at home

It’s a gorgeous day after several weeks of weather that have really put the “bleak” in midwinter. We took the boys to the park wearing nothing but fleece sweatshirts over their clothes, instead of the heavy, bulky jackets which recently caused G. to wail “It makes my arms too fat and I can’t twirl my hair!” (he has a permanent tangle at the back from this self-soothing activity). It was such a pleasure to watch them run around (or in B’s case, toddle around) unburdened, like little champagne corks followed by endless showers of bubbles.

Now everyone is sleeping, and I am alone in the sunshine, in my living room, looking out across the bare trees and the hospital grounds and the patches of melting snow. And today, for the first time since we got back, I feel deeply, exactly at home. Somehow the passing-through-ness has lifted with the weather (hopefully less briefly, since we’re getting more snow this week). I can imagine remembering this afternoon years from now, in some other place, and being glad. It’s been a long time coming.

Last night we were looking at our two boys, the almost-toilet-trained and the almost-ambulatory, and trying to remember what it was like when G was at B’s stage. We don’t really believe that he ever was, G having skipped entirely the solemn, wry and contemplative baby stage and emerging fully formed, like Athena, except naked and rolling in a barrel. With sparklers attached. I am constantly resisting what feels like an unfair urge to cast B as the yin to G’s yang, the calm beside the storm. He has every opportunity to prove us wrong. But we do start to wonder if we’ve been exaggerating, a bit, just how lively things have been since G joined the party.

So I went upstairs and unearthed a CD with some old videos of G from the first winter we lived in Paris. We slid it into the laptop and clicked on the first video we saw – G in his first pair of rubber-soled shoes, walking across the dining room floor in our apartment. There it was, the 1000-watt smile, barely containing the canary. And underneath our encouraging voices, a strange, persistent noise. After a second, it came to me. It was the thumping of G’s shoes, like timpani, as, at fourteen months, he made his way across the floor. It’s G’s world, and we really do just live in it.

B, on the other hand, is silent as a sylph. He has shown no interest in walking more than a few steps, but he can get to the top of the stairs without making a sound. If he wants attention, he raises one finger in the air, as if he is politely making a point at a meeting. He bursts into absolute highbeams every time G enters the room, and his second favorite game is throwing cereal to Lucy.

In a couple of weeks our babysitter is moving both boys to a bigger site that, thankfully, also exists in her kingdom (more, someday, about working, commuting, the morning oatmeal ritual, and the pleasures of sitting by myself at a desk). I worried, with that peculiar combination of protectiveness and embarrassment, if there were discipline problems around the edges that we weren’t hearing about. “Oh, no,” said M, when I ventured a question on the phone. “I was just watching him all day the other day, and how frustrated he gets that he can’t just move through the other children. He can’t help running into them – he just wants to get across the room, and they happen to be in the way. It just doesn’t seem fair for him to spend the day in time-out just for being a three-year-old boy.” I was flooded with relief. Having always been the child who sat in the corner with a book, being the mother of the one ricocheting around the room is strange and uncharted territory. It requires adjustment, like finding out you are related to Herbert Hoover.

But we let G stay up late to watch Springsteen perform at the Super Bowl, and he curled up next to me on the sofa, leaning into the crook of my arm. After a few minutes of football, to which neither his father nor I could give too much illumination, he said, “Too much pushing in football. It makes me nervous.”

I said, “Me, too.”