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Lucky Number 7

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Amelia

I told my friends that if he and I would just have one conversation, I knew that the magic would happen. We orbited around each other for 6 months, bumping into each other at parties or somewhere on campus–I was a baby, 18, it was my freshman year, he was my first serious college crush.

We finally did have a conversation and once it got going, it lasted until sunrise. Drew’s beloved grandmother had just passed away and he had returned from her memorial service only days before. We sat in his tiny little dorm room and he showed me pictures from his sister’s wedding the previous fall because he wanted me to see a picture of his Grandmother Jean. He had a classically gross college couch, it was white with blue stripes, but I distinctly remember thinking that the casual dirtiness of a 20-year-old boy’s room was a threshold into the next stage of my child-adult life. We talked for hours about our families and told funny stories and hashed out what we believed about life and death. It was a conversation that only young love can tolerate, but the big words and thoughts, the big ideas, the instant intimacy of wanting to absorb as much as possible about another person is the apoxy of love. The sun was coming to get us, there was a kiss, and then the footprint for our future started to take shape.

***

“Maybe we’re making a mistake.”
“You think? But what do we do? The wedding’s in 2 months, we can’t just call it off. “
“We can. We should if it’s the right thing to do. We don’t have to do this yet. We can still get married, but do you think we should wait?”
“There’s 150 invitation in the back of this truck right now. They say May 21st. They say that we want this.”
“We do want this.”
“What would tell our parents?”
“That we talked about it and realized that we’re too young. That marriage doesn’t make any sense. That we haven’t done enough. That we need more time.”
“And then what? Do we break up?”
“We could? Could we? Can you imagine marrying anyone else? Are we afraid of marriage or each other?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to marry anyone else though. I want to marry you. I don’t even know what that means, but I know that it has to be you–we’re freaking out because we don’t know what we’re doing, but even if I don’t know what marriage is, I know You. Do you want to call it off?”
“I don’t think we can–I don’t think I could do this with anyone else.”
“So we’re doing it?”
“We’re doing it. I love you. I want to marry you.”
“Me too. We’re being ridiculous. We know that this is right.”
“Should we still go inside and rent a movie?”
“Sure. Do you think the invitations will be ok in the back of the truck?”

***

When we pulled up to the Grand Canyon, it was weeks before my 19th birthday. Drew looked at me and said, “no matter what happens, you will always be the person that I saw the Grand Canyon with for the first time.”

My mind flashed to him pulling up to the canyon in 20 years while a wife and two kids got out of the car. They would be looking at one of the world’s natural wonders and Drew would be staring into that space and thinking about that girl, Amelia Uffelman, the girl he saw the Grand Canyon with when he was 20 years old. He would be thinking about an ’88 Toyota Camry and the surprising number of rainbows that we saw as we made our way across the country, and eating out of tin cans, and digging a moat around a tent to survive a storm. No matter what happened, I would always be in this memory.

I shivered and thought, what if it’s me that he shares all of this with in 20 years? What if I’m the one that gets out of the car?

***

I didn’t do any kind of big romantic surprise to tell Drew that I thought there was a baby taking root in my stomach. We’re too familiar for secrets, and even if I had tried he would have known right away. Instead, I was surrounded by sticks with faint pink lines, but I needed proof. I am a woman who exists in a world of words, not shapes. I needed a word.

“Hey! So…on your way home, will you pick up a pregnancy test for me?”
“Yeah?”
“Mmm Hmm. But it needs to be digital. It needs to be the kind that will say pregnant or not pregnant. It needs to actually tell me, ok?”
“Ok, digital, got it. Hey babe? Are you telling me that you’re pregnant?”
“Maybe. I think so. Maybe?”
“I’ll be right there.”

***

We broke up for a little while. He had graduated college and we couldn’t see each other through the dim light of being young and getting older. He moved to Colorado, I went to India, we needed to step away so that the tiny dots could turn back into a picture. We dated other people but instead of calling friends after those dates, we called each other. Drew checked out CD after CD from the library and made me mixed tapes or sent me whole albums. He wrote long letters on index cards telling me about snow capped mountains and frying sausages next to a lift house. Soon he started writing about love, about ideas that he had, about our future. Soon I was writing back and we were making plans and starting to tell each other ‘I love you’ when we hung up. Soon he was getting in a little red truck and driving over a mountain pass and across the country to come back. Soon I was jumping off of a couch to run into the driveway and literally fling myself into his arms. We refer to this as “that time we tried to break up”.

