man/dude/dawg

don't say I never gave you anything

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five and one half

James is a very precise charachter.  She's the one who has to initate conversations on the playground, just to be sure they go the way she wants them to.  She accepts that things just are a certain way, and then that way becomes as concrete as tombstones, or banana bread, or McDonald's cheeseburgers.  Things don't change.

She is also very observant, and she catalogues information away inside her head, and then it never leaves.  She assumes that the whole world operates this way, and that is fine, until I do something like take a different way home from school or walk up the stairs with my left foot first.  I know kids are sponges, but this goes far beyond just being a sponge. 

The other morning, we were getting ready to leave, and she was putting on her shoes while i got Griffin ready, and when I came back to tie them, they were tied.  "I did it myself," she said, like maybe she has always been able to do it, and I was just too stupid to ever ask.  Cool.  Very exciting.  Now get in the car.  We're later than usual.

So that night, I'm picking her up from kindergarten (not sure how we got to the big K...), and her teacher is just getting ready to go, and we're talking for a few minutes and James does it again.  She ties her shoe.  her teacher starts telling me how she is very anal about the shoe tying, about how James thinks she does it best, and makes sure the knot is perfectly tightened before moving onto the next task.  I explain that James is weird and bordering on OCD about things, and off we go.

Driving home, she randomly starts saying the pledge of allegiance, and so I turn down the stereo and am listening to her.  It hit me again that she is growing up FAST, that she knows all of these things, and I don't even have a clue what they are, and I'm feeling a little sad about the whole thing, like I've chosen to miss all of these things, and home school?  Yeah!  Maybe I should home school!

I ask her what else she keeps in that head of hers.  I want her to recite love poems to me.  I want her to sing songs and puke out more dinosaur facts about dinosuars I have never even heard of.  But she does none of that. 

"A few good things," she says, "and lots of bad things that I'm not supposed to say".

Its funny, because since she is so anal, I sometimes forget that she is still half me.  Forever.  Granted, it's the sarcastic, smart-ass side, but it's something. 

Unable to pass up the "bad things", I ask her what it is that we don't say.  I'm waiting for glory-filled f-bombs.  I'm waiting for fat cow, douche bag, and son*of*a*bitch.  But those?  Those would just be ordinary, and james is far too evolved for ordinary.  As quickly as she gave us "Cat Master The Flash" she cracks open her head, rolls out her tongue and yells "Get out of here or and I'll destroy your car!"

Which is puzzling, because we don't even have cable, and never have guests that require me to throw them out, but it is also intriguing, and promising.  The next time we head to a big city, James is *SO* invited. 

eggs

I give back to humanity by dragging the girls with me on impossible errands.  I tell myself that I need to do it.  That the deli section of the supermarket, and the waiting room at the cable company, and the combined ten thousand square feet of our local gap stores all NEED me to bring along my children.  And not because they are nice to look at, or smell good, or are really good at spotting thieves or anything.  I do it because in each of these places I take them, there are teenagers.  The kind who make uber-high marks in school and work their allotted twenty hours a week bagging groceries and french fries.  I do it for these good kids.  Because one of those classes they aced, all the way back in their freshman year at the local high school, was health class.  Health class, as we all know, is a sort of final attempt at ridding young people of the urge to do really fun things. Like drink.  Do drugs.  Have sex.  Eat cheeseburgers.

And we all know that the best way to do that is to scare the kids.  You show them pictures of meth freaks, and you pass around slides taken of a diseased lung.  You bring in reformed teen moms to talk with the students and cry, and tell them how she just gave up on herself when the school wouldn't let her bring her breastfeeding newborn to prom and THAT IS WHY SHE NOW WEIGHS FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS.  Sorry.  I really needed to yell that.  cause I didn't make it up.

