What You Do

I spoke to a friend at around 5:30 this evening and realized, when she asked me point blank, that I had not left the apartment in over twenty-four hours. Why? Sick baby, that's why. The routine is familiar to me now, in a dreamlike way--sharply defined behind a veil of haze--perhaps because it so often launches itself in the middle of the night. Like most people, I suppose, I loathe being wakened from a deep sleep, but when a hot face presents itself to you with a wail of utter despair, you are suddenly so awake that it's as though you never were asleep, as though night never actually happened--it is in these moments, at 3 a.m. with a sick little girl in my arms, that I can really believe the world has stopped, that only she and I exist, that only her suffering and my desire to alleviate it exist, and that I was given this child, put on this earth, for precisely this reason, to be the source of some, of any, relief.

We spent all day like this, once the long night finally turned itself over, and all day, we lay beside each other, her eyes hot with tears each time she sat up over the pot I was carting around with us from room to room. She knew the sips of liquid she was drinking were making her sick, but she is two, after all, and she couldn't quite get over the emptiness in her stomach, and we tried, again and again, my teeth clenched as I waited: a popsicle, a cracker, some Gatorade, a rice cake, some seltzer. It all came up, and I held her head each time, and then she sank back into me each time, collapsed, almost, in a rare submission, saying, over and over, "Me not better, Mama. Me not."

"You will be soon," I said, holding her, pushing her damp hair off of her forehead, my own mind flashing a surreal sideshow of my own sick memories, as they always do when they are sick: the antennae on the small TV carted into our sick rooms and the static on the screen, such an anachronism now, my father in the doorway with a coffee Fribble from Friendly's, my mother's face, a face I never imagined wearing until the first of these night wakenings, the cool cloths she always brought, just before you needed to ask her, poking those chalky orange-flavored baby aspirin into the soil of a plant in the living room, a story I have not told my girls, maybe won't.

The rise and fall of a day with a fever, the sobbing at the worst of it, the hot flushed skin, the bright eyes, and then the cooling off, the euphoria, the padding around holding hands--"I like to walk with you inside, Mama," making me mad at myself for tiring of it. "Now I better. I hungry," and then the rise again. And the fall. And the inevitable turn to the favorite game, the way I will remember my littlest girl over the course of this remarkable year of her life: Tiny Mama, in which she turns to me with no warning, no introduction, and announces, "Now you baby," and I am meant to immediately assume my role, no dress rehearsal, no allowances for timing. This time, though, when I complied, when I asked for my blanket and for her to make me some soup in her kitchen, she shook her head, forgetting, in that instant, that the whole thing had been her idea, initiated not by me. "No," she says, climbing onto the couch and nestling into me, her skin, I can sense through her shirt and through mine, hot and dry again. "You Mama."

"Why?" I say, curious about the unprecedented pivot, unexpected change-back.

"I need you take care of me," she says, matter-of-factly, aptly, so sweetly that I almost cannot bear it.

And the day continues. The rise and fall of it.

And I do.

poemish

Things have been turning up: the ladybug towel, just today.

And the silver ice tongs, and the puzzle piece.

And I wonder if this is the way it is: that nothing is ever actually lost?

The Heart Cake Day

Yesterday, Lily, Annika and I made a cake for a just-four-year-old we love, and today we presented it to her at her birthday party. We made the cake because the birthday girl's mother had expressed dismay at her daughter's very specific yet frustratingly vague vision and wasn't sure if she could take it on or if a bakery could be hired to create it. I liked the idea of the challenge: how do you make something look the way it looks in someone else's imagination?

This is what the birthday girl wanted: a large heart-shaped cake that was the color of raspberries and covered with glitter. We mixed the batter, which I had thought would be white but which Lily and Annika insisted be pink. We baked it, and made the frosting, which came pretty close to raspberries, perhaps a little more pink. We covered the entire cake with silvery translucent glitter sugar crystals, and Lily and I wrote the words "Happy Birthday Amelia" in "fancy" lettering with a glittery, silvery icing tube.