***

“My stomach isn’t feeling right.”
“Ok…so you just said that four minutes ago.”
“I did?”
“Yeah, and you said it four minutes before that.”
“I did? You’ve been watching the clock?”
“Of course–isn’t that my job?”
“Drew, do you think I’m having contractions?”
“Well, let’s keep watching, but I think so.”
“Oh my God, are we going to meet our son today?”
“We just might.”

***

We got married on a Saturday in May. It was 3 months before my 23rd birthday, four months before his 25th. I am astonished by how young that sounds, how young we were.

We wrote our vows to make promises about a future that seems to always be upon us and always still ahead. Drew stared at my forehead because he was afraid that if he looked in my eyes he would cry too much to speak. I kept pressing my lips together because I was nervous about wearing lipstick. The birds and the bees were literally all around us, humming and chirping with the inherent knowledge that life goes on, reminding us with their confident song that there are constants in the world no matter how much we press forward or slip back.

It’s been seven years since that day. We are still standing by our promises, although we’ve had to think on our feet and revise  this or that as we’ve gone along. We created a child together and fell in love in a new way that humbles us and forces us to keep our roots growing together. We work hard at this. We laugh a lot. We get to say, seven years ago, I married my best friend. We talk a lot about being young and getting old. Sometimes we yell. We forgive and figure it out and do a lot of really normal married stuff. We’re growing up together.

I love you, Drew.

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A Mother and A Woman

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Amelia

For the last three years I have shied away from a mother’s day post because I have a lot of wonderful things to say about my mom and stepmother and a couple of other really powerful women that have shaped my life, and I want to acknowledge the group of women that I mother our collective brood with, and I want to wax poetic about the experience, but I’m not sure that I know how to go about reconciling that I feel that the mothers in my life are so deserving of recognition while I myself am still shaking my head in disbelief that I’ve been entrusted with a child’s life.

This blog is largely dedicated to my experience as a parent. From that lens it seems that I’m pretty much all-in with the whole mama gig, and don’t get me wrong, I am, but there’s so much about being a mother that feels, for lack of a better term, like make-believe to me. I still have days or moments when I feel like an outsider looking in at the snow globe of our lives and it seems surreal and and foggy and oddly fragile. In part I think that this feeling is born out of the whole my-heart-is-now-walking-outside-my-body phenomenon that every parent is all too familiar with, and in part I think that having a child is the inevitable and somewhat clichéd crossroads moment that everyone can tell you over and over about, but you can’t really appreciate the magnitude of the choice until you actually make it.

Down one path you see a life that is blissfully and appropriately self-centered. All the shops lining its trail flash signs that invite you to do whatever the hell you want with your life, sleep till noon, go back to school, spend all your money on a glass tile backsplash, book a flight for tomorrow on a moment’s notice, stay out, stay up, stay in, write books, live in a glass castle, indulge, indulge, indulge. Down the other path, you see a life that is boisterous and self-centered in a completely different way. The signs are more subtle, inviting you to step in here to have your heart explode with joy when your child giggles for the first time, look at a tiny face and see your husband’s smile, see the sunrise 5 days a week, let a tiny person decorate your kitchen with flour, settle down, anchor yourself with roots, indulge, indulge, indulge.

I’ve been feeling these things for only a couple of years now, so I’m about as far off from being an expert on this as one can be, but I think the point that I’ve arrived at is that two women have taken permanent residence in my being. One is a woman who is a mother and she is soft and attempting to make peace with stretch marks and she is joy-filled and emotional and honestly spends the majority of her time thinking about the child that she has and his future, and the child that she wants and their future. She consumes herself with reading about ways to honor the magnitude of trust that’s been placed in her hands, and reaches out to other mothers for guidance and acceptance and communion, she cries out of pride and fear and frustration. She’s grateful for early mornings and date nights in and the excuse of needing to be home for nap time. She’s unapologetic about all of the ways that she changed, all of the ways that her priorities have shifted, all of the ways that her resolve has morphed.

