mother may never understand no matter how many questions she asks.

Anyone need an apartment?

Hyper

I wish that I could describe smell. Pleasant aroma or foul odor. It changes, depending on time of day and mood. Wet soap after Tad's shower or coffee grounds in trash or eucalyptus when I go for acupuncture. Fish from Vito's. Lemon drops from Walgreens and peppermint Altoids. Sautéing onions or garlic for soup or chili for dinner or no dinner. Peppers on a Mike's or Mikes' pizza. Poop, nonspecific. Wet towels that need washing. Sheets that have been slept upon and in and around. Cole's blankets. Someone else's laundry, the soap, I think. Newspaper, pulp. My mother in law's perfume. Smoke wreaths. Babies. Pine. Exhaust. Outside. The smell of outside.

Letting Go

Sometimes people need to let go, a little. And it doesn't have to be a bad thing.

Oh Henry

Swimming, swimming in your tank
blue and green
like water
following your reflection
fighting with your reflection
you ate
you swam
you pooped
you died
and we will miss you.

created by Aidan Elise and Jane no-middle-name to be recited at the ceremonious toilet flushing on the occasion of the death of one Henry Betta blue fish arrived beginning of May, 2004, died December 7, 2005