Everything Happened | vol. 150
Dream: Pregnancy is a drag so my mom agrees to have the fetus transferred to her uterus. The transfer triggers labor and the baby is born catastrophically early. It doesn’t survive.
Dream: Nick gets a job offer in Waco, Texas for more money and so we move there without discussion. We buy a bungalow that is already furnished and agree not to bring anything else with us except what we can pack in our suitcases. I drive through neon-lit retail development at night, trying to make sense of moving again so quickly. (I have never been to Waco.)
Dream: I’ve lost Desi in a parking lot where some event is happening. Among all the parked cars are small buses and sprinter vans branded with health agencies or corporations, and you can climb inside them to learn about fire safety or get your blood pressure taken. His blonde head will pop up and register me and then he will vanish again into the crowds. I’m wearing a baby in a front carrier, our new baby?, and I can’t move quickly. People can see I’m tailing him and keep pointing me in his direction but I can’t catch up to him.
Low point: I take Desi to the library, a few blocks away. He says he’s going to walk but bails at the first intersection, so I end up carrying him on my hip the rest of the way. The weather is a sweat lodge; no one would elect to experience it without the promise of being cleansed. The purification we are seeking is a. getting out of the house, and b. the uniform and holy chill of central air conditioning. Desi catches sight of the library and flings himself from my body. He runs up the steps, ululating. “Liberry! Liberry!” He is making me look good, though he has equal enthusiasm for visiting IKEA and Target. I allow myself to think that we are going to have a good outing.
We are there to get a library card for me, return the books Nick checked out for Desi last week, and get more books for him. I am so tired of our children’s books! We moved on from the board books we were given as baby gifts but never really bothered to restock, and our handful of Richard Scarry books are tattooed to my insides at this point. The firefighters are going to a fire! The children are going to school! The witch is riding on a broomstick! Go, everyone, go! Desi knows them better than I do. The way he nails the lines on every page is so perfect that sometimes I think….he’s reading it. He’s not! Still, sometimes I will say, “Wait…Des….what is the word that says helicopter?” and Desi will point to the helicopter illustration and Nick will appear suddenly to say, “Evie….he’s not reading it.” But is he reading it? (No.)
At the library, I manage to fill out the application for a card while Desi trashes the children’s area. The librarian is not amused. I still think he’s a wondrous being of light, but the older he gets, the more I am able to see him through others’ eyes, that is, see him as a peanut-butter-slicked ruffian with dirty fingernails finna raise hell in your quiet, civic space. I push the clipboard back over the counter without a word and rush to where he is. Here’s what we’re not doing! We’re not throwing toys. We’re not shrieking. And we’re not jumping from this table to the ground or climbing on the table at all. We are definitely not pulling books to the floor like we’re looking for money in the shelves. If you cannot listen, we will go right home and we will not check out any books. Now pick out a book and I will read it to you.
Desi picks out a book about a “lion king” of Mali and a LeVar Burton book about a rhino who swallowed a thunderstorm. He’s picked out the LeVar Burton book for himself before, he must remember it. I get through both of them with him and feel very serene and gauzy, aren’t we the perfect vision of Madonna and child, him on my lap listening eagerly, asking adorable questions. Aren’t these books refreshing in their subject matter, the absence of animals in tailored clothes going to work? He gets up from my lap and starts to play with the toys again, this time in a sanctioned manner, i.e. not as ballistics, and I take the opportunity to pull out my phone and search the library’s catalog for the fourth book in the Neapolitan series.
The search function has the nerve to be all “I don’t know her” about the BESTSELLING SERIES CURRENTLY IN PRODUCTION FOR THE SMALL SCREEN BY H-B-GODDAMN-O. I try several search phrases and nothing. Something small and significant dies inside me. What kind of crackerjack library system doesn’t have Elena Ferrante in 2018. How could we move to such a place. How could we STAY in such a place? My sorrow has become an isolation chamber and when I come to, I realize that a child is howling, and it’s my child, and I don’t have eyes on him.
