There’s really nothing sweeter than coming back to a place I left a year ago. Fights and grievances evaporate, everything appears shiny and new, and I find myself appreciating details I might never have noticed if I lived here all the time. People are happy to see me, and instead of uncomfortable conversations about what I’m doing to make a living, we chat about my fabulous tan.
One of these days I’ll have to settle down. Pick a country and stick with it for a few consecutive years. Like a grownup.
But not yet.
I’m a little late with this recap, but that’s a good thing. Now everyone who missed the first week’s chapters because they were wrapped up in the Christine O’Donnell non-sex story or too busy trying to figure out how to pronounce Lincecum or in a sugar coma from one too many dips into the candy bowl can have a chance to rectify the situation.
N.B. “Rectifying The Situation” is what they call a prostate exam on the Jersey Shore.
Anywho…
- Cary led the week with a horrifying tale of neglect and hoarding, filled with impending doom.
- First-time contributor Dan gave us the opening chapter of a story that will strike many of us close to home. You don’t need an unusual name to misread someone.
- Jann starts out the story of Ham. Ham does not like green eggs (I imagine) and he doesn’t like that his life is too perfect. I mean, creepily perfect.
- I wrote something. I mean, I think I know what I wrote and it might not suck completely, but I’m not sure yet. There’s a place called Boomtown, I know that. Go read it if that compels you.
- Valary ended the first week with her opening chapter of “Rummy”. Rummy’s a rocking horse with the sweetest friend ever.
1. How I gained some weight during the year I wasn’t in Grenada. I’ve been back for two months now, and it’s still the very first thing people comment on when they see me. It’s stressing me out so much that I hid in my apartment for four weeks, avoiding people. I’ve lost ten pounds since I got here, but no one mentions that. I’m not writing about it.
2. How last year I went through some really awful emotional abuse from my family. Now that I’ve gotten some distance from them, I’m actually thinking about it more, and I don’t want that, because there’s nothing to do except get over it. (I talked to them about it, which only led to specific explanations re: why I deserve to be treated like shit.) I’m not writing about it.
3. Bean’s father is a jerk. This is not a surprise, nor is it something I can’t handle. But still. I’m not writing about it.
4. I’m lonely. I want to have dirty martinis with my girlfriends, get tipsy and talk about how much we love each other. I’m not writing about it.
5. My book, which was almost finished in May, has floundered. I don’t have the physical or emotional space I need to focus on it. I’m worried I’ll never get it together, and that if I do, it’ll be trite and boring. I’m most certainly not writing about it.
6. I stopped taking Wellbutrin back in May. I don’t feel awful without it, but I know I’d feel better with it, but I can’t afford to fill the prescriptions here. I’m not writing about it.
7. There’s a broken pipe in my head. It’s spewing words, and in order to avoid a flood, I had to shut the whole system down. I’m definitely not writing about THAT.
8. I’ve been sick off and on since I got to Grenada. I had two fevers, which were miserable, a cold, and I generally just feel shitty, probably because of the heat and how hard it is to stay hydrated. It makes it hard to keep up with Bean, and everything else. I’m not writing about it.
9. I haven’t had a real job in a long time, and I’m terrified that I’ll never be hired again. I’m kind of a loser, you know? Totally not writing about it.
10. I could use a hug, like a real hug. Maybe I’ll write about that. Then again, maybe I won’t.
His after work ritual began as soon as he walked in the gate, when he’d sit down on the chair in the verandah that looked like wicker but actually was made of fiberglass.
He’d slide his fingers under the laces of his sneakers, which were invariably sparkling bright, white and clean. Slowly, deliberately, he’d pull on the laces, and only when they were fully loosened would he slide the sneakers off his feet.
That’s what he was doing the day he told me about his dream. The dream in which we’d been liming at the beach bar and I’d had too much to drink and refused to come home with him. The dream in which I’d danced with half the guys in the yard, close close. The dream in which I’d cussed him every time he said it was time to go.
“Now why would you do that, babes?” As he asks this he’s still looking down, still working his laces.
“I don’t know, sweetie. Why would I?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.” And that’s when I finally hear the accusation in his voice.
