child’s play
Photo by me
Billy is better than me at many things, including being playful. He makes up random, minimalist games, almost daily, for William and himself.
For instance, there is “Frankenstein,” which consists of pulling William up to a standing position, and saying “he lives!”, as if in shock and horror. And “Hospital”, where Billy solemnly informs the baby-patient that “we have to amputate the belly.” Then offers his finger for William to bite down on while tickling his middle. And there’s “Baby Torpedo” where Billy holds William like a batting ram, and (gently) butts his head into random things, and makes explosion sounds.
William can be such a surly boy, staring unflaggingly at admiring strangers. So I love to watch him wait expectantly for his dad to swoop in, scoop him up, and whisk him across the room. William sees Billy passing and giggles, throws his hands up, strings syllables to “dadada.”
Still, when William is tired, or hungry, or just up from his nap–his hair curly and wild–then it’s me he wants. Me, his “mamama”, who is good at being steady and sturdy and calm.
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Filed under family matters, motherhood, photographs | Comments (5)down for the day
Will with Grandpa Johnson
floor play
Will and Grandma Johnson
Photos by Michael Johnson
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Filed under photographs | Comments (3)bff with john grisham?
Writers, you know how it goes: you send off your polished-up, double spaced prose to some literary magazine, tucked in that manila envelope, remembering to enclose the SASE that they always request. Then you wait weeks or months until that same slender envelope finds it way home, foreign-looking for its travels. Inside there is an anonymous form letter. “Sorry, your story wasn’t right for our publication,” it reads.
This weekend I tore open one of these envelopes. It was from The Hook, a local weekly paper, concerning their annual fiction contest. This year’s judge is novelist-celibrity John Grisham, known for his sparkling baby blues and law-centric thrillers turn blockbusters.
Every year I submit to this contest, and every year I eventually read the winning pieces in the paper. So when I opened my SASE, I expected to see, “we’re sorry” or maybe find my five dollar entry fee refunded for some contest rule I’d inadvertently broken. Instead I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was among the twelve finalists.
My entry was a story from my middle school series: a tale of a thirteen year old girl, cocky and fragile, crushed and alienation by her first crush. My protagonist has bad bangs,a flat chest, and the desire to make the world a better place through extreme makeovers. Like her, I can’t help but daydream a little. Maybe after Mr. Grisham reads my story, he’ll fall in luvvv with it, and he’ll pick me. Maybe John and I will start texting each other all the time and become BFF!!
Like her, I can’t help but ask if you’ll cross you fingers for me.
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Filed under writing | Comments (3)our brutal hearts
The monster of age before youth
computer drawing by me
Will and I loving on each other
Photo by Billy
In the beautiful novel I just finished, the protagonist speaks of luxuriating in the last days of childhood, under his mother’s yellow skirt. For him, at a tragically young age, war rendered the adults in his life helpless, or brutal, or both. I have been thinking about this in terms of our baby boy William.
Although we often feel like servants, Billy guesses that we must seem like demigods to William. At eight months old, he marvels at objects, textures, sounds, and above all us: his parents. To him, we are hotter than Bradgelina, funnier than Sarah Silverman, wiser than Thich Nhat Han. We rock harder than Kiss on its comeback tour, and sound more soulful than Billie Holiday, blissed out on smack.
Sometimes we talk about the thinness of this illusion. Certainly, someday soon William will discover our shortcomings, our frailty, our brutal hearts. But in the meantime, there is something gorgeous and surreal about this moment; this brief time when we can provide simple things– morsels of ripe fruit, jangling keys, soothing coos–to the amazement and delight of our boy. And all the while, his eyes say foolishly, I want to be just like you.
So Billy and I build layers onto this fragile perfection, buffer it to shiny, and guard against fracture; luxuriating here together in this warm safe moment as long as we can.
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Filed under drawings, motherhood, photographs, reading | Comments (4)will’s world
William in his room
Photo by Billy
At eight months old, William is flat out smitten with anything geeky. He loves remotes and I-pods and cellphones that beep, vibrate, light up. But hands down, his favorite object in our house is our laptop. His eyes brighten whenever I crack it open; he paws madly at the keys, finding functions I’ve never seen before, and can’t quickly undo .
Mostly I encourage this burgeoning crush on technology. After all, my boy will have to navigate these tools, and more, in this computer age. In his lifetime, the configuration of work and play, private and public life, will change dramatically. Media and communications will continue to converge in unprecedented ways. Information will grow even more varied, democratic, accessible, apocryphal, and unmanageable.
How will I show William how to manage? How will I manage at all? I’m not exactly a Luddite, but I grew up playing Frogger, and more often, flashlight tag outside with other kids. It seems a cruel trick, played on modern parents, that our children will grow up in a world increasingly unrecognizable from that of our upbringing. I fear that something great will be lost in the translation, as Will’s world speeds, ever more quickly into the unknown.
Maybe my sweet boy will help to decode it for me.
Here’s an interesting link I found right after I wrote this post.
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Filed under motherhood, photographs, the world we live in | Comment (1)