8 month birthday update.

Today we went to the library for the first time. You were standing stiff-legged (with my help) to play with a toy with a moveable yellow plastic train track circle in its center. To make it spin, you had to pull a blue lever, but it also unleashed this awful grinding motor noise that made your eyes bug and your stomach stiffen and your arms fly outwards. This didn’t deter you from your fascination, however – and as Grandpa Bolin would say (he often says that this is his favorite word) – you were Un De Turd.

Okay, I swear. This is the last day I don’t do your brushing or compression or syringe tastes. This time I promise to do them every day (as long as I’m not completely incapacitated with some mother bug flu beam). You need as much preventative care as you can get, so we don’t have to learn new and intrusive techniques later. I promise from this point on to show more perseverance – you deserve it, and although you may not enjoy it, you’ll benefit from it later. Just wait and see.

Nine days left with your as-it-was-born beautiful soft belly. I wonder how you’ll broadcast your scars. One little girl I heard tell of calls her g-tube scar her moon. Another little boy with a port scar shows it proudly to other kids. I’ll make sure to get you a megaphone when the time comes.

You stared at our shadows today, on the porch in the rocking chair, and on the grass. My shadow waved to you. If it would have been a picture someone would have picked it up and brought it closer to you, but you had to be content looking from my lap.

And stats: 28 ounces fortified. 5 retches. 1 large spit-up. Many smiles. 1 hour PT (straightening to mid-thoracic spine by reaching, rolling from back to side to front, reaching airplane in air supported under chest and hips, trunk control on ball). And 4-10 space cadet sessions (1-5 seconds apiece). 1 2 hour nap. 1 30 minute nap. Fell asleep for the night after holding a basket up to your face to look through the slats at the light (or chew on it, rather) during an outdated video about the Brain as The Enlightened Machine (can’t say I blame you).

I Dreamt I Was A Plane

The news gets under my skin. Sometimes I have to ignore it for years to prevent debilitating depression (redundant, yes, I know) and nightmares.

Nightmare, 1:30 a.m. Wednesday morning: For an uncomfortably prolongued moment my mind becomes awash in a buzzing mass of noisy Nothing (like the sensation of standing under a helicopter no sense just a spike of intensity uncomfortable and scary to bear, crescendoing in and decrescendoing out) as if I’m entering Cho Seung-Hui’s persona then exiting [but during the moment I am consciously not entering Hui’s but ?’s persona, as he called himself, and I am completely aware that no sense will ever be made of the massacre, leaving nothing but the terrific (archaic usage) questions, and although the media and the FBI investigators will try to extract some logic, and the lawmakers will make addendums and new referendums in gun control to “prevent” any similar experience – I (in that terrible moment) know that all their efforts are truly futile, because at bottom, Seung-Hui is empty, nothing, in hell, stuck in a pit, and that his demons are simply unanswered questions and the failed attempt to escape from that empty pull that desired the answers – a lost self, no identity, no reason, no limits, and most weighty – he had no substance]. The draw into this is completely unpreventable - as strong as an MRI to a piece of steel – and completely unwanted. This happens at least twice in succession and I remember now that the sound and overall feel is more like jolting electrical menace and electrical surge than helicopter. It is a terrifying feeling and I feel immersed in what feels like him crying out to share his hell with others. I am helpless to escape from the pull and must wait until it passes.

A(n imaginary) Virginia Tech student’s voice says Usually I feel there is a blessing in something. Here we were blessed with nothing.

Again the crescendo in but this time like my jaws are being clamped shut by my own muscles more tightly than I can bear with fear that my teeth will shatter and a general tightening over my whole body as if my muscles are growing terribly spastic and horrifically uncontrollable. I fear I’m having a seizure. During this the fear hits that I am unable to move and I want desperately to be able to stand and walk. I wake myself slightly, so I think, but really I’m just moving up a layer in consciousness to where I am able to stand and walk, and I know I’m upstairs at my parents’ home, and I want to go wake my mother and tell her I’m seizing as if I was a child who was very ill. Then I go back to the previous layer, unable to move as if my muscles are a vice grip from which I can’t escape, then back to a slight release and wanting to tell my mother. This happens at least three times until I finally wake for real and am frightened because my door is open into a black hallway and of the now unfamiliar light coming from Finn’s yellow paper star. I fear crazy things that I don’t feel safe writing down. I also fear that F. can feel my bad dream before shaking the feeling, getting up and going downstairs for a drink of water. I believed for a moment that some of the victims must have felt that helpless pull, that inability to move, that draw into a substanceless, purposeless end masterminded by a nobody in want of answers – another voice arises: This was the work of man, not of God.

I found that there was nothing more to say that would not spill unwilling and unwatchdogged out of my fingers, so I quit writing. I then found that I was not producing anything, and that my fingernails typed out words on my own arm, on tabletops, on newsprint, feeling unfilfilled and generally unhappy at my lack of concern for their well being. So, if they have something to say, I have decided to let them say it regardless of its benefit or irrelevance to man and motherkind. Today I believe they want to talk about _______________ (it is at this point that I relinquish control to see what they have to say and they fill in the blank with) plans for the future. I suppose this comes from Monk’s visit during which he didn’t visit but you (the thing that calls herself I) thought about several times him saying things like his plans to build the solar home or his silkscreen press or his skateboards or his tshirts that he’s selling to Norwegian ebay-ers. So, your plans for the future include writing a sermon. You feel, though, that you have a naïve at best understanding of God, one that oft lapses into blasphemy when you try to write about h(excuse me) – Him. See? That thought you just had – blasphemous (Him just a man word anyhow what care he if I capitalize it or not what show of relevance does that really give a capital letter if things such as DuPont or Exxon or even silly Tampax feel themselves important enough to capitalize). But you’ve recently learned that there is no locus of the self only a jarbled jumble of synaptic gaps and firing neurotransmitters collected into a beautifully complex junkheap called BRAIN and that there is there a seat of spirituality that can be excited by the proper experimental scientist located in the temporal lobe and how gorgeous a world we live in where we aren’t just an I but a complex series of Goldberg devices one domino knocking down the other and continuously travelling paths and (really you’ve got to learn to use periods you’re not pregnant are you and other bad jokes) so Fine. Here. Are you happy? Punctuation central. Fingers, you’re really uncoordinated this evening. Oh, it’s not our fault. Oh, it’s nobody’s. So simplified, the self-reflective study of English where any text is open to interpretation and the main lesson seems to be ANYTHING GOES if YOU READ INTO IT WELL ENOUGH and MAKE CONNECTIONS and NOTICE THEMES AND ECHOES but IF YOU CAN BACK IT UP, YOU’VE GOT A PAPER but it must be as yet un

Oh, I’ve lost interest in that train. On to something else. Oh parietal lobe. Oh temporal, my favorite. Oh hippocampus (seat of long-term memory), that doesn’t form until 3 years old and explains why we don’t remember being Baby. Let me in on your secrets. Prove to me the order of the universe and a grand design behind the chaos. Show me how you fire in succession and how we can increase your happiness and productivity. Let me peek into that thalamus (the operator), that amygdala (self-preservation/fear), those unconscious urges erupting from your mysterious limbic system that looks something quite like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

Meanwhile my son sleeps arms outward, dreaming he’s a biplane or a giant tree, and my conscious self now notices that, once again, wrapping yourself around a theme is a difficult and tedious task that requires great restraint and great effort from the frontal lobe.