“You… You want me to explain my behavior? In YOUR dream?”
He blinks and nods slowly and I know he’s dead serious, I know he believes in the power and truth of dreams and loup-garou and obeahmen. So I know, I know I shouldn’t laugh but I can’t help it, because all I can hear is Harvey Keitel saying,
“You shoot me in a DREAM, you better wake up and apologize!”
I lose control of my laughter. It spills out of my mouth and leaks from the corners of my eyes, then floats on the cool night breeeze, up up until it’s carried out over Westerhall Bay. My mirth is so heavy that in spite of himself and the overproof rum in his blood, he finally cracks a smile, stands up, kisses my mouth, roughing my lips with his beard, and goes to the kitchen to see if I’ve seasoned the meat the way he taught me.
As a parent, I know what these words mean, how they feel. I see clearly how the unconditional love I have for my child affects my decisions, my actions, my thoughts. And this love, this unconditional love, was never something I chose. It just happened. One day I was myself, the way I had always been, and the next day, I was part of something more. And this something more is a beautiful thing.
As a single parent, this unconditional love affects every relationship I have. I want someone to feel for me what I feel for the boy. And no one ever has. I’ve dated. I’ve had relationships. I’ve heard “I love you.” But every relationship has ended. And everyone always has an excuse.
There are no excuses in parenting. And there shouldn’t be. I love the boy. I want to do anything within my power to see him live a happy, healthy life. And if it’s not within my power, I’ll summon superhuman strength. Because I want to. But beyond providing for him, I want to be around him. I want to spend time with him doing everything, doing nothing. Because being with him makes me happy,
All of my relationships start out great. Don’t they always? Long conversations, text messages, giggles and butterflies. But the true test of a relationship is when you move past the new and into the settled. When doing nothing is enough because you’re doing nothing with someone you love. And this is when my relationships generally end. And this is when I start hearing or making excuses.
When I’m the one who ends a relationship, it’s usually because I don’t feel the person I’m with loves me in the way I want to be loved. Of course, this isn’t what I say.
When I’m not the one who ends a relationship, it’s usually because the person I am with senses that I want something beyond what he is capable of giving. Of course, that isn’t what he says.
Relationships have ended because of: behavioral differences, logistical concerns and, my favorite, “We’re just in different places in our lives.”
The boy wakes up early. Very early. I do not.
I like to listen to Maria Callas during dinner. The boy does not.
The boy walks slowly, taking time to observe his environment. I do not.
I like silence. The boy does not.
These differences don’t affect our day-to-day lives. We figure out a way to make it work, not only because we have to, but because we want to.
In every relationship I’ve had, these little differences become magnified. Argued about. They become excuses to say goodbye.
And I can’t help but feel that whatever the relationship was, it wasn’t love. Not really.
Because in my mind, love doesn’t end. Love is something powerful enough to move past the silliness of everyday life. Love is divine.
I know this to be true.
Love is divine.
I’ve been with people I care about. And people have cared about me. Sometimes very deeply. Sometimes so deeply, I begin to question my idea that romantic love should be as powerful as the love I have for the boy. I think that perhaps I have unrealistic expectations. But I always reach the same conclusion.
If love is divine, it can not be quantified. It either exists, or it doesn’t. No one believes in a percentage of God. You either believe, or you don’t.
I believe in love.
And it would be nice to find someone to believe in love with me.
![It’s not just that Cheryl *knows* the rules, it’s that she was there while I invented them. The night Bean was born, she stayed overnight with my grandmother, so my mom could sleep in the other bed in my room at the clinic. Cheryl was still at the house when we got home early the next afternoon. For the two and half years that followed, she spent eight hours a day, five days a week with my family. She knows me, and she knows Bean, even if she hasn’t seen him in a year and a half. She’s also the only person he remembers from our life here in Grenada. Other than his father. He even forgot mangoes.
So when Cheryl called and said could she please take Bean for Saturday, and bring him in a sports festival t’ing for chirren, I said yes, of course, because she’s still his only babysitter.
