We are but older children, dear,
Who fret to find our bedtime near.

Remember when I said that, to him, a reflection was simply that? I misspoke. “Can I have some privacy?” he will say as he clambers onto the bathroom counter and opens the mirrored cabinet doors so that they touch his cheeks. He is talking to his friends, his twins, learning about infinity.

(“Susan, do you have any twin sisters?” he asked me the other night at dinner, and I said, “No, I don’t think so” — but if he only knew for how long and how much I wanted a twin sister, lived with the hope that one might, despite my own mother’s flat denials, miraculously appear, long-lost. If only he knew of the reams of foolscap I devoted to twin-sister short stories, not to mention a 40-page novella that my father took to work and got his secretary to type on an IBM Selectric. But I digress.)

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that we have been reading, of late, some Lewis Carroll: Rachel’s childhood copy — actually, make that Rachel’s mother’s childhood copy — of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. “To Wendy, With love from Nan. Christmas 1949,” the book is inscribed. Just below that inscription, Wendy wrote her name, in full, on a fancy bookplate (“This book belongs to…”). And then, just in case, she wrote it again, on the title page, along with her address. A generation later, Rachel’s name and address — and phone number — were painstakingly etched out in pencil opposite her mother’s. All of which by way of saying: Don’t lose this. This is valuable.

Rowan plays and plays and plays, acting out elaborate scenarios with trains and trucks and Bakugans and the faces and the spaces beyond them in the mirror. The borders of his world are still, utterly permeable, open to possibility. And for this I am grateful. Don’t lose this, I want to tell him: This is valuable.

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Hey folks! It’s time for another episode of Talking about Death.

Actually, probably not so much episodes as commercial breaks, small interruptions in our regular programming to discuss life’s big, unanswerable questions in manageable chunks.

Rowan is back on his “figuring out death” focus, looping round as he does to the subject every few months or seasons or so. Last week, he woke me up with a chipper “Rachel and I talked about dead people last night!” In fact, he and I had talked about dead people as I lay with him before he went to sleep — what it means to be dead: that you can’t see, or hear, or feel, or know about the people still living. He had sobbed at the thought of leaving me, Rachel, his brother; missing us too much already; not yet ready to not be. I rubbed his back, held him close, tried to explain about probabilities, how memories and lessons and the wonderful things that we do live on. But mostly I was quiet, letting him have his grief, work through it.

Which he continues to do, in slightly macabre — if generally quite pragmatic — ways.

“I love this cat,” Isaac said on Saturday morning, nuzzling Lola, our increasingly tolerant alpha feline, as she stretched across the kitchen floor. And from the dining room came sound of the voice of five-year-old wisdom, intoning: “You know that cat’s going to die one day.”

I went to sit with Rowan at the table. “Who will you be sadder,” he asked me between bites of oatmeal with milk and brown sugar: “when the cats die or we?”

“When you die,” I told him. Because it’s true.

This morning, on the way to school: “If a giant pancake runned over you, would you get dead?”

“No,” I answer, “I doubt it. It would have to be a really giant pancake.”

“But if a car runned over you, you’d get dead, right?”

“Yes, probably. Or at least very hurt.”

“But you would only get dead if it runned over your heart and your head, right? Your heart or your head?”

“If it ran over your heart or your head, yes, you would probably die.”

Small pause.

“Hey, head, dead! That rhymes!”

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Sometimes, these things just write themselves, you know?

Update: It’s a trend! From a friend:

Send me your garpage head photos!

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So that quilt I’m making? I’ve been doing the math. Some numbers for you: A queen-sized quilt top measures 83 by 103 inches. That translates into 437 individual blocks, each measuring 4.5 square inches. Each block, in turn, is made up of nine individual pieces. For a total of 3,933 individual pieces of fabric.

Each of those 3,933 individual pieces varies in length, from 1.25 to 5 inches, but they are all 1.25 inches wide. And so, for the past couple of weeks, I have been wielding my trusty Olfa rotary cutter as I watch episodes of True Blood and United States of Tara and Bob the Builder on DVD, cutting those 1.25-inch-wide strips from approximately 12 yards of red and pink fabric. Twelve yards, at approximately 36 inches per yard, means I need to cut approximately 346 strips.

I’m guessing I’m about halfway done.

(We will pause here for a moment to let it sink in, slowly, that my project is, as previously stated, cutting 12 yards of perfectly good fabric into approximately 4,300 pieces and then sewing them all back together again. Got it? Okay, let’s continue.)

It’s all going to add up to something beautiful. I know it is. But, in the short term what it’s added up to is this: My arms and shoulders are shot. My wrists ache and my palms and thumbs tingle. My forearms are dotted with painful little knots.

It’s not like I wasn’t perfectly aware that this could happen. I’ve written before about carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive strain disorder and the fact that I can no longer knit. Or type. Or bowl (not that that one is a huge loss, to me or to the world, but still). So why I decided that it would be perfectly acceptable to repetitively strain my upper limbs in 22- and 45-minute bursts is beyond me. Although, actually, it’s not. I was in denial. I wanted the quilt so badly, wanted so much to get going on this artistic pursuit, that I pretended I could do it.

