It’s like this: At 4:30 yesterday morning the smoke detector beeped once outside our bedroom, though there was no smoke. Brad rushed to silence it. We drifted back to sleep. It bleated again at 5:30. Insistently. Still no smoke. But it stoked the fire of the day anyway. Annie called out. I crept into her room. Snuggled next to her in her bed. She threw her arm over my neck. Tossed. Turned. Tossed again. Asked to go downstairs. Asked for cereal. Asked for “Octonauts.” Asked for a pancake. Asked to get down form her high chair. Asked to play a game.
The others wake up. It’s a busy day ahead. For the past month, every day is a busy day ahead. I wake up at 5, feeling as if I’m clinging on to some cosmic ceiling fan set to its highest speed. A breath away from being flung off.
There’s the 8:30 soccer game. Brad goes ahead with Lily. I shower, do Annie’s hair, do Jovie’s hair. Gather water bottles and toys. Pack snacks. Zip up Annie’s hoodie. Load everyone in the van. Buckle the carseat. Buckle my seatbelt. Drive. Unload the van. Walk to the field. Get out the coloring book and crayons. Cheer on the girls. Great save Camille! Nice job Myron! Good work Lily! This for an hour. Then back to the van. Back to the house.
Next, Brad is taking Lily and Jovie to the NASCAR race in Richmond. My sister and I are throwing a baby shower for my niece. Annie is tagging along. But first, I have to make the sauce for the meatballs. Load the van with all the shower things. The cooler. The drinks. The pots of mums we were giving as favors. The decorations. The diaper cake. I have to make a sandwich for Annie. Get her to use the potty again. Pack dresses for us to change into. Brad leaves with the girls.
I have a moment in the kitchen where I feel as if the ceiling might fall down on my head. There’s so much to do and I’m just the one person. But I will the panic to pass. Inertia keeps me moving. Annie won’t let me dwell.
We get back in the van. Get back on the road for the hour-plus drive. Annie asks me where we’re going. She asks me how long it will take to get there. She asks me why we are going. She asks me why we stopped at the stop sign. She asks me why I’m stopping for coffee.
I tell her it’s the only way I’ll get through the day.
We drive. She drifts to sleep. In the void of her chatter, my mind drifts.
It is Sept. 11. The sky looks like a lint trap. Gray cumulus on the horizon. Fading to stratus and pale blue above. Not at all like the cerulean sky from twenty years ago.
I remember the elevator in Heister Hall at Penn State. I remember the two girls from my dorm floor talking about a plane flying into the World Trade Center. I remember someone mentioning it again in my Creative Writing class. I remember my classmates and I didn’t really get it and that class carried on as usual. I remember I didn’t get it until I got to the giant screen at the student center. I remember the orange glow. The black smoke. The growing dread as flight numbers, departures and destinations flashed across the screen. Dialing home over and over on my blue Nokia phone and not getting through. Desperate to confirm my dad was not traveling out of Dulles that day as he often did. It wasn’t until much later in the afternoon I found out he was safe at home. The other day a student asked me about the planes. “Is it true there were no planes in the sky after it happened?” “It’s true,” I told him. I remember returning home to Virginia that weekend. The steady stream of passenger jets that had always dotted the sky missing. I remember going into Washington, D.C., too. Seeing fighter jets fly grid patterns, surveilling the skies.
On the radio in the car, a woman shares about her brother. How he loved nature. How they found his fish and wildlife badge in a tree near the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania where his plane crashed that day. How when she visited the site she yelled into the void for a sign from her brother. How next she found a perfectly shaped birds nest at her feet. How she knew it was her brother telling her, “I am here.”
As I drive, I think about how beautiful this part of Virginia is. The rolling farmland. The Shenandoah meandering through. I think about how grateful I am for it. How much I love the land. The trees. The wildflowers. The crows blowing off the trees like old leaves. I find myself wishing that loving the land were enough to heal it. I find my mind fighting off the cynicism that we are too damaged a species to heal any of it. All the awful things that have happened since that awful day. The war that reshaped my little brother. Hurricane Katrina. Sandy Hook, Orlando, Parkland, Las Vegas, and the rest. The politics. The Pandemic. The realization that the fabric we’ve quilted ourselves from is unraveling.