To further reinforce all of these teachings, you dole out a bag of flour, or a raw egg, and turn the lot of prepubescent punks loose into the world for a whole week to be parents.  And they stamp your egg so that you can't eat that one the next morning with your orange juice and replace it later.  They check your egg everyday for signs of abuse, and then in the time it takes to get through one chapter in your algebra class, the little experiment is up and "now see?" they say, "being a parent is nothing you want to do at your age!  What if that were a real baby?  What would you do then?"

I would have smacked you for drawing on its forehead, that's what I would do.  But I have children now, as we all know, and I swear that every time they act like children, I still think about that egg.  That sweet, quiet, angelic little ball of protein.  To think that I didn't even give it a name.  Or a gender. 

And so the need arises, with great immediacy, to journey out by the mall, and roll into target for some rolls of toilet paper, or some new shampoo, and yeah.  I pile the girls into the car.  And you know what they do?  They run into each other and fall down.  They try to hug displays of stuffed horses and bring the whole damned pile down.  They sit together in the back of the cart having the "nu-uh.  I did it!" battle.  Loudly.  And then Griffin pees her pants.  And sometimes, while I swear at them under my breath, and threaten them with things such as making them live in the backyard, I look up and down whatever aisle we are stuck in, and laugh a little bit, under my breath.

If, by chance, the lady today from target is reading this...the one who got the wad of ABC gum flung into her cart while I tried to find the lids to the under-bed storage containers...you looked so put together, while I booked ass out of that aisle, and I just wanted you to know that someday?  Someday your own kids will do so much worse.  You can only hope they do it back to me.  Because me?  I will understand.

And laugh.

methods

This morning, I stopped at the grocery with the girls to pick up flowers for James' retiring teacher.  It made us late, and so when I got there, I had already resigned myself to sliding into work on the outside of 9:30.  And maybe it made me linger, or maybe it made me more willing to stay once I had arrived, but while dropping glove off in her room, her teacher called me back, to ask a very strange question.

I know her teacher only by the complaints I lodge to Matt against her.  Most of them are catty, and unfounded, but the mom in me has always felt that maybe she didn't have my black/white, emotion driven ideal of people-raising as a foundation.  I mentioned unfounded, right?  Good.

She wanted to know if my office had any properties with owners who would be willing to work out a rent to own relationship.  I made the funny raised eyebrow face to her, because she has spoken on several occasions about the uber-house her and her mate are building together.  When I say uber, I mean roughly three times the normal, everyday house value for our area.  Uber.

So I asked her what had happened to the uber house, assuming she had uncovered a bum contractor, or encountered a setback with the city, but instead she went honest with me, and it blew me away.

Her man, it turns out, took the opportunity last weekend to beat the ever loving shit out of her, for a reason she still can not understand, and I kneeled there around the snack table listening to her whispered story, and it scared me in ways I can not explain, because for reasons time did not permit me to know, her guy decided to unleash testosterone on her, after four years of remarkably calm and promise-building history.

It's funny that I only come here anymore to unload baggage.  I have no problem processing the good and the up and up, day to day actions.  I never give them a second thought.  Sitting here now, envisioning her hiding out in a shelter awaiting something to happen that no one really understands...it shakes me.  To think that she embarked on this battle, alone, over a week ago sickens me, and has gotten my brain working, calling up connections within my office, begging agents for this or that...I get it now, that I am nothing more than a bleeding heart.

Yet I am also the queen of turning things around, and by the time I could appropriately relay all of this to Matt tonight, my panic had turned to promise.  I am a Chabe, after all.  It will be okay, I told myself.  Better now than later.  Air.  That.  Out.

For parallel structure, I caught half of Opprah tonight.  The show had something to do with being thirty.  It had everything to do with not being where you thought you should, and towards the end, there was this guest who really...had my day not gone the way it had, I would have blow off as middle aged and dumb.

This lady got to thirty, and didn't like what she saw, and so she wrote her own obituary.  "No regrets," she said, and I believed her, and she decided right then who she had to become, and I sat with the tv volume set to loud, hanging on her every word.

