Golden hour

Sigh. I just never get tired of looking at pictures of him. People keep telling me to enjoy this time. They say it goes by fast, and before I know it he'll be a kid. Full-on kid, no baby. 

I guess it's true. Someday he won't want me to hold him when he wakes up from a nap. He won't constantly smile in that simple, baby way that lights up his whole face. He won't go wild with joy every time he happens to catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror.

Someday I won't be able to filter the world for him - he'll go out and have experiences without my help. I won't be his whole world. We won't spend our days together like we do now. He'll stand up on his own, and there will be a million amazing little things I won't know about him.

Wow. Talk about bittersweet.

What has changed

I'm a different person than I was six months ago. It probably isn't discernible to anyone else but man is it obvious to me. There's the physical part of course (almost none of it for the better - such is life), but much more dramatic are the emotional, psychological changes. I react to things differently. I see them differently - I'm more sensitive. At first I chalked these things up to hormones and brand-new-mom-itis, but 6 months? Let's call a spade a spade. There has been a shift, and I'm betting my money that it's a permanent one. Or at least a long-term one, anyhow.

*

The front page of last Saturday's New York Times featured, as its lead story, an article on the drought/famine in Somalia. Front and center, above the fold, was a photo of a woman in a refugee camp, baby to her breast. She was emaciated and looked exhausted, and the baby looked skeletal. Or maybe the baby wasn't skeletal; all I could see was the head. I didn't need to see bony little arms to know what was going on, though. She had walked for days to reach the camp. She was starving, and since she wasn't getting enough food or water, she wasn't producing anything for her little one.

This article came on the heels of Nils's 6-month doctor's appointment, where I learned that he had dropped a little on the weight-gain curve. 25th percentile down from the 50th. (Oliver and I, with our lineage; who'd have thought we'd have a skinny baby, right?) No big deal, I was told, but I worried anyway. "Little thing, " I said as I held him close and kissed the top of his head. "We need to fatten you up! Are you getting enough to eat? Are you hungry right now? Can I feed you?" Seeing that woman then, with her baby, and putting my own concerns next to hers... I felt sick. My little boy wasn't going to starve. My "worst case scenario" involved walking to the grocery store and buying formula. I could not imagine a scenario in which food was not available for Nils.

"Oliver, you've got to listen to this, " I said. I read him excerpts from the article, pausing occasionally to sniffle or blubber. "We're giving money to Somalia."

*

Just this past week I finished reading Eating Animals, a book I had been meaning to read for quite some time. It makes a strong case for vegetarianism, a concept/lifestyle I have a lot of respect for. I have never been a vegetarian, but I have been slowly cutting meat out of our diet for years - I estimate that we eat 75% less of it than we did when we got married. My reasons for doing this have always been environmental first and health-related second, and it has stopped there. Animal rights has never been a factor. I believe in the food chain/predator-prey thing, so meat has never been "unethical" for me.

Reading this book in recent weeks though, with its first-person accounts of the cruelty that is apparently standard in slaughterhouses and factory farms... it flipped a switch. I couldn't help but draw a parallel between these animals and my own little beast. In many ways, Nils is like a little animal. He can't communicate with me the way adults can. He can't fight for himself. He can't do anything for himself. I feed him, I bathe him, I shuttle him from one room to the next. Left on his own he would be absolutely powerless to get what he needed. And this vulnerability, it's part of what makes me love him so much. We lock eyes and I feel like I tune into something more powerful than just he and I. There's something about Life with a capital L there. He and I are a part of something bigger, and that "bigger" encompasses every living thing. Why not do my best to respect those living things, then? Sure, vegetarianism. Let's give this a shot, see where it goes.*

* It has been three weeks now, an effortless three weeks. It helps that most of my cookbooks are geared towards vegetarians. I will say this though: I woke up this morning with a craving for salt. The first salt craving of my life.

Red fox

The more Nils's hair grows in, the more we become convinced that it's red. Tough to tell though, since in some lights it looks blonde, and in others, sandy brown. Personally, I'm rooting for red. I think Oliver is too, since he has taken to calling Nils "Red Fox". My favorite part of this father-son lingo? Oliver has absolutely no idea who this guy is:

Red fox indeed!