The thoughts tumble over each other. They’re dark because I’m burnt out. I’m tired of feeling as if I’m low-key failing in every facet of my life. Distracted as a mother as a fumble through a new job and all the things to know and do there, while anticipating the start of my next grad school class this week. Distant as a wife as my brain is consumed by all my other duties.
Facet. The cynical part laughs at the idea of this being a gem-quality time of life. I push the cynicism aside. Anyway, I have to pick up ice for the party.
I think about writing. My last stronghold of competence. There’s never time for it anymore. I try not to think about school. Just for today. Just because I know I’ll wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it later anyway. Thinking about school is a rabbit hole. The legal pad length to-do list. The training I need to finish. The IEP goals I need to learn how to write. The lesson plans I need read. The back-to-school-night presentation I need to review. All of the faking it I feel as if I’m doing.
Annie wakes up. I get the ice.
At my sister’s house I unload the car. There’s an hour and a half and so much to do. One nephew helps unload the van. Another one teases me about something or other. Tells Annie how cute she is. His girlfriend asks what she can do. Relief washes over me. I give her a job. My sister-in-law arrives. I delegate another job to her. My sister and I MacGyver a balloon arch out of cardboard and a coat hanger. The sauce for the meatball is still too runny. Guests are arriving. My mom offers to take care of it so I can change. When I come back downstairs, she presents me with the thickened sauce.
Gratitude. I’m always surrounded by women who quietly take care of business. Just seamless. We’re all in a dance. We all get a chance to lead.
Annie disappears into a bedroom with two of her cousins. Later, when I go up to take Annie on a bathroom break, the other two (ages 3 and 4) follow us and say they need a bathroom break, too. I giggle as I dutifully assist wiping three heinies from three different families. They skip back to whatever game they are playing. Later, we color with chalk on the front porch. I’m reminded how much I love being an aunt. How glad I am that my kids get to grow up with cousins.
My niece looks like a goddess. I talk to my great-nephew through the emerald fabric of her dress. Put my hand on her belly and feel him roll about a little. As if by osmosis, I remember the same sensation in my own stomach. The stretching of the skin. The otherness and the wonder that comes with holding a human inside you. My niece is going to be an excellent mother. Both tender and steady. Later, when she unwraps a fuzzy bear snowsuit, I remember a similar one her little brother wore decades ago. I was still in high school. What a wonder it is. How time stretches.
My best friend arrives. And her stomach bumps slightly, too. And I can’t wait for her motherhood. The hopefulness of it. She and my niece are both on another plane right now, I think. Both in their own middle world with the life they are baring.
The laughter of women in the next room warms me. Annie racing around with her cousins. My 11-year-old niece chatting with me about Harry Potter and school. How she helped Annie get a snack and sat with her at the table.
The food was delicious. The conversation was good. The decorations looked cute. After weeks of my sister and I fretting about this party- it happened. And it was nice. And my niece seemed happy. We pulled it off after all that.
My sister helped me load the van again. We coaxed a loopy Annie into her carseat. I got back on the road. Annie wanted to listen to “Volcano” by Jimmy Buffett over and over. She talked the entire ride home about this and that. I thought ahead to when we arrived at the house. How I’d get her inside and fix her something easy for dinner. Wash the chalk off her feet in the bath. Tuck her in. Unload the van again.
For now, I answer Annie’s endless questions. The clouds have cleared. The sky is bluer. More like it was twenty years ago. As the sun lowers, I watch planes landing at Dulles Airport. The ones circling like fireflies higher up.
I think about all the times it felt like the world was ending. All the big and small deaths of the soul. And how somehow we all kept going. On the same day I found monarch caterpillars crawling over the milkweed in the back yard, I found the remains of a monarch butterfly in the front yard.
It’s like this all the time, I realize: The days both exhausting and exhilarating. Both fierce and finite.