This is Bean’s first ever sleepover with anyone who is not my mother. He’ll be back tomorrow.
*
When I informed Bean’s father, he frowned. Briefly. And then he said, “You know I hear dey say Cheryl have dem wild children.”
“Wild?” Like, what does that even mean?
“Yeah, man.”
“Wild. Like the big daughter.”
Yeah, man!”
“The one who got in trouble for reading?”
He shrugged, which signifies concession.
*
We didn’t go anywhere at all the first few days. Bean fell asleep on the New York to Miami leg of our flight, so I did too, which was great, because I’d barely gotten three hours of sleep the night before, and terrible, because when I fall asleep in cars or on airplanes, I don’t move, and I wake up with molten fire in my knees and ankles, the residue of my battle with Lyme Disease in high school.
Bean was a good sport about Mommy’s feet. I had new DVDs and books, fresh magic markers, and a sketchbook that I wallpapered in Buzz Lightyear stickers. We drew frogs, houses with plants growing from their chimneys, and a dinosaur that looked exactly like the Loch Ness Monster. I restrung my red coral necklace, slipping in a turquoise bead every five chips.
I’d promised that we would go the the beach the first day, and I meant it, but I had to let my feet - too swollen even for slippers - heal.
The storm, when it came, approached slowly. Bean was exhausted from the day before, had played for *hours* in the ocean, and didn’t sleep late the following morning because he woke up hungry. He ate three hard-boiled eggs and some ham for hops and went back to sleep.
“Mommy? Where is Woody? Did you pack Woody in the suitcase?”
“Yes, baby. He’s in the box with your Legos. See?”
“Nooo.” He sniffs air out at me, hard, a horrifying expression of impatience I recognized he’d learned by watching me communicate with his grandmother.
“Not THIS Woody. This is SMALL Woody. I want BIG Woody.”
“I didn’t bring Big Woody,” I reminded him. “We left Big Woody at Grandma’s house.. She’ll keep him safe for you. Also, sweetie pie? Big Woody didn’t have his hat. A cowboy can’t travel without his hat.”
“I WANT TO GO TO GRANDMA’S HOUSE!”
That was the beginning of an epic - no, no, literally! epic. - tantrum. It lasted about sixteen hours. Highlights include:
- This is not my house!
- I need space!
- I want to go to Grandma’s house!
- I want to go to the yellow house!
- I want to go to Hickory!
- WHERE IS UNCLE BOB’S DOG?
- I want to go to the beach!
- YOU ARE NOT MY REAL PARENTS! [blatantly lifted from Coraline, I realized later]
- I hate the beach!
- I HATE MY BED. IT IS NOT EVEN A REAL BED. IT’S LONG. AND MADE OF WOOD.
- I hate this house, this sink is OUTSIDE THE BATHROOM! TAKE ME TO THE AIRPORT RIGHT NOW! COME ON, MOMMY! WHY ARE YOU JUST SITTING THERE?
- YOU SAID THERE IS ALWAYS A BEACH AND NOW YOU SAY THERE IS NOT ALWAYS A BEACH. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO TELL THE TRUTH, MOMMY!
- Go out and get me some sunglasses that fit me!
He’s yelling at me like third-year Harry Potter.
I know he got a whole lot of sun the day before. I also know he’s overtired and still catching up on hydration. That he has spent well over three days straight mostly stuck alone with me and my hurty feet. That some of the food is unfamiliar and that his daddy talks funny, funny enough that he doesn’t always understand.
Yet mostly I’m amazed at how quickly he just slides into Grenada. He drinks guava-kiwi juice and eats a breadfruit chip, and I’m relieved, because he can be very particular about food, and has recently declared that he does not like! chicken nuggets! any! more! So it matters when we don’t have Cheerios, his favorite, but we *do* have Alpen, a muesli concoction from Switzerland, full of peanuts and currants, and he clears the bowl and asks for and receives three refills.
His father makes him cocoa tea, and it’s not like the Ovaltine in our kitchen back at Amherst, it is not so processed, it is unsweetened; like real baking chocolate squares that you melt in a pan, fold with white sugar. The first cup is too hot and bitter, but his father quickly learns to let it cool, then add some sweet milk. Bean drinks it, gulping, and if he notices the bits of bay leaf, he doesn’t mention it.