The other woman is the one that longs for a lot of things. There’s not another way to say it. She has opinions and gigantic ideas and she wants to over indulge and spend her life on a dance floor spinning and laughing. She’s anxious to always be feeling something new, to be recognized for being more that a long shadow behind a set of small footprints, to spend her time making out in backseats, and hunting down books, and learning how to finally make beautiful things in a meaningful way. She thinks about work and making a name for herself and saying, see that? I did that, and sure, I’ll be right over, no problem.

Until recently, I couldn’t really articulate this, but in an indistinct way I felt these two sides of myself in constant tension with one another. Not because I felt that one side was superior to the other (quite the opposite) but just that there was discord. It wasn’t harmonious, you chose one path or the other, there was no turning back. Thinking about Mother’s Day, and my anxiety about having a spotlight shined on a part of my life that I secretly feel guilty about not being 100% about 100% of the time, has made me think that I probably just need to lighten up a little. My two ‘lives’ are not mutually exclusive. I am a woman and I am a mother and I am a wife and I am an individual. My guess is that almost every single woman–parent–out there feels this on some sort of spectrum. We wouldn’t trade our lives with our families for anything, and we desperately want not just everyone else, but our own eyes to still see us as those awesome independent women that once ruled our worlds. We’re both. Two for the price of one.

The last thing that I’ll to this is that I sense the finality of it. We will have our youngest child move out, move on one day, and although my heart will still be in permanent residence in someone else’s shoes, and although I’ll still be thinking about their future and their well being and all of that, but my time being mine will be the rule and no longer the exception. I will suddenly be able to sleep in and stay out and say yes, I’ll be right there, and I can take classes and read books and learn to make beautiful things. I see that door on the horizon, and here again I feel a strange little dual ping in my heart. I can’t wait. I hope they’ll never leave us.

Perhaps the metaphor of turning our hearts over to our children is even more apt than I’ve realized…we’re not making a choice, we’re creating a song: they put the baby in our arms and one becomes two, a single note becomes a harmony.

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Coupla Things

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Amelia

Hi!

I know, I know–it’s been forever, we should do lunch, the kids are getting so big, etc etc…but, I’ve got many blog things on my mind and thought that we better get back to it.

1. Asher Walton. This kid is just…he’s doing so much. We were at the park this weekend and Drew and I couldn’t stop talking about how something has changed again in the last few weeks and suddenly his toddler body is looking more like a boy’s body. He loves to climb on anything and is especially good at hanging from stuff (see picture below) and he’s using all kinds of words that aren’t overly surprising, but it catches us off guard that he’s able to put so much together. I offered him oatmeal for breakfast last week and he said quite clearly, “no, I had oatmeal for breakfast yesterday. I will have cereal today.”

Oh.

He does a lot of things that make him seem like a two-year-old and I have to constantly remind him to say please and ask him not to do that and please don’t touch that and blah blah blah, but more and more I find that we just talk. I ask him about his day and he tells me about it. This has to be one of the most rewarding phenomenons of raising a child. A word to the wise though…don’t ask Asher (or any of this little buddies) to keep any secrets for you–if he knows it, he’ll share it. We’re having a little issue with him talking on his mat during nap at school (who on earth could he have inherited this habit from?) so every day when we pick him up we will ask if he talked on his mat. He always tells the truth, and the unapologetic response is so funny.

“Asher, did you talk on your mat at naptime today?”
“Yes! Yes I did talk on my mat today!” >>unbridled enthusiasm<<
“Baby, you know that you’re not supposed to talk on your mat.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s disruptive to the other children. That means they can’t sleep when you talk”
“OH! OK!”>>as if it’s the first time he’s ever heard this<<

So much truth. If only we were all governed internally like the toddler nation–what a world it would be.

2. New Interests and Old Interests. Asher loves airplanes first and foremost. Whether or not this will stick as a life-long love obviously remains to be seen, but if Asher had to pick a spouse right now, I’m pretty sure that he would ask if it would be cool to marry a jet engine. That being said, he’s also getting really excited about animals. For the first time in his short 36 months of life, when given the chance to pick out his own toy at the store last week, instead of reaching for an airplane or digger, he walked out with two whales which he named Beepo and Geeko. He’s also loving dinosaurs and nightly we read the deeply moving and intellectually stimulating tome, Dinosaurs Dig. I don’t want to blow the plot for all of you, but it’s basically about a bunch of dinosaurs who work with diggers. It was written by someone who has probably become a millionaire.