Annika and I walked to the party carrying this enormous cake, as Lily was meeting us at the party spot from the school bus. It is amazing how much attention you get when walking that many blocks with a giant raspberry-colored sparkly birthday cake and an Annika. The cake itself suffered only one relatively minor smushing, into my sweater button, and arrived at the party before most of the guests. It was set in a place of honor, tilted up for maximum viewing potential, and after about five minutes the birthday girl realized it had arrived. She ran across the room, hair flying, eyes enormous, skidding to a stop in front of her cake. She climbed up on a stool for a closer look. She closed her eyes, then opened them again, as though to see if the cake had remained in place. She shook her head slightly.

"It's EXACTLY what I was hoping for," she said.

Sometimes, this actually happens.

I Believe in Dog

This seems like a good sign: even though it's 11:48, and I still have about 2 hours of work to do on the baby food cookbook, I have not one but TWO entries I want to write. I think I will choose one and have the other in my back pocket for tomorrow. But maybe this will spiral out of control in a good way and tomorrow I'll have seven or eight ideas, and what will I do then? As one of my wiser friends would point out: That would be a high-class problem.

So which to tackle first? Dogs. Or rather dog as conduit to a light at the end of the tunnel, by which I mean a shift in perspective, which really, when it comes right down to it, is often all I am looking for, all anybody ever needs. Today was Sadie's second dog job in two days--they don't call collies working dogs for nothing. (Although don't tell Scout--he thinks his job is licking the garbage can and occasionally moving from the couch to the bed.) This visit, for several key reasons, is mine and mine alone. For one, it takes place when Lily is in school and Annika, theoretically, is napping. For another, it is to the YAI NAtional Institute for People with Disabilities, and when they say disabilities, they're not kidding. I thought I had prepared myself, done my homework, before my first visit, but I was truly taken back by the severity of some of the disabilities: people who could not see, hear, speak, walk or move their limbs of their own accord, people missing eyes, hands, arms, legs, parts of faces, people who, on first sighting, barely resembled what we think of as people at all.

So what is a person, anyway? An assemblage of limbs and organs and brain and skin and blood? What if all that isn't there?

As it turns out, Sadie knows, knows what a person is and how to pad right up to one and lick that person's hand and then her face, turning slightly and leaning into a wheelchair so that person can rest her hand, a loose and angled contraption with three fingers and heavy bulging veins, on her back ever so lightly, burrowing those fingers into her fur, throwing back her head, sightless eyes toward the ceiling, her smile so wide you can't bear to look at it for long because you feel yourself on the verge of bursting into tears, which would be a human thing to do, would make one certainly a person, too, but wouldn't be quite right under the circumstances.

Wouldn't be quite right because this room, the lunchroom of this huge facility, with a sort of funny not-quite-hospital smell and plastic chairs around the edges and social workers and therapists who have that earnest liberal arts vibe and groovy faded t-shirts from expensive islands and a leader of the program who has a digital camera to photograph the people with the dogs and a shiny bald head and the confidence that must come with knowing you are going to heaven if there is one and six dogs, from the polar bear sized Homer down to a teeny curly ball of fluff named Mica, and about thirty people who didn't come with the dogs, people in wheelchairs and careening around unsteadily and lying on the floor and leaning into the walls and clutching at my arm and reaching into my back pocket where I keep the pictures of Sadie--this room is full of joy.

It is the most joyful place, in fact, I have been in years, maybe ever, because the people--and feeling joy, that makes a person--are so joyful that they are shrieking with it, some of them, mouths open so wide I can see their tonsils, or so overcome by it that they are trembling with it, rippling all over from head to toe with it, throwing out their arms and throwing them around the dogs, the whole dog in the cases of the smaller ones, the neck or midsection or tail end of the larger ones, like Sadie, who licks and leans and makes a sort of vibrating whistling happy sound she doesn't make anywhere else, overcome herself, perhaps, with so much showing of joy, so much directed at her.

What makes a person? Joy, and sorrow, too--the man who whispered, "Noreen died," in my ear each time I drew near until one of the earnest social workers explained, "He loved her. It was a very long time ago," and I looked closely at this man's face, his leathery black skin, his red stained sweatshirt, the mournful piece of spaghetti stuck to the top of his shoe and put my arm on his shoulder. He jerked; I realized he hadn't seen or sensed me. "Noreen," he said, shaking his head, and I could see his eyes were cloudy white all over. "I know," I said. "I'm sorry."