In this photo, he stands on the edge of his bed, his belly pressed against the painted concrete wall, his fingers angled against the bottom corner of the window. After I take the photo, I walk across the mattress on my knees, duck my head under the lace curtain, join him between it and the window.
“What do you see, baby?”
“Kitties! There were kitties. Two. They might come back.”
The garden on the other side of his bedroom wall is overgrown and exotic, a sight with or without kitties, but Bean harbors a particular affection for felines.
My head level with his behind the lace curtain, I watch my son’s face. His mouth is open a little bit, enough that I can see all his teeth. His hands are aflutter (twitter? atwitter? ha!) and his eyes are fixed on the green beyond the screen.
He’s enthralled, delighted, eyes bright with the *possibility* of seeing the cats again. He’s riveted in *anticipation* - “they might come back” - of the sight.
It’s a quality of his I covet, that ability to so effortlessly pluck joy from the world, and eat it whole.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l619b0QWEf1qzqhpio1_500.jpg)
It’s not just that Cheryl *knows* the rules, it’s that she was there while I invented them. The night Bean was born, she stayed overnight with my grandmother, so my mom could sleep in the other bed in my room at the clinic. Cheryl was still at the house when we got home early the next afternoon. For the two and half years that followed, she spent eight hours a day, five days a week with my family. She knows me, and she knows Bean, even if she hasn’t seen him in a year and a half. She’s also the only person he remembers from our life here in Grenada. Other than his father. He even forgot mangoes.
So when Cheryl called and said could she please take Bean for Saturday, and bring him in a sports festival t’ing for chirren, I said yes, of course, because she’s still his only babysitter.
This is Bean’s first ever sleepover with anyone who is not my mother. He’ll be back tomorrow.
*
When I informed Bean’s father, he frowned. Briefly. And then he said, “You know I hear dey say Cheryl have dem wild children.”
“Wild?” Like, what does that even mean?
“Yeah, man.”
“Wild. Like the big daughter.”
Yeah, man!”
“The one who got in trouble for reading?”
He shrugged, which signifies concession.
*
We didn’t go anywhere at all the first few days. Bean fell asleep on the New York to Miami leg of our flight, so I did too, which was great, because I’d barely gotten three hours of sleep the night before, and terrible, because when I fall asleep in cars or on airplanes, I don’t move, and I wake up with molten fire in my knees and ankles, the residue of my battle with Lyme Disease in high school.
Bean was a good sport about Mommy’s feet. I had new DVDs and books, fresh magic markers, and a sketchbook that I wallpapered in Buzz Lightyear stickers. We drew frogs, houses with plants growing from their chimneys, and a dinosaur that looked exactly like the Loch Ness Monster. I restrung my red coral necklace, slipping in a turquoise bead every five chips.
I’d promised that we would go the the beach the first day, and I meant it, but I had to let my feet - too swollen even for slippers - heal.
The storm, when it came, approached slowly. Bean was exhausted from the day before, had played for *hours* in the ocean, and didn’t sleep late the following morning because he woke up hungry. He ate three hard-boiled eggs and some ham for hops and went back to sleep.
“Mommy? Where is Woody? Did you pack Woody in the suitcase?”
“Yes, baby. He’s in the box with your Legos. See?”
“Nooo.” He sniffs air out at me, hard, a horrifying expression of impatience I recognized he’d learned by watching me communicate with his grandmother.
“Not THIS Woody. This is SMALL Woody. I want BIG Woody.”
“I didn’t bring Big Woody,” I reminded him. “We left Big Woody at Grandma’s house.. She’ll keep him safe for you. Also, sweetie pie? Big Woody didn’t have his hat. A cowboy can’t travel without his hat.”
“I WANT TO GO TO GRANDMA’S HOUSE!”
That was the beginning of an epic - no, no, literally! epic. - tantrum. It lasted about sixteen hours. Highlights include:
- This is not my house!
- I need space!
- I want to go to Grandma’s house!
