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Just Who is Nursing Who?
The first time I held a baby to my breast to nurse, I felt a wet tugging at my nipple. My body was exhausted from the labor, but when collostrum flowed out into his ready little mouth, I sat there amazed.
Perhaps because I’d just endured a day and a half of labor, and perhaps because I was still reeling with thoughts of I have a baby boy—sweet mother of God! I have a baby boy! I looked down on his pink face too stunned to cry.
Looking down into his moist eyes as they took all of this new world in — the lights, the shapes, the sounds no longer filtered through what I imagined to be the red canopy of his life for nine and a half months.
What’s Become of the Boys We Used To Kiss?
Buddy Benton kissed my cheek at my locker in ninth grade.
He’d been wanting to carry my books, hold my hand, or get a kiss from me since I’d met him the year before when I transferred junior highs. He was a little bit goofy and kind of a loud mouth, but we were both soccer players, singers, and honor students, and it was easy to be around him.
I always rolled my eyes at Buddy’s advances and lectured him many times that we were just friends — especially because he was a Mormon and I was a Baptist. I’d been indoctrinated enough to know there was no chance, no sense in starting anything since our religions were incompatible.
But Buddy stole a kiss on my cheek and something in my heart shifted. With that fast swoop to my face, where I could feel his hot breath on my skin, I felt something I hadn’t known before. Perhaps I felt what it was to be desired; perhaps I felt what it was to desire someone else: to let all the little details I’d ever noticed about him — his lanky gait, the muscles in his calves, the milky quality of his tenor voice — awaken something beautiful, fluttery, and tender in me.
Brows Make the Mama
“That one’s that skinny, and that one’s that skinny,” my four-year-old daughter says, pulling my face close and grabbing my eyebrows into an uneven pinch in each hand.
My right brow looks like it always looks after I wax. Subtle. Full. A clean crescent. My left brow I must now lovingly refer to as “the skinny brow.”
Not so subtle. Not so full.
Slump
My son’s been drawing racecars lately. Really good ones. Of course, they’re of the animated Pixar car, Lightning McQueen variety, but he’s six and they’re 3-D, and except that I’ve never seen the number “95” drawn accurately on the door – it’s usually “65” or “92” – they’re pretty impressive.
He’s got the spatial stuff down, as well as the colors and character personality.
But, yesterday he was in some sort of slump. I watched him rip page after page from his notebook and throw them to the floor with just a single line or curve on each tossed page.
When a Mother Is Most Needed
“Hold me?” my four-year-old daughter whispers from a pile of blankets in the middle of the hide-a-bed.
She’s been out here in the living room for twenty-four hours now with a flu bug.
First, she’d been pale and stoic, retching so often over a seven-hour period that I quit counting after she hit the double digits.
Mugged
Mugged
A middle-aged, olive-skinned woman with salt-and-pepper bobbed hair and a nylon jacket staggered to my apartment playground clutching her chest.
I ran across the lot to her, thinking she was having a heart attack. But in limited English and desperate body language, she conveyed she’d been mugged: her purse, grocery bags, and head scarf had just been stolen from her.
With my heart racing, I looked back at my girlfriends to make sure they were watching my children, and used my cell phone to call 911. Wishing I could speak any foreign language at all, I tried to understand her English. At first I thought her son had robbed her, but eventually I figured out that by saying a “son” had grabbed her things from her – she’d actually meant “boy.”
Emergency
My daughter’s second trip to the Emergency Room turned into a three-day stay in the hospital’s pediatric unit. She suffered a painful kidney condition and doctors suspected something else was wrong, too.
After multiple I.V. insertions into her little arm, and numerous tests, ranging from urine and blood samples to ultrasounds and CAT scans, doctors were finally able to get her symptoms under control and make a diagnosis.
Throughout all this, the doctors and nurses were so thorough— treating her symptoms carefully and listening to her every word— that despite my daughter’s pain and fear, I had confidence in her care. So, I felt calm and strong.
A Loving Act
Gramps is dying. My mom called last night to give me the most recent news. After months of dramatic decline, her father is back in the hospital and it now looks as if he’ll never return to the life he once knew.
My Gram, after 65 years of marriage, has had to make a heartbreaking decision: “I hope you’re not going to hate me,” she whispers to my mom on the phone. Gramps is back in the hospital with a lung infection after his food has been going down the wrong passageway, and, given the other complications of his health, the only way to sustain him now would be to use a feeding tube. “I’ve decided he should not have the tube,” she says, her voice breaking.
My mother’s been thinking about Gramps’ suffering for months now. “This is a loving act, Mom,” she chokes out. “You’re honoring his life.”
Loaded
Every night for the past week, my seven-year-olds been shooting his plastic and foam bow-and-arrow set in the backyard.
He’ll shoot, and then watch in awe as it soars across the lawn or collides with a tree trunk. After that, he runs as fast as he can to pick the arrow up from wherever it’s landed to do it all over again another fifty times.
Watching him, I reflect on how there’s something primal about aiming, firing and witnessing contact. We have no weapons in our home, but I’ve felt that satisfaction in my bones myself, whether it’s involved an arrow and a target, a rock and a pond, a baseball and a mitt, or even a peach pit and a trash can.
Tree
When you get the perfect perch in a tree, you’re cradled.
You straddle a thick branch while the coarseness of the bark works like Velcro or the sticky backside of a postage stamp.
There, you can lean back against the upstretched limb behind you, or you can lean forward to the branch reaching sideways in front of you. If you’ve got your notebook with you, you can rest it on that side-reaching limb: nature’s desk.
From the vantage point of the tree, you can see the horizon further than you could on the ground.
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