Of course, the idea of the quilt is tied to the idea of writing the novel, of the two taking shape simultaneously, of the story, like the fabric, being broken down into its individual parts and breathtakingly reassembled. Yeah, yeah, so romantic. Of course my wrists would get right on board that.

Thing is, I don’t know why I decided I had to make the quilt in the space of a couple months when I’ve given myself permission to work slowly but steadily on the manuscript. My goal for the novel is 250 words each workday. (To put that into perspective, this post is pushing 400 words as of this sentence.) It’s not very much, but it’s doable even on the days when I feel as though, as Ann Lamott might put it, everything I write is “a stupid, self-indulgent sack of spider puke.” And it adds up, over time. Two hundred and fifty words is a page. A page each workday adds up to a manuscript in about a year, give or take. Especially on the days when, as often happens, I write more than 250 words. But not a lot more.

So, I’m backing off with the quilting. I’ll schedule a few emergency appointments with the acupuncturist. And then I’ll cut a few strips a day. I’ll write my few words a day. And I will complete both projects without compromising my body, or my sanity. At least, no more than they’re already compromised.

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I’m envisioning this as an ongoing series.

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It was bound to happen, and now it’s official: Isaac likes Rachel better, too. Just like his big brother! At least this time, I was somewhat prepared for the sea change, having already had the experience of Rowan stomping all over my heart with his toddler feet before kicking it out the door.

So, it’s Mama non Grata all over again around here. Actually, it’s been this way for at least a full season. In the summer, Isaac was still chanting, plaintively, “I want Susan!” if anyone besides me so much as glanced at him. But now, he’s Rachel’s boy, all the way, and I have been relegated to a device designed to convey him to her.

Yesterday, for example, he woke up from his nap in what has become his new, signature style: bellowing from his big-boy bed, “I don’t want to sleep!” When I went to get him, he burst into tears at the sight of me and commenced with the “I want Rachel! I want to wake up with Rachel!” shtick. Since she wasn’t around — having taken Rowan to a puppet show — Isaac was stuck with me. And, let me tell you, he was none too gracious about that, and vented by telling me off resoundingly for idiotically getting him milk in a glass instead of a sippy cup.

When Rachel arrived home, about ten minutes later, he was still pissed. “I wanted to wake up with yoooouuuuu,” he told her, leaning from me into her arms and snuggling up on her shoulder. “Well, let’s go do that then,” she told him. And, in an act of what can only be described as overindulgence of titanic proportions, she toted him back upstairs and into his bed so that they could REENACT HIS AWAKENING. Except, of course, with her there instead of me. Jeez. Pun intended. They returned downstairs, him all smiles, not fazed in the least by my stink eye.

Oddly, Isaac’s newfound infatuation with Rachel means that I am the only one who can get him to sleep. If she tries to put him down for his nap or to bed, he becomes so overwrought with grief at the prospect of her leaving that she simply can’t, at least not without a vale of tears and 15 minutes worth of screaming.

Me? A couple of stories and a quick cuddle and, meh, okay, you can go. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, now.

In the middle of the night, if he wakes up, it’s up to me to get him back down. Which I usually do by saying, “If you just lie down now, sweetie, I’ll go see if Rachel wants to cuddle you.” By the time I’m back in bed, he’s fast asleep.

“At least Rowan likes us both the same now,” I said to Rachel this afternoon.

“Yeah,” she said, trailing off in that way she has that makes it clear that there’s more coming. “Except in the middle of the night.”

This is true. Even though I sleep closest to the door, should Rowan wake in the night, he will come into our room and walk all the way around the bed to Rachel’s side in order to get some Mama comfort. My theory is that Rowan’s habit is a combination of two things: first, he got used to Rachel’s presence in the night when Isaac was a nursing baby and Rachel and I pragmatically divided up the children according to who could most easily meet their needs in the middle of the night. Since I was the one with the milk, I got the baby, and she got Rowan. Second, Rachel does not mind sleeping with Rowan in his bed, whereas I, well, don’t love it so much. Not because I am a bad person, but because I prefer not to be elbowed in the stomach at regular intervals. Call me crazy.

Rachel’s theory is that she is nicer than I am to wake up in the middle of the night, which may or may not be true, but I will point out for the record that this theory did not stop her, two mornings ago, from rolling over at 5 AM and jostling me fully awake. “What?” I said, panicked, “What? Is it Isaac?” But by then she had already turned over. It took me a few seconds to realize she’d done it in her sleep. And then I lay awake until 6:13 AM, when Isaac woke up and I went to get him.

“I want to wake up with Rachel,” he told me.

“Yeah, well, I just did an hour ago, and it was none too pretty,” I told him. And we went downstairs to make tea.

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And, if you come inside, he might “throw you in the garbage.” In fact, if you do just about anything these days, he will, he says, throw you in the garbage. Or, for the more environmentally minded of you, “in the compost.” Or “out the window.” Which, I suppose, is better than, “I flush you down the toilet,” or, heaven forbid, “I put you in the oven and it be hot and I burn you all up and make cookies and you be yummy.”