Matt and I don't maintain many close relationships.  We've stopped believing the reason is because it is bad, and have shifted the thought process to us merely being too intense for most people.  That isn't even a lofty, flowery way of putting it.  We are intense people.  We don't have drama or anything, but we expect a lot of people intimately involved in our lives.  We don't live the way you are4 supposed to.  This woman, apparently, doesn't either.  But she was much more elegant in her interpretation of our philosophy.  I dug it.  I nodded my head to it, and at one point blurted out "YES", which made my children think it was okay to grab the kitten by his neck.  ( it is not)

The framework for our lives is not a series of goals.  There are not milestones, or victories, but instead there are boundaries.  And listening to said housewife Opprah chick, I heard the framework for what we have always believed.  You have to know where you need to end up.  You have to have the clear picture, of sixty years from now, and you have to feel the emotion of it, and you have to accept that not every moment of your journey on its behalf will be a step towards it.

Making way for hiccups, and monkey wrenches, has done nothing but good for our respective journeys.  it is the Old Man and the Sea, who brings nothing home but the skeleton of a marlin.  Make.  It.   Your.  Journey.

Marrying my life ideals to the events of this morning should be much easier.  I want to sit her down, and explain the beauty and hope of rumble strips.  I want to end it, and help her walk her bags out of the shelter.  I want her to open the door and see what I see.  Nothing has to change everything.

That is HUGE, I am told.  I don't see it, because I care so little about so much, but Matt and I are both confident that our children will leave our house someday, with a dream for their future, and it will not just be an education, or a mate.  it will be success, measured in a list of really good ideas, checked off one by one.

That, I believe, is power.

No...

...it is not a puppy, Moriah.  Closer, though.  Baby steps...

My mother and I had long overdue plans to meet for lunch on Friday.  We used to do it twice a week at least, but trying to coordinate an hour's break from two very unpredictable work schedules makes those days a distant memory.

I started to close down at work to meet her, and my cell phone rang, and it was her, calling to say she had gone out into the mall to speak with someone, and saw this old lady with two kittens she was trying to get rid of.  I've been joking for almost two years that my children are my pets, but lately they have both been so un-baby the joke was turning into more of a sad excuse.

I told her I would head over right then, and to have the woman wait for me, and I would try and get permission on the way.  Matt was not having any of it.  He's gotten used to my mid-day calls pleading for a kitten.  I've gotten used to his saying no.  Only a few weeks ago, we discovered that we may have a resident mouse, or at least  a vacationing one, and that?  THAT was my golden ticket.  We needed a mouser.

So meet the kitten. 

I picked the girls up early on Friday.  I told them I had a surprise, and told them it was something small, and smelly, and that we used to have.  Griffin, excersising her genius once again, guessed a kitten.  James was sure it would be a flower.  Or a pool.  Or a new plate.  Puzzling, indeed.  I told them that when we got to Target, they would know because the first aisle I would go down would be THE aisle.

I wish I would have had the camera.  Boot was in disbelief, blinking and asking a thousand questions, needing to know the color and where he came from, and "DID DADDY SAY YES?!?"  I took them to meet the kitten, and asked james what she thought a good name would be.

Everyone knows that you should never ask a child an open ended question like that.  You're supposed to name the thing while driving it home, and tell the kids he already had a name when you got him.  And then make that name romantic and proper.  I was going to go with Graham.

"Cat Master The Flash," she said, like she had been storing the name for ten thousand years, waiting for that moment, and because kids get so few choices in their free, sticky lives, that is his name.  Cat Master for short.  In a sing-song sort of way.  Like maybe we are luring him out to eat him.

He's a good little kitty, now that he has been properly rid of fleas, and his claws have been trimmed, and he is on an appropriate diet of soggy kitten food.  Maybe, when no one is around, the Might M almost digs him, as well.  Maybe.

