Happy Happy! Joy Joy Joy!

When I first started using the Internet as my playground, back in 1997 or so, I had so much time. I had the equivalent of a giant tanker truck full of time. Or a faucet. I had a faucet of time. I played around with email and chose alternate identities for myself and hung out on message boards and started a secret blog and forgot the password for it and then forgot its location. Then I registered torturedpotato.com and started playing with html and putting up pictures and silly stories and puttered like a 3 year old in a leafy puddle. (Hi Rowan!) It is dreadful, a lot of it, but I enjoyed doing it. Some saturday mornings I would get up at 8 am, drink three cups of coffee and spend until noon just fiddling with building the perfect nested tables for my website. Then I started the cheeseblog and I had a new focus; the rest of the site has been all but abandoned and as sad as I find it when I go to old, abandoned websites, now I don’t have the time to make it better or even to take it down.

Which, of course, didn’t stop me from registering another domain a couple of years ago and doing absolutely nothing with it.

My pattern with blogging has been the same: I take the time, I write, I rewrite, I delete, I fiddle. I read and re-read, I recover, I fiddle. Eventually, I post. But I don’t have a faucet full of time anymore. I have a stoppered sink with a finite amount of water in it and after a certain, small amount of time has passed, the stopper is pulled and I am done. That’ s it. No more fiddling, faddling, re-doing, re-writing. You would think I’d get faster. But instead I’ve become more fastidious. Look how long it just took me to tell you that I have given myself 45 minutes to write this entry. 10 minutes have already passed.

Trombone is one year old today.

I have started several entries discussing that fact and I have deleted them all. One just said, Dear Trombone: Holy shit. You’ll understand if you ever have kids. Then I was going to put a photo at the bottom.

I want everything to be perfect. Oh well.

Trombone is one year old today and as of yesterday, he can make a trombone noise. He can slap your hand when you say “high five.” He can touch his nose, in theory; actually he claps his hands over his ears. He says “duck” for ducks, “cat” for catts and “gagoo gagoo” for baby. His favourite things are, in order of preference: books, me, his father, food, telephones, remote controls.

He is not quite 3 times as big as he was a year ago. He is a red-headed, blue-eyed, fair-skinned boy who tans. Last night as I was nursing him before bed I noticed his ankles are brown. I tried to rub off the dirt but it wasn’t dirt. My red-headed, blue-eyed, fair-skinned boy tans better than me, me with the olive complexion.

I know, skin cancer. I know. But also, vitamin D.

I haven’t given him vitamin D drops in months. His ankles must be tanning as a self-protection mechanism.

I must focus! I only have 25 minutes left.

Love has grown slowly and silently in my bloodstream like vines climbing a trellis. When I first saw my son, all squally and red, a year ago at 2:24 pm today,

I knew I loved him

but I didn’t love him yet.

You see? My mind loved him. The rest of me rushed to cocoon him, protect him, nurture him, because it knew to. But – it knew to. Acted on knowledge and instinct and a little on obligation. Not, “Oh, I have to feed this baby or I’ll go to jail” obligation but deep, instinctual obligation. “This is my kid, he smells right,” wild animal obligation. And feelings and knowledge are connected, yes. There was a subtle shift, though, when I began to act from my heart centre instead of my brain centre.

The first few months of parenthood are sort of like a hybrid car. You switch back and forth between gasoline and electricity. Heart and head. One carries you when the other is exhausted. When your brain says goddamn it why won’t he sleep, your heart kicks in and you can hold him one more hour. When your heart is sick from listening to the weeping, your brain takes over and allows you to know you are doing what is best.

We blossom into our finest moments as parents when the heart and the head can work together, when both are allowed to be truthful, impulsive, free. When we are able to use our whole selves.

Four minutes.

Dear Trombone,

big kisses,
yr mother

What a year it’s been.