For the Modern-Day Kittys and Lydias, (Epistolary Wednesday)

For You Modern-Day Kittys and Lydias,

I’m addressing you metaphorically, of course, as Austen’s characters are merely that. But, I find no better way to warn you, Girl, of the downside to obsessively fixating on potential matches and romance all around you in the seventh grade. You remember, don’t you, how Lydia’s obsession with “the officers” and her mother’s relentless matchmaking led to shame and embarrassment for her whole family, how she threw caution to the wind and put undeserved faith in Wickham, who was interested in sex and money and very little in Lydia? In Austen’s days, of course, Lydia was old enough to marry, but hitched and pregnant is not where I want you or any of your friends at sixteen. Need a contemporary warning? Lorelei Gilmore (albeit with the worst parents on earth). Pregnant at 16. Yes, it all turned out all right after she lived in a garden shed with her daughter and was estranged from her family for many years. It’s good now, but might I remind you of the years her romance cost her?

All this is to say, it concerns me that you take so much pleasure in matchmaking your friends at the junior high school dance, that you are “so happy for” the “couple” who has just placed tentative hands on one another’s shoulders and hips for the first time in their lives after only glancing at each other fearfully in the hallway for the first two months of school. You’re happy and squeally for them--as if they’ve just announced an engagement, a wedding, a baby. And this leaves me unsettled and wondering what on earth you think this means—two children swaying together for three minutes in a gymnasium. I hope you know this is not the end of their story. That they will (99.99999% likely) “break up” in the next two weeks, that their hearts will get broken over and over again in the context of this not-quite-real world of global studies tests, bus rides, field trips, hall passes, AP exams, choir concerts and track meets. They might do things they wished they hadn’t.

Sweetheart, some of these kids will take this "romance" in the serious way that you seem to be taking it--up to the next level. You should know: there will be pregnancies you will not see evidence of. There will be diseases you hear nothing about. Some of your friends, too, will end up used and abused by other children who haven't learned anything about real love. There will be appointments and counseling and parents tearing their hair out and crying because these poor parents are strapped with the job of helping these not-quite-or-even-close-to adults navigate adult-like decisions and adult-like hormones and adult-like bodies.

Please accept my kind but urgent rebuke. How about we celebrate romance later? Let’s pull out our dancing shoes when these children understand that romance is as temporary as the cold, solid ice pop you get handed at the Fourth of July parade. What seems so solid and dependable in romance can liquefy in the wrong climates. Let’s laugh and smile when these creatures learn how to own their choices and take responsibility for their lives. Let’s do the Macarena when they learn selflessness, because that's what helps love last; it's what gives romance a fighting chance at re-forming once it's become a puddly mess. Let’s do the Cha Cha Slide and the Chicken when they’ve learned how to suffer long for someone else, when they know how true love hopes and waits and defers and hangs in there and doesn’t give up. Okay, sweetheart? Okay? Okay??

***Heather Weber is the author of Dear Boy,: An Epistolary Memoir

"Dear Boy, is a brilliant and unusual memoir of distance and absence--the absence of a beloved brother from his sister's life and the absence of healthy mothering that, over the years, drove brother and sister apart. Weber deftly shifts point of view so that, piece by piece, readers gather the sum of confusion and loss. Yet there is so much love and forgiveness in the narrator that, in a way, each character is redeemed. I'm moved by this life, this telling of it." --Fleda Brown, author of Driving with Dvorak.

Dear Summering Girls, (Epistolary Wednesday, August 13)

Dear Summering Girls,

Recently, my blog feed exploded with posts from various mom-bloggers about "How To Stay Sane During the Summer When Your Kids Are Home" and "How to Set Up a Routine When You’re a Work-At-Home-Mom." I know these songs by heart, I've sung them so much.

If it was just me and you at home for the summer, it would be delightful. Pure magic. But it’s not. I’ve got this thing called "Work" and these things called "Expectations" (that you’ll know not to interrupt me at certain times; that you’ll really clean your room when you say you will) that mingle with us like houseguests that just won't leave, spoiling all our fun. And these last few weeks of summer, Work and Expectations have been at each other's throats. Some mornings it's just chaos and anarchy and I have to tell Work to hush up because Expectations are just being ignored like a cast-off friend.  I mean, how can you get worse at following your Morning Routine (i.e. brush teeth, dress, empty dishwasher, eat, do math facts, read for 20) now that you’ve had the whole summer to practice? And those pink shoes on the bathroom floor--the ones that have been sitting there for over a week, the ones I’ve asked you three times to pick up--are still sitting there.