   

Friday, June 8th

The end of May, I borrowed the gumption of a Lark and told the babysitter, as plainly as possible, that I was giving my two week notice.  This babysitter, I should clarify, was the owner of the in-home place I had been stashing Glove away at since mid-October.  I appreciate her.  I am so thankful that I was able to find her, and that she took such good care of my girl all day. (there's a BUT coming)

But Griffin was falling behind.  I know that sounds pretentious and freaky when speaking of a two year old, but the truth of the matter is, she was the oldest of six toddler girls there, and the lack of potty-trained, cable-free influences was turning her into a...er....heathen?  Sure.  We'll go with that.  A Heathen.

So June eight rolled around.  Griffin's very last day of daycare.  Less than two hours after I dropped her off, I got a call on my cell phone, from the sitter.  These calls have happened with some frequency since the girls left the nest, but every time I have ever looked down at my cell, and seen those two phone numbers, my heart has stopped.  For nothing, it turns out.  knockonwood.

This call was to say that a (still unnamed but identified by griffin) baby had pulled at griffin's glasses, and broke them off of her face.  My first thought, of course, was sharp plastic near eyeballs, and that maybe this would be a dangerous story, one full of blood and blindness and unrepairable frames that had almost become a third child in the past six months.   Like I said...those numbers freak me out.  Maybe I was in alarm mode.

The kid was fine.  Panicked that her glasses were gone, and she couldn't see, but no blinder than when I had dropped her off.  (that is almost funny)

I drove to the daycare and snuck into cubby-land to retrieve them, thinking a paper clip or something short of tape could repair them.  I begged Lenzcraffters to throw me a bone, I bought crazyglue and epoxy and by lunch time, had pretty much resigned myself to her glasses...those little brown things with the blue tint...being beyond repair.

Which ended up being okay, after the replacement discount at the above mentioned retailer.

I begged and pleaded with the woman...the same woman who fit griffin last winter...to let me keep her original frames, and after some bribing, a few tears, and a hefty amount of sulking, she slipped me this little lens-free pair of spectacles as she brushed by me coming out of the lab.  They sit in the cupboard now, like an old friend, and when I open the door to grab the rice or pasta or whatever, my eyes keep falling first to them.

I almost made it five years before hearing that something was wrong with one of my children.  I don't even mean a big thing.  I mean anything.  We had colds, one flu...but really, birthmarks under clothing were the closest thing to imperfection in my life as a parent.   I don't write this, or think of this, and not think I am lucky that THIS is the something in our lives.  I know we have gotten off luckily in our journey.

Big or small, finding out something is wrong with your child changes you.  It makes you question every time you ever held your breath, and every time you didn't hold it longer.  It takes every thought you ever had, and interrogates it, and spits it out amidst algorithms and Latin phrases, and it doesn't care if any of it ever makes any sense to you.  Because it never will.  It knows that. 

I remember feeling guilty in December.  I remember offering to drive home, so I could take my mind off of it for another hour.  I thought I should have seen something sooner.  I thought I should have spent less time complaining when she cried, I should have spent less time pushing her onto grandparents and brothers and anyone else, just so I could catch my breath.  I should have put that energy back into her, because then?  Then she wouldn't have gone two years without the ability to discern her mother from a pile of laundry on the couch.

And I stood in the mall, with the belief that the only way to start to make this right for her was to pick out the best frames there, regardless of price, or insurance, or it being the week before Christmas, and the oil-tank being a hair above the 1/4 tank line.

And we did.  And I vowed then to make it all up to her.  To forever forget the absolutely awful newborn and infant she was.  To stop holding as evidence my pregnancy with her...the near losses as well as the early arrivals...to just go forward following her lead...right there, I swallowed it all, and had yet to look back..

But now, I open the cupboard...and it all comes back to me. 

Self-check?  My guilt is almost gone.  Her eyes are improving.  Soon, I think, I should move them.  I can move them.  Maybe even tuck them away. 

