Passage West

Dearest and Closest,

On Monday night, we made the move from our friends’ the Amory’s to our new (albeit rented) apartment on the hill of Portland’s East End. Dan had stayed late the night before cleaning and finishing the final touches of painting and setting up our bed. We arrived to a wall of boxes and what seemed like a daunting amount of work. It was hot, in the mid-nineties and all our things looked limp and shabby in the heat. It was hard to imagine that once this place has some curtains and all our things—some shabby chic, some lovely, some just shabby-ish—all spread around it will look like a home, and, probably, a pretty nice one. Some of our stuff that had gone all the way to California and come all the way back looked a little worse for the wear—this antique chair I’m sitting on has been punctured slightly in the leather seat. Another chair ripped a little. A backpack packed in a box with our shower and bath filters has molded. There are some dings and dents and bruises, but we have them , too, so why wouldn’t our stuff? What we are pulling out of boxes is part fuselage of lives that exploded in a way that we least expected and also part the grace of things. I know stuff is stuff and it’s not our family, it’s not our animals, it’s not our dear friends. But, I’m starting a new relationship to my stuff—one that is more tethered to the intention of some of my things. When those things come tumbling out of boxes they bring with them my memories, my tastes, parts of my past. The impact of them cannot be trivialized. My surrogate grandparents, many many years ago, had a fire and lost everything they owned, even their cat. Embodied memories, ordinary things, a being whom they loved—all gone.

What was harder to see in our pile of stuff was Ellison’s bed, a bag of Green Tea kitty litter we had bought for the trip, her litter box, a bag of her toys. I find myself doing an odd crab-like walk through our boxes, my head to the side, my eyes shifty. I don’t want to look at her things; I don’t want to think about it. Sometimes I figure Dan thinks this makes me hard—he wants to mention her often, recognize the things, validate their existence. I can’t. Yet. It hurts too much.

On Monday, when we arrived at the top of the hill, we stopped for a coffee and picked up a few things to make lunch at a small gourmet shop that graces, and gentrifies, the Hill with it’s presence. As I waited in line for a coffee, someone said “Hi Caitlin.” At first I wasn’t sure who it was, except a familiar face, and I gave a big smile and said “Hi How are you? We’re just moving back to town. It’s really nice to see you. (I still wasn’t sure I knew who this was—my brains are going out my nipples!)” From there things slid down hill precipitously. It was the owner of a restaurant Dan and I had always loved, and, in fact, I had three times written favorably about it in the local paper. It was a place we could not wait to be back nearby—a neighborhood bistro of sorts, with only about eight tables, that serves up great burgers and salmon. We must have taken countless friends and family for dinner, ordered take out a million times, even whooped it up there for a pretty penny last summer with Tim and Jess. In the coffee shop, as I stood in line waiting to pay for my two coffees, he proceeded to scream at me for missing a reservation ten days ago. I stood there stammering, trying to say, “Oh, I’m so sorry…I didn’t realize…I’ve been very supportive of your restaurant and I’d never want to hurt it…” But he yelled and yelled and yelled. After he left, I could not breath. In the heat, holding the cold sweating coffees, everyone in the coffee shop looking at me, I thought I might die. I tried to speak to pay for my coffee and no voice came out. In truth, I had not really missed a reservation. I had stopped by with Mercedes to see if they could accommodate all four of us and two babies after Dan and Mike finished carrying the heavy stuff from our U-Haul up three floors to our new apartment. They didn’t have highchairs, they couldn’t do it for an hour and a half, etc, etc. The waitress was unpleasant –which was uncharacteristic of the place—and unyielding. Finally, I said, we’ll come by later and see. To which she took my name. I totally should have called when it became later and later and Dan and Mike were still carrying things and the babies were tired and everyone was covered with sweat. But I didn’t. I forgot. I didn’t think to take her writing us down seriously because it seemed like it really wasn’t going to work. When I came back out to the car from the coffee shop, I was shaking. “I don’t want to live here,” I told Dan. “I want to go home to Mom’s.” “What do you mean?” When I told him, he went through the roof and called the guy, saying “Don’t corner my wife and scream at her—especially when I’m sitting right outside. Come say it to me.” The guy hung up on him. That night in the heat, with our things looming everywhere around us, our son sweatily asleep in our bed, I started to feel totally beat by the last year of our lives. Dan was truculent and touchy and didn’t want to spend any more time on the guy from the restaurant whom, he said, was a small man and not worth our time. I wanted to fall apart. Dan wanted to push forward. As M. slept we began an enormous fight about everything and nothing—it was too hot to make any sense—but the gist was I wanted to be anywhere but here and I had no idea what that meant, except that I was angry about everything that had been so hard and this made Dan angry because he wants to move forward, not backward (that green light that year by year recedes before us…)

