Everything Happened | vol. 149
On his third birthday, Desi gave us the gift of passing out on the couch at 5:05 p.m. He’d evaded his nap that day, but nap-skipping never seems to stop him from running a bedtime delaying scam that stretches until ten some nights. Still, there he was, fully nude, clutching his birthday balloon, and threading a long strand of drool from his lower lip to his bare chest. We left him alone for a bit and talked about our days, and then finally carried his floppy body upstairs and put him in his bed. It was not even 6:00 p.m.
Nick and I had stolen hours for ourselves and had sidestepped the daily dramaturgy of getting him to bed. He’d just…done it. Our evening was wide as a yawn before us; it was still daylight! We spent an hour in separate rooms doing the work of moving into our new rental home. This is something we have not managed to do much of in the nearly two weeks we’ve lived here, because it doesn’t go so well while Desi is home with us, which he has been every day since we left Ohio because his preschool hasn’t started yet.
And in case I’ve not mentioned the bedtime scam, it means there are few hours when he’s not awake and we are. Are we complicit in the scam? Oh, probably. I still reserve the right to complain about it, like how by the time he’s conked for the night we have an hour if we’re lucky to shift boxes around in pursuit of livability, or we can beach ourselves on the closest horizontal surface and worship our beautiful phones. You can guess which one my sweaty pregnant ass tends to pick.
So no childcare, late bedtimes, deep fatigue of the mental labor of living among moving wreckage, and the energy vampire that is mid-Atlantic humidity in August. I guess this is why people made this face 😬😬😬 to me about moving while pregnant with a toddler and starting a new job and selling a house, etc. And I responded with this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ because, what else could we do….but do it?
After making impressive progress on the house, it was not yet 7:00. Nick and I just gawked around. Even the dishes were done. I’d already worked out over my lunch break. I made a salsa with the remainders of our weekend farmer’s market haul. I took a very hot shower. I read my book in a robe. It was now 8:00 and the sun was just remembering to set. I said, elated, “It’s like we don’t have a kid!!!” Immediately, I wanted to take the words back, not because we weren’t having a bomb night to ourselves but because I’m superstitious. Just the night before as I watched Desi drift off to sleep on his last day of being two years old (at a FAR LATER HOUR than preferred) I had the thought that pops up like toast a few times a day: if you die, I won’t survive it.
When Meaghan O’Connell wrote in And Now We Have Everything that when you give birth, you give birth to a death, I wanted to throw the book across the room. (I can’t quote you the perfect sentence exactly, because this book and most of my others are boxed up in cardboard in a storage unit down the road.) This is a reaction I sometimes have to writing that is true and good, a jealous, excited little tantrum. By giving them life, we condemn them to death. The same death that waits for everyone.
"No one had warned me that with a child comes death. Death slinks into your mind. It circles your growing body, and once your child has left it, death circles him too. It would be dangerous to turn your attentions away from your child—this is how the death presence makes you feel,” Claudia Dey wrote in a piece that all my friends and I seemed to need at the exact same time, published last week.
I don’t stick my fingers against his slumbering upper lip anymore, waiting for hot breath from his nostrils, the way I did when he was brand new. I’d wake up in bed and startle that there was a baby in the room, and feel certain the motionless baby was dead. Now it’s just the flat remembering that awful things happen to people of all sizes, that I am powerless to stop brain tumors, wrong-way drivers, and falling cornices. I exhale and move on to the next thought. It’s a practice, I guess, or the only thing I am able to do with the ugliness that clots in my brain. I leave it alone. It’s the Babadook; I can’t get rid of it.
The fetal anatomy scan was last Friday, and everything seems to be developing as expected. The familiar swell of disbelief that I could grow a spine, or rather a small, perfect spine could grow itself undirected by me. The last time I was pregnant, I was so committed to not knowing the baby’s sex in utero that they faced the monitor away from me. All I can remember are the still images they printed out for us on slick thermal paper, as inscrutable as inkblots. How surreal to watch as the new person squirmed and pouted, kicked and sucked. I had the tech call Nick and Desi in from the waiting room to see. Hey Des, wanna see what the baby’s done with your old place?
I wouldn’t have picked this town for myself, but I just don’t hate it. Our world is slower and smaller here. Nick and I walk eight minutes to work, the preschool Desi starts soon is a short bike ride, everyone in my office leaves for the day by 4:30. By 6:30, we’ve eaten dinner and are finding our shoes for a walk. In Columbus, 6:30 is when we all were just finally arriving home for the day.
It feels like stealing hours back from my finite life, winding back the pocket watch in All Dogs Go To Heaven, the scariest movie ever made. Even with the strain of moving and starting new jobs, each day has felt a little bit like that third birthday. Scraps of time we’d thought we’d lost, ours to inhale.
yr mate,
Evie
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