Goodbye to all that
06 August 2011 05:37 AM Categories: Writing prompts | The kid
We have boxes and boxes of baby stuff, things we kept around, you know, just in case. Just in case we went crazy and did it again. We even tried to go crazy and do it again, but it was a half-hearted gesture and now I know it will never happen again for me. So I go through the boxes. I remember a different time, one that was simpler in some ways, though it was also overwhelming and painful and I was so strung out from lack of sleep that I couldn’t enjoy what enjoyable bits there were.
When we moved here from DC four years ago, the boy wasn’t even two years old yet. We actually moved from Alexandria, Virginia, where we lived in a cold drafty house, a place where we spent less than six months. The wind was biting that winter and the snow piled up and then there was sleet and rain. I felt so isolated from our cozy DC Adams Morgan neighborhood and then we were in Berkeley and the isolation continued. There was the strangeness of being in a new place, knowing no one, with a kid that was a homebody who needed me intensely.
“We need to be nice to each other,” I told my husband at the time. We were not up to the task. The stress of isolation, of moving, of his new job took it out of us. Maybe we both were depressed. My mother’s visit that first summer showed me how sludgy my life had become. Often I wouldn’t get dressed until after noon and couldn’t manage to even get out of the house once the day really began. My husband and I were snappy with each other. Mom was embroiled in her own troubles, too, the same troubles that had been distracting her before we moved.
So: the boxes. I have been going through them slowly, deciding what to hold onto in a sentimental nostalgic time capsule of unreality, deciding what is saleable (money would come in handy right now), what we should give away. I go through the geological layers of our son’s early life and our lives, too, as a relatively recently married couple with a baby, following the traditional pattern of man in the world, woman at home.
Who are we now? We are parents. Our son is an elementary schooler. There will be no more babies. Eras are ending all around me. I no longer cling to them, but take my comfort in thinking about real geologic time, how our existence on this earth is but a spark, a spark quickly extinguished. My only choice is to get on with it, be kind to those around me, and forgive myself and others for the mistakes we’ve made before I am covered by dirt, turned into ash. Before I return to the battered earth.
From the prompt "A baby."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. (Yes, I skipped yesterday. The prompt was "Obama." I didn't feel like getting political here, plus the boy is sick and I was otherwise occupied for much of the day.)
Image: The boy, me, and Nora-dog, summer 2005.
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