Still, it’s not like it’s all fun and games for him, always throwing people out of windows and burning them up in ovens and all. He suffers, too. “Do you remember?” he’ll ask: “You remember when the lion bite me? In my bed? At the zoo?” And if you think the lions are bad, just wait until you hear about the fishies, biting his fingers in the night, giving him owies. “I don’t like that doggie,” he says, pointing to a picture in a book. “He bite me.”

He’s working something through that exploding little brain of his, is our Isaac. Cheerfully navigating our most violent demises and attacks to his person by wild (and domesticated) animals while planting kisses on our knees and mucking about with syntax. “I love you,” he says, over and over: “I love you too much.” 

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I’m quilting again, after a too-long break. I don’t know — something about having two children under the age of five just didn’t seem conducive to futzing around with geometry and sewing machines and rotary blades and tiny scraps of fabric and, oh, pins. Lots of pins, scattered, no matter how careful you try to be, on the floor. On which crawl babies. Who like to put things in their mouths. And so on.

Also there was the fact that I couldn’t find the pedal for the sewing machine. And then, for some reason, I decided that the sewing machine wasn’t working. And the idea of both finding the pedal (it was behind some shelves in the basement) and then actually hooking up the entire machine and running some fabric through it just to check if it worked — and then deciding what to do with it if it didn’t — seemed so overwhelming that I needed to take a nap and eat some chocolate every time I thought of it.

But, in the past few weeks, I’ve got unstuck. I suspect it has something to do with finishing teaching. For the past semester, I taught a course in creative nonfiction at the local university. And while teaching opened my eyes to about a zillion mostly fantastic things, it also seemed to consume vast swaths of my creative energy. It seems I can teach writing or actually write, but not both at the same time, aside from a few blog posts here and there.

But! I am done! And from the moment the last paper was graded, I’ve been on a nonstop organizational extravaganza. Filing, purging, list making and crossing-off. Alphabetizing the CDs. I even bought a label maker. I’m hard-core, man.

And, so, the sewing machine works. I’m not sure why I thought it didn’t, but it did a fine job of hemming the hanging-down curtains in Rowan’s room, which have been bothering me for approximately a year and a half. And then I dug out the beginnings of a quilt idea I had experimented briefly with a couple years ago — log cabin, but monochrome — and tried to figure out exactly where it stood.

I think I first got obsessed with quilting when I took Women’s Writing and Feminist Theory as an undergraduate. Read enough Alice Walker at a formative age, and I suppose that’s bound to happen. I remember creating a presentation on The Color Purple in which I mapped out all the characters’ various relationships to each other as patches on a crazy quilt. There was Walker’s short story, “Everyday Use,” which brought home to me the power of the artist: when one sister objects to her sibling actually using her family’s heirloom quilts as opposed to hanging them on a wall, their mother replies, “‘She can always make some more. Maggie knows how to quilt.’” Something about quilting’s combination of beauty and utility, the idea of disparate scraps of cloth coming together to create works of art, fascinated me.

And now, it appears, Rowan is fascinated, too. He stands by me as I feed scraps of material through the machine. His job is to remove the pins, which he does, carefully replacing them in the Altoids box that serves as their container. Then he helps me cut the newly sewn pieces apart, and then stands by the ironing board, inhaling deeply, while I press them. “I love the way it smells,” he says of the steaming fabric. For the sake of everyone’s self-preservation, I have not yet explained to him the function of the pedal. Just as he thinks the car drives itself, he assumes the sewing machine is powered by my brain. And that’s just fine by me, for now.

I think of Walker, in her essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, describing the year it took her to write The Color Purple: lodged in a cabin in northern California, working on a quilt, spending time with her daughter. Scraps of fabric stitched together like words become sentences, paragraphs, chapters. The whole more than the sum of its parts. Her, trusting in her vision of what both would be before anyone else could see them.

All of which is by way of saying that I have dug out the novel manuscript, and I’m writing again. This is not so much a resolution as an affirmation: 2010 holds a novel manuscript and a queen-sized quilt top. Pins be damned. Yesterday, I bought more fabric. Along with the label maker.

Rowan doesn’t yet know what we’re making, has no concept that these painstakingly pinned and sewn and unpinned and ironed pieces of fabric, have any larger purpose. “But what is it?” he asks. And I try to explain: that we’re making a blanket; that each of these tiny pieces of cloth will eventually join together in a (hopefully) gorgeous design, the whole more beautiful than the sum of its parts. I show him the quilt I made for him before I knew him, had any sense of his possibility. We hang it on his wall, right next to his map of the world.

“Basically,” I said to him, “you take a [perfectly good] big piece of material, cut it up into a whole bunch of little pieces, rearrange them, and sew it back together again”: smaller, more intricate, stronger, more detailed. More work. More beautiful, for its scars. Kind of, some days, like my life, before and after him.

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