3. Young Love. These kids…I mean–it’s just a lot. And it’s cute overload whenever Asher is with any of his little buddies. There’s the occasional outburst of frustration, but mostly we see a lot of playing and hugging and telling each other things. It’s the best form of entertainment that I know, and is even better for the other parents that we get to share it with. We have good friends.

Also of note? We will often go to a local greasy spoon type diner for breakfast on Saturday mornings (known largely as the Pancake Store in the Walton house) and Asher proudly tells the waitress that he would like pancakes and milk. Then, as any true connoisseur would, he enjoys his pancakes with ketchup. You read that correctly. He does not do this when we make pancakes for him at home, but as soon as the plate lands in front of him at the restaurant, the kid reaches for the ketchup. We do not question this because we do not choose that battle. Mmmmmmm. Ketchup and pancakes.

4. Louie is growing like a weed still (still!) and at 9 months is better behaved than many puppies, but still very much a puppy. Drew takes him on a near daily run which helps curb a little of his four-legged enthusiasm, but we’re pretty sure that he’d be up for a marathon if there was a human taker around. He’s dominant trait is his sweetness, he’s an incredibly cuddly and sincere little guy, and does amazingly well with Asher.

For our part, Drew and I have been kind of burning the candle at both ends and moving at mach 12. We are hoping to have some very exciting news about a ‘new’ house in the coming weeks which has been dominating a lot of our free time and brain energy, and in the meantime we’re both plugging away at work and play, and feeling incredibly grateful for the warm weather and seemingly longer days. I’ll be back with more soon–

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Chewy Louie

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Amelia

There is a new Walton in the world. He is fuzzy and soft and has a cute little black noes and four of the softest little feet I’ve ever felt. He has salty breath and floppy ears and a perma-expression that seems to be saying, “Wh0? Me?”.

We named him Louie because I was thinking of our sweet Grace and the fact that Drew always called her Gracie Lou which lead me to thinking that Lou wouldn’t be a bad name for a dog at all, but of course no puppy is up to the task of such a serious sounding name and so it evolved into Louie. Or, in honor of this family’s New Orleans roots, Louis. Either one works. Drew and I never have agreed on how we spell our cat’s name, might as well maintain the tradition for the dog too.

Initially I was pretty dead set on adopting an older dog. I didn’t really want to deal with the chewingpeeingpooping mess of a puppy and we already get up in the middle of the night plenty with the one petit choux in our midst. But then we started talking about Grace and how a little part of us always knew that Grace was never all that interested in being a family dog and our concern that if we adopted an older dog there was a very good chance that it would be seamless, but there was also a chance that that dog also wouldn’t care all that much for life with a two-year-old.

So we thought about it for about a month.

And then we decided to go for it and start from the ground up with a puppy that will never know anything other than a floppy jumpy kid who’s prone to spontaneously hugging animals even if he’s not much of a tail puller. They seem to be getting on with one another just fine, but of all of the family members, I think it’s fair to say that I’m the most gonzo over Louie.

Clearly Louie struggles with relaxing

Other than my dorm years, I’ve never lived a day of my life without at least one dog in the house. Within a week of graduating college I was at the SPCA cozying up to Grace, and so the months that  just passed without the presence of a dog in our lives were kind of long ones for me. For whatever the trials of living with dogs might be, there are few things as comforting as that constant companionship and they always seem to be up for all of the good things in life–walks, naps, laughs, hugs, treats, play, and a little dose of conspiracy. Living with a puppy is about what we expected it to be, but I’m happier too, and as an added bonus, I’m loving all of the earrings that I can now wear courtesy of Louie’s pointy little teeth. Well, kind of. I’m kind of loving that. I do know that we’re all pretty smitten with this (increasingly bigger) little guy.

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Ribster

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Amelia

Have I mentioned on the ol blog that we’re having a bit of a raccoon issue at our house?

