Pinball

Birmingham, training.  My first week of work, but it does not feel like it, because I am not in my city, staying in a downtown hotel.  Orientation is all forms, and small talk.  Too much food.  I think of my children, also in their first week, wondering where I am, where their father is.  I wish this transition could have run more smoothly, but am grateful for the employment, ever mindful of my state of grace.

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We sit on the back porch.  Our back porch.  Jack throws a beach ball against the French door, making circles in the morning’s condensation.  “Look, Mom!” he shouts.  The circles please him.

A few minutes later we meander to the front porch. We are porch sitting people, so we made sure that our home design included ample porchiness.  We have no furniture out there, no rocking chairs (we do not have much furniture inside, either, empty and echoing).  We sit on the brick steps,  the children chase pink balloons that are blown into the grass.  Liam, who has never had a mailbox, opens and closes it, opens and closes.  “Dis is Jack’s maybox!” he says, brightly.  “Mom, can we open dis maybox?  What’s in dere?  Cwose it, cwose it!”  Jack’s balloon pops on the grass, and he wails.  The dog is there, too, tied up to the railing.  Our neighbor hails us, and we shout greeting.  Across the street, sprinkler heads pop up.  Later, the Professor will purchase a riding lawnmower at a home improvement big box store, and we will go to The Olive Garden for my birthday dinner.  Our descent into suburbia is rapid, total.  I feel both comfortable and wildly uncomfortable, not in my own skin but happy for a safe yard, a sleepy street, good public schools.  I wash my cloth diapers, and water my grass.  It is odd, new, and we’re trying it on, this sub-urban bliss.  No picket fence as yet, but stay tuned.

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“Mama, you sweep in dis bed wif me.”

“No,  Liam, mama has her bed downstairs in her room, and you have your big boy bed up here in your room.”

“No.  Dis Mama’s bed AND Liam’s bed.  You sweep wif me, Mama.”

He has slept one night through in the new house.  Many nights he just appears, wordless and silent, at my bedside, and I jolt awake, retroactively terrified by his midnight descent down the steep flight of hardwood stairs.  Once he sees my eyes open, he cries hysterically, and it takes several minutes of soothing before the hitching sobs subside.  Other nights he cries from his bed, or from somewhere on the steps.  Some nights he cries every other hour.  We ignore what we can, but even then my nerves are shot.  I exist most nights in a state of half-sleep, remaining mostly alert, listening for the inevitable cries – certain I hear them even when I don’t.  Even here in the hotel, I woke at least five times, disoriented, checking the clock.

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The Professor was gone for two weeks, then with us for a week (only because of Isaac, that blessed, wretched storm).  Now gone another week, then with us for 24 hours, then gone again.  We had our one week oasis of family time, free of internet, free of tv, a little blip of time floating in a sea of upheaval and separation.  I feel, especially now, a bit buffeted.  Blown from this town to that, from this home to that.  Routineless, listless, staying afloat until October, when we will all settle into normalcy.  I will be bored after a week of it, but oh I long for that glorious week.  I am tired of adapting.