Our old friends.

thank you.

to James, year six

One day last week Sandi pulled your dad aside, and told him how crazy-social you have become, except she may have used terminology a bit more befitting a middle-aged down-easter.  It may have come out like "you know James has come out-TA her shell somethin' wicked!"  And that is okay.  She went on to say that you have taken your people skills to a new level lately, with jokes, and speaking out, and generally, as far as I could discern from my second person relaying of the facts, growing up to be the five year old we could always see you becoming.

And that sounds like I am willing you to just stop growing.  It sounds like what I am saying is that you are a-okay just the way you are, and that I never ever again want you to grow or learn or glean anything ever again.  Ever.  Except it isn't like that.  I think that here we are, five years after I forced you out so you could meet your grandmother before her return flight home; five years after your father danced wildly around the man-nurse who wanted nothing more than to wash the birth from your hair without the nuisance of a man who had clearly lost his mind.  Five years!

Indeed...here we are.  At five, you have a deep appreciation for David Bowie.  And dinosaurs.  And Mario.  And berries, and the color red, and enforcing the rules.  And David Bowie.

Your birthday party was this past Sunday.  We planted flowers in pots we decorated, and ate cupcakes out of ice cream cones.  It was the first and last Sunday birthday party of my birthday party throwing career.  The balloon store is closed on Sunday, which meant the usual crowd of twenty was reduced to one mylar pony whose air valve happened to be the exact shape, size, and location of a penis.  Motherhood is no doubt an ongoing education.  This year I learned to take note of where balloon animals may or may not excrete urine, because if you were a boy, or three years older, your party could have taken on a whole 'nother theme.

Year five has been a strange one for us all.  I point this out only because you won't remember nine tenths of it, and what you do remember will be so swayed by the presence of candy or sharp objects that it won't count anyways.  A strange year.  Yes.

Your father moved home a few months ago.  We quickly fell back into our old routines, only it was better this time.  I cook, he washes dishes.  I start chores, he finishes them.  We both tuck in.  We both open go-gurt tubes.  Life, really is good.

I hope it stays this way.  I mention this only because last fall, your oldest Uncle embarked on a journey halfway around the world, at the urging of a very evil man, who through loopholes, magic potions and possibly a lie or two will forever into the future be called our forty third pres'dent.  Last fall, Devin left his car in our care.  A crappy little civic that regardless of any and all attempts the Chabes make, smells like cigarettes and Axe body spray.  And has really weird seat covers.

You ask me, sometimes, why we have Devin's car.  Why he didn't take it with him, and because the first time I was so caught off guard, my answer has always just been that he left it because he had to go to war.  I think you understand that, because you have not once asked for clarification.  We reached the half-way mark of his tour only to have him be gifted an additional three months of service on the front lines in the war on terror.  I think maybe that is all supposed to be capitalized now.  The War On Terror.

On those days when your father drops you off in the morning, and I see the booster in the back of his car, it is hard to not stop and wonder if that will be your memory of him.  If something...the anything that is never more than a knock away...will happen, and years from now at Memorial Day Parades, and those ceremonies we never go to after wards...what if we have to go to them?  Will the smell of his car be the only memory you ever have of him?

The past year has driven you closer to your own sibling.  Maybe it was just the age gap shrinking.  Maybe it was the fact that she can see now, and so her need to be a cranky ass has dwindled, but a shift happened none-the-less.

   

You guys now share a room, with matching beds and apple bedding you picked from the limited options I took the liberty of pre-screening for you.  Your complaints as to the arrangement run rampant, but I take them with a grain of salt.  It's funny because the two of you are so eager to call anyone and everyone, besides each other, a best friend.  "No worries," I tell myself.  Someday you will find each other.  I know it. 

