Christmas with you.
🍁🙃
As far as I can tell.
Listen: his infant laughter is brighter than the Summer,
even though the nights have shortened.
Someday he will speak his first word
(as far as we can tell).
As far as we can tell,
he already has.
I do not know what he knows:
I have no idea how much territory his mind has explored.
I do not know what he knows:
he has already covered ground beyond my borders,
frontiers I have not.
I have not
accepted the fact that my inability to comprehend his gaze
is a remark on his comprehension.
To become like a child:
every day a discovery,
every blink an uncovering,
every touch assumed love in it.
To become like a child:
to break the flood of our disenchantment
on the rock of clean reality
(untarnished innocence).
All was meant to remain in a realm we all revoked.
To be a parent:
to watch this come, to watch it go,
to witness a clearing of the smoke
or a smoking of the clear.
His eyes will hold envy before he ever sees it.
His heart will hurt and be hurt
before he ever knows what hit him.
To be a parent:
Front row to this Autumn Reenactment, Fall
Again, renovated wrecking ball,
nothing new under sun or cloudy skies.
I will wait until he is old enough to crawl
out from under the rubble.
He will have his eyes opened,
his youth undisguised,
then - if all goes well
if I have something to say,
as far as I can tell -
he will open his own eyes.
Strangers in the Night
I can already feel it slipping away.
Soon I won’t remember what it was like, not knowing you.
Every day I can see my opinion of you forming into something more solid, more opaque. I keep adding a piece to your puzzle, knowing I won’t finish it ever but still seeing more and more picture nonetheless.
When you first got here I felt like a stranger had been placed on my chest. I would wake up in the middle of the night to feed you and stare down with so many questions. You were not intuitive to me. I think I was given a baby that smiled so early because I needed a baby that knew me, so I could learn to know him.
I was thrown off by you. I wobbled. I could not find my center as I distractedly watched you orbit around me.
You found your rhythm before I found mine. You led the dance.
Today I drove by the place where we saw your first ultrasound photo and I laughed, looking back at you in the back seat. Here you are! So much of you has already bloomed into personality. I lost my breath a little back then. I stared at the stranger in the photo and felt uneasy that someone I didn’t know would change me so much.
And now that feeling is almost gone. I always remember your face now. When you first got here I would sometimes get excited to see you after sleeping because I couldn’t remember what you looked like exactly. I know the sound of your laugh. You are now a more uniquely-only-you kind of strange and less could-be-anyone stranger each day.
I’m guessing someday I won’t be able to recall not knowing you. I may even think I’ve cornered the market on who “Wesley” is. I want to remember that you made me “mom”, but I did not make you, Son.
I want to remember once the illusion of time+proximity=intimacy sets in, that we were total strangers once, until we weren’t. Until one day we woke up friends.
“It turned out so right
For strangers in the night”
You love Aunt Nanna
Aunt Nanna got a new job which means random trips to Seattle which means more happiness and cuddles for us.
Your current morning routine:
Wake up around 6am. Your dad comes to get you, puts you into whatever clothes look warm and comfiest (9/10 times this is sweat pants). You help him wake up with giggles and squawks and yelps.
He brings you to me shortly after so you can eat. Then you signal you’re finished by turning your head to stare out the window. You look out the window, I look at you, we snuggle, and I cherish.
Your dad picks you up and you get some of his best, his morning, to play with him, talk at him, and watch him. By 7:30 you’re ready for a nap already.
That Little Beast: A Poem, By Mary Oliver
That pretty little beast, a poem,
has a mind of its own.
Sometimes I want it to crave apples
but it wants red meat.
Sometimes I want to walk peacefully
on the shore
and it wants to take off all its clothes
and dive in. Sometimes I want to use small words
and make them important
and it starts shouting the dictionary,
the opportunities.
Sometimes I want to sum up and give thanks,
putting things in order
and it starts dancing around the room
on its four furry legs, laughing
and calling me outrageous. But sometimes, when I'm thinking about you,
and no doubt smiling,
it sits down quietly, one paw under its chin,
and just listens. With Love - Oma & Opa
<3 this week
Found something new today
: Toes
Blustery Day - October 3rd
Keep coming back to watch this over and over.
Seated
you are barely taller than my briefcase.
Someday you will know the till,
the thrill, the chase,
the soil underneath fingernails,
the heart as it keeps pace.
Today you wear what I wish I wore more:
a soft brow and a quiet face.