The "after" picture.

Here's a typical conversation about Expectations:

Did you clean your room?

Yes.  

Let me check it.  [Gasp] Your laundry EXPLODED in here! What happened? How could you say you cleaned your room when it looks like this?

But I did! I did clean it!

But don’t you see the dirty underwear on the floor? What about the Kleenexes wadded up next to the garbage can? I want you to Clean This Room.

I have this naïve belief that come August 19, the first day of school, you will magically and suddenly become innately disciplined human beings once again; you will pull Expectations out from under that heap of clothing and wet towels on your bedroom floor, dust her off, and allow her to accompany you through your day: you will get up on time;you will eat more than a smattering of Cheerios for breakfast; you will put on fresh clothes and change your underwear and empty the dishwasher all without me mentioning these things to you. A mom can hope, can’t she?

Until then, I don’t even work in the home office most of the time because if I were to do that, you'd be leaving wrappers and tissues all over the living room and I wouldn't be able to catch you in the act. Best to have you deal with it immediately, before the candy wrappers and tissues become the next pink-shoes-on-the-bathroom floor and a month goes by before I see the carpet again. I wish I was that mom who didn’t lose brain cells at the sight of garbage on the floor, wish I could just sit right among the muck and play tickle fights and video games in the evenings when I'm done working, but you didn't win that lotto, girls. You are not those children and I am not that mom and someday, when you live in your own house and you’re all grown up, if you want to never flush the toilet and let it back up and let fruit flies reproduce over your left-out glass of orange juice, if you want to sit in a dark room all day and play video games, never seeing the sun, so be it. I will love you then as I do now. But I won’t live with you.

This is just to say that I really love you and I'm really looking forward to school next week, despite the fact that junior high and fourth grade are on the horizon, whole new worlds of Work and Expectations that I don't have to manage on your behalf. Instead, I will just be Mom with Milk and Cookies at the end of the day. I'll be a Good Listener and Your Biggest Fan and I will leave lunch clean up to the lunch ladies.

Dear Tiny Road Trippers (Epistolary Wednesday)

On Wednesdays, I write letters.

Dear Tiny Road Trippers,

Preschool closed down last week. It’s you and me and some vacation days and I want to take you away—from all the rat race of hide-and-go-seek in the evening backyards and Laundry Day and Morning Chores. Let’s go up to western Minnesota, you and me.  I think the drive is only 7 hours, but it’s really 8. With all our stopping and getting mixed up, the entire trip is 9. And for the first three hours, when one of you has to pee so desperately, twice, I think about turning around, think I don’t really have to do this. We could spend a happy few days at home, emptying the dishwasher and doing laundry and summer math facts and driving to the lake. But when we’re home, it’s so hard to break each of us from what pulls us most powerfully. My email account. Your smart phones. Your singular love for the 3-year-old neighbor boy.

Auntie Nay and Tiny piggy-backing

So here we are in a small town of 1,900, and when we drove in I felt myself relax. Felt we could just hunker down with the Boy's* family, now our adopted family, and walk the barely trafficked streets, run on the empty high school track, wave at neighbors, play at the playground, swim, beach. Of course, two of you can’t get through the day without a Minecraft marathon (curses on Minecraft!), but that’s okay; it gives me time with Tiny who, after a good nap, has turned so charming and sweet again and in love with her cousins and their dogs and her auntie.

Tiny, Cash, and Ruby

Life seems so simple here, if expensive. Auntie Nay says the groceries cost way more than what they cost us back home. There’s a Walmart and a Hy-Vee about an hour away, and that’s it. People here are farmers or teachers or doctors and some of them are out of work, and it’s calm and quiet except for when the St. John church bells ring at 5 p.m. for Saturday evening mass.

And now, I’m sitting on the bed at dusk next to Tiny as she whispers the words to "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" and fingers the movements in the warm, sticky air above her head until she pauses and leans over, still whispering, “Mom, my arm is tired. My arm is tired.”

“Okay. Well. Let it sleep.” I whisper back, and she receives this without comment and moves her fingers to tickling her belly. 

Dinner by sunlight.

