See how he grows

We have started hockey again this year, and after the gap of the off-season I see huge changes in my Small Boy, leaps of maturity that I did not notice in the small steps leading us from day to day. But this start into a new hockey season brings me messages of change: in his attitude above all he is a new boy. He is confident. He is eager, even volunteering that in addition to the standard Saturday afternoon practice he would like to go to the optional Thursday session as well. He hits the ice and doesn’t look back – unlike last year there are no requests for rests, no coming off the ice to sit on the bench, no sitting on the ice refusing to try. There are no tears; on the contrary, every time he looks up there is a smile on his face. I am even allowed this year to leave the players’ bench and go to the restaurant, which is out of the line of sight of the practice rink, for a coffee; and I find that now that I can do this I do not want to. It is too fun watching the surprise appearance of this new Small Boy. For reasons I no longer recall, shortly after the Boychen was born I started calling him the Butterfly King; but it is my Small Boy this winter who is spreading his wings.

Because I need a bit of a boost

I have been having a series of days in which the joys of motherhood have remained quite stubbornly on the other side of the fence. It has been exhausting. A trial. Dare I say, unrewarding? Days with very little in the way of short-term payoff. I need to remind myself that if the cliche “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon” applies to any endeavor, it applies to parenting. This isn’t about today. It’s about the long, long road I need to walk these boys down, the slow growth into manhood. These boys will be men one day, and let’s be honest: though they very clearly have their own little spirits, will be their own men, they will also enter adulthood with a bag full of gifts they got from me. So because it’s been rough, I’m patting myself on the back today.

This Time The Mother Writes a Poem For Herself

I am golden glitter and Elmer’s glue
and big blue stars on construction paper.
I am thick magic markers on the blank page.
I am beads and bangles, scissors and glue
and autumn-leaves-and pipe-cleaner bouquets.
I am popsicle stick castles and bobbing for apples
and popcorn garnish for the tree.
I am the walk in the park and the bread for the ducks
and the acorn that started to sprout.
I am the stick boat in the creek and the sand in the box
and the lemonade stand on the side of the road.
I am all of the childhood days you will likely forget
but the smell of Elmer’s glue will make you smile
and you will always be partial to blue stars
and you will know how an acorn turns into a tree.
And I will know that I am this,
that I am this and this and this.

Mortar and pestle

Last night Small Boy and Boychen were taking turns smashing crackers in my mortar and pestle – I was not cooking anything that required the mortar and pestle but they wanted to use it, so I put some crackers in for them – when Small Boy asked me which was the mortar and which was the pestle. In twenty years of using a mortar and pestle, it never occurred to me to wonder this, though somehow I knew, when I thought about it for a second, that the bowl is the mortar and the stick is the pestle. But I have never actively considered it: it has always simply been my “mortar and pestle” and I use it to make pesto and crush walnuts and grind up a masala.

But of course the Small Boy would ask: there are two words, and there are two things, and he wants to know which noun belongs to which object. He wants to know these things. And so he makes me slow down and look actively at the objects around me and name them. With precision. Which is what I am supposed to do as a poet; yet it takes a four-and-a-half year old to make me look down at my moss-green mortar and pestle set that came across the ocean with me, really look down at it, and make sure that I have a clear picture in my head of which is the mortar, and which is the pestle.

* * *

In other news, Small Boy has crafted his first couplet:
Fly away
bird of prey
He got meter and rhyme in one fell swoop.

Postcards from a changing season

Ten days ago we were having a glorious Indian summer, a last hurrah. Summer is surely gone now, it’s leaving goodbye notes everywhere.

This morning I went to tip water out of Small Boy’s wheelbarrow and a thin layer of ice slipped off.

We had our first hot chocolates of the season; I love steamed milk.

At the zoo Boychen’s hands were red and cold

We bought Small Boy’s snow suit today

Hockey camp starts on Saturday

Raspberries

Also from several weeks ago…

A walk in the woods

We live next to the woods. Some of it is privately owned and occasionally harvested; some of it is a nature preserve with a pond, a brook, and ducks. There is a fox, there are herons. The boys treat it as their private paradise and go into the woods almost every day; it is my mother-in-law’s favorite thing to do with them. This afternoon we went on a mushroom expedition, or, as the Boychen said “memli looga” (Schwemmli luega, Swiss for looking at mushrooms). There was also dancing and tree climbing.