About now I should be guiding this letter to a conclusion.  To some pre-ordained thought or message or whatever equally pompous mass happens to rule the moment.  But I dunno this time, besides that I love you, all five years of you, and like candles on a cake, I can only hope we have many more.  Many,many, many more. 

xoxo, mom

hands and feet

This morning, on our way out the door to preschool, and daycare, and red offices, James stopped to pick up  a small, pink beaded ring.  "I need this," she said, "for my wedding".

I was busy, and figured that whatever her story was, if the pink beaded ring got her into the car a second faster, I didn't care, and it did.  And so I didn't bother to think about how my four year old was almost five, or how she had told me she was getting married; I didn't even make a solid mental note of who her intended groom would be.

I picked her up tonight, brought her home, she ran to the television and begged for David Bowie.  Time passed and she came back to the kitchen, Matt installing a new bathroom light, me cooking dinner, and for some reason I thought, right then, to tell Matt about her wedding.

"Do you KNOW how you get married?" she asked, obviously knowing the answer.

"How?"

"you kiss them.  On the lips.  I married jackson today."

What's funny is how you have these miniature people, and regardless of any prior knowledge of how populations come to be, you assume it happens in far off lands, at least as far as your childen are concerned.

I watched Matt sink off the chair he was standing on in the bathroom.  The knob and tube wiring would have done just as well jolting him as she did.  And so it comes to be that even though I call one of them "the baby", we are passed that stage. 

Too bad, cause I really GOT that stage. 

Too bad, because I have closets and basements and garages full of baby-wares, and I guess that until today, a small part of me was holding on to the belief that I would need them.  And not for grandchildren.

They have to go.  My two year old is going on thirty, and my near-five year old is knee deep in a preschool-esque consumated marriage, and I think that maybe it is okay to just be ourselves, and not have babies. 

I am thankful that we had them young, that we had inner conflicts over traveling to deserts for music festivals the week I was due.  That we brought them home wearing gowns printed with hamburgers, and let them sleep in our bed even though it always spooked out the nurses.  I am thankful, and happy, to be here.  Where things *happen*. 

Even if my son-in-law does pee his nap-mat once a week.

kharma is a four eyed bitch

When we were in San Diego, we became tentative friends with this guy in Matt's office, despite the fact that his wife was a roving ass who possessed no more personality than the sliver of my chipped toenail that I threw in the bathroom trash last weekend.  His wife was always overly interested in James.  When J was a newborn, I placed her into the ass-girl's arms, and the firsts words out of her mouth were that she wanted one.  She wanted a baby.  Good for her, Matt and I decided.  Never mind that she had trouble committing to a pair of sunglasses for the afternoon.  Besides, there's a system of checks and balances in working order just in case someone gets in over their heads with their children, right?  Right?

The week before we moved to Boston, ass-girl had a baby girl of her own.  They gave it some weird ghetto name and dressed it in giraffe suits.  I remember sitting over a mutual friend's breakfast bar, sipping coffee and Irish cream, and studying the lot of photographs, and saying to my friend that something was wrong with their baby.  She had an extra plate in her head or something, and I know that it came out snarky and childish, but I truly believed that there was something wrong with their child.   And then we moved, and got busy waiting for our baby 2 to come, and save the occasional picture of the ass-girl baby, I forgot all about them.  Until earlier this year, when I opened a myspace account to email Alex French (who never emailed back...) and Matt shared with me a link to both of the ass-people's accounts.  And then they updated their accounts, with pictures of the something-wrong-with-her child, to show that the baby was now cross-eyed , and rocking what were perhaps the thickest pair of glasses I had ever seen.

Until last night.

A few weeks ago, Matt shared with me a theory as to why griffin appears to be so out of her mind.  And scatter brained.  And inattentive.  And overly dramatic when coloring, or watching television.  And his theory also explained why I spent much of last Spring in the emergency room with her, freshly fallen down our one hundred year old staircase, and the last time, how at the exact moment that I rounded the corner to check on her, I witnessed her walking off the top stair into thin air, without a lick of fear in her eyes.