In some ways, all our arms have gotten tired from holding up the routine. So then, we should let them sleep these few days before we face school registration and work and the Daily Grind.

Also, I just love you more and better when we pause all that other stuff so we can just be. Let’s always remember to do that. You’re getting so old and, I fear, drawing away each in your own little ways. This is normal, but sometimes we get so far apart that when I look at you this week I see both desire and uncertainty in one of your little faces; you’re wanting to get close like you were when you held my hand voluntarily everywhere we walked, but you don’t know how to get there without doing that.

After our visit, we stop in Minneapolis to see more cousins and that giant mall "of America." While driving through one of the many tiny country towns, I exclaim, “Look, here’s a town that’s ten seconds long! If you blink, you might miss it.” And you older ones unwrap the earbuds from around your ears and stare. “Whooa.”

Oldest, Middle, and cousins

There was a time when I had so much time that I walked hours daily to fill it. Around and across neighborhoods in all seasons of the year, I noticed things like rusty cars, children whining on the sidewalk, a dog sniffing near a ravine in the park. With all my modern-day efficiency strategies, all the smarts of smartphones, I’ve thought I’ve done myself a favor by filling up the time. I've been Getting More Stuff Done, so much that I’ve forgotten to be and notice as much as I've wanted to. And I haven’t helped you practice those things as much either.

“Mama,” Tiny says from her carseat as we exit the town. “I blinked but I didn’t miss it!”

I think, then, that there is still hope for us, despite all the blinking we do--for connecting, for paying attention, for being. And we can start now with this road and with this trip--with the shanty towns, the speckled cows, the chilled blue water of the community pool, and the street lined with toads that jump frantically out of our path. Let's do our best not to miss too much.

*The story about the Boy and how I adopted his family can be found here. 

Dear Sixth Grade (Epistolary Wednesday)

On Wednesdays, I'm writing letters.

Sixth Grade,

You’ve changed since I was 12. I remember you a shadowy room, full of the odor of the science teacher’s imported-to-Iowa sea water and “mystery powders,” which we burned over open flames or fizzled with vinegar. You housed our “personal development” unit, in which us girls awkwardly sat under the teaching of a female stand-in instructor who handed us postcards we could fill out and send in to receive free personal development “kits.” We didn’t have our periods, silly, but of course we would be intrigued by anything free, especially tampons and sanitary napkins in bright purple cardboard boxes designed specifically to pique our interest.

I self-consciously wore my mother’s clothes here, her yoke-front jeans skirt and button down shirts. My hair sported a ponytail on the side, my ears big hoop earrings. Our homeroom and science teacher, who I adore retrospectively, dragged us on outings particular to his passions: he had a religious fanaticism for raptors and life in the ocean. And he expected a lot from us girls, as he should have, reprimanding me for dropping out of the Extended Learning Program, reprimanding my table-mates for their own drive-lessness. You were lethargy and boredom for me, Sixth Grade. Seriously, who flipping cared about owls like that?

I was depressed (parents divorced that year, blah blah), but I kind of thought everybody was (and has been) with you, but I’m watching my Oldest now in the same school district and it’s like you are her very own personal social club and crack cocaine. Who needs Facebook and uppers when they’ve got Mr. Snyder’s sixth grade classroom? She’s having so much fun that she doesn't even notice the fact that she's learning, and I do know she’s learning because her test scores come back higher and higher, and she placed into pre-algebra for junior high math next year (which I didn’t even know you could do, SG. And that's how all the smart kids got a year ahead of me in math!).

Truly, you're like this recently-come-near relative who’s won the lotto, presenting us with gifts and delights you were never able to offer before. And we take full advantage: to hear Oldest talk, you’d think her teacher was a stand-up comedian (deemed “Most Ironic” of anyone in the class). At certain times he lets them have smart phones in the room where, I should add, there seems to be a steady stream of Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and Hunger Games references, jokes, nonsensical gibberish, dares, and ground-rolling stunts that the entire room finds profoundly funny. Oldest repeats the same ludicrously-funny-to-her stories ad nauseum around the dinner table. Sometimes I have trouble catching the joke. “It’s sixth-grade humor!” she cajoles.

I don’t remember you being such a riot.