A sudden shortness of breath

Late last week, on Thursday or perhaps Friday, I noticed that I was winded after walking the stairs to the first floor of our apartment. I have felt tired for some time now, but winded from a flight of stairs is something I usually am not. Yesterday I took the boys shopping and had to stop and rest as we walked home from the bus-stop, a walk of all of three minutes that I make nearly every day.

I started a new birth control pill two months ago, not out of any reproductive necessity but in the hopes that it would even out my increasingly severe PMS – the last lingering symptom, I think, of the post-partum depression and anxiety I suffered through last spring. I remembered blood clots can be a side effect of birth control pills, though Dr. Fantabulous and I both thought that would be unlikely in my case since I suffer from a Factor VII deficiency. But I ran through in my mind a list of the warning signs he had given me: leg cramps, especially in the calves – yes; headache – yes; chest pain – yes; shortness of breath – oh my, yes. I called Dr. Fantabulous’ office only to find him on vacation. The other doctor in the practice recommended magnesium, lots and lots of water, and to wait and see how it was in another month. I made an appointment to see Dr. Fantabulous when he returns from vacation. I hung up the phone.

I had a panic attack. I called R at work, asked him to come home. I sat on the kitchen floor and asked Small Boy if he knows what to do if something happens to Mama when Dada isn’t home. “Ob Unfall, Feuer, einerlei, in Notruf whale ich eins eins zwei” he recited.* Thank you, two dozen fire department books we have in the house.

R came home. I explained the story, explained that Dr. Fantabulous was away, that I didn’t know what to do next, that I was scared. He called the emergency room and explained the situation and asked if we should see our GP or what.

They said to come to the ER. Now.

We called the in-laws to come stay with the boys. We went to the ER. They got me into a bed right away. They drew vials and vials of blood right away, they administered an EKG and ordered a CT. I had to wait nearly two hours for the CT and by the time it was my turn I had convinced myself that I had just wasted 10,0000 Swiss Francs worth of medical tests over a panic attack. The CT results came quickly – five, perhaps ten minutes – and confirmed multiple pulmonary emboli in both lungs.

I said, in all my bi-lingual eloquence: “Wow. Really. Wow.”

The doctor, who would give brusque a bad name, said the hematologist would be in to see me and left. Really. The entire conversation proceded thus:

“The CT confirms multiple emboli. We’ll need to start therapy right now with a shot. The hematologist will be in to see you.”

“Wow. Really. Wow.”

“A nurse will be in to give you a shot.”

And she left. And I started to cry. And I had a dozen questions. Am I at immediate risk for a heart attack? A stroke? Am I at long term risk for pulmonary hypertension? Am I going to die this year? The Boychen is just starting to talk, am I going to die before I get to hear him say I love you?

The hematologist came in and talked me down off the ledge, explained the treatment (anti-coagulant drugs I have to inject daily for the next six to twelve months depending on how I respond, follow up visits, and those charming compression stockings), explained how little risk there is now – now that we know about the emboli, now that treatment has begun – of serious long-term consequences.

Now that we know. I have been walking around with these emboli that could take me from my sons for who knows how long and didn’t even know. I’ve been painting, decorating my studio in my mind, making lists of all the house and garden projects to start on at the new house, writing poems and ordering books on line, and all the while these emboli – these things – have been digging in and stealing my breath.

Breathe, I tell my boys when they are scared or hurt and crying too hard to stop, breathe. Look at me. Look at Mama. Breathe. As always, I find it easier to dispense advice than to follow it even if it is my own. But it is the only advice there is. Breathe.

* Whether accident, fire or anything, in an emergency I call 112

Round three

The exhaustion is familiar, the way my body crashes after the adrenaline rush of gathering the keys, my wallet, a diaper bag (the hospital has diapers, why do I always make Small Boy grab his brother’s diaper bag? I do it to give him something to do, I think, a job that will make him feel like he helped, a job that will keep him from crying, from becoming another child I have to take care of), getting the boys in the car, the short drive to the pediatric emergency room at the Inselspital. The check in, the exam (we had the same doctor as last time, a friendly young Austrian man who remembered us as well), the treatment: cleaning the wound – a sharp angular cut high on his forehead bleeding down his face, cutting away some of his beautiful hair, opting for glue and butterfly strips over stitches, waiting a bit afterwards to make sure he didn’t react to the Dormikum, getting the discharge instructions, driving home. It is then, when we come home, that it sweeps over me, the exhaustion, the stress, the fear. It is then that I cry. It is then that I shake. It is then, afterwards, after the fact, that the walls come tumbling down. It is always after, after, that I fall apart.