The next day was our anniversary and we awoke tired and bruised. Our son needed us. Our dog needed us. And it was so terribly hot and humid anyone needing anything seemed like an enormous effort. As I picked through some of our old things, M. on my hip and became reacquainted with everything we had gathered together and apart, I felt a flood of love for our lives come over me. I looked at Dan and said, “Look we’re better together than divided. Let’s move on. I’ll pick up and keep going forward. I believe in this. In us. I’ll do it. I’m just…I’m tired.” And he reached over with his long long arms and took me and M. to him and held us, all of us covered with sweat, a little island in the middle of nowhere.

Here’s what our apartment looks like: You come up three flights of an old Victorian house to a door that opens into the dining room and to the right is a large living room that looks out to downtown Portland. To the right of that is a small office for me to write and Dan to do whatever he does…pay bills and surf the Internet, I guess. If you had gone to the left from the dining room, you’d walk though a pantry to a large kitchen, where I sit now, the windows open, a faint, salty breeze sailing through. Through the kitchen is a small bedroom for M., which is separated by a bathroom from our room, so we are connected and close to him. Dan painted M.’s room a light cornflower blue and our room something called English Hyacinth which is a blue lavender hue that I can’t decide if I love or hate. He painted my office white and our dining room white, the living room is a light green, the kitchen also a light green, the pantry a robin’s egg blue and the bathroom a turqoisey green. All sea colors. From M's room I can see a sliver of the ocean and, at night, smell its heavy musk.

We spent our anniversary cleaning the detritus from the previous tenants, setting up bits of furniture and trying to make a space that was functional and then we took our boys to the beach. Hopper ran around like a madman, only to plop in the sand beside us and pant until he got up the strength to go plunge himself back into the water. M. crawled all around in the sand and thought it tasted better than any solid food I’ve ever given him and shrieked with delight when we washed him off in the water. We read a couple of the poems our family read to us at our wedding, opened a bottle of wine that was a wedding gift from Will and Leah two years ago and have been saving (last year I was pregnant). We poured a little into two tiny baby food jars and toasted our lives together and then went home and made $4.99 frozen pizza and finished the wine while M. banged his loudest, hardest wooden toys on his wooden highchair.

The next day, our place in some kind of livable chaos, we went back to my family for two days and packed up our things for good at my mother’s, put her house back the way it was before she arranged it so beautifully for us and then packed up my father’s Scion and he drove with us in caravan down to Portland to unload more of our things. Bless his heart he carried everything up to the third floor with Dan, had a bowl of Gazpacho and drove home, leaving only a bag of summer squash and cucumbers from his garden.

Dan is working tonight and I’ve put M. to bed, finally, after much rocking in our new rocking chair which was my step-mother, Gail’s, grandmother’s which Dan sanded last week and painted white. M. was afraid of the new place, still a muddled chaos of boxes and things piled everywhere and the new sounds—city sounds, unlike the birds and trees and silence outside his window at my mother’s. Finally, he fell asleep, a sweaty, crumpled heap on my chest as we rocked in his new bedroom, the light blue walls almost translucent in the gloaming.

I am drinking a beer. I am taking it in. I am starting over. Like that. I’m doing it because I have to, because one must go forward, because it’s right and because it’s my heart.

Love, Caitlin, Dan, Hopper and M.