- I want to go to the yellow house!
- I want to go to Hickory!
- WHERE IS UNCLE BOB’S DOG?
- I want to go to the beach!
- YOU ARE NOT MY REAL PARENTS! [blatantly lifted from Coraline, I realized later]
- I hate the beach!
- I HATE MY BED. IT IS NOT EVEN A REAL BED. IT’S LONG. AND MADE OF WOOD.
- I hate this house, this sink is OUTSIDE THE BATHROOM! TAKE ME TO THE AIRPORT RIGHT NOW! COME ON, MOMMY! WHY ARE YOU JUST SITTING THERE?
- YOU SAID THERE IS ALWAYS A BEACH AND NOW YOU SAY THERE IS NOT ALWAYS A BEACH. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO TELL THE TRUTH, MOMMY!
- Go out and get me some sunglasses that fit me!
He’s yelling at me like third-year Harry Potter.
I know he got a whole lot of sun the day before. I also know he’s overtired and still catching up on hydration. That he has spent well over three days straight mostly stuck alone with me and my hurty feet. That some of the food is unfamiliar and that his daddy talks funny, funny enough that he doesn’t always understand.
Yet mostly I’m amazed at how quickly he just slides into Grenada. He drinks guava-kiwi juice and eats a breadfruit chip, and I’m relieved, because he can be very particular about food, and has recently declared that he does not like! chicken nuggets! any! more! So it matters when we don’t have Cheerios, his favorite, but we *do* have Alpen, a muesli concoction from Switzerland, full of peanuts and currants, and he clears the bowl and asks for and receives three refills.
His father makes him cocoa tea, and it’s not like the Ovaltine in our kitchen back at Amherst, it is not so processed, it is unsweetened; like real baking chocolate squares that you melt in a pan, fold with white sugar. The first cup is too hot and bitter, but his father quickly learns to let it cool, then add some sweet milk. Bean drinks it, gulping, and if he notices the bits of bay leaf, he doesn’t mention it.
In this photo, he stands on the edge of his bed, his belly pressed against the painted concrete wall, his fingers angled against the bottom corner of the window. After I take the photo, I walk across the mattress on my knees, duck my head under the lace curtain, join him between it and the window.
“What do you see, baby?”
“Kitties! There were kitties. Two. They might come back.”
The garden on the other side of his bedroom wall is overgrown and exotic, a sight with or without kitties, but Bean harbors a particular affection for felines.
My head level with his behind the lace curtain, I watch my son’s face. His mouth is open a little bit, enough that I can see all his teeth. His hands are aflutter (twitter? atwitter? ha!) and his eyes are fixed on the green beyond the screen.
He’s enthralled, delighted, eyes bright with the *possibility* of seeing the cats again. He’s riveted in *anticipation* - “they might come back” - of the sight.
It’s a quality of his I covet, that ability to so effortlessly pluck joy from the world, and eat it whole.
She has a special t’ing with one of them. He’s a Rasta in the fiberglass shop and he works with a piece of jersey tied around his head. It’s bright white and keeps the cutting dust from troubling his scalp and dirtying his plaits.
She’s 37 and he’s 23, which is how she likes it. “The young ones,” she tells me, “are very… enthusiastic.” She draws out the sound. En-thus-i-as-tic. She laughs then and that’s when I hear her wordless confession, hanging limp in the grinding pauses between each syllable. That’s when she admits that every day - right before she serves lunch - she meets him in the concrete shower block by the rigging shop, and there he picks her up and frankly fucks her against the tile wall. I almost missed this because I am too new and too foreign and too literal. I am still learning to see past the unsubtle.
because we’re all adults here, aren’t we?
family legends and a pet chicken
grandma vera & grand anse beach
it’s not you - it’s the atlantic ocean
night vision (alternate ending)
confession of a reformed tourist
morning starts early in the tropics
stuff my bean says (fat is the f-word)
“break stick in your ears, or what?”
Jewish mysticism. The magic of numbers. The “bible code”. Esoteric numerology.
