We called them back from the edge where the grass darkened into bog, picked them up to take a picture with us, in the spot where we were married ten years before. They don’t know what comes next or where they’re going, they just know they have to be there, be in it. The grass in the meadow had curved low on the ground in a pattern like clouds, and the kids were running in it, in the breathless, expectant way of children.
I’m watching her learn it on her own, among her friends at school, trying out different spellings at the kitchen table, or picking up on letters in the wild when we’re out driving, her whole face lighting up in the rearview. I was going to follow all the steps and now it’s like she’s taken flight. I had bought all the books, last year, to teach her to read. The many all-caps drawings in pen she makes for us. Her quick hug around my waist at the stove where I’m cooking, seeing me frustrated with her brother, stepping around the baby. She’s so silly, so ever in the mood for a game it’s easy to miss how soft she is, how easily, deeply wounded.
My first light, my bright girl, she laughs loud. The shock that it doesn’t take sameness, that I don’t need to share his tastes to share the blaze of his happiness. But then, the abandon with which he sends his trucks into the block towers, whooping at their destruction. How he never wants to NOT be wearing pajamas. Making a nest of blankets on the couch for us to read books in. Today, working on the solar system puzzle together, slowly, on the kitchen table. We will understand each other, like January people do.
Every day I wonder: Who are you? Who will you be? Our birthdays are five days apart, with 35 years between us, and when he was born I thought, Here is a child who will be like me. He is so small, so heavy with tears each day, and so much lighter– like a bird– than his constant motion makes him seem. Did you know this, mama? Did you know the world contained this miracle, this walking? I have doubts about my own purposes here, but I know our baby’s. Ha! Ha! she shouts, looking at me, eyes wide. She opens her mouth as she takes her first wobbly steps, holding my hands. She is our more, and her whole face shows it. Who is that family with three children, outnumbered? Spilling noisily out of a grocery aisle, or strolling loose and easy to the park like, it’s no big deal, what’s one more? She is our big deal. Is she really ours? I take a beat before I recognize our reflection as a family of five. Even now, almost a year later, I still look at her in astonishment. The baby is both things incarnate: the embodiment of joy, and unexpected.
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