Dearest and Closest,

Today, under silent blue skies, endless golden sunshine that highlighted shadows falling long and deep on the green green trees, we packed up our car, piled in and left my mother’s. On a day like this—hot, perfect Maine summer—all we wanted to do was stay and stay. In the afternoon sunshine we planted a white Lilac my mother gave me for my birthday in honor of Ellison, sprinkled about third of her ashes next to the alive, tight, bound roots, played the Greg Brown song “Two Little Feet” on a small radio Dan set up on a chair on the yard because she had little feet and we used to hold her and dance to this song and I read the St. Francis prayer in French. We scattered four small thyme plants at the base of her Lilac and we found three gray rocks at the shore, one of which was shaped almost like the back of a small gray cat, much like Ellison. It was warm from sitting in the sun and felt almost alive. We all participated—even Hopper who oversaw Dan’s digging and filling of the hole around the plant and M. helped hold the umbrella my mother held over his head because with the heat he only wore a diaper. We took the final two thirds of her ashes and put them in the car, taking her once more for this last leg of journey to a new home. And then we went for a last swim in the cold, clear, Atlantic—Cadillac Mountain in the distance-- and came back, pulled on clothes and set out. Our lives are changing, unfolding to a new beginning, no matter if we feel totally ready or not. All day I had a knot in my stomach, an anxiety fueled by the acute knowledge that our future in uncertain and, yet, we must, at this juncture lunge back into the stream and try, try again.

Leaving home, leaving my mother was hard for me. Differently hard from when we set out to cross all 3,000 miles of America a year and a half ago now, but hard, because, in the safety of home we’ve been able to lick our wounds, hide and recover. And also, this has been an important time. It is natural that my mother, I’d guess, is glad to have her home free of our things, dog, baby and adult, which migrated from our two rooms out to the living room, kitchen and beyond. It is natural that we, a young family trying to learn how to be a young family, needs to be on its own. But the closeness we’ve had in this time has been special. And what my mother gave us in a place to recover and marshal our best, was a gift. Also M. has grown so much at her house—he had his first solid foods in her kitchen, his first safari on her lawn, his first swim in the cove by her house, he grew from a peanut of a guy to a live wire who’s already crawling sideways and backwards and pulling himself by his arms all over the place. During these months he could not have been surrounded by more love. He--we all—will miss the enveloping embrace of extended family. We will forever be grateful and also, I think, feel nostalgic for some of the times we had at home as a family. When we got in the car, I pulled out my mother’s new book—a collection of essays about our family and the natural world and where they meet and divide—and started reading it out loud to Dan. Like that, the three-hour drive sped past as home grew further and further away in our rearview mirror but not our hearts.

The truth is I’m afraid to go back out there, to start over so naked, so fragile feeling. I said to Dan as I packed our clothes—many of which are threadbare and shabby—“God, can you tell what we’ve been through by our clothes? Do these things represent us?” And he laughed and said, “Probably.” My grandmother, Dorothy, I remember, whenever I feel shabby, was accepted to Vassar and did not go because she felt her clothes were too tattered. Feeling held back—holding yourself back—because you look, or more, feel poor, is never the way to go—all you have to do is listen to Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors to remember how rich you can feel, even in rags—but it is hard, almost impossible to know this in yourself in the moment. Coming home to Portland, the place we so bravely left just under eighteen months ago, takes a certain amount of mettle that is almost daunting. I feel like people will judge us, somehow, think we're failures, not understand what happened to us and why and how. I’ve always thought Portland had this edge—this weird whisper saying “if you leave here and don’t make it out there you’re just a loser.” But maybe it’s my own whisper. Our saving grace is our beautiful (and beautifully clothed in hand me downs from Vanessa’s wonderfully dressed three children) son whose smile lights up the universe and saves me, at least, from even caring about myself or what silly thing I’m wearing.

Today, also, our dear friends Tim and Jess set out to cross America to move to Los Angeles. This was a bittersweet parting—two years ago we all planned to be in L.A by this time together. They are now going and we are back. Also, my brother, Aran, and my sister in law, Margot are crossing America and coming home from Mexico, driving with their two dogs and a car full of stuff, camping along the way. And, this week, our friends Ken and Kamalah had a baby girl. As all our journeys coalesced in my mind today, the sun setting outside my window, I felt so preciously that we are all, somehow, in this together.

