House Tour and other thoughts

You have become very verbal, and you get excited when friends come over to the house. While home for Thanksgiving my friend Julie came over and as you led her up the stairs to the playroom you pointed at the antique mirror on the wall that said "That's art. No touching." This of course was before you got so worked up over wanting her and my attention while she vented to me about something to do with her son that you pelted her in the head with a Lego and you and I had to go sit in the other room to calm our bodies and talk about what behavior is allowed and what isn't. Ah, Succotash. You are two! Sometimes so very two. But the wet kisses make up for it. 

I enjoy your house tours so much. A new possible babysitter came over to play and you were showing her all your toys. I still have to translate. "This is the Ama, and this is the baby, and this is Big Bird. There's a boat and an alligator and then there's the bus." (Your summary of Little People toys plus the plot of The Muppet Movie, which you call "puppets" and which you insist on watching almost every morning. Your favorite scene is the one with Steve Martin as the waiter. You've started saying "Steve Martin!" when you want to see it. And if I want to make you laugh at the dinner table, all I have to do is lean in conspiratorially and say "Sparkling muscatel. One of the finest wines of Idaho," and you crack up.)

While in general I prefer to keep your baby blog heavy on the charming things you do and how much I love you, but there is context in the world, unfortunately. I am still afraid of the pandemic, even as we have slowly learned to live within it. I hate seeing your smile disappear behind a mask. And as new words bubble up in your mouth every day, one time zone away words disappear from my mother's mouth at almost the same rate. This Thanksgiving morning, while we were happily ensconced in Marblehead ("Mahulhead!" you said for the first time, and also "I uv oo" which made me die), watching puppets for the ninetieth time and anticipating a low key dinner with Ginger and Brian and their friends Colleen and Christ and the good silverware because that's who I am even if I don't have time to polish it, my mother got up at six in the morning and went wandering outside in her pajamas in a light rain. Wandering is not unusual for Alzheimers patients, but it is hugely dangerous, and I am now triangulating safety measures for their apartment in hopes that Mom doesn't have to move to memory care for a few months longer.

I haven't entirely finished mourning the relationship I wish you could have had with my mother, Succotash. She was brilliant. Brilliant, and dry, and funny, and sharp, and her knowledge of decorative arts was encyclopedic, and she also drove me crazy and was rigid, maybe even more rigid than I am, and could telegraph her discomfort though a formality of tone that made me insane, and that I certainly do as well, which will probably make you insane. Selfishly, I also watch what is happening to her and worry about where you will be in your life when it happens to me. She's only 31 years older than me, which is long, but not that long. I can remember 31 years ago. 31 years ago I was 13 years old. Seventh grade. I remember seventh grade. And most of what has come between. In contrast I am 42 years older than you. Which means you will likely be much younger than I am now when you have to install baby locks on the doorknobs of wherever I am living, and persuade me to wear an ugly GPS watch so that you can track me on your cell phone, or whatever technology has supplanted cell phones in 30 years. 

I hate the thought of leaving you in only 30-odd years. For though Mom hasn't left yet, she is going. A word a day slips away, and I feel like I am watching her unraveling at the same time that I am watching and reveling in your coming together. I guess that's how it's supposed to go, on a macrocosmic level. Mom's time is almost past. My time is now. Your time is coming, is almost here. That's how it's supposed to be. But all the same, I wish you could have known her. I wish she could have known you. I wish, still, that there could have been more time.