Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I am.

Day 276

O Evabird, yesterday you mastered the wave. For months, I've practiced with you, lifted your wrist and said over and over, Say Bye-bye. Say love you. For a while you turned your palm towards yourself and opened and closed your fingers. The other way, I said and turned your hand. Say Bye-bye to Daddy. Or Nana. Or Mimi. Or Poppy. Or Grandpa. Or Auntie CC. Bye-bye to whoever it was who had been with us and was leaving.

And so this morning, when I had to head back to work at NYU for the first time since you were born, it broke my heart a little to watch you wave at me. All day, if I closed my eyes too long, you'd be there waving. I bragged a little, and a dear friend declared saying goodbye a "useful skill."

Much of the day, I took notes, wrote words like essay and glass and RAIN in all caps; sympathetic vibration; LOVE; arpeggio; dream. It felt good to find myself in another mind--an old familiar mind--but as good as it felt, towards the end of the day, I noticed something else: I had doodled birds all along the edges of the paper. Nothing exquisite or detailed, the same simple birds that littered all my childhood drawings, little more than upside down w's, but there they were: everywhere.

In essay, we teach that if you're truly engaged you can't really leave something, that you have to return to it, that that original thing has done such work on your mind and your thinking that it has left an indelible mark on you. I think--at least in this instance--we may very well be right.

35: The Good Life

Guest Blogger

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Breeze (noun)

[Sometimes I think life would be more enjoyable if I stopped writing about it and started simply living it. In those moments, I reason that if my only self-imposed obligation was to be present I'd be able to understand the clouds differently; I'd hear Eva's laugh more clearly; I'd really feel these breezes that keep blowing, that I keep telling her about, Ocean breeze, I say, or, hot summer breeze, or this is what the wind feels like in Oklahoma. Sometimes, I wonder if writing--and perhaps even speaking--removes us from where we are or delivers us where we want to be.

Other times, I eat a square of chocolate, brush my teeth then crawl in bed and read.]

What Love Looks Like

Week 39

She's now been out in the world for as long as she was inside of me. Feels like forever ago.

I Carry You in my Heart

Ah, bittersweet, my last day of teaching
(at least until next spring!)
at the Hungerford School.
Oh, how I'll miss it.

This might be how each day began...

...but this is how most days ended!!!

(Pictured: Rachel having her usual existential crisis.)

Sweet, soulful Christerpher.

Hilarious Matthew who informed me that the mysterious
"man in the red suit"
who often shows up in his poems
is, in fact, Santa Claus.

The ever-inspiring Courtney who described her teacher as
"cuddly as a tiger lily."

Da Boyz of Mr. Anthony's class
who took the last day to write deeply passionate love poems
to their sub.

Adam & Manny--
big-hearted, fairy-loving fun--
half the time I forgot we were supposed to be learning.

Goodbye, sweet poets!!!

I carry you in my heart
along the city streets,
and, oh your love, it makes me smile
at everyone I meet.

Day 261

O Evabird, I thought you might forever smell like pears and lavender. Already you're changing, already you smell of waffles and mango and sometimes chlorine or sleep or crumbs. I try to take in every bit of you before you change again, before you start smelling like sweat or salty ocean or running-through-the-fields, like cherry lip gloss or lollipops or Scratch-n-Sniff stickers, before you smell of drugstore perfume and backyard Truth-or-Dare, of places I've never seen, people I've never met.

Tonight when I was giving you your bath, I squeezed the water from the rag and watched the drops roll down your back and wondered what on earth it was I did all those days before you; I mean, I really wondered. I'm still wondering, and I can only guess that I'll be wondering for a long, long time, at least until the days before you were so long ago that I can hardly even fathom them. Happy 261st day, my little wild-eyed wonder. So much of the world for you to see; so much of you to see the world. Sweet coconut cream dreams.

Xo.

Confession Thursdays

I've had two burgers today; it's not even five o'clock.

Spanish for Feathers

Look Eva, I said, las uvas! Las uvas! We were on the airplane, and I was pointing to the clouds. She had slept soundlessly on my chest as we climbed to 33,000 feet, but then she woke, and there was the rattle and the silver teether and Baby Jane, but finally, all the tricks in my bag could do no good, so I pointed to the clouds. Las uvas, I said, las uvas. I couldn't quite remember if uva was the word for cloud or bird, but I took pleasure in the fact that we were in the sky and either might work. Las uvas, oh, las beautiful uvas.

Very cute, the woman beside me said, and I smiled. Yes, my daughter is bilingual, I wanted to say, and so am I! Grapes, the woman said. Floating grapes.

Grapes?

Las uvas, she said. Grapes.

We three stared out the window, and the clouds were long and stringy as cotton candy pulled from its paper cone. Cumulus may have saved me, may have painted me as both bilingual and wildly imaginative, but those wisps were as thin and real as a dream. I thought hard for the word for feather. Pluma, I thought, but then I thought la pluma was a pen. I imagined Eva growing up to believe that the sky was filled with ink pens and grapes, that it was ready to be written on and devoured. Feathers, I whispered to her and she pressed her hand on the window. Las plumas, the woman beside me said, and I repeated it, and the loud hum of the plane carried us home.

Sunnyside Up