Tonight we are staying at our dear friend’s the Amory’s in Portland—they are on North Haven but have, again, opened their doors to us. They have been instrumental in our ability to rise again and restart our lives. Tomorrow we will go over to our freshly painted apartment which Dan painted all last weekend with help from Frank and his son Zach and my cousin Jane and begin to do the final push of pulling our things our of boxes, dusting them off and setting up a home. After such a long journey, I’m not even sure I still know how.

But, of course I do. I have to. My son depends on me to create a new safe space where he can continue to thrive.

Love, Caitlin, Dan, Hopper and M.

August 5, 2009

Dearest and Closest,

Our lives turned a corner last week. Dan got a job bartending thirty minutes north of Portland in the town of Brunswick and, so, we’ve determined to take the scary but, we hope, good decision to tentatively restart our lives on our own in Portland. We’ve decided we’re going to try to make it work for Dan to go to grad school, beginning in September, and, we signed the lease on an apartment in Portland’s East End. Dan will commute two days a week to Boston and I will hold down the fort. This week we will begin moving from my mother’s to our new apartment. I feel like I’m teetering on a precipice, naked, and below me is an inviting but an oh so cold Maine ocean.

This week I turn thirty-five and M. turns seven months old. Tonight, with my mother, we celebrated my birthday with lobster and French bread, brand new potatoes straight out of the earth, cucumbers fresh from the vine and corn on the cob. And, later, a chocolate cake with fudge frosting. Afterwards, with M. on my lap as I rocked in my mother’s small red antique rocking chair, we sang songs. M. sat up, his legs straddling my thighs, his hand in his mouth, looking from face to face as we sang “The Sloop John B.” (“So, hoist up the John B. sails, See how the mainsail sets, Send for the captain ashore, let me go home. Let me go home, let me go home. I feel so break up, I want to go home”), "Amazing Grace,"  "Clementine" and anything else we could remember part and parcel. These are the kinds of evenings that I will remember from these four plus months of living with my mother as we’ve tried to put back together lives that hit rock bottom as fall out from the recession. This is the gift we will take with us. Over the weekend, my father and Gail made a birthday cookout lunch for me and invited my surrogate grandparents, Meme and Pop pop, and we ate coleslaw and hot dogs and burgers and Gail’s homemade pickles and then a sour cherry pie with cherries from their tree. They had decorated the driveway with balloons like I was a kid again and put them all over the porch. After both of these wonderful celebrations of my birthday, I started to feel almost wistful about leaving home. But change, once my enemy, has become the harmony to my life—we’ve spent so much of the last five months living out of bags, driving between Portland and home, bouncing around all over the place and never really feeling tethered that I’ve had to just relax, to the best of my uptight ability, and accept. I still resist it, of course. Right now, I know the necessary next step for all of us is that we move on, stronger from this time of being shored up by family, and step back out into the fray.

This time with living with my mother, this time with family, has been a gift. I almost have felt self-conscious saying that before now—so many people have been affected like us, or worse, by this recession and do not have the kind of support we were lucky enough to have received. I will never forget this time which, even with the ups and downs that anxieties and close quarters create, was totally unexpected and would never have happened for any other reason. I can’t imagine how differently our lives would have been living in L.A, far away from family, our son barely knowing my parents, his development observed on the phone and in photos. Instead, we’ve really been able to share in the marvel of his growing. And grow he has. At almost thirty inches long and over twenty-two pounds, an early crawler and babbler who knows not only his own name but Hopper’s (mama is still a stretch, and, thankfully, so is dada—we’re only a little competitive about this around here…), a willful, huge force to be reckoned with who wants to stay up late and hang out with us (are we really this cool?) until he self destructs, this child is becoming a fully fledged person.

With the sun finally gracing us day after day after day, we’ve been trying to take a break from various jobs and errands each afternoon to take M. and Hopper for a swim. We slather M. in sun block, take off all his clothes and hold him so his feet can dangle in. He loves the feeling of sand on his feet, in his hands and, unfortunately, in his mouth. He had his first Safari this week out on the yard, underneath the crabapple tree at Mom’s—his knees got all dirty and he pulled up fistfuls of clover and grass, throwing them with abandon as if the world was his to pulverize. But there was something, sweeter, too—in discovery, we learn, one must sacrifice, but maybe not the one who’s doing the destroying.