The time you fit in the bathroom sink and your father's hands
9/26/18
Sometimes you almost can’t see a difference from life now and life before. But the window betrays that his piano pieces are now duets.
A Poem for the Morning
I had a whole year
they told me
to decide whether I wanted
to spend every following year
with you.
Go through every season,
till you excise any reason
for breaking us off,
they said.
I had no similar option
with our son:
9 months of wonder,
then lightning, then thunder -
we all fell down.
Whereas you created the mold for yourself
in my heart;
he is supposed to conform to the mold
awaiting him
in my heart.
He must navigate the street around the corner,
the one where we saw him coming.
I didn’t see you coming.
These are two very different
but equal ways of loving.
(✎E 📷S)
Cheers, Ev
September is the month where we get to add another year to marriage and another year since we met. I get to pause, and think about so many days with you that have been filled to the brim with quiet contemplation and conversation, a shared passion.
And the best thought we've had, the best of you and me, now lives and breathes outside of us and watches the world. He often has that look of question as he watches us. He is spitting our image back to us in an uncomfortable and breath-taking way all the time.
It’s been thrilling to see you in someone else every day.
We like to think we’re good at putting our finger on what we know is going to slip through them. But there's a touch of infinity to his joy that's intangible. There's a level of mystery to this thought experiment that's almost painful, but stops just short at awesome. The old fashioned, full-of-awe kind.
Before we were parents we were spouses and before that love interests. And when we don’t know how to be anything, we’re always friends and fellow truth-seekers. I've often thought, there's no one I'd rather suffer with than you. Is that strange? There's also no one I'd rather be deliriously happy with. And that’s the best way I can sum up what marriage has been like.
Cheers, Ev.
Photo by Taylor Sporleder
Six week appointment
Wesley,
Today was my final Dr appointment for awhile. I guess we made it to some kind of milestone.
I am often thinking about what I will tell you about this summer...your start at this outside-the-womb human thing.
I want to tell you that I subsisted on a sea-saw diet of despair and friendship. That you pushed and pushed and pushed me until I could only find gratitude to hold on to. That, for a time, you cured me of vanity for I no longer worried about the shape of my figure, the veracity of my thoughts, or the successfulness of my work.
That your story began with people. It began as a story set among the pillars of an ancient amphitheater, and I sat down to hear the poem. These people loved you through ice cream drop offs and caffeinating your parents and covering work and homemade provisions and long texts and cross state drives and cross country flights and rocking back and forth and listening ears for our struggles and deaf ears for when we couldn't calm you, and so much overwhelming graciousness. I'll tell you about each pillar by name, because they all waited very patiently to hear yours.
I will tell you the whole truth, including all things female. Especially the female parts perhaps, for that's where the lion share of demand was aimed. Though you were born different than me, your story started with parity. We were equally helpless.
I'll tell you all the flowers were blooming and we saw some and missed others because the heat that we and they endured made it impossible to keep up at times.
I'll tell you your father grew older in age and younger at heart, as is his way. And that he kept you alive, because he kept me alive.
I'll tell you I wore my moods like wounds and waited for healing. I'll tell you your smile was both enough and never enough to heal me, and I imagined mine was the same to you.
That's where your story started, love. With spring flowers and supportive people-pillars and a dad who lives life like he's always making art. And my persevering smile, and yours.
Also with a Storyteller.
A Newly 30-Year-Old to His Newly 30-Day-Old
You are nothing if not pendulum:
you scream-coarse my nerves raw,
then teach me the delicious strain
of an over-filled heart.
If I am fire, you cool.
If I am freeze, you thaw.
You do this while doing almost nothing.
All you tend to achieve
is sleep and breathe.
Existence
is ample cause to love.
Even if you did not smile, squirm or coo,
or never calmed, nor stared askew,
I would still have no choice
but to love you.
Some little understood - under-studied - tug,
an elemental force like weak or strong nuclear,
but less clinical, more crucial.
Textbook,
but novel;
biographical fantasy:
you are a story unto yourself,
a book I will never put down
(don’t even let me pause).
You share space but own your own:
full sentence, also clause.
Yours is the only friendship I anticipated
but the only stranger I have ever truly loved.
Do not let me become
too familiar.
But keep making me family,
keep making me -
through the early-human ways,
the crumbling into my shoulder,
the piercing gray-blue gaze
as clear as perfect water -
keep making me
your father.