“What the Living Do,” by Marie Howe. Have you read this poem? I hadn’t. Thanks to Pickle Me This for posting the link. I don’t know why, but sitting here this afternoon, struggling with sick kids and boredom (mine, as much as anyone’s), it landed in my lap like a beautiful, unexpected gift.
Only the originator of the stomach bug is all better, hale and hearty and racing around in the nude so we can start working again on the potty training, which hit a temporary plateau … stomach flu, road trip, and then two parents too tired and distracted to reinforce knowledge already learned. Let’s just say we hit a low point yesterday afternoon, while I fell into a brief coma on the couch and Kev attempted to work from home, and … well, it was messy. Nuf said.
There were moments yesterday when I felt I’d lost the will to go on. Luckily for us humans, the going on tends to go whether or not we feel like participating. Today I feel better, even though everyone’s underfoot (the lad in the green blanket quite literally) and mostly sick. Only up three times last night.
“Mommy, come on, a read a book!” Thus sayeth my healthy fellow, who is quite bored. Okay.
So … we took a hasty, six-hour road trip, plagued by Easter traffic and stomach woes (you don’t want to know more), that was nothing short of blessed with wonder and luck. We arrived late on Thursday, not sure whether Kev’s sister was near labour, or whether we might have headed out too soon, and by Friday aft, when I saw her, I thought …. hmm, I think this is going to come together after all. Around 7 that evening, her partner called to say: Come over! Midwife arrived! Yes, I was honoured to be part of the birth, serving as doula as well as auntie-to-be. We transferred to hospital early on, the daddy-to-be negotiating country roads with an impressive lack of panic, and labour progressed beautifully. Labouring women fill the room with bravery and courage and strength, and my sister-in-law was calm and focused and when called upon for a last-minute miracle, delivered. Literally. Our family’s new nephew and first cousin arrived at 1:26 in the morning, with loads of black hair and good wail.
We are home again, alive with love and excitement and pride.
Kevin and I watched Bright Star last night. It’s a recent movie that had been recommended by several friends, and my friend D’s review finally pushed me over the top: I was ready to rent it. The movie is by Jane Campion, based on the doomed love story of John Keats and a young woman named Fanny Brawne; his sonnet to her, “Bright Star,” may or may not have been the last poem he ever wrote. The movie is beautifully composed, and though I’m not sure how entirely accurate it is (apparently there was another woman, in real life, to whom Keats was somewhat attached during the same time period, and for whom he wrote a poem), the plot is distilled into a story of young love. This shows my age, but I was very sympathetic to the dilemma Fanny’s mother faced: she recognized that her daughter was falling in love, and her warnings were gentle and compassionate, and her silent presence was so deeply loving as she watched her daughter suffering the heartbreak of an impossible connection. Because, of course, the pairing was impossible. Keats was already ill with tuberculosis (and considering how contagious the disease, I cringed every time he coughed while embracing healthy, young Fanny). But just as imposing was Keats’s lack of a living. His poetry was admired by some influential friends, but scorned by critics. (Not that at the best of times poets ever make much of a living). When Keats died, at age 25, he believed he’d left nothing immortal behind. I can still remember writing an essay on “Ode to a Grecian Urn” in the last exam I ever sat in undergrad. Nothing is immortal; but that poem–and its beautiful concluding lines: ” ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ that is all / Ye know on Earth and all ye need to know”–have lasted a century and a half, more immortal than most earthly things.
Ultimately, for me the movie was a true and unabashed recognition of young love, and of the passion experienced in a first romantic pairing. And it was also about artists and the making of art, and how painful the process (“I am writing again,” Keats says at one point; and I understood so well, how the writing comes and goes), how little it can be relied upon yet how impossible not to pursue if it’s what one must do. It’s no way to make a living. Never has been. Never will be. It exists unconnected from worldly success. There is no way to predict what will last; yet that sense of grasping at the immortal is probably what drives most artists to create. A strange paradox. There’s no point in making art if you’re only making it to attempt to make yourself immortal; yet you probably wouldn’t make it if you weren’t tapping into the threads of human experience that are essentially immortal: death, birth, love, creation, beauty.
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On another subject altogether … my baby. My baby is two years old today. He was born around 7 o’clock in the morning, so when we woke, Kevin and I reminisced about that vivid and intense hour of labour that preceded his arrival. It was a panicked hour, our midwives got lost, and about forty-five minutes into the wait Kevin called a neighbour (luckily a midwife!) to come and help. She arrived almost exactly at the same moment as our midwives. I still remember Kevin saying, his hands gently on me, “Please, don’t push. Don’t push. Don’t push.” He was more panicked than I was, because I was entirely focused on what was happening in my body. And we both remember the midwives taking the stairs two at a time, arrived just in time to rescue Kevin from having to catch our baby. Albus remembers that we called at 7:05 to report the arrival of their new baby brother (the kids and Kevin’s mom were all spending the night at my mom’s). AppleApple remembers that they asked what colour the new baby’s hair was, and we said, “Red.” Ha! Honestly, we couldn’t imagine having any child without red hair, and spent the next few months examining his locks for signs of colour. Now, I can’t imagine him as anything but what and who he is. Happy birthday, son.
(Bottom two photos by AppleApple!).
Not sitting here with the inspiration to write. But look at these photos. Yesterday, Kevin and Albus cooked the evening meal together: coconut chicken with baked rice, bouillabaisse, and fruit smoothies for dessert. Last Sunday, Fooey and Kevin cooked French onion soup (above, Fooey is monitoring the progress of the toasting bread in the toaster oven). Their other memorable meal item was a cheese and fruit plate for dessert.
I also had to include this photo of AppleApple wearing her Grandma Linda’s jacket–from when Grandma Linda was a little girl. It is hand-sewn, though I’ll have to ask who did the sewing. AppleApple disappeared into her own mysterious world yesterday, dressing up in the jacket, and a white collared shirt, a black bubble skirt, and tights, and pushing her hair off her face with a band. She looked so beautiful. I found her sitting on her fabric box in the girls’ bedroom, serene and lost in thought. I never found out what she was thinking, though it looked like it might have been sad. I sat on the floor, asked my questions, received no answers; and so sat quietly just watching her. I thought about how there will be so many things that she does and thinks that I will never know, and though it was difficult, I understood that I would respect that distance, not scrabble to break it. As long as she knows I’m here if she needs me. (The photo was not taken at that moment, but later in the afternoon when she was busy taking photos of her own. The other day I heard her camera beeping, and realized she was setting it up on the 10-second delay so she could take self-portraits. Um …. And Albus has been taking photos and making movies, too, on his own–very old–digital movie camera. No shortage of documentation at our house. The only trouble will be narrowing our evidence down to a few iconic images, which is all that ever lasts; if even that could be said to last, in a family’s memory, for however long a family remembers).