I’ve noticed an odd facet to myself in the pulverizing department. A person who would readily spare every ant, spider or slug, when they come near my son I’ve become a ruthless killer. This is wrong, I know. The other day I sucked up some circling tiny ants in our room, who knows why they were there, with the vacuum. Yesterday, I pushed a yellow jacket who was too interested in our blanket on the beach into the sand until he was smooshed and then buried his carcass with handfuls of sand, topping the pile with a large rock. What has happened to me? New mothers are a force to be feared, I reckon.

Anyway, here we go. By the end of the weekend we will have unloaded all our things from the U-Haul storage unit into our new apartment. The one glaringly obvious absence will be Ellison, whose bed I worry about seeing in the sad pile of our stuff. Somehow I keep thinking that when we pull all of our belongings out of that ten by ten steel cage, she will be there, too. This and many more scars from this last year and a half of our lives will come with us into this brave new start.

We will all spend the next few weeks adjusting as Dan starts his new job and we get ready for him to start school; new sleep patterns will need to be achieved, new routines, a new home. As a family, we will start over and learn who we are together, just the four of us, again. At my mother’s, on Friday night’s, we’ve made pizza. That celebration of week’s end is something we will take with us, honoring the fun we had together making and eating beautiful pizzas fresh from the oven. The other night Dan told my mother she’d need to drive down to Portland on Friday nights to join us. I hope she take shim up on it.

Love, Caitlin, Dan, M. and Hopper.

July 23, 2009

Dearest and Closest,

Tonight, I’m alone—well, sort of alone--the baby is sleeping and Hopper is lying at my feet. Dan has made his weekly pilgrimage to Portland to teach his photography class at Maine College of Art—three hours there and three hours back. I haven’t been alone, really, in a long time. It’s weird to finally be quiet. We’ve been living in other people’s spaces so much and been spending so much time all pressed like sardines in the car or on a bed together, that being alone, being quiet for a moment, almost feels weird. But this week, we’ve been staying at my father and Gail’s place while they spend some days teaching on Martha’s Vineyard in a summer kids’ program. We’re spreading out and playing house. We started a notebook that has all of the things we want for our dream house in the future—it’s going to happen, right? —like a big bathroom with plenty of space on the floor to have a party or roll around if you’re a baby and a special side table/counter next to the sink with a railing for a changing table. And skylights, plenty of skylights.

Anyway, tonight, I made myself a big bowl of pasta with fresh summer herbs from the garden—tarragon, rosemary, basil and dill—some olive oil and Parmesan and ate it all with a big glass of red wine. Earlier I pilfered the first four Sungold tomatoes, just ripened, and ate them while standing in the garden. That was a mean thing to do; my father might have liked to have had them when he gets home on Saturday. But I couldn’t resist.

Last night Dan, Hopper, M. and I took a walk along a beach not far from here that bordered the most gorgeous land of rolling fields and groomed woods of birches and spruce and maple with a dream house (for sale for the paltry sum of 2.8 million) sitting up on a knoll looking out over the water to Castine. We found a crop of fireweed, which, in my family, we’ve always called my birthday flower because it blooms in late July or early August. I gathered an armful of it, still sagging with bees, and brought it home. There’s a theme here—hedonistic I suppose—of taking what’s there and making it mine. Maybe this is what happens when you don’t have much to call your own, you start grabbing willy nilly.

M. started solid food a little over a week ago—bananas, then prunes, then avocado (he thought those were disgusting), then sweet potato and, tomorrow we’ll start with some pears. He wasn’t so into it, sitting on Dan’s lap while I made the sound of a bee buzzing into his mouth, until my surrogate grandparents, Meme and PopPop, bought him a high chair and now he feels so grown up in the chair and thinks it’s so much fun to be perched at the table with his own little tray, he’s game for anything. Well, almost anything, as long as it doesn’t include avocado.

On Sunday M. had his first day the beach and dunked his delicate little toes into the Atlantic with the mountains of Acadia in the distance. Dan and I had our first swims this side of Paradise since we’ve been home.

Many firsts.