But most of all, I think, more than the joy or the sorrow (one thin line, remember?) is connection--that moment when a person becomes linked to you and you to them in that moment more meaningfully than anything else in the world because for the two of you, it is that moment--that is the moment of your life right then. Sadie knows this, always has, knows how easy and life-affirming it can be to simply connect. She brings me to it, takes me home remembering, valuing, wondering--wondering how many people like this there are in the world, people we just don't see.

Oh, Sadie. You are such a very good dog.

And finally, one last late note: the director always tells the people who come to visit with us in the lunchroom not to touch us, to touch the dogs but not the people. They never listen--they prefer the dogs, for the most part, but when one isn't right at hand, they reach out to me instead. And I close my hand around the hand on my arm, it is always my arm, and whisper, "Thank you."

The Thin Line

That song from the Breakfast Club is running through my head as I type, in part I suppose because the one small section of the Oscars I managed to catch involved a somewhat disorienting sighting of Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald standing on stage together. I felt like I should be spraying Sun-In in my hair and zipping up the bottoms of my jeans. You know which one I mean: Don't you, forget about me...

This blog, my struggles to keep at it despite, well, everything, is exposing an insecure side to me that I'm not sure what to do with. I do know that I cannot, will not, give up on it, especially when I least know what to do with it, so here I go, again--is that a song title, too? Anyway.

A new friend, someone I liked from the instant we were introduced, wrote to me recently that, "...the line that separates happy stages from sad is always rather narrow...along with our age seems to go a sense of deep vulnerability." This struck me as astute and even somehow comforting, not to mention the fact that "deep vulnerability" is such an apt way of describing how I am finding 40 so far. These girls, my fierce, open-hearted, self-possessed Lily and my merry, sharp-eyed sponge of an Annika: they fill me with awe, make me laugh until my eyes water, cause me to lie awake consumed by their well-being until the sun rises and it's time to fill the milk cups, leave me dazzled and drunk with exhaustion, and raw. Vulnerable. Deeply, deeply so.

Tonight at dusk, the three of us set out for Sadie's "dog job," our therapy work at Gilda's Club, into a perfect early spring evening, the kind when the air feels so clean and new on your skin that you almost want to lie down and sleep on the sidewalk. A loud night--ambulances, more dogs than ever, it seemed, strollers swerving, pizza parlors open on all sides to the world, radios blasting, even a bagpipe player in front of the art house on 6th Avenue, wearing a kilt and sending piercing honking notes out over the sounds of the voices. "Mama?" Lily said, flushed with pride on our way home as passers-by commented on her leash technique and praised Sadie more extravagantly than usual. "Yes?" I said, suddenly a little bit shocked that she was old enough to be walking beside me like this. "Is it mean to say I find that music a little annoying?" I just laughed, and she laughed, and Annika, who loves nothing more than when we are laughing, laughed, too, and we kept walking, and laughing, and becoming, I saw later, when I thought about it, a part of the beautiful chaos of the evening, the street, the city, and in that moment, on the happy side of the line.

Talking Points

You know that thing we all learn in a college linguistics class or from some yahoo sitting next to us on a bus to DC or because it seems to be one of those things that Americans just know by osmosis about how Eskimos have so many words for snow? I am, again, tempted to look this up on Google, exactly how many words for snow the Eskimos have, but am remembering the time I found myself looking up how old Barbra Streisand was when she made Yentl, for no reason any reasonable person could discern, and so again I will stop myself--although I won't promise not to do it tomorrow, after another glorious four hours of sleep. Did you read the Huffington Post piece about how sleep is the real feminist issue these days? If not, do. But back to my story. I know you were riveted: Eskimos. And snow.

No, not riveting, but this morning when I was helping Lily decide which coat to wear, the snow thing popped into my head, and for the first time ever I found myself thinking it didn't necessarily make very much sense. Or rather, that if we were to ascribe anew a word to every possible noun in our own language, there would have to be as many words for each noun as there are Americans (again, tempted: Damn you, Google and your infinite knowledge).