I grew up in the middle of nowhere.  Long gravel roads, lots of trees, lots of land, screens in the windows optional, just generally the middle of nowhere.  And do you know that in that time we never had a single raccoon come in the house?  Black snake? Perhaps. Neighbor’s dogs? Definitely.  But not one raccoon.

I now have a house key and a sidewalk and it appears that we have a raccoon.  Scratch that.  We HAVE a raccoon.  And he’s ballsy.  He (she?) comes in after dark, helps himself to the cat food, does some splishing and splashing in the water bowl until he feels that he has thoroughly cleaned behind both ears and, from what I gather, is taking measurements of our kitchen to send to his interior decorator, Diana, so that the space will be just so when he moves in full time.

At first the mere sight of us would send him waddling.  Then our dog Grace took over and she would chase him out and, apart from the small heart attack that I would have at 3am when Grace would suddenly bolt down the hall barking at full force, things seemed to be ok.  Then there was one night that Grace was at my parent’s and the raccoon quickly realized that it was just me and him and the cat food.  He looked at me with a great deal of misplaced smugness, turned his back on me and went to town on the cat food.  Do you know what I did?  I knocked him silly with a broom.  I did, I whacked the s*it out of him, and he took the hint and headed out the door.  That seemed to take care of the problem for a little while, but then Grace passed away, and the raccoon didn’t take long to wise up and start deciding which corner he wanted to set his cigar chair in again.

How is this raccoon getting in?  Well,  I drew you a picture:

Up until this past weekend, the raccoon was a nuisance, but not especially destructive.  I would even go so far as to say that I was not overwhelmingly concerned with his occasional intrusion.  Well. WELL. We spent the night with friends on Saturday night and all I can say is, if any of you got an invitation to the rodent rager that was hosted in our kitchen and didn’t post pictures to facebook because you didn’t want us to find out about it?  The jig is up.

Ya’ll, the raccoon(s???) went bonkers in our kitchen.  They ate taco shells, they broke wine glasses, they opened cabinet doors, they bathed their muddy little feet in the sink and then WALKED ALL OVER OUR COUNTERS, they took empty tupperware containers out and spread them around, they lounged on the stairs and snacked on gold fish crackers and discussed the underwhelming amenities of our kitchen, I’m sure.  In fact, as I spent all of Sunday afternoon scalding every square inch of our kitchen, I could almost hear their little raccoon laughter hanging in the air around me.  They appeared to have a better time we have had in years, and Drew and I are pretty awesome at having a good time.

But guess what, Raccoon?  We’ll see who gets the last laugh.

Consider yourself warned.

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Gold

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Amelia

This is happening in our front yard right now.

It takes my breath away every time that we pull up to our house.

I can’t stop taking pictures of trees–this might be the only time that my phone picture gallery doesn’t like an exclusive tribute to Asher.  Everywhere we turn, more. gorgeous. trees.  I can’t help it, I feel ridiculously thankful to live in this part of the country this time of year, and as I’m getting older the feeling is just getting more and more intense.  This is the time of year that I get all googly eyed over sweaters and firewood and turning the oven on and calling people inside to bring in more light as the darkness of winter creeps closer and closer.  Where Spring finds us throwing open doors and longing for the smell of dirt and the open road, Fall turns us back to the nest, back to the home, back to something essential in the heart.  And I love that it’s fleeting and that it is to be cherished and that I don’t feel like too big of a dork stopping mid stride to snap a picture.  Really, there’s little not to love.  Happy Fall, Ya’ll!

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letting go

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Amelia

We had to let go of our precious Gracie dog after 8 years.

It has taken me 2 weeks to try to write this post, I just deleted 8 paragraphs that I wrote immediately after about how we loved that dog and why, and how confusing it is to feel such sadness over a pet.  I wrote too much only to realize that I will never need to be able to look back at a blog post to remember her–Grace is so closely woven into the first decade(ish) of our lives together that she will always be a presence when we look back, and that will trump 8 paragraphs any day of the week.

Mary Oliver wrote,

“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?“
(from “The Summer Day”)

and I can think of nothing that so clearly expresses what I love about the presence of mind that dogs bring into our lives.  To our Grace.

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The big 0-2

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Amelia

I am going to attempt to catch up on the last—ah–month or so with a series of 4 posts.  Part one, consider yourself written.