Polyglot

Boychen’s words are coming gradually now. Up and down and out. Mouth and nose and eyes. Hi. Bye-bye. Cheese, which he said just today, deez, and is his new cutest. word. ever. The baby books would tell me he is slow at this, as his brother was, according to the books. Late to start. Slow to get going. Perhaps. He’ll be twenty months old next week and if I push it and stretch the understanding of “words” he might squeak by the twenty-words-by-twenty-months rule of thumb. Maybe. Probably not. But they are coming now, his first little words. Late, according to the books that I cast aside when it comes to all things language in this polyglot life.

The books would have called Small Boy a late speaker as well. Perhaps he was. Even for a bilingual child, he was probably slow to get going. He had his Bumblebee Moment – the moment when he got it, the moment when I saw understanding pass across his face: there is a word for everything and every word is different – came well after his second birthday. Now Small Boy is a Plappermou – a chatterbox – in two languages, open and friendly and starting up conversations with people on the bus. He knows, instinctively now, when to switch from Swiss to English or vice-versa. His default language with children on the playground, at the zoo or in the museums, is Swiss, but if he hears a girl on the playground speaking English with her Dad, he’ll walk up and start talking to them in English. His default language with me and my friends and their children is English even though most of them are bilingual as well; he takes his cues from the Mamas. He moves smoothly between his two worlds, from this International Herald Tribune reading, NPR listening, Dr. Suess reading house to his grandparents’ Swiss farm with Die Berner Zeittung and DRS and the Schellen-Ursli stories. He passes back and forth from his Swiss playgroup to our English Moms’ group changing his languages like shoes.

Maybe they are slow to get going, these bilingual boys of mine, the books would tell me so. Late. But they’ve got two languages, two lives, two cultures. Two worlds they pass between without even realizing they have crossed a boundary. Boychen’s first little words are leading him here, to join us in this polyglot life.

A different kind of evaluation

Did I really only post once in June, and that on the last day of the month? Is June really over? The year half-gone?

I had planned on a mid-year evaluation of this Writing Year, this year I’ve allowed myself to take myself seriously, this year I’ve taken the risk. It’s already there all sketched out in my poetry notebook, the pluses and the minuses and the plays well with others. The list of things I need to focus on for the second half of the year, the places I fall short. I had planned on posting a mid-year evaluation of this Writing Year today, on this last day of June, but on this last day of June we made another trip to the pediatric ER for my second son, the son who goes through life like a Humvee, the son who will scare a year off my life for sure.

He’s fine, like he was last time; he’s got a hard head (words you never want to hear, roughly translated from the German: we need to take an x-ray to rule out a skull fracture, it’s an internal rule when we see this kind of swelling).

But this is what it’s like, being mother to these boys: like a watermelon split open, my protective rind stripped away, all the fleshy fruit red in the sun. A peach, an apricot, all the soft easily bruised flesh on the outside. My first-born, I worry about how the world is going to break his heart, bruise his kind soul. He can be so suddenly, so easily crushed. My second son, I worry about broken bones. The boy has no sense of his boundaries, his limits, his size. I honestly think he has no idea that he is not yet two; I honestly think it does not occur to him that he is not every bit as big as his big brother. The things that will hurt them, these two, they are so different, but in this way they are the same: I cannot hold them at bay.

In no way can I protect my boys from their defining traits. The things that will hurt them – the Small Boy’s big heart and thin skin, Boychen’s all-afterburner-no-rudder approach to life – are also, of course, their greatest strengths. If they’re going to be their brave best selves in the world they will do it by calling on these very traits. Small Boy’s kindness, Boychen’s fearlessness. These are the things that can make them full and rich. These are the things that surely will hurt them. These are the things that make them who they are. These are the things that keep me awake at night, suddenly understanding what it is to be mother to these boys. Like a peach, bruised in transit.