When I find him, he’s dragging around a basket filled with books from the adult section, and screaming a happy tune. I tell him to keep his voice down and if he can listen, he can pick out some books from the kids’ section and we can take them home with us. I try to force my eyes to sparkle with wonder and mischief at this last part, one of my mom tricks, but in my exasperation, it is more of a Ramona Singer look. He tells me he is going to listen, then bolts away with the basket, screaming his head off.
I catch up to him, get him by the waist, and carry him kicking and screaming out of the library. It is hotter than ever, difficult to carry a feral three-year-old in my state, and not only are we stuck with Richard Scarry at home, the library doesn’t have my book or probably any books ever written.
“I am in a bad place,” I declared to Nick once I got us in the door of our terrible rental house, which is basically fine but terrible when I’m already pissed off about something else, and which is always dark because of the blackout curtains in the windows to regulate the temperature.
Low point: The college is open on Labor Day so I have to work, and Nick has to teach, but Desi’s preschool is closed. We don’t have quick backup childcare options here and so Nick is home with Desi or sequestering him in his office with play-dough and Netflix between classes. Then when he has to go teach, I slip out and try to run Desi around campus a bit to wear him out. It makes napping impossible, and it’s actually too hot to be outside in long stretches. I take him to the dining hall with me for lunch. It’s a bustling place and college students are oblivious. Children to them are as abstract as their mortality. It feels low stakes.
The only thing he will eat is a cereal bowl of dry tortilla chips and a glass of milk. I have him set up with my phone to watch shows on Youtube while he eats. Though he gets ample screen time at home, we only allow our phones as entertainment in crisis situations, like airplanes or emergency departments. I have decided lack of childcare is a crisis situation. He sits in a Youtube trance, quietly munching chips. I wolf down my meal and then stare at my watch, willing the time to move faster so I can return him to Nick. I try to reframe my thinking: instead of being anxious about the trance inevitably being broken, and him bolting into a janitor’s closet or swiping cookies from the dessert counter, I am just appreciating that for now, there is peace.
I begin to notice other children around me and some of them I recognize from Desi’s preschool. The college is a major employer around here; one parent had the foresight and excess PTO to take off today, and they are meeting up with the other parent for lunch. I feel cheated. I am supposed to be here unobserved. Now there are all these families here, and the kids are eating cut fruit and rotisserie chicken and baby carrots and sitting still in their seats without having to be screen-lulled.
Desi asks for soft serve, because he must know all college cafeterias are required by law to have a soft serve machine. Why not. Ice cream will buy me a few more minutes of entertainment. They are out of cones so I do a blorp of chocolate and vanilla swirl into a bowl for him. The bowls must have been straight from the dishwasher because the ice cream melts immediately. By the time we get back to our seat, it is a pool of gray-brown liquid. Desi unpauses the video and then drinks the liquid out of the bowl. It streams down his cheeks, onto his neck and shirt. While this is happening a woman who recognizes me as another preschool parent comes over to be friendly. She is a ringer for Leighton Meester. She is tan and uncreased by worry. Desi won’t say hi because he is still baptizing himself in soft serve. The show ends and he pops out of his chocolate trough to whine for another episode. I am in hell.
High point: Preschool resumes the next day. Desi seems to be eating there and on a predictable nap schedule again. We drive to Delaware one evening to go to Target (lol) and Nick and I talk out some of the hard stuff in the car. We start alternating who does Desi’s bedtime and it’s a relief. After Desi is down, we watch Game of Thrones together and eat ice cream drumsticks that we don’t have to share. We don’t have a dishwasher anymore and Nick always gets the dishes done every night. I email a house cleaning service to get quotes.
The library has the Neapolitan books (and most books) and I don’t know why my phone said it didn’t. But the fourth book is waiting there for me right now, literally it has my name on it.
yr mate,
Evie
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