Our baby boy is 2.  In our house, the morning of September 11, 2011 could not just be about hushed memories of where we were 10 years ago, because in our lives, it simply can’t be.  Instead, we talked about where we were 2 years ago.  We walked through the story, looked at the spot in the living room where I rocked back and forth in labor knowing that a little child who was on the inside was about to come out, we told Asher about his quick arrival, and remembered the date that is affectionately known as the day of 10,000 kisses in my mind, the day that we became parents.

Asher remembers this as the day that he gets to eat cake.  In fact, he has not forgotten about cake, and asks daily if there might be more cake to be had.  For a week after his birthday every time the fridge door was cracked, Asher would snap his head in its direction and ask hopefully, “firetruck cake?” knowing that more chicken or pasta was most likely in his immediate future.  One turns two, one falls madly in love with banana cake, one faces the cruel truth that daily cake eating is not part of one’s immediate reality.

It may not win any awards, but I'm going to shamelessly say that I am disproportionately proud of this cake.

We had a sweet little party in our back yard for Asher.  My stepmother, little sister, mother, and Drew largely made this party happen.  While I was furrowing my brow over a bowl of frosting and a hunk of cake, they were weeding and spreading mulch (I’m not kidding), potting plants, wrangling and thoroughly entertaining the birthday boy, and generally making our house go from drab to fab.  I don’t know how anyone does anything without a crew, or at least how I would do anything…they were birthday superstars.I loosely put together a firetruck party for Asher which meant that everything was in primary colors and we had a firetruck cake.  We pulled out all of our yard water toys and tossed in some bubbles, stripped the kiddos down and let them run around.  I also used this as an excuse to buy 34543 balloons because honestly, balloons make everything more festive.

So…two.  Our little boy is two and so full of two-ness.  He’s talking and talking and he likes to go fast on the bike and he wants to do everything himself, he has people that he talks about constantly and calls ‘special’, he wants us to tell him stories about trains and horses, he has a favorite color (yellow) and a favorite toy (Yellow The Red Bear–Drew came up with that one) and about a zillion favorite things to do around the house.  He likes pasta until the second that he doesn’t want it anymore, he can take his own shoes off (and almost put them back on) he still snuggles with his mama, he can count on one hand and sing a very adorable, very incomprehensible version of the ABCs.  Our late walker is now a bumbling, enthusiastic runner, he loves drawing and making art more than any other part of his day at school and he can finally say ‘helicopter’.

I like living with a toddler.  More specifically, we love living with Asher.  Drew and I, incorrigible saps that we are, look over our little carrot-topped child and come this close to choking up on a daily basis.  We’re so shocked by all of the human-ness that comes out of this little human, and we still struggle to wrap our minds around the notion that Asher is something that we created.  We created him, and yet he’s so much his own little vision.

We’ll never get over that, will we?

So Asher is two, he’s been in our lives since I first learned of his mysterious presence one night in February of 2009.  He’s so big and so little, learning so much with such a long road in front of him, toeing the line between baby and little boy.  It’s possible to say that although our story is a great one, we never knew how much love the two of us possessed until we knew him.

Happy Birthday precious boy.

Did I get a special shirt made for Asher’s party?  Um, yeah, I did.  It’s ok.

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Digging in.

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Amelia

First, a little story.  My dear friend Charlotte had (has?) juvenile arthritis as a child and had to spend time in the hospital when she was three.  On the day of discharge, Charlotte’s mom said, “ok kiddo, when we get out of here, we can do anything you want. Anything at all!” with visions, I’m sure, of an ice cream stand or a toy shop.  Charlotte looked at her mom and asked confidently, “can we go home and put on some David Bowie records and dance in the living room?!” and that’s exactly what they did.  That makes me love children even more. (And Charlotte.  And David Bowie.)

What I’m trying to say here is that we’ve got some changes happening around the Walton world.  Drew is plugging away in his Nurse Practitioner program at UVA in addition to being on the faculty for the school of nursing and working full time.  Saying that Drew is busy is kind of like saying that chocolate is the greatest food that has ever been invented, which is to say, it’s indisputably true.  Drew’s week starts when he heads in for the night shift on Sunday evenings and ends in May of 2013.  The amazing thing about Drew though is that he’s on this crazy 24 hour schedule that involves working, learning, AND teaching, and yet he’s still here.  He’s still on the floor playing with trains, he’s still leaving me the random love note, he’s still reminding me that we have so much to be thankful for.

