Something Out of Nothing

life's little pieces

It’s May, the second-best month of the year. At my house, we’ve all been spending a lot of time with my seven-year-old daughter’s giant, rainbow-colored, stuffed yeti. Her name—officially, according to her tag—is Diane, and we all talk about her like we’ve known her for years. Also according to her tag, her favorite food is shepherd’s pie. My daughter arranges her meals on the salvaged metal end of a cinnamon roll container, which looks very much like a miniature tin plate. Sometimes after the kids eat breakfast and scramble out the door to school, it’s just me and Diane left sitting at the table. It’s possible that I’ve asked her a question or two. She has little to say—or doesn’t like me, hard to tell.

Last night when I was getting ready for bed, I noticed this sign on my toilet, which I can only assume was left by my seven-year-old son. It’s no one’s birthday, and he’s not supposed to talk like that. For a while I couldn’t decide whether to laugh, but then I decided to, because really, how many chances do we get?

What else. I wonder if I’m a good mother a lot more than I used to. I made strawberry jam and burned it. I hosted a funeral at my house. All my peonies were pinned to the ground by a rainstorm, battered and destroyed. I ordered pool floats for my daughter’s twelfth birthday party, a fact that astonishes me. This is the last month of my thirties, ever.

I’ve spent three days trying to write something here. I couldn’t get any words out, until I started telling you all about Diane. Most of my words are going toward the new book I’m writing while my kids are at school. I grew hundreds of flower seedlings indoors but can’t get them all in the ground fast enough, and most of them are now leggy and sun-starved and dying. (Here, I should say something about how often my ambitions outpace my abilities.) I couldn’t water the plants because I was busy scrubbing something purple from the rug. I took a month to finish reading a single book and, in the end, wished I hadn’t. I let the deli turkey go bad, and the hummus, and the strawberries.

I don’t always know what to say here, in this middle space. But I am glad you all are here. I am not very good at small talk. When I see people, I want to ask, “What are you failing at right now? What risks are you taking? Have you read any good poems?” Or I want to talk about Shogun, which is a really, really good show.

It occurred to me, just this year, that I do not enjoy live music concerts. Funny how it can take 40 years (or longer) to get inside your own mind. I read a bunch of Kurt Cobain’s diary entries. Did you know he had a chronic stomach condition and was always in pain? Well, more than one kind of pain. I took my kids to see Peter Pan, which is a play about the trade-offs of growing up, and I wasn’t sure whose side I was on. My kids also wrote this with Bananagrams. Poetry everywhere, if you’re willing to look.

I tried to recreate the gallo pinto we ate in Costa Rica, but I overcooked the rice, which ruined the dish, and I had to throw it all out. I bought green plantains and never fried them. The kids asked if we could trade our bearded dragon for chickens, and I was sick of going to the pet store, so we did.

I had an old filling replaced in my tooth and couldn’t feel the left half of my face for a whole morning. My first-grade son wrote a 14-page story, and it occurred to me for the first time that he might be the writer in the family. How had I missed it? He always holds my hand, even if we are just walking down the driveway. I found the most perfect linen skirt and bought it.

Underneath the chair on our back porch, a mouse was living in a nest made from tiny scraps of blue fabric. We found the nest because the children broke the lamp throwing a football, so we moved the furniture to vacuum the glass. My husband caught the mouse and the kids begged, so he told them he would throw it in the woods without killing it. I found out later he had caught the mouse by punching it, and it had been dead all along. Who am I to judge—I was secretly really mad about the broken lamp.

After the book I didn’t like, I read another one in one day. Sometimes, when you’re stuck, you have to just do whatever comes to mind. We looked everywhere but couldn’t find where all the blue fabric had come from, how that mouse had made herself a home out of nothing.