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Bath time!














B and Daddy, so happy



















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Clock

This is a piece I wrote but didn't read for my Mothers Writing Group "Spilled Ink" reading at Bookwoman.


Liz: CLOCK

All my life I've been perfectly content with whatever age I am. I never yearned to be older than I was, I never wanted to wear more makeup so that I would fit in with the older kids, or so that the older boys would want to date me. Although when I was 16 I had a thing for the 23 year old waiter, who would come over to my parent's house and visit me in the afternoons, after school and before his shift started. His name was Tom and he looked exactly like Tom Peterson from Cheap Trick. And his little brother was in my Spanish class. I was an aching, terrified virgin. He must have been stoned out of his mind, because he would just come over, lie down on my bed, look up at my Styx and Aerosmith posters and ask me to bring him something to eat. What was going on in Tom's mind? He never touched me, as bad as I wanted it. It was some sort of twisted Jane Eyre teen angst situation. Later I learned he'd been fucking Julie, from my English class. She was even more insecure than I was, wore braces on her teeth and sold drugs. Wanting to be old. All the teenage girls I knew who were having sex. Not me.

Now I wonder "Am I old?" I'm 45. It doesn't seem real. This is the time when bodies start to give out. Eyes fail. Heart attacks happen in the middle of the day for no reason. Someone dies at my age and everyone says, "So young!" but really, it's not totally unexpected. It's not tragically young, like 17 or 27.

I know that Time heals. That in terms of the entirety of creation, my bright shining moment here is already gone. That there is something to Eternity. It's like having a baby, who lingers over almost everything. Who is either distracted so easily, or is so completely absorbed. It's that childhood we're all trying so hard to recover, where all that we do is imbued with the sense of play. Where work ceases to be punching a clock. Where work is assembling the clock itself, with such care and love you lose all track of time.

My son is obsessed with clocks. We can't figure it out. And he knows digital as well as analog, roman numeral or numbers. All round objects with hands are clocks. Temperature gauge? Clock. Odometer? Clock. DVR readout? Clock. What does he pick out to notice at the library? Clocks. All of them. Thousands of books and DVDs and even computer terminals at his fingertips and his fascination, the first couple of times we've gone, is with the clocks on the wall. In a moment of weakness, I forgot (or rather, ignored) my vow to myself to never Google symptoms plus the word "toddler" ever again. My parenting guru suggests that when I do this, when I take myself down that rabbit hole, it's a sign to myself that I am overwhelmed, exhausted, depleted, in need of self-care. And she's right. So when I googled "obsessed with clocks + toddler" and one of the many search results listed it among symptoms of Aspberger's Syndrome, I felt my body go cold and my stomach drop. My husband's nephews, my nephews, his sister's sons, have Aspberger's. My own sister is profoundly retarded and lives in a state school. There is epilepsy, suicide, depression, bipolar depression, post partum depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness of all stripes and just plain crazy in my and my husband's family histories. When we met with a "Genetic Counselor" during the first trimester of my pregnancy, almost every box on the list was checked. Most of them from my side of the family.

So I've watched my son from before he was born, worrying, wondering about his neurological development. Terrified that there would be something Wrong with him. That he would be too slow. Too fast. Not right. He was, after all, delivered by forceps and a scalpel to my perineum after a 67-hour back labor. My acupuncturist Sarai, whose name is spelled S.A.R.A.I. -- exactly the same as the Sarai in the Bible who had a baby at 90 -- and who helped deliver my son and saw me through that tremendous labor and delivery with her amazing acupuncture tools, said she was not surprised he is obsessed with clocks. His conception, and his birth, was all about time and timing.

There is an acronym for women like me. For women who have been told they have "unexplained infertility." And it's TTC. Trying To Conceive. After a year a half of TTC, most of it the old-fashioned way but enhanced with herbs and acupuncture needles, I did conceive, for what I think was the first time in my long, storied, sexually active life. And frankly, it didn't take this 45-year old first time mom all that long. A year and a half. I don't know what the secret is. "Relax, stop trying," those people with children will tell you. "Cough syrup." "Quit caffeine." "Start the adoption process." I think it really had something to do with dedicating myself to taking care of myself, for real. Treating myself to the kind of care I helpfully suggest everyone else does. I don't have a high stress job, but I made it stressful. So I took off for a month. I had my uterus massaged. I did acupuncture and Chinese herbs. Nettle and Red herbal teas. I also did several months of pills, injections, turkey bastings and surgery. The surgery was the last straw. Meawhile, while TTC, I was clocking every minute of every day, marking my time not by the changing colors and temperatures of the seasons or the fund drives on public radio, but by the changing colors on chemically treated sticks and temperature readings on thermometers. I had long passed Advanced Maternal Age. But as I said before, I've always been happy to be the age I am. So I liked that designation, "Advanced." In yoga, this would imply mastery over complicated postures or philosophical principles. And so I was, and I am, certainly Advanced when it comes to being Maternal.

I Think I Gave Birth to a Comedian, Folks

Bodhi's favorite phrase these days?

"That's funny."

Usually in reference to some mischievous act (or another) involving water, hair pulling, or the dog squealing.

Take for instance the gleam in his eye in this photo we took last night:



















Enjoying himself, even though his parents posed him in giant wax vampire lips.