It's late, and even in a land that hands over Ted Kennedy's Senate seat to a Cosmo centerfold, it's not really a good idea to follow Obama. But do you know what I mean? When I was first explaining to Lily what a dictionary was, I told her that if you wanted to know what a word meant, you could just look it up in this book, and the book would provide you with a definition. "Does it have a picture for the word?" she asked, and I smiled, thinking of all those SAT words: loquacious, indeterminate, obdurate, scintillate. "Not usually," I said, but then--when I scoped out the children's dictionaries at the bookstore--realized that kids' ones do and became perhaps irrationally enraged. If anyone can picture what a cupcake looks like, or a kite, or a carousel, it's a kid, and whatever the kid's version is, it's bound to be better than the dictionary artist's. It's like falling intensely in love with a book and then seeing the movie and thinking: What? That character isn't supposed to look like Matt Damon.

More to the point, if you say cupcake to me, this is what appears in my mind's eye: a white, fairly fine-grained, regular not behemoth sized cupcake in a foil wrapper with a tall swirl of the kind of icing that definitely contains shortening, not butter, and when I say tall, I mean about two-inches, and when I say icing, I mean fluffy but solid enough to hold its shape, pastel-colored, and I wouldn't be adverse to a sprinkle of colored sugar crystals for a little additional crunch. If you say cupcake to a certain friend of mine, this is what appears in his mind's eye; a dense, fudgy, low-to-the-ground little mouthful with a slick glaze of dark chocolate on top. If you say cupcake to Lily, there's no cake at all: she's strictly a frosting gal, a quality I endorse in my children.

So a hundred words for snow, if that's what it is? I guess I'm not actually all that impressed, you seemingly ubiquitous (why are the SAT words coming so fast and so furiously?) linguists, you. Go beyond, deeper than, cupcake, and see what I'm getting at: love, family, mother, peace, happiness, anger, life, death, self, I could keep going forever. Does any word mean what it means to me to anybody else in the world? Not even close. Frankly, I think it's a bit of a miracle most of us find so many people to communicate with. I wonder how often we actually know what each other is saying.

Tomorrow

The world seems off-kilter, and I talk, talk, talk and think, think, think, and still it rains in the morning, hard, and I send my first-born out the door in her yellow rain jacket, walk her onto the school bus, kiss her soft head, and walk off again, the little one in my arms, send her off as though she were a parcel or a soldier: out into the world, thinking, thinking as I watch the bus disappear around the corner: I would die for you.

The little one searches my face as we wait for the elevator, reaches out and touches my cheek with a delicate finger. What you name, Mama? she asks, a new game, and I answer, wiping a speck of crayon from her forehead, My name is Amy. She chortles, shakes her head in mock-dismay. No, no, she says. You not Amy. You Mama. You my Mama.

Later I emerge from the subway, from this bizarre maze of train-filled tunnels below the streets on which cars and trucks and buildings dash and perch and settle, and as my head clears the overhang and is first exposed to the air outside the subway system the sun appears, and the sky, for the first time all day, is a sort of dirty pale blue but blue nonetheless, and the rain has stopped, and I walk my boots around the puddles stretching my gloveless fingers, testing the air for premature signs of spring or at least a winter on the wane.

The girls have been listening to Annie, begging me to sing the songs they love best: "Maybe," to see me rock an imaginary baby, or a gleeful Annika, or even a lanky Lily; "I Don't Need Anyone But You," to hear me tell the story of the duet I performed as a babysitter on the beach, in Cape Cod, as a just teenager (while I wonder how at thirteen I minded seven children most of each day for a week, marvel at the energy and resourcefulness of my barely adolescent self); but most of all "Tomorrow," for the sheer belting joy of it, the way my woefully inadequate (so pretty, Mama, they say, believing it) voice cracks at every high note, the way I beam when they join me in the chorus.

And as I walk up and down the city streets, especially, only, on those rare occasions when I am alone, I find myself singing it in my head, wondering about the lyrics--is tomorrow always a day away or only a day away? I want to check it, but I keep forgetting, and then when I could, say now, I decide not to do so, not to know.

Instead I remember what I keep letting myself forget: that I have always had a way to set things straight a little, a little at least, a way to rein in the voice at the edge of an octave-and-a-half, a way to be everything I am, to center, to breathe. And so I do that, this, instead. And a little, a little, at least, it works.

I would like to remember that...

this morning Annika announced, verbatim, "Hey guys! Grandpa Joel is fast asleep on the couch, dreaming."

And stay tuned for my thoughts on hardware stores. Baby steps, baby steps...