THROUGH THE CRACKS
Daily debacles & the poet's faithful salvage
“No ideas but in things” – William Carlos Williams
“There is another world, and it’s this one” – Charles Bernstein
“Excuse me, ma’am, but is she going in the water?” a stranger asked me.
I was mid-wipe on the other baby, soiled diaper still open on the bench, child hoisted by his ankles in my left hand. His usually dependable sister had decided THIS was the moment to move quickly for the first time in her life, cover the two hundred yards to the lakeshore (perfectly outside of my eyeline via a series of ancient sycamores), and disappear over the ridge of wave-shoved shale.
I yelled while I tried to extricate myself from the paraphernalia of preparedness. I waved a poopy wipe in the air. Her brother looked placid, as if to say “now what?”
I snatched him up naked and ran with him on my hip (which made him laugh—as so many moments with toddlers, this one just became more and more absurd). A yelling mother and a naked, belly-laughing brother crested the rocks and driftwood to see… Sister arranged neatly in an “M”-shaped seat on wet stones, waves licking her right foot. A complaint drifted up from her easily breathing mouth, trailing into my ears as though she’d been speaking it for a while and I’d only just turned the volume up enough to hear. “…Something in SHOE,” she continued.
I delivered a heated version of my gravest speech on hand-holding and NEVER going near water without Mama. Both children received it as a passing breeze. Sister looked up and calmly repeated her concern about the foreign object in her shoe, as though she was sorry, but not surprised, that I hadn’t listened the first time. Brother took off naked down the shoreline towards some fishermen.
When you’re split between two toddlers in this way, it’s starkly clear that the only path forward is improvisation. Once they’re miraculously down for their nap (SOMEHOW wrested from lakeshore back to picnic table diaper station, still partly covered in shale gravel; re-diapered and clothed over wet, fabric-resistant, flailing bodies; coerced and clipped into the double stroller from fiercely rancorous plank positions; unloaded from the stroller in the baking sun and buckled into overheated car seats between other park patrons who have positioned their cars too close to mine to allow an adult and child body to squeeze back in together, which necessitates some serious lean-twist-reach-and-sustain action; driven around for the right amount of time to get sleepy but NOT micro-nap and ruin their real nap; unbuckled and lifted into the creaky upstairs of the house and their respective cribs one at a time, with me sprinting and dropping leaking cups of milk on the dusty stairs while the car stands, still running for AC and music, in the driveway)—after all this, a second truth emerges: that I will experience more of the available joy in my life if I can catch what falls through the cracks between plans.
In between my efforts of organization, preparation, anticipation, and structure (all of which are necessary to a point, but which I’m capable of torqueing into a form of maniacal superstition that makes the Spanish Inquisition look low key), and underneath the many stories I tell myself about who I am and what should be happening, there’s a great deal of other stuff going on, and it’s generally a lot more interesting.
For example, while I am applying brainpower to dubbing my morning a diaper-and-drowning disaster (an idea, a form of shorthand), a few more nuanced and compelling things (experiences, actualities) have happened: Sister has gained confidence, trundling to the lakeshore to have a nice sit-down while her mother and brother take too long; Brother is gaining flexibility and receptivity, this time acquiescing to the diaper change with only a few hundred yards of being chased (and, once I was finally able to swipe him up by the wrist—I’m not kidding, I have to sprint, this kid is FAST—he relaxed quickly, as if to shrug and say, “eh, fair’s fair”). These are relevant, even exciting, changes occurring in real-time within rapidly changing humans, and I easily could have overlooked them.
Beyond my immediate reactions, which mostly defer to the tyranny of expectation, there lies, perhaps, most of my life. One could even call it “reality.”
The stuff I think I know—who I am, how certain things should be done, what’s going to happen if X—become like floorboards that I busily lay out, so that I have a way to move across my day that doesn’t involve the work of treading, and feeling, rougher, fresher ground. I mean, floors are great, but have your bare feet contacted plant matter lately? “Barefoot meadow walk” is going to be the next ultimate spa treatment.
Consider a bit of dimly informed but well-meaning physics: if you chop up a block of frozen creamed corn (this essay is local and seasonal), it will melt faster in the pan, because you’ve just increased its surface area. When I let moments, experiences, tumble unbound— similarly in smaller pieces, which need not adhere to any pattern or premeditated understanding—I increase my surface area on the world. More comes through the cracks.
In one reading of the Diaper & Drowning episode, I was at best a busy mom whose attention lapsed, and at worst, a negligent parent. But both of these are broad, reductive, and reflexive concepts. If we peek underneath the floorboards to assess what falls through and accumulates down on the raw, cool dirt, we might find many invaluable things:
We might hear the quality of my son’s laughter as I galloped him towards the lakeshore, how it was thick with the proprietary excitement of a co-conspirator though he neither knew nor cared why we were running so fast.
We might be able to see the measured calm of my daughter, sitting precisely at the edge of the waves, just out of any real danger, almost as though she had known what to do.
We would certainly feel the wind crashing through the yawning windows of the car while two children nodded off to mariachi music.
We would see my son rip the window shade in two, casually, like a scientist performing a trial. Look! he seems to think, as he observes the soft fragments flapping gently in his hands, It comes apart! He turns them over to be sure.
Yes, he can confirm. Now there are more.
Reminds me of whaT happens at a farm.table at suppertime when.some.one says, "oh no.. the cows are out"
I've been reading these as soon as I see them in my inbox, and they're always just what I needed.