He’s an uncircumcised lapsed Protestant from Ohio who looks like the missing link between Buddy Holly and Woody Allen. He’s often mistaken for a Jew because he studies Torah and Talmud and regularly attends synagogue, but he never actually converted. He calls himself a Righteous Gentile, a descendant of the goyim who chose to go with Moses when he parted the Red Sea. It’s the kind of affectation that would make him eccentric, except he’s not wealthy, so he’s merely weird.
Perhaps I shouldn’t dismiss it as an affectation. He has, after all, kept it up for over 20 years now. So while I don’t share his need for a rabbi and a shul, I accept it, because far be it from me to belittle anyone’s search for comfort.
He lives in a section of the Bronx that was once home to a thriving Jewish community, but is now primarily Irish and Italian. So the congregation is very small and the rabbi is quite happy to have him.
In 2001 Yom Kippur started at sundown on Thursday the 27th of September. I called him a week or so before and asked, “Daddy? Are you going to synagogue for Yom Kippur? Can I come with you? Please?”
I surprised myself with that request. I’m not religious. I’m not Jewish. But I hadn’t been to church in more than ten years, so I didn’t have one. (I never had.) In the days immediately following September 11th, I felt desperate for religion. A day of atonement felt serendipitously appropriate.
I drove from my apartment in Nyack to his house in Throggs Neck. The highways were nearly deserted. The sky was still dirty. There was a raw ache pulsing in the air. A silent scream.
When I got there he looked at my clothing - dark grey skirt that reached my ankles, darker grey cardigan sweater, red wine colored collared shirt and black not-leather shoes with rubber soles. He looked at me and smiled.
“You look nice, honey”, he said. “You’re dressed perfectly. How did you…”
“How did I know what to wear? Kosher Dining Hall.” (One of my roommates at Cornell was an orthodox Jew.)
He nodded and smiled again and took my hand. We walked together to the synagogue, and when we got there I quietly took a seat in the women’s half of the pews. I don’t remember anything about the service. I did not hear a single word, because I was busy studying the lines in the palms of my hands and weeping. I had needed to cry, very badly.
So I did.
And it was awesome, in the way that only wholesale, visceral regurgitation of grief can be awesome.
Since then I’ve been in a “house of worship” only once. My stepfather’s funeral was held in a Catholic church. There was incense and stained glass and light, and a priest from West Africa with a voice that rubbed against my soul like music. I wore a bright pink shirt, because that’s what John would have wanted, and a terrible hair cut, because in my hazy, numb fog of grief I’d gone to the barbershop in the Wall Street subway station and told the guy,
“Cut it. Just cut it.”
1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
3. Don’t romanticize your “vocation.” You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle.” All that matters is what you leave on the page.
4. Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.
5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.
7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
9. Don’t confuse honors with achievement.
10. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
What pisses me off, I explained, is that this one stupid thing I did is the only thing anyone remembers. And now I do anything remotely weird, and people look at me funny, worry about me, call my fucking mother, ask her if I’m taking my medication. I’ve always been weird, and I’m not about to stop because it makes people nervous. God. I’m sick of the eggshells. It’s like I need a doctor’s note to act like myself.
I stopped. Looked at my hands.
That’s it. You need to write me a doctor’s note.
And so he did. “Maria is 17 and almost, but not quite, all growed up. She can be weird, or moody, and sometimes she yells, but she is fine, and will ask for your help when and if she needs it.”
I never showed it to anyone. But I could have, and that made me feel bulletproof.
I am too old for this shit.
A couple of weeks ago, at the very last possible second, I registered for a writing workshop.
If you’ve known me for a while you may already know that I’m writing a book. About Grenada. Not just about me and why I went and what I did there and how it saved my life, but also about the people I met the wisdom they shared with me. I’ve been working on it for years. I’ve got seven notebooks and more than 4,000 blog posts. So at this point it’s really a question of organizing and polishing. Because I’ve basically already written it.
But the organizing and polishing is a big deal. Harder, in some ways, than the actual writing.
It was my mother’s idea that I sign up for the workshop. She said she thought it would be the push I needed to finish. And I agreed with her, so I did it.