In this way, I’m tightening up too.  I’ve also got some changes ahead and for the first time in a long time I’m feeling like I have two feet under me, two eyes on the horizon, two hands able to make it all happen.  We’re all digging in around here.  Eyes on the prize.

***

Right now we sit at the table before Drew heads to work and we sit as a family of three and hold hands and say ‘Thank you for our blessings’.  Asher loves this and we often have to stop about every minute and half as Asher reaches for our hands again and smiles at his captive audience before coyly saying, ‘dank doo bessing’ with a giant grin.  I realized for the first time last night that we hadn’t actually talked about what we were saying when we said thank you like this every day and so I started chatting with Asher about everything around us that is a blessing.  Asher caught on quickly and started pointing to everything around him and asking…Milk, blessing?  Water, blessing? Chicken, blessing? and then more shyly, Mama, blessing?  Papa, blessing? and for each of these we would say yes! we are so lucky to have milk, we are so fortunate to have water, we are so blessed to have food, etc.  When he started asking about the people we said that yes, all of the people in our life were so special and then he looked at us and without a hint of question he said, Asher! Blessing!

And Drew and I looked at each other and we looked at our joyous little son with bar-b-que sauce on his forehead and YES! Asher is a blessing!

***

I remember literally having the bottom fall out of a grocery bag in front of our house last year around this time and sitting on the ground next to the mess crying my eyes out because I couldn’t feel life being easy.  I simply couldn’t feel it.  I didn’t see a point out there somewhere where I would feel powerful again.  I could see Drew’s path, I could see Asher’s path, and despite being technically successful, when I thought about myself I saw a lot of fuzzy grey blurry stuff accentuated with some more grey stuff and some more blurry edges.  I think this is the identity shift that happens in the year after having children…I wasn’t a(n enormous) glowy pregnant woman anymore, I wasn’t a mother to an infant anymore, I was still a wife, I had a teensy bit more confidence and freedom with regards to loving and raising Asher, but as far as the internal person that I hang out with everyday commonly known as me?  I just couldn’t get a sense of her.

I don’t feel that way anymore.  I can’t say that it was one big epiphany, that no more grocery bags have broken (well, actually yes, I can. No more grocery bags have broken, but you know what I’m saying here) or that I’m dancing with Rainbow Bright and Strawberry Shortcake at every turn, but somewhere in the midst of taking it day by day, I am starting to see what is ahead, and more than just feeling good about it, I know it.  I have a sense of it again.

***
Things are changing.  We are not spinning our wheels, we are not getting lost in the cacophony of sameness, we are noticing the seasons changing, we are seeing faint lines appear at the corners of our eyes, we are delighting in toddler ankles emerging under hems that were too long mere weeks ago.  I think as humans we can vacillate between worrying that things will never be the same and worrying that we will never be able to make a change.  This is funny, right?  But I think that I am finally at a point where I can appreciate all of the work that has gone into the stability that Drew and I are creating for our family, and all of the possibilites and freedom that will be born out of this foundation.

And really, I get to sit down every day and say thank you for our blessings with two men that seem to inherently understand the power of that statement more than anyone else I’ve ever known, and if that doesn’t make my feet tingle with a sense of purpose and destination, I don’t know that anything ever will.

So thanks Charlotte for reminding me that kids are adorable, and thanks Drew for being an all around rock star, and thank you Asher for loving to say thank you, and thanks life for giving me the kick in the pants that I needed to remember that actually everything is a-ok.

Oh, and thank you David Bowie for being you.  Yessir.

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Inside Voice

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Amelia

(By the infinitely clever and wise Shel Silverstein)

I was thinking about a post about listening to my internal barometer and then came across this poem kind of randomly tonight and realized that this sums it all up nicely.  I’ve also decided that I will be wallpapering my children’s rooms, cars, lunch boxes, gym bags, prom dress lining, back pack interior, and everything thing else that I can think of with these little reminders, but for right now, I’m pretty sure that I’m the one that needed to see it.

 

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