And so sitting in the Ophthalmologist's office yesterday, I found this little seed in me that believed I would be leaving the office with a fearless, borderline out of control two year old.  Instead, the man took one look down her muddy, wide pupils and took that from her.  From me. 

Griffin, it turns out, is mother-fucking farsighted.  So much so that the good Doctor was surprised she was not already cross-eyed.  For over two year years, we have shoved things in her face, and shared things with her, and showed things to her, and she has been responsive, and thankful, and excited, because she just doesn't know any better.  Not because she actually saw anything.  Aren't ALL people bat-shit-blind?  no?

We went to lunch after her appointment, and drove straight home to get the girl some glasses.  Matt and I bribed her with gum-balls and chocolate and ponies and possibly a whore to let us play dress-up with her face, and within a thirty minute window we were saying our goodbyes and see-ya-in-two-hours.

And driving away from the mall, I mentioned to Matt that this was all my fault.  That all that time ago, when I snickered at the [name removed]-baby, deep down I knew that I was jinxing us into some sort of aesthetic catastrophe.  And we laughed at the absurdity of my guilt.  And we killed two hours, and drove back to retrieve her new eyes.  She refused to let the technician fit them.  She refused to put them on, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that I was thankful.  That the thought didn't cross my mind to just forget about the events of the day, and to refund our money and go home and put the girls to bed and sit down in front of the television and reject the notion that possibly, a large, painful battle lay in front of us.

Only when we got home, and turned on the television, Glove slapped her glasses onto her face, and set about examining her surroundings, for the very first time.  She studied all of us, and spent a few minutes just looking at the carpet, and her shadow, and touching both of them.  She sat on the floor, with the giant pillow I made her last Christmas, and watched Rudolph without blocking the view of everyone else in the room.  And when bedtime finally did roll around, she screamed at me to put her gwasses back on.

But the trips out are already full of stares, and whispers, and pointing (people...get a hold of yourself...), and yet she is the happiest little girl I've ever seen.  And thankful, and curious, and content, even,  to just sit with us and read a book or look at the tree.  They are a gift, for a little girl we already believed was one of the two most special ones ever. 

So here you go.  Pictures of the new Griffin.  AKA the girl who stole Christmas money for something as trivial as sight.  Enjoy.  :)

to Griffin, year two

When I found out I was pregnant with you, my use and interest for your father fell short of even having him change a lightbulb.  As did his in me.  And then all of a sudden, you were coming, and we didn't speak of it, or plan for it, or even really celebrate it.  Someday you will read this and laugh, because you will understand that if ever your father and I were not together, we would both have no other choice than to become freaky old women who live alone with their twenty-two hundred cats, only your father and I could both do without animals as roommates, so if the unthinkable were to happen, we wouldn't even be able to fulfill our rebound destinies.  Granted, that fear is pretty low on the list of things holding us together, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that every so often, when he leads our car four hours into nowhere without even enough warning for me to gather proper nourishment, it does cross my mind.  And then I remember that for forever, i will never be able to hate your father as much as I hate cats.

And so you were born eventually, after months of worrying if you would even make it, and wondering if your father would even be in town when you were born, and the whole labor things started, and ended, and before i had held you, my friend Michelle was holding a cell phone to my ear, so i could tell your father that indeed, my feelings about you arriving on october 3rd were correct, and that really, there was no need to worry about missing anything anymore, because he already had.

And that you were perfect.  And small.  I said that about a thousand times before you had even opened your eyes.

And you slept next to me in my bed, all wrapped up in you receiving blanket, and sighed every so often, as if just to remind me that you were there.  I didn't tell anyone your name.  I held up the paperwork a whopping twelve hours, just so your father could be there, as he had for james, to announce your name for the very first time.  Griffin Lucille Chabe.