No hard feelings though. I’m glad you’ve changed. I’m glad you’ve been good to my oldest baby. Third and Fourth were not so good, downright traumatic really. So thank you for an environment where friendship and endearing nicknames grow. And for friends with whom she’s coordinating matching outfits, surprising the gym teachers and the principal with a triplet of brainy dark glasses and black blouses with white polka dots. And that she’s having so much fun and such good self-esteem (really, she doesn’t hesitate to declare “I’m amazing!”) that the love of one of those unshowered, scab-picking sweet young men in her class is Completely Unnecessary and goes Completely Unnoticed.

Seventh has a lot to live up to.

****
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What We Were Going to Become

I was unpacking my office tonight and found report cards from elementary school. (Quick aside: I love the sound of "my office."  It's a bedroom on the main floor near to the kitchen and near the toys and near the baby, easy to slip in and slip out and it's mine all mine.  I feel so lucky and simultaneously sorry for the husband who received a man cave in the unfinished part of the basement with no finished walls, no windows.  But I kinda sorta think he doesn't care about things like finished walls and windows, so it works out all right.)
Anyhoo, here's my question for today after reading my report cards: Do you remember what you wanted to be when you were growing up?  And do you remember what people said you were good at at age nine?  Are you doing those things still? Are you good at them?

I have a distinct memory of knowing I wanted to write a book when I grew up.  I was seven years old or younger. How do I know? Because we hadn't yet moved from our home in San Jose (which we did when I was seven), and I was standing in our wide, sky-light lit family room thinking that there were two things I wanted most in the whole wide world:

(1) A Pretty-in-Pink Barbie doll

(2) I wanted to write a book. 

And not just a kid's picture book. No, when I was seven-or-younger, I knew I wanted to write a real, honest-to-God gritty story with words for details instead of pictures. It would be longer I knew, than your average novel. Maybe an inch thick. With small words and lots and lots of pages.

How do such things drop into our psyches at such young ages? Is it God who makes these deposits? If not, what natural forces conspire to make a seven year old know she wants to move people with words, lots of words, someday when she's so old, so old, like maybe thirty-three?

3rd grade: Heather is an excellent writer. She is very original, includes conversation, and is highly motivated. I'm looking forward to Heather's stories next year, too! (Please come and share!)

Let me pause for just a moment and consider what my MFA cohorts and I might have given for praise such as this, for a bar set so low that including conversation and being highly motivated were benchmarks of high achievement.  Our soul to the devil, I do believe.

4th: Well, I was sick this year. For months. And didn't go to school.  No prophecies here.

5th: Heather has very creative ideas. Shared and published this year. Applies all skills for written work. Enjoyed writing to Pen Pals in Bakersfield, CA.

Vaguely, yes vaguely, I remember the pen pals in Bakersfield. I felt sorry for them. Had they just suffered an earthquake? Or a fire?  Google isn't helping me out on this one.  But, lucky pen pals, I applied all my skills for written work. Those pupils got a freaking glorious composition, they did.

6th grade, spring: Heather has recently finished her story "Gum on the Gym Teacher's Shoe." She has applied spelling, capitalization and punctuation skills to her writing. (Halleluyer.)

6th grade, end-of-year: A voluminous reader who not only understands the pleasure of reading fiction, but sees it also as an avenue for self-understanding and enriching the spirit.  She has progressed so far in our writing program she is now confident to compose lengthy stories at the keyboard in the computer lab where she spends a great deal of time. She has discovered an intrinsic pleasure in herself to write.

My sixth grade teacher was part-prophet, part thorn in my side. He had too-high expectations of me, he did. Called me a "quitter" when I dropped out of the Program for Smart Kids just because I felt like it. His face got red. He shouted, sort of, at me and my friends Jenny and Brodie and told us we were a bunch of drop outs. I think I may have quit my editorial position on the school paper just to thumb my nose at him.  And one day, he got mad at me for writing such long stories that I used up more than my share of paper from the dot matrix printer. I was the only kid writing 25-page typewritten stories. I remember the scene of his indignation: It was after gym class, and he'd found a draft in the recycle bin and held it up in front of the entire gym-class line of students, his face flushing.  He was the greenest hippie guy I knew in 1989 in Iowa: long stories were admirable, sure, but saving trees was dire.  On the other hand, he was smart as a whip and wouldn't take crap from any kid, especially one who sold herself short.

Sometimes I dream about this teacher--I mean, I literally dream about him. I want to go back and ask him how--how he peered into my soul and knew what he knew when it took me another fifteen years after that to see the same thing. That I'm a writer.

