A few days before her wedding, my sister, an art major, made a pair of life-sized papier mâché figures for her senior exhibition thesis, using another sister, Angela, as her model. By the time my children and I arrived for the wedding festivities, the figures had served their purpose and were to be found lurking about my parents' house--one torso and one standing figure--sitting atop the washer as I breezed in from the garage, for instance, or leaning against the wall behind a chair in the family room. Seen through the periphery of the eye, even when I knew what they were, it felt as though there were a family member in the room. There was invariably a sense of disappointment when I turned to look and there was no one there. And then there were the times when I would speak a few words to them before realizing.
Our entire visit was a play on our perceptions. The night before we left to fly home to The Hague, Steve and I stood close together in the dark of the cabin, pressing foreheads and cheeks together in a rare moment alone, our sleeping children on the other side of the door we were about to enter. Steve whispered, "It has been a strange visit, but I'm glad that we came."
I knew exactly what he meant. There had been a generational shift, somehow, one that had been gradually evolving for years but had never seemed absolute until this visit. We had become the adults, no longer the children. With our own family now complete--most likely the last of the grandchildren on Steve's side, though definitely not my own--we now felt keenly the passage of time and all that it entails. We could no longer pretend we were kids just starting out, just starting a family. It's now our children's turn to make childhood memories, and ours to help them.
We had visited the hospital that day to see Steve's dad post-surgery. The surgery was a good thing and by no means his first, but seeing his father in a hospital bed after having done so many rounds in hospitals with him as the brilliant surgeon was emotional for my husband, so rarely an emotional man. His hero was mortal after all. The night before, Steve had given his father a beautiful priesthood blessing, telling him that throughout his life he has been a healer by profession, and now it is his turn to be the one healed. Less profoundly, my face was still puffy from enough dental work to convince me that I was no longer an adolescent.
We had been alone at the cabin, really for the first time without Steve's parents at least partially in residence, and that, too, was a strange sensation. We kept looking around us as though expecting to see them going about their previously usual business. We felt their absence much more than we had expected to, but worse than that was the sense of future absence. It was the realization of how much we will miss the relationships that we have always been blessed to take for granted, even if separation is only temporary.
We had been alone at the cabin, really for the first time without Steve's parents at least partially in residence, and that, too, was a strange sensation. We kept looking around us as though expecting to see them going about their previously usual business. We felt their absence much more than we had expected to, but worse than that was the sense of future absence. It was the realization of how much we will miss the relationships that we have always been blessed to take for granted, even if separation is only temporary.
Looking at my beautiful baby sister, Danielle, standing outside the temple in which I was married ten years ago, wearing the dress in which I was married (with her own characteristic addition of tulip sleeves), a cocktail of images past and present swam before my eyes. My entire life I have collected notebooks and photographs, haunted by the notion that if I cannot remember the people and events of my own life it will be as though they never happened. Experiences, even profound ones, disappear so quickly into the deep, gone forever, it seems. And then comes a day--a wedding, a funeral, or something less obvious, a specific place or scent--and memories float back up to the surface, making me laugh or love or cry all over again. They were there all the time. On this day, I saw glinting grey almond-shaped eyes and strawberry bobbed hair, a two-year-old who was hilarious but hated to be laughed at. She would circle, moving closer and closer, a disingenuous smile on her adorable little face, until she pounced, teeth and claws out, protesting her audience's approbation. I saw my thirteen-year-old self, all untested potential and insecurity, cuddling with that little sister, the calico and lace coverlet of my daybed wrapped around us. To me she was a living doll. My mother said that with my sister she thought she had finally had a baby who slept through the night, until she discovered that it was I who had been getting up with her, sneaking in to hold her at the first cry. One of my neighborhood friends had a sister the same age, and she and I would take the babies out with us so often that we soon had a reputation as teenage mothers. It is no wonder that I now call my sister by my daughter's name, and Violette by my sister's.
Watching her with her new husband, scenes from my early marriage also returned to me, having lost nothing of their force in the ten years' lapse: Random comments, an early morning outside of a b&b in Edinburgh, tempestuous fights in our tiny kitchen on Second Avenue and Seventy-Third Street, the guitar string he gave me for Valentine's Day while we were dating. Things had mellowed significantly by our third anniversary, but I could feel those early moments still. Comforting to know that these memories and lessons are retained in their perfect form, somewhere in the mind and in the soul. With perspective, I hope, and without bitterness.
As I write, we are slowly, slowly beginning to emerge from six weeks of JET. LAG. Okay, so maybe only two of the weeks were technically jet lag, but we arrived home to find sunset significantly later, and having it as bright as midday at bedtime has done nothing for our melatonin levels. And to top it off, on our first night back TTO discovered that he could get out of his crib, so there have been bunk beds and a shared room to adjust to. We haven't been this sleep-deprived since TTO's first year, something that, having now moved on from the baby thing, we thought we would never have to relive. I keep telling myself that it resolved itself then and it can this time, but we are starting to lose hope that we will sleep a full night before the shortened days of winter come along again to rescue us. We are not ourselves at the moment.
p.s. As I was typing that, Townsend ran into the room and spit a mouthful of water all over me and laughed. He was not wearing a diaper. His father is now escorting him out to the garden. It is really the only option, since we cannot keep clothing on him and our furniture and rugs are not safe with him around. Luckily, this is Europe, so all the neighbors who are out on their terraces enjoying this lovely Sunday will simply applaud our healthy nudist approach to parenting. Snapshot of our life as we now find it. Oh, and we are thinking of getting a dog.