We’re pulling, slowly, our lives together. We found an apartment we think we’ll take in Portland. Dan is getting closer to a job—we think---and is piecing together work from various areas, which keeps him shuttling to Portland, then home, here, Down East and then back again. Sometimes we all go with him and sometimes we stay here. I was thinking about this the other day: the last time I spent a full summer up here in REAL Maine I was eighteen and savoring every moment of home before I left for a year in Paris. I remember being hyper aware of how beautiful the place I came from was. It still is.

If we recover--WHEN we recover--from all that we’ve been through, I wonder what our lives will look like. I hope they look like Dan going to grad school, a few satisfying projects for me, some money coming in from various jobs that don’t exhaust us and a place to live that we don’t need to move from for a while. This time of living out of bags and bouncing from my mother’s to Portland to my father’s to all over the place—never touching down for more than a few nights, trying to get the baby and Hopper to relax in a new bed that last week was familiar and today is all new again, has been a challenge and, honestly, spiritually tested me. I feel frayed at my heart’s core. When I say that, I really mean it because I’ve been thinking about an MRI I had of my heart years ago that showed weird stringy pieces hanging in my ventricles. There was no danger from them I was told; I just have a “stringy heart.” Now, more than ever, it’s like I can actually feel those strings. Going through a time like we’ve been through has confronted every fiber of my being and asked me to be bigger at times than I’m really capable of. Sometimes I’ve just been a bitch, or wanted to be a bitch but couldn’t which is worse than just being a bitch. And sometimes I’ve surprised myself. But the eventual cost to my expanding and contracting heart has been a worry that I may have been asked to go beyond my spiritual abilities. I hope this isn’t the case.

At night, I stand in the doorframe and watch my son sleep in a bed that feels, yet again, new to him. His trusting body is curled like a kitten, the back of his neck fleshy and soft where the hair meets his skin in a fuzzy line, and his legs pile on top of each other like little matches. “What makes you trust me?” I want to wake him up and ask. And yet I know the answer: He has no choice. He must. This is what he is designed to do. And the deep weight of that makes my stringy heart open and close, flutter, open and close, open.

Love, Caitlin, Dan, M. and Hopper.

June 21, Father’s Day 2009

Dearest and Closest,

Today the relentless rain that has been creating enormous puddles on the lawn, the driveway, on the roads—everywhere—and making the stream Dan cleared outside my mother’s house babble like a brook, stopped for a brief moment to grace Father’s Day with a shard of sun, and then began again, misty, cool, clarifying. Friday night the rain cascaded out of the sky with such conviction it almost scared me as I lay in bed in the dark, our son between us, our dog dreaming a high pitched doggy dream, the window creaking against the wind as it was pelted with rain. Maybe it was because I’d been reading about the Pioneers before I went to bed and, although exhausted, I couldn’t sleep because my brain was teeming with the stories of women, many of whom were leaving behind ordered lives in the East--lives that included town houses and pear trees, lovely parlors and some, even, had maids--to hitch their dreams to a wagon filled with all the belongings a team of horses could pull until they reached their destinations way out on the wide open prairie, the wind whipping through the grasses, the sky unendingly huge overhead and the only thing to make a home with was the dug out earth and sod. What you never read about in the Little House in the Prairie books is the rain coming through the roof of the Ingall’s sod house in Plum Creek, making everything so wet and muddy it was almost unlivable. The other night, reading about the effort it took to clean up the mud all over everything—one woman put her children to bed under the table leaves so they wouldn’t get wet—and then the snakes that would fall through the sod roof with the rain, I was just overwhelmed by the courage it must have taken to get up every morning to keep house and make a home when the whole word feels like it’s pressing against you, from the earth to the sky.

In a much more mild way, we also have been fighting the rain. My mother’s roof began leaking into the two small rooms at the back of her house where we’re sleeping. So we’ve got a Stoneyfield Farm yogurt container hanging by some strings from one of the rafters and a bucket standing at attention for the drip drip drop of rain making its way into our little nest.

In a weird twist for the positive, however, the humid wet rain is helping M. who developed a case of Croup late in the week which was so bad that Friday night we were awake all night, holding him upright so he could sleep and breathe. By Saturday he was better, and today he’s feeling more like himself with some coughing fits and raspy breathing at times, but basically laughing and playing and nursing and sleeping well. I will never forget the half light in our room Friday night, Dan sitting propped up on a pile of pillows, our son lying exhausted against his chest, his sweet face so totally trusting, so desirous of rest.

