egg carton caterpillar

We hoped you’d choose this. We’ve been waiting for you.

Freddy and I made it to storytime at the public library this week for the first time in a month. His interest has been vague and indeterminate, like an insect on its very last leg. Like Charlotte when she is done making her eggsack. And true to the trend, he was not interested once we arrived. The two of us snuggled up on the couch over in the tween zone and read our own picture books while the babies and toddlers danced and sang. He couldn’t even be swayed by the freeze song, a long-time sure thing. I said it was ok and that I could see that he was all done with story time and how much sense that made because he is a kid now. Not a baby. Not a toddler. Not even all that little of kidlet after all. I suggested that maybe he could make the craft with everyone one last time and so he painted half an egg carton red, stuck some googly eyes on it and a pair of pipecleaner antenna and, voila! A caterpillar.

Before that though, while we were still snuggled on the tween couch, I held him close and whispered into his still round-ish cheek how much I have enjoyed sharing these storytimes with him and how fun they have been and how it is ok that now that they are over for us. I needed to make some line in the sand for myself, something to note, a moment to remember, like this is a last and I know it. I am here for it. It didn’t just happen. Didn’t invisibly pass me by. The heartache of that is so big. And if I can remember, or just simply hold onto the desire to remember to remember in the moment, I’ll take that.

Lasts are really like that and five is such an intense straddle divide. It is everything unto itself. An entire universe of an existence. To be five! So alive. So absolute. So NOW. I longed so intensely for all of the activity of early childhood that everyone told me would be over in a blink with eider and moo, and in the end I still just nodded and chuffed and rolled my eyes. Ha ha ha what do you know! This is my life! My mind is a steel trap! How on earth could this ever end and how in a million years could I ever possibly forget!

Turns out I was always wrong and everyone else was always right and raising children is akin to becoming an animate burial ground for all of the versions of them and of me that we can no longer ever be again. It is a casual and daily devastation. The one we never knew we were in unilateral agreement on from the first moment we dreamed of a life other than this false singular one. We outgrow, we forget, we move on and become something new. I am not sure how this is the arrangement but it is. It is horror and desolation.

And yet. And yet. It is also how we touch transcendence. It is how we unfold entire galaxies and universes beyond our own. It is how what is infinite comes into being. The irony, I know.

I still snuggle Freddy every night until he falls asleep. Sometimes simply laying side by side, but most with our limbs in a tangle and our faces pressed close and tight. In the dark in his little bedroom closet, we let ourselves get all the way existential. I tell him in a steady chain of easy words how much I love him, how loved he is, the immense gift of his becoming to our family and the entire world, and on and on until I run out of breath or his breathing deepens to snores, whichever happens first. Sometimes I have to continue even after he has fallen asleep because the incantation needs that extra layer of completion to work the way I intend it to.

Lately, he has been worried about growing up and what will become of him once I am dead (which is basically what I worry about every night, too). He asked me last night if when he was grown if I would turn to dust, like is that the trajectory’s time frame. I find myself reassuring him in ways I would rather stay much more vague about. I don’t like to make any promises, especially when it comes to mine or anyone else’s mortality. But what the fuck he is five right now and only now and who the hell do I think I am if I cannot even reassure his heart of everlasting peace and ease as he drifts into dreams?

I know that developing these fears is developmentally right on track. But I am deeply feeling and I have bred children that are just the same. We learn to hold the heavy weight of our mortal fragility from a very young age. I mean, don’t you? Of course. This is the world we inhabit. We have the choice of either overwhelm or indifference and I will choose to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of this reality every single time. Yet even so these children continue to show me how to interface with impermanence while also giving ourselves wholeheartedly to the glory of today.

The grief and the love in equal measure. A double-sided coin spinning through space-time.

I am headed to Milwaukee for the weekend to help out my mom for a few days. Chris drove me to the airport this morning and I read him four or five of the poems I was writing around this time last year. When all I could do was feel it all. And cry. It is impossible even now not to cry when I retrace those times. It feels so good. I am glad that those tender parts of me are all still near enough to touch completely and also that I had the forethought to write it down at the time. Recording feeling is not quite the same as recording events. They can yield something similar but the road to get there is distinct. I wanted to clearly remember the intensity of emotion inside the months leading up to Maple’s departure. And so I do. It feels so good to cry, ya know. To just let it move through me. Let myself be the tides. Made of tears. In infinite measure.

Later on the same not so long drive we were listening to a song on Chris’ “Chill Mix” and I looked over at him at some point to see he had big tear trails running down his cheeks all the way to his chin. A tear beard. He told me he had first heard that song in those same months before Maple’s launch and it did so much to stir up the enormity of those feelings. How on earth are we supposed to ever be prepared for the magnitude of our children’s ultimate departure? How on earth?

I’ve been thinking so much lately about how Chris did a real code switch on me from the beginning when it seemed like I was the true tender one. Turns out his capacity to sense me and the fierce currents of feeling that lived inside of me were born out of his own sweet tenderness. He feels it all. As we have grown older, sometimes I wonder if I may be a little bit more callous than him. But no. We are together in the strength of our sensitivity. And we have made a life and a small little universe of such incredible sensate depth, where all of the occupants are naked and shimmering beating hearts. Even the doggos.

The other day, Maple sent me a reel that was something about multigenerational living and how it must have been strong propaganda that ever convinced us that such a lifestyle was failing. I am not sure if she was sharing that in reference to the possibility of my mom living with us one day or her openness to the possibility of a hypothetical choice she may one day make to build a life with us. I don’t know. I am just happy that she can see the world this way. With unity and lasting connection carrying us forward through generations. I find a good measure of comfort in this alternative narrative around family.

I spoke with her just a bit ago. During my layover. We speak often, and it is an absolute delight. She said she declared her major today. She had just come from doing so. We had been joking over her spring break that declaring a major is very akin to proposing. So dramatic. So momentous. And even though I believe she knew all along who she wanted to give a ring to, she did deliberate between a few for a spell. As she ought. Might as well put some real weight into the decision. You have to secure a few doors shut in order to open one wide. When she walked through the door and into the woodworking department, she said a group of about ten upperclassmen was seated there. It’s you, they said. We’ve been waiting for you, they said. Ever since we saw you pop up on the accepted at MECA IG page. We hoped you’d choose this. We’ve been waiting for you.

And doesn’t it just feel like such a crazy test of of choice and chance? Like knowing something is right and seeing the faint impression of a suggestion of the path proceeding but not quite. There is still room for doubt, for second-guessing. But even so, she chose the door that she was always meant to choose and they said yes, and please, and thank god.

I can’t get enough of any of it really. The fates at play. The magic that surrounds it. From the fairy realms of nighttime snuggles and made up stories about talking racoons all the way through poetry and sad songs and the endless passing of time all the way up to art school and a brand spanking new world ready to be built. What an incredible ongoing revelation it is to be alive. She is sharpening her saw and tightening her hand plane. Ready to craft the way forward.

It is still crying season after all friends, and I am made of tears. Of muscle and tissue too. When I am dead Freddy says he will build a statue of me so that he can always remember me. Of papa, and maple, and eider too. We are his.

Who knows. Maybe he will propose to a sculpture department one day.