We spent the next six months telling everyone that you were not like other babies.  You cried an abnormal amount, at abnormal frequencies.  You could never be put down.  Your father would come home, and I would hand you to him, wanting nothing more than three seconds of not having to watch your ugula dance in self-loathing, and your cries would swell even more.  And once a day, i thought to myself that I just couldn't do it.  That you were inately angry for some reason i didn't know.  That you hated us, that we werent the folks the farm had promised you that you were going to live with.  A small part of me wondered if maybe you knew that hardship you were on us.  maybe you sensed that you took more time and emotion than your father or I could muster.  maybe that was the trick that made me just love you, and hold you, and walk you, all night long, attempting to isolate the noise that came from you when you were awake and sometimes even in your sleep.  You just needed to feel that things were going to be okay.

So we just loved you.  We tried our best to make you feel safe, and secure, and warm, and loved, and then at six months old, you woke up one morning with this big, gummy grin on your face, and there was a shift.  Every day, I see that same smile, and it does a fine job of, little by little, whitting away at the poopstained memories from the beginning of your visit to earth.

And now it has been two years.  I bring you downstairs in the morning and the first thing you do is turn on the television, and start pressing the volume buttons, trying to find Sponge Bob or, as you call him, "bab-a-heen".  You exist almost exclusively on cheese and iced tea.  You refer to animals by the sounds they make.  You are obsessed with poop, and pee, and how animals do both.  A few weeks ago, I told you that birds don't pee they only poop, and your eyebrows lifted so far above your face that I almost had to scoop them up off of the ground behind you.  We bought you a bird feeder for your birthday, and you spend a good chunk of every day just standing there, willing one to come and eat your ghetto seed and let you show me where they poop from. 

Every morning you still wake up crying.  You get so angry sometimes that your whole body goes positively stiff, and red, and it scares the shit out of all of us.  You say "hi" to everyone you see.  You say "bye" to everyone you see.  And then when I leave you, after all but shoving me out of the door and locking it behind me, you throw up this little baby version of the sign language for "i love you", and everytime, it makes me want to just change my mind and not go anywhere after all.  Even though we've been out of toilet paper for three days and the milk in the fridge went bad sometime last week.

Because as hard as you are, you just have this way of making it all worth it.  You'll bring blankets to anyone who lays down on the couch.  If I give you a treat, or a snack, or a cup of friggin water even, you always hold out the other hand, and raise it up, and remind me of "shishter", and you don't put it down again until it is full with a second identical item for your Boot.  You cry when we take her to school in the morning.  You ask me at least once per day if we can go get her yet.  if our errands happen to take us past her school, you rage and scream until all I can do is go in and get her early.  You always run to hug her.

And you miss your father.  More than I do, i think, at times. 

Three months from now, this will all be over, and you will resume growing up witin a nuclear family unit.  I doubt you will ever remember any of this weird arrangement.  I doubt you will remember the fundamental role in our decision to pursue such an inhumane living arrangement.  beyond that, i hope you don't remember any of the struggle that was getting us four passed all of that, and to this point.  Because you are so completely worth it.  So.Completely.Worth.It.

Today, at two years and one month, you started "school".  When you have children of your own, you will understand that "school" is what you call day-care to make yourself feel better.  That it gives purpose and conviction to the notion that, for whatever reason, valid or not, your parents no longer wish to care for you twenty four hours per day.  I knew you would do fine.  I knew that I would be hard pressed to pry you out of Tracey's house today when my work day ended.  I knew that in the seven hours you were in her care, she would fall in love with you, and collect stories of your day to share with me.  As to be expected from our children, you didn't disappoint.

Your success didn't make it any easier to close that door between us this morning.  The fact that you are the second child I have gone through this with didn't either.  I sat outside for a few minutes, running through myself to make sure I could, indeed, leave you.  Making sure that it was time.  For me.

And it was.  And you made friends.  And survived.  And came home ready to hang out and do fun stuff.  As did I. 

Bring. On. The. Play-Doh.

Happy late birthday, glove.  I love you.

Mom.