Trying to Work

You are home with your new sitter Annalise, a calm and brilliant English PhD student at Fordham to whom you immediately took. I am in the library. I am supposed to be grinding.

I'm too tired to grind, as we were up nursing all night, and also because even though I have been desperate for some quiet time to myself, I miss you. Also I forgot to eat lunch.

Lately you have been very focused on different drawings in your books. If there is only a part of a person showing, you want to see what is missing. "I see feet," you say of someone who is looking around the corner of a door, or "I see face," of someone who is turned away. It certainly means something, this preoccupation with completeness in figures, but I don't know what. I have to find the same character drawn in a different attitude so that you can examine them from every angle.

Today the Post suggested that we have hit the peak of the Omicron outbreak in New York. God willing. We have an at-home testing machine now. You want to go back to school, and I don't blame you. I know you are enjoying showing Annalise The Great Muppet Caper, which she has never seen. Maybe you'll show her Gene Kelly too? My stricture on visual media in the afternoon has fallen before the shattering might of my fatigue and desperation to keep you entertained in the dead of winter when there is nowhere, literally, for us to go. I'm sorry for that Succotash. I'm sorry for that, and for this morning when I made you have your nose drops even though you screamed "NO THANK YOU NO THANK YOU MAMA NOOOOOO" and kicked your little baby feet. I don't like being the heavy, the cruel mother who forces drops into your sweet little nose, which is prone to getting stuffy. 

I apologized to you later and tried to explain that sometimes mamas have to do things that Succotashes don't like if it's to keep them healthy and safe. "Thank you, Mama," you said, for the apology I think, not the nose drops.

I am going to work now, really, I am. 

I see Succotash's feet.