I don't think it matters exactly what was named in us by someone else as long as it was true and productive; it is no less a blessing.  If you had the same gift of an adult naming your passion, of another person looking into you so deeply and calling out the very thing you most wanted in the world, do you share the same sense of gratitude?

It's as if a message in a tiny bottle was cast upon the seas of our youth and later washed up upon the beaches of middle adulthood where we find ourselves unrolling the scroll with the delight of recognition:

Dear [Heather], You are in your right place at your right time. And you always have been.

Such comfort, no?

Cabinet Files of a 33-Year-Old Female on Raven Street

There is a Hawkeyes v. Cyclones game today.  There’s nobody local I know who hasn’t posted something non-game related on Facebook.  These Saturdays make me feel like a closet freak, me and my closet freak of a family that only notices game happenings because of traffic backups and FB posts from our friends.  I did not wear my black and gold yesterday, like my daughter’s teacher, in preparation for said game.  I did not tailgate. Did not turn on a radio or a television to watch pre-game, during-game, or post-game coverage. The only concern I had was whether I could get across town this morning without getting stuck in a mile-long line of SUVs with Hawkeye flags waving. Other than that, I really don’t care about football.

In my defense, there was nothing in my history to prepare me for a love of football.  As I sorted through the relics of my past (i.e. filing cabinet) yesterday, in preparation of our move, there are clues  that hint at the kind of person I would become. First grade teachers wrote notes; college professors wrote letters of recommendation about me and my creative writing abilities.  Articles I deemed important were tucked away in files for me to find some day, when I really needed them. When I was nineteen, I started saving articles about the work of ministry. I saved essays arguing for a place for women in ministry.  I never wanted to be a pastor, never wanted any sort of leadership role in a church, but the writers or these articles had things to say that were so very important to me that I chewed on them, wrestled with them, brought them up for dinner conversations, and basically hung onto as if these were ideas my upon which my life depended. But I never thought once about, vocationally, being in ministry until I was thirty years old, eleven years later.
There were other telltale signs of the person I was becoming: the standardized test, what a marvelous testament to my utter lack of spatial intelligence, my bumbling mathematical vertigo. Oh, I was great at concepts, the ideas of math.  But ask me to identify a pattern or fit shapes together and my vision grew blurry.  These were standardized test report words that I came to recognize and cherish: Reading. Comprehension. Vocabulary. Usage. Oh, Usage!  How I loved your deftly-turning-of-a-sentence ways.  Spelling.  I was conscientious, my teachers wrote on almost every report card. But I was most conscientious about my spelling list, studying it with exactitude, relishing in my own private pleasure at having remembered to spell a word correctly.  Did other students not study with like eagerness? Did they not relish their spelling successes? If other students made it through high school without having learned basic spelling patterns and rules, I was unaware of this, and indeed, would have been rudely shocked by the news.

What else was in that cabinet? Well, there were crises of health and family that would send aftershocks on into my future. There were notes and handouts from teachers of various creative writing and literature classes.  And what I discovered in my excavation was that my sentimental attachment to these notes and handouts were directly tied to my degree of affection for/respect of whoever taught the class. It was easy for me to toss hundreds of pages of notes I copied down from the teachers who droned on, utterly passionless or--worse--utterly narcissistic.  But the teachers who lit fire under me, whether they were teaching on Ghandi or Moby Dick or Marcel Duchamp, are those whose teachings I can never toss out—because those were the  teachers who helped me come alive, who helped me define the scope of me by the way they listened to and answered my tentative voice.   And beyond any transmission of information,  I am most grateful for their teaching me how to think, inquire, and question—creatively—with courage, respect, and a little bit of moxie.  And thank God, because thinking and questions are what helps us figure out Who We Want to Be and how to navigates the earthquakes and aftershocks in our lives.

At the ripe age of seven, I knew  I wanted to be an author of a book.   At the ripe age of thirty, I knew I was pastoral.  Never once did I want to grow up to be a thinker (and the filing cabinet didn’t suggest it, in so many words), but now (I think:) the idea is golden.

