Eight year old (2)

Dear Isaac,

On the morning I began drafting this letter to you, I woke up early — earlier than you, at least, at 6 AM  — and snuck downstairs to my office in order to try to squeeze in some journalling before you and your brother woke up. (Or, really, before you woke up: Rowan will reliably sleep in well past seven these days, but you have never really varied from your preferred 6 AM-ish wake-up call, slipping in to my room to cuddle and ask questions and steal my covers and wonder about French toast. You know. I can barely fault you for it — I've always been terrible at sleeping in, and I'm not getting any better at it as I get older.) It's a crapshoot, my early-morning attempts at pre-kid activity: you wake up at the slightest noise and so I often forfeit tea, try not to put too much weight on the stairs, pee in the basement rather than risk using the bathroom upstairs, all in the name of having you sleep longer.

This particular morning, I made it! I got all the way into my office and even got through a paragraph before I heard the unmistakable sound of you, stumbling out of bed and across the hallway, peeking into my room and not finding me there. I heard you grab a pajama shirt, the fall of your feet down the stairs and then there you were, poking your head into my office and crawling into my lap. I admit that I thought, Damnit. We spent the next half-hour and three longhand pages like that. You pulled The House Book off my shelf and flipped through it, chattering to me about all the different buildings by famous architects as I attempted to write ("Is that a mansion?" "Do you think a house like that would cost 299 million dollars?” “I would really, really like to live in that house."), squirming in my lap, all elbows and sit-bones into my thighs and ribs and sides. We jockeyed for space on the desk — me with my notebook and you with your massive hardcover. We negotiated: you wanting breakfast and me wanting to finish, you wanting to sit on my lap exactly as you wanted to sit and me wanting you to sit so that I could feel my legs. Etc.

If I look back on those pages, which I'm doing right now, they are annotated with notes about you, ranging from annoyance to pleasure, fatigue to adoration.

Because you're eight, all skinny and snaggletoothed, long-limbed and flexible (you trim your toenails with your teeth; you can still do the splits all ways, although you don't drop suddenly into them and scare people now as often as you did, say, a year ago), legs covered in bruises and picked-at mosquito bites. You shaved your head about four months ago — your hair, your choice — but it's mostly grown in. Last week, I quietly snipped away the beginnings of the mullet at the nape of your neck, because we do still have some standards around here and hockey hair isn't one of them. Yet.

Because you're eight, and these kinds of cuddles, these extended, one-on-one moments of physical closeness, are fewer and further in between. Sure, you prefer to fall asleep in my bed and would stay there all night if I could sleep next to your squirminess and sheet-stealing, but I can't, and so each night that you're here I gather up your sleep-limp body and carry you to your own bed. You're still little enough, light enough, to do that, although it's starting to get awkward: those never-ending legs catching the sheets as I try to move you. One night a couple of weeks ago I heaved you gently onto your bed and your weight shifted so that I lost my balance ever so slightly and fell, gently, onto the mattress with you, your cheek coming to rest against my chest like you were a baby again. I stayed there for a few minutes, remembering.

That’s it, isn't it, what it means to be eight? Still small enough for so many things — laps, late-night bed shuffles — but not for much longer, with those long legs of yours. You're starting to be a real menace in those tickle fights you suggest almost daily. You still prefer to be read to out loud — and I love to read to you, so that's a great thing. (We just finished E.L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, one of my absolute childhood favourites, and I thought about how much fun it would be to take you to New York one day, go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art together.) But still, lately I catch you with a book on the couch, and I hear you whispering the words under your breath, and I wonder just how much longer we’ll be reading together: will I notice first that you’re too big for my lap or that you’re too independent a reader to sit with me any longer? Either way, there are going to be some feelings about that. We’ll discuss those later.

First, I will tell you that if I had to take bets, I would predict that you will be an archaeologist or jeweler. Or a curator: you are fascinated with rocks, have turned your bedroom into a display case for the various fossils and specimens that you collect on your own and with your still-beloved former babysitter, Clair. You're convinced that they’re worth millions, which would be a good thing because of your above-mentioned mansion fantasies. We're having lots of talks about money these days, but I fear it your context for the numbers is still underdeveloped. Which is fine, given that I can barely wrap my head around the fact that you are eight. And nine and ten can't be far behind, can they?

So much for distractions.

Isaac, you are a goofball, a dancer, a ninja. You love Minecraft and your best friend. Your best meal is still breakfast, preferably copious quantities of French toast or oatmeal, covered with copious quantities of maple syrup. Many things in your life are copious — the more the better. You are equal parts sweet but wildly unsentimental; you don’t cry at goodbyes and would prefer not to say them at all; it's hard not to want to hug you anyway but I'm learning to give you your space. Which makes the morning cuddles, the bedtime reading, extra sweet. (It would be disingenuous not to note that now you are here for only half your bedtimes. I want you to know that I notice your absences, miss you when you are not here — even as I welcome sleeping in past seven, even when I can wake up and journal and drink a cup of tea uninterrupted. I want you to know that know that you're okay exactly where you are.)

You are eight, and I will watch you celebrate that eight-ness with a bunch of boys running wildly through the neighbourhood, and I will marvel. I will watch you catch hold of this new age, on the cusp of this new time, and run with it. And I will revel in those moments when you stop, even for a moment, and fall into my lap.

I love you,

Mom

PS: Seven-year-old

PPS: Six-year-old

PPPS: Five-year-old

I think I'll call her Zelda

I have a new baby.

Vintage kroehler.

I haven’t settled on a name yet, but I’m taking suggestions. She’s a little rough around the edges, but for $50 off kijiji, she’s a steal.