Fire Island

   

For a few weeks now I've been meaning to dip my toes into some water. No, scratch that. I've been thinking about total submersion. Shaking that heat once and for all. Total relief. Bracing myself against a chain of waves. Running sluggishly out to shore and getting pulled back by an outgoing rush of water. Letting my hair get stiff and salty from the ocean. Rubbing a hand over any given place on my body and coming away with a sand-dusted palm.

I am not a beach person. I like to keep my skin a healthy ivory. I have never made "the beach" a part of any vacation I have taken. I think I have purchased two swimsuits in the last 10 years. I do not own a beach towel. That need to submerge myself though; it couldn't be ignored. And so today I found myself - along with my equally sun-shy husband and uninitiated little boy (his first-ever trip to the beach!) at Fire Island. I was tossed around like a rag doll by the waves of the Atlantic. My swimsuit almost fell off about a dozen times, my legs got sunburnt, and it took a bit of effort to not care that my jiggly bits were on display. It was fantastic. I am still not a beach person. I will however, be back at this beach before the summer is over.

 

 

Passing

 
In recent years I have felt there is something seriously lacking in my life. Hijinks. It has been forever since I jumped in a fountain in the middle of the night, pulled a prank, talked in a public place with a fake British accent about my billionaire father, etc.

My first year out of college, a friend of mine had a motorcycle. She parked it in her building's lot and someone kept coming and knocking it down. (Don't ask me how, but it was somehow obvious that the bike wasn't falling over on its own) This drove her nuts, so one weekend the two of us spent our Friday and Saturday nights crouched in the bushes next to her parked bike. We wore all black, and she kept a digital camera at the ready. We never caught the vandals, but my whole reason for doing the two-night stakeout was hijinks! Woo hoo! It had been forever.

This same desire led me to agree with Oliver and my brother last summer that yes, we should indeed sneak into Detroit's Central Station. 18 stories of abandoned wreckage... sounds like prime turf for hijinks! I was breathless with excitement the entire time we were inside, and practically bouncing off the walls once we finished our tour and came out.

The motorcycle stakeout and the abandoned railway station represent the exception to the rule though - it has been forever since I've done things in that spirit on a regular basis. I don't think about this change in lifestyle too often, but when I do it is with regret. It always makes me think that I've lost something, and that as the years go by I'll lose even more. The giddiness of my younger years was intoxicating. I still love telling some of those stories or, even better, enjoying the memories myself.

I got an email from an old friend the other week, out of the blue. She and I used to do all sorts of ridiculous things together. On a school trip to Disney World we jumped off a ride and ran out the emergency exit, just to see where we'd end up. Bored out of our skulls one summer evening, we made cupcakes, wrote an acrostic poem to go with them, then drove around town and delivered them to our friends. We went to Mike's Great Skate one Friday evening toward the end of high school (and if you're from Kenosha you know how out of place we would have looked there), just to see what sorts of looks we would get. Hearing from her reminded me all over again of the things I used to do... and don't do any more.

When I started to really think about it though, my perspective shifted. Yes, I used to do silly, fun things and now I don't. What were those silly things though, if not attempts to live a life that was nice to look back on? They were small adventures, and once I was old enough they faded out and bigger ones took their place. Interesting jobs, wonderful trips, diverse cities to call home, etc. If some of my youthful exuberance had faded, couldn't these things at least be passable substitutes?

And then I was hit with another memory, again with the old friend. She went off to college a year before I did, and she left Wisconsin to do it. A few nights before she left we ended up in her kitchen, taking pictures with all the dairy products we could find in her house. (Keep Wisconsin in your heart!) I seem to remember her mom passing in and out of the evening's frame, smiling in at us from time to time.

That's what I want now. I want to be the mom, passing through the background on my way to read a book on the porch. I want to laugh to myself at the silly, fun things my kids are doing. I get it. Life changes, and if you let yourself change with it, it can be really good. Who I was at 17 - that's not who I'm supposed to be now. Sometimes now, mine is a supporting role. That's cool. I'm content - no, excited - to raise my kids to dream up ridiculous shenanigans of their own.