I am not writing my blog right now because I realized mid-August that it felt like a burden instead of a release. I am too sad, navigating the twins leaving for college. I scheduled these posts that day so the blog wouldn’t be empty, but I could pull back and use the time left with the twins. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.

homage to Wallace Stevens

I.
I am six years old, standing in the pumpkin fields on a school field trip. I ask the teacher if there’s a bathroom and she says, “not out here.” Thus begins my penchant for asking a question the wrong way and not being able to ask it again without looking like an idiot. I pee in my pants in the pumpkin field. I tell all the other kids that I sat down in the field in some water. They believe me, but I ride home on the bus humiliated and lock myself in the classroom bathroom when we return to school.

II.
I am around ten. We’ve returned many times since that field trip to this particular farm. On this day, my family is picking pumpkins again for Halloween. I will get to carve them with my father. In my heart, I really really really want a tiny pumpkin. But I know my sister will point out that a tiny pumpkin cannot be carved and I am an idiot for wasting my pumpkin choice on a tiny pumpkin. So I choose one that is bigger than I really want just so I can be like her and maybe we can be pumpkin twins when it comes to carving them that night.

III.
I just turned twenty and I am at the farm with the boy I love. We are picking vegetables for a dinner party that we are throwing for all of his friends. I like being with this group of boys because they make me feel as if I am Wendy from Peter Pan and they are the Lost Boys. Everything I do is rewarded with such awe and affection. As the car bumps over the dirt road, I am rocked into a feeling of contentment.

Read the rest here.

I am not writing my blog right now because I realized mid-August that it felt like a burden instead of a release. I am too sad, navigating the twins leaving for college. I scheduled these posts that day so the blog wouldn’t be empty, but I could pull back and use the time left with the twins. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.

At the beginning of summer, my biggest worry was kindergarten. The end of school was hard and I spent the first days at home weepy and overwhelmed. At Disney, we went to see Finding Nemo the musical, and it was as if the story had been tailored solely to neurotic parents of incoming kindergarteners:

You mean so much to me
I don’t know what I would do
In this big blue world
If something should happen to you

Josh raised his eyebrows pointedly at me when Crush and Marlin muse about letting kids grow up.

But what if they’re not ready?
I mean how do ya know?

Well ya never really know
But if they’re ever gonna grow
Then ya gotta let ’em go
Ya know?
Just go with the flow-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Read the rest here.

I am not writing my blog right now because I realized mid-August that it felt like a burden instead of a release. I am too sad, navigating the twins leaving for college. I scheduled these posts that day so the blog wouldn’t be empty, but I could pull back and use the time left with the twins. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.

It seemed like the perfect time to open the doors of the Virtual Lushary and encourage everyone to get good and figuratively drunk, distracting them from searching for a post that fits the first clue.

A toast: to Blogger Bingo! Long may it be played.

Read the rest here.

I am not writing my blog right now because I realized mid-August that it felt like a burden instead of a release. I am too sad, navigating the twins leaving for college. I scheduled these posts that day so the blog wouldn’t be empty, but I could pull back and use the time left with the twins. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.

Grace Paley died today. Josh called me from work to tell me the news and his voice was cracking as he said it. It was like a favourite great aunt who had always been at Thanksgiving dinner was suddenly gone.

I met her once when we were trying to conceive. I went to a reading where she read the essay “Traveling”. It begins with her mother and sister taking a bus from New York to Virginia in 1927. When the bus got to D.C., every African-American got up and moved to the back of the bus. Paley’s mother and sister were sitting in the back and when the driver asked them to move to the front of the bus, her mother refused. She refused three times and remained in the back of the bus until they got to Richmond.

The story switches to Paley’s ride from New York to Miami Beach in 1943. Paley is sitting in the last seat in the white section. An African-American woman gets on the bus, holding a sleeping child. All of the white men in the white section let this woman and child stand. Paley offers the woman her seat but the woman demurs. Finally, Paley tells her that she’ll hold the baby. And the woman, from sheer exhaustion, gives Paley her child and continues to stand next to her.

Read the rest here.

I am not writing my blog right now because I realized mid-August that it felt like a burden instead of a release. I am too sad, navigating the twins leaving for college. I scheduled these posts that day so the blog wouldn’t be empty, but I could pull back and use the time left with the twins. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.

The space between the twins’ beds is called the “We.” They named it that when they were around two. They would drop things in the space — binkies, stuffed animals, lovies — and ask us to fetch it. “In the We!” they’d inform us, as we stretched our arms into painful angles to grab the binkies/stuffed animals/lovies. There was “I” and there was “he” or “she,” and between their two beds was a space called “We.”

The twins are splitting into two rooms.

They have shared a room since the first day of their life. First they shared a room at the hospital, and then they moved to a single crib in our house. Later on, they moved to two cribs, side-by-side. Finally, it became two toddler beds that ran the length of their wall.

Read the rest here.