Turning Point

Today's blog is less about you, my Succotash, than it is about the world immediately around you.

Once there was a day, many years ago, when everything changed. On that day, described in another blog at another time by an earlier version of your mother, your dad gave a job talk at Harvard Business School at the exact same moment that my first book went to auction. Is it shook out, the auction was a smashing success, but the job talk was not. The following year was a hard one - I was on the road promoting the book they had paid for, but your dad was on the road being a management consultant and feeling like everything he had worked so hard for was coming to nothing. (It wasn't true. In fact, the things he learned at that otherwise terrible job went on to inform his work in significant ways. But even so. It was a hard chunk of time.)

Well, this week we have another one of those days. On Wednesday, we will learn if you get into the snazzy private school we are hoping you will get into, at the exact same time your father will be giving a job talk at Johns Hopkins. We also, at some point in the coming days, might field a second offer on our New York City apartment. I hope some day you will forgive us for selling that beautiful little prewar box with the working fireplace and the soon to be illegal gas stove, where you spent the first five months of your life, and then one year when you were two. I guess overall that is a smallish percentage of your overall life, and if you retain any memories of it at all, they will be hazy, and probably having to do with an elevator that still had an elevator operator. It will last as a story you tell about yourself, after hearing us tell it to you, and seeing the pictures.

Otherwise, you continue to grow. We're still trying to wean, and it's tough going, but we have discussed that even though it will be sad when we stop nursing, that it will mean that you are really a big kid, and that is something to celebrate. I've dangled the prospect of a balance bike as part of this coming celebration, something only big kids can do. Balance bikes aren't for babies.

I think you are using pretend to work through your feelings about no longer being a baby. After warm water when we are getting ready for bed you will sometimes pretend to be a little baby, curl up in a ball and ask me to carry you like a baby. I pretend to rock you, and sing Rockabye Baby, and shower you with kisses. Sometimes you even say "I am just a baby! I can't walk! I need a diaper!" and then we put your underpants on, and you tell me that you "kept growing, and growing, and growing, and now I'm a big kid!" I like that you are using stories and pretend to work it out. I've whispered to you that sometimes everyone wishes they were still a baby, even grownups. As my mother fades and fails far away, I sometimes wish I could be a baby still, too. Last night I even dreamt about her, as she was, giving me instructions about something. I wonder if the day will come when you dream the same thing about me.