It’s a big time commitment. In addition to preparing my own submissions, every week I have to read and critique the work of three other people. There are also written homework assignments as well as reading that I have to be prepared to discuss.
More than once in the past couple of weeks I’ve been sitting here at my desk, typing away, when she asks if she can check her email. And I tell her she can’t because the wireless isn’t working (it usually doesn’t) and I’m just working offline.
To make an already-too-long story short, this morning she has a conniption about how I’m addicted to the internet and how dare I criticize her for leaving the house with my child without telling me because SHE HAS TO DO THAT BECAUSE I’M NEVER PAYING ATTENTION. Which is crazytalk. She actually pulled out of the driveway while looking straight at me while I was trying to flag her down and ask her where they were going. And even though this workshop was her idea and she knew how much work it would be because I’ve taken them before, every single night while I’m trying to catch up on my work (because I was behind because I registered late and am still trying to catch up) she makes some passive-aggressive comment about why aren’t I done yet.
Fuck.
I do not have energy to waste on this. I don’t even want to finish this post.
I wonder sometimes if she doesn’t, on some level, want me to fail.
I am too old for this shit.
I want to go home.
Mommy, I want to wash. Mommy, I want to sweep. Mommy, why don’t you use the dishwasher? These are some of the first sentences he ever spoke.
He was about eight months old when I went back to work. Cheryl, whose primary task was ostensibly to take care of my grandmother who was dying of Parkinson’s, decided that her time at our house would now be dedicated to Bean. And since her third primary task was to cook and clean, Cheryl and my son spent many days together mopping, sweeping and doing the laundry. Since he was fourteen months old, he has been helping us hand-wash dishes.
After Cheryl went home for the day and before I got home from work, Bean would spend time with his grandmother. If you’ve ever spent more than three weeks in the tropics you know that the cleaning is never done. Our house had about thirty non-consecutive feet of verandah, and windows that were always open, letting in the breeze but also the insects and the salt that rose up from the bay. Always open unless it was raining, of course. The first tippling sound of rain quickly became a trigger for just jumping up from whatever you were doing and running around the house closing all the doors and windows. My mom often did it with not-yet-walking Bean tucked under her arm.
Then, on weekends, he’d watch his father clean. Bean’s daddy is Jah’s gift to laundry. So much so that I was banned from washing his white shirts. Banned! I couldn’t get them bright enough.
The point of this random Grenada memory is that right at this very moment I’m sitting at my desk, looking through the sliding doors at him in the driveway, happier than a clam because he’s carrying one of those enormous brooms that’s like three inches by three feet. And I’m thinking that because he spent so much time when he was very little cleaning with people he loved, he’s likely going to be all about cleaning for the rest of his life.
I can’t relate. I might even be a little jealous.
It started when he was newborn.
It’s funny, you know? Because you’re pregnant for nine months, waiting for the baby. Anticipating the baby. Imagining the baby. Et cetera. And then! Labor and delivery, which is basically like military basic training, except condensed and in your vagina. And then you bring home the baby!
And what does the baby do? The baby SLEEPS.
Or at least Bean did. He slept for hours and hours on end, and all I could do was sit there and watch him. I watched his chest rise and fall. I listened to him breathe. I watched his nose wiggle and wondered if he was dreaming. I saw him smile and said to myself, I don’t care what “the book” says, that’s not gas.
That phase lasted for maybe four weeks. Four weeks in which I couldn’t wait to look in his eyes, talk to him, play with him, but couldn’t because you wake a sleeping newborn like you simply walk into Mordor.
Also, because he was a newborn, his limbs were still all tucked in while he slept. I hear this is typical, that most babies spend their first weeks still sleeping the way they did in the womb, where they had to make the best possible use of the available space, and so tucked their limbs in, neatly folding them against their bodies.
Try to picture that. He WAS a bean. The same shape, anyway. And so I, in my post-birth quasi-delirium, in this weird state of grace where words were just coming to me, seemingly out of the ether, started calling him bean.
I started calling him bean, which evolved into Bean, and it stuck.
His full, complete and official nickname is Joaquín the illustrious Bean.
Lucky for both of us, he likes it.