I’ve been looking for a new dresser for a little while — you know, to go with the newly painted bedroom (which I painted LIKE A BOSS, I might add; photos forthcoming). In my search, I’ve discovered something kind of interesting about furniture in general: there’s no middle ground. Either it’s essentially free or it’s a billion dollars, with very little in between except for MDF crap. I'm right about this, aren’t I? Witness: the dresser that I really, really, really want to buy except for every single one of the nearly three thousand dollars it will cost.

So, so pretty. So, so, expensive.

So, yeah: kijiji won that contest. But I’m actually kind of ecstatic about that, because, perversely, it means that I CAN HAZ ALL THE PROJEKTS. (Also, I’ve somehow convinced myself that I’m now $3000 richer.) It wasn’t enough to spend five days painting the bedroom. Or the following weekend touching up the hallways and the doors (and they look marvelous). Or completely refolding every single thing in the linen closet. Or any of the other roughly zillion household projects I’ve taken on in the past few weeks. I want more, apparently — more backbreaking, painstaking, fiddly steps involving power tools and chemicals and dust and fumes and dozens of opportunities to screw up. Bring it, I say. I watch myself say that, and I know what’s ahead, and I still want it. There’s a metaphor or twelve in that, too, but right now I’m too busy googling “refinishing very thin veneer” to do that kind of thinking. Which is probably a good thing.

There’s a very good chance that my new dresser is going to be (even more) gorgeous. There’s a much higher chance that it’s also going to hurt. I can hold both those things in one hand right now, before I’ve entered a hardware store.

 I'll keep you posted. 

Life on the edge

I’m painting my bedroom.

If you know anything at all about me and painting, right now you’re giggling. Because … well, you know what? In this case a few pictures are worth well more than a thousand words:

What can I say? I’m a Sagittarius — a little too gung-ho to get started on creative projects, to get started on just about any project, really. I plan and I prep and I get everything almost all the way ready and then I get too excited and just begin and then I get too close to the edge. By which I mean I exceed my limits. And the result is colour on the ceiling where really there should be only white. So, when Sharp asked me to write on the theme of taking life “#totheedge,” I was all like, “Have I got a metaphor for YOU.”

This time, I’m going to take the painting slower. This time, I’m going to cover every inch of floor with drop cloths, tape all the edges, wait for things to dry properly, make good on all the advice my next-door-neighbour/former-pro-painter Holly so generously bestowed after I texted her and asked her for a “pre-painting consult.” This time, maybe I won’t spill over the edges.

But even as I type those words, I’m shaking my head and smiling at just how adorable and naïve I am, ducky. Because I already know what will happen, and so do you. Bet on it: there’s gonna be paint where paint ought not to be, and all the prepping and taping and waiting and good intentions in the world won’t be able to stop it. There will be spills, and smudges, blurred boundaries, drips on the ceiling fan. And the best I’ll be able to do is to catch them and sponge them off before they dry, cover over my mistakes, and hope no one notices. Most of all, I hope that I don't notice, because I'm the one who will.

I could hire someone to paint for me, of course. But I won’t, partly because money, partly because I kind of like painting, and mostly because this feels like the kind of job — a rite of passage, a ritual — that I need to do by myself. (According to my mother, “by myself” was my very first two-word phrase. I was a fun toddler.)

There are only about a million and three metaphors here.

In this post-separation world, I’m making space for my new worldview, imagining life going forward in ways that are radically different than I imagined it might for so long. Some of that is a cause for grief, and some of that is joy, and all of it requires a leap of faith that comes from clearing space, deciding on a colour scheme, drawing new boundaries and taping them off, and then getting as up close and personal to those boundaries — those edges — as I can with a paintbrush and the steadiest hands I can muster.

Secret underpaintings. 

I’m on the edge of a newer life here. It’s not brand-new: a lot of different colours on the same walls, variations on the same schedule, the same paintings hung in new spots (and new paintings hung in old spots). Different mattress, same box spring, and so on. Sometimes, I look around the house and it feels as though I’m in one of those double cartoons where they change nine things and you have to figure out which ones — utterly familiar and utterly unfamiliar all the same: those chairs are different, and that cutlery, and that painting is in a different spot, and that one’s gone. Oh, and you’re the only adult who lives here any more, with all the privileges and obligations and responsibilities and emotions that go along with that. Speaking of emotions, I’m second-guessing my emotional state constantly: I feel just fine right now, but what if I feel bad later? What will I do then? I’m trying to notice that habit, remind myself that worrying about future emotional states isn’t particularly productive.

But painting — that’s entirely productive. Painting is task after task after task, immediate and satisfying, an act of bravery and change.

New colours on old walls, imagining change and then acting on it. It’ll be messy, and fun, and maddening, and I’ll probably want to quit more than once, but in the end — with any luck — it’ll be kind of beautiful, and highly imperfect, and all mine. (Except for the seven-year-old who has taken to cuddling up for stories in my new bed on the nights that he’s here NOM, or the 10-year-old who likes to curl up in the same bed to read books or play video games. That’s good. There’s room for them in my vision.) There will be spills. There will be blurred boundaries and uneven borders and paint where it ought not to be. But there will also be new colour, new possibilities, beauty, satisfaction, and kids curled up on my new sheets. You can’t have all that unless you get right to the edge, look over at what lies beyond it, and take the leap anyway.

* * *

This post is sponsored by the Sharp AQUOS Crystal phone, which features a five-inch, “edgeless” screen that allows for maximum viewing with a minimal handprints (no painter’s tape required). It's also got great audio, featuring Harman/Kardon technologies, and a fab camera. I am being compensated for this post, but all opinions are my own.