Dan is the most devoted father I can imagine. He loves M. with a ferocity that is awe inspiring. He always has time for M., patience for everything he needs, love and tenderness. It’s not that I didn’t know how loyal Dan was to Hopper and Ellison and me before. I did. But with his son, there is a protective quality that I challenge anyone to counter. It was befitting after such a tender night of sitting up with M. that we celebrated father’s day, because I truly felt Dan was heroic holding M. hour after hour while he slept. In the morning we had blueberry pancakes with bacon at my father and Gail’s. My mother gave Dan some tools and I gave him some pickles and sauerkraut from the farm up the road. And then we made hot dogs and pic-nic beans and coleslaw and my mother made yellow cake with strawberries and blueberries on top. It was a day of feasting. And even though it rained—poured—all day, it felt light, somehow, and full of love.

We got the financial packet from Mass Art and are trying to figure out what miracle we’d need to come up with the money to live on while he goes to school. He got loans which will cover the entire tuition, which delays the pain of the cost of school, but of course, does not eradicate it. I don’t understand why Obama hasn’t taken up this initiative to forgive all student debt so to stimulate the economy—doesn’t he realize that the young people who owe money would love to go out and buy things with that money they’d be saving Anyway, for us, finding a way to make this work it seems hard. Dan really wants to go. And I want this for him and for our future, too. Anyway, stranger things have happened. You don’t just get into one of the top grad programs in the country and not try to figure it out. I tried twice to get into a couple of the top acting programs—Yale, Harvard, NYU, etc-- and didn’t even get wait listed. So, I know what it is to want this and I appreciate what an honor it is to get it.

In the meantime, Dan’s gone around to every bar/restaurant in Portland, gone to some around here, by my mother’s house on the coast two and half hours from Portland, and applied for a slew of jobs. All the restaurants have told him that they’re getting too many applications to even sort through or that they need to see how the summer pans out economically. Everyone’s tight. Everyone needs the tourist industry to save them this summer.

And so. Our lives turn on the axis of our son, without whom we would be emotionally destitute, which would be worse than any kind of financial disaster. He is truly the glue that keeps us together—and I mean than in every way: our marriage, our selves, our senses of self, our ability to laugh, our sensitivity to the world.

Having M., knowing him has made everything else in my life get moved to number two—and that’s freed me in a way from the career pressure I’ve always carried around, the frantic feeling of never achieving at the level I want, the exhaustive desire to wring work hours out of my body I’m too tired to put in. These days I know I won’t fulfill my lists. I know I won’t get to everything. I know I need to love it to do it and that organizes me in a way.

Soon, M. will begin solid food—in a few weeks he’ll have his first banana mashed with breast milk. Then maybe some cereal, some pear, some apple, etc. We’ll try a little of one thing every so often and gradually add in more. I’m excited in some ways to see what his little mouth does with food, but I also feel sad inside that the days of just breastfeeding are coming to their inevitable close. I’ll miss the time together. Also, what’s strange, is that I’ve never been as calm as when I’m nursing M. It’s like I go blank and I can find a meditative peace that I’ve never been able to achieve anywhere. And believe me I’ve tried—yoga, meditation classes, spiritual retreats. So, when he makes the sure move from my breast to the whole world of taste, it will be bittersweet. I love food so I can’t wait to share it with him, taste it with him—popcorn and hot chocolate on a snowy afternoon, a perfect crisp Macintosh apple, homemade bread with butter, blueberry pancakes, a ball-park hot dog. But I will miss his warm little body curled up against me, his hand restlessly hitting against his side as he calms himself down, the sweet little mammalian sounds he makes as he nurses which always make me picture a female pig with her piglets or a dog with her puppies, the protective spoon my own body makes around his.

Didn’t someone say the way we miss our lives is to live them? Something like that, I think. Anyway, this is a bittersweet time—in high relief, we feel it all. Love and fear, anxiety and frustration, instability and stability—everything is happening at once.

Love, Caitlin, Dan, Hopper and M.