Art

One thing I am grateful for every day is that we have so many lovely talented people all around us, and that both of us see the arts, the humanities, as a lens through which we see ourselves and the human experience.

What is art?  In our home, it is anything that tells a story of who we are, "we" in the humanist sense.  We surround ourselves with it; we bathe in it.  Music, literature, theater, visual art, even fashion and television and film, good, bad or indifferent...there are so many ways to look inside the human soul.  It is a priceless and yet simple gift to give our children from birth.

I wrote this promise to Arthur late last night, and I thank you for letting me share it with you.


My beautiful boy,

A thousand days have passed since I first felt the constant-every-other-second worry for you; still, each night I sneak on my toes over the protesting wood and creaky door to see you splayed-limbed and dreaming of ice cream or bubbles or dogs or trains and jet planes, to assure myself with the sound of your sweet little kid snore.

Your still light (but not for long), limp bedtime body wrapped around me in exhausted defeat at the end of your nightly mutiny is the closest I'll ever come back to the flutters and kicks that once left me breathless or to the sweetness of you at my breast, to those surreal and glowing moments, but I've always understood (resignedly at times) that you are a man already inside your heart (like Michaelangelo said, it is the task of the sculptor to discover it--only you are the sculptor of your self), and your mind and body will grow into it.  This is as it should be, and our hearts and spirits are ageless, my darling.

I tell them all I never read but I go on to your father about Icarus and the Anyone in the Pretty How Town and later in the delicious muted humming of our 1:45 AM home when you and he are on other planes, I slip into some Atwood and William Carlos Williams and savor the sweet delicate rhythms and the iambs and trochees and apostrophe of their brothers and sisters, and listening to these words float through the night, I make promises to the air that I will share them all with you, the way we share the piano and the paint and the spring earth and grass.

Words and love are my cocoon, and when our clothes are second-hand and our food comes in plain yellow boxes and my time is sold for a mortgage, words and love are one, true, perfect thing...they are a gift I can give you.

Words and love are my cocoon; you and Daddo are my light.  Together, we are a prism.

Adoringly,
Your Maman

The Juice-thief

Sticky rice-encrusted ringlets and a rainbow of crepe paper
knotted and twisted around little pink berry toes
hardly define the small man
(who is spring, summer, winter and fall within the course of an hour but mostly spring)
as hot, giant, indignant, hyperbolic tears declare his most recent betrayal,
contradicting the small, desperate arms clinging to the Juice-thief's thick shoulders
(attached to thick forearms
attached to thick hands
attached to thick Juice-thieving fingers)--
the Juice-thief whose thick Juice-thieving fingers had suddenly, unapologetically stolen what had been very clearly HIS--
he'd clung to it, needed it--not because he was thirsty but because it was HIS--his very own juice--

He'd protested in painful, desperate, frequently protolinguistic pleas
until at last his voice (misunderstood and hoarse and mournful)
had surrendered, put hors de combat, along with the rest of the company, head and heart and limbs,
wrapping his small ape body (and his crepe paper rainbow knotted spirit and little pink berry toes)
around the Juice-thief,
his finally silent sobs muffled in the thick neck of gentle musk and discount soap and salty sweat
and at last his sticky rice honey ringlets and the copper penny juice-thief tangles were an indistinguishable mess.

My Friend Arthur

The thing that blows me away the most about being Arthur's mom is how much my friend he's become. I told Justin I didn't know how there could be enough love for anyone else in our family, were we to have a second child, and he replied (I'm paraphrasing), "Love doesn't divide with children, it grows. There's just more love when they come along." And I found that to be so amazingly true. Waiting eleven years to become parents, I had grown to fear that having a child would take us away from each other, but now I find myself thinking about that schoolhouse rock song all the time: "Three, oh three, it's a magic number."

I love letting him be Arthur, watching him become his own man. I like the way he takes a bite out of every vegetable or ravioli on the plate, each in turn, then finishes them at last after he's gone through his ritual. I love that he would eat three bananas in a sitting if we allowed him to (but of course, we don't!), and that his favorite thing in the whole world is to drum, even if it's just with his hands on a table, and that he loves to read and pets animals gently like an adult does. He has all these little quirks that tell me he is not us, he is not really mine, he is himself, belongs only to him. Just as all parents feel, I know that I am extraordinarily lucky to be the woman who gets to help him find that person inside himself, a responsibility I don't take lightly.

I like the way he has little inside jokes with me and little inside jokes with Justin and Justin and I have our little inside jokes. Justin calls us "my people." I love that, too.