When the Third One Comes Along

Tiny turned one year old yesterday. Exactly one year ago that day, I was walking the sidewalks on Raven Street with a friend, pausing for the hearty contractions, walking through the milder. My neighbors, most assuredly, peeped from their windows at my swollen belly and bent over form.  I was aware, good-humoredly, that I was a good show, more exciting than most of what happens on the block.  A woman in labor, just an hour or two on the other side of new life entering the world. In the coming months, the neighbors would gawk and giggle at Tiny from a respectful distance.  Only one would offer to hold her, coo, and make faces for her entertainment, jiggle her and rock her during rough afternoons. The rest are not those kinds of neighbors. Though at times I think how quaint it could be if they were, because then the neighborhood would be celebrating with us this week—this week that delivers us a Tiny who is a slender 18.8 pounds but tall: a willowy thirty inches tall when standing, assisted by a parent, sister, grandparent or other good-hearted charity worker who is willing to walk, hunched over, as Tiny leads them around the house/church/yard by the hands.  Her rosy cheeks, her quad-toothed smile, the chestnut brown wisps of bangs that part down the middle of her forehead make her a vision that could turn anyone into a lover-of-Tiny.

Or, so I think, biased as I am.   I have been a lover of all my babies, and have acted like the man in the New Testament parable who invited all his servant could find to attend his banquet, to fill up his table in celebration. For Oldest’s first birthday, our home was jam-packed on a humid June day. Twenty-five or thirty friends and extended family members, most over voting age, were invited to watch and cheer as our one-year-old bit timidly into a chocolate-frosted cupcake for the first time, as her fingers flirted with the satiny paper wrapped around a book, or a bag of blocks.

It was the same dimension of celebration with Middle, in frigid November. Her wisps of blond curls flipped out over her ears as she toddled and tripped over ribbons and bows scattered on the floor, and all the adults roared with laughter as we listened to the pre-recorded song on a battery-operated toy about a farmer and his hybrid animals: You put a pig in front, you put a horse behind. Put them together and what do you find? A Pig-Horse! Little Middle stared at us crazies, giggled, and toddled away. 

But yesterday, for Tiny, it was different. Our local family has grown enough to make for an adequate number of guests: Two big sisters, a grandpa, and his GF, who is also a lover-of-Tiny.  And I, well, I have grown so scattered, so stretched thin from loving the first two babies-turned-children who have so many wants I am working on fulfilling from day to day. And so many needs. There’s the obvious, such as laundry, and food in their bellies, and direction on bathing, or spelling, or chores.   There’s haircut, doctor appointment, and dentist scheduling times two. And then there are Deep Talks, where one of them goes philosophical and analytical and reveals her possession of more self-awareness than most grown-ups I know, and needs to ask questions about my childhood, about what it means to grow up, about the etymology of swear words.   The other needs Snuggling and Book Reading and relentlessly pursues accomodation.

So yesterday, the day of Tiny’s birthday, it turned out I had to take Oldest to her Annual Allergist Appointment where they performed Not-Fun Tests and made her eat peanuts, which made her sick, which made them make us stay in the clinic for observation, which meant we were late getting home. I had not made frosting for cupcakes, had not checked our supply of candles, had not wrapped the Eric Carle book I purchased for Tiny. By previous-child standards, these were parenting fails.

Thank God for Grandpa and his GF, who watched Middle and Tiny, and cleared our dining room table, grilled burgers, and boiled corn so we could sit down, ravenous, and watch Tiny squirm in her highchair.  And Grandpa’s GF dressed her in a special one-time-outfit—a pink birthday tutu and white t-shirt—that would be stained with chocolate chip frosting the second we brought out her first cupcake. When we sang happy birthday, Mark holding a plateful of cupcakes in front of her, she looked at us like we all had a touch of fever and then ripped into a cupcake, crushing it into chocolate smithereens on her highchair tray. Soon after, she let us know she preferred popcorn instead.

 Now that the third child has come along, the fanfare is  dulled—at least for us. Even so, my love couldn’t be more resplendent. And this same love is more prophetic  than ever it was with Middle and Oldest. I can see into Tiny’s future and love her as six-year-old Tiny and as almost-nine-year-old  Tiny because now I know what it means to parent not-just-babies, but children at the entrance to that long tunnel called Growing Up.  So at night, when I nurse her, I stare into her stained-glass-blue mosaic eyes and imagine her someday-fuller face, her someday-sloping nose, the someday-forehead that I will bend down to kiss goodnight or lean toward to kiss goodbye and my breath catches in my throat at all that expanse of change and time.