They say it keeps getting better and so far, that's been eminently true. I keep trying to grasp at the wisps of this experience, so ethereal it slips through my fingers like grains of sand, solid and yet liquid; mutable and transmutable. It is an impossible game trying to define and concretize parenthood. It is simply something that lives and breathes...and then suddenly your child is 19 months or 19 years or about to turn...37?
I sometimes look at my neighbours, this wonderful Italian couple who have been so generous already with time and advice and food from their garden. They have a tall jar of cookies in their kitchen from which Leo (or 'Nono') liberally steals and gives to a delighted Nahanni. I think of them in that house next door, which he built and in which they have lived for 28 years, and I see the nature of what I am up against. I think of them living there, their day-to-day life of raising three daughters. Of Christmases and first school days and summer holidays. Of the reaping and sowing of that garden which has begun to feed us too. Their children are grown, and now 5 grandchildren, the eldest at 14, roam those hallways, eat the cookies from that tall jar. Surely they must wonder, especially as we cart our small child to and fro before their eyes - surely they too wonder where the time goes. I think of Enriquez, wrapped up thickly in crisp white cotton as they bundled him into an immaculate red car in the bouncing super-8 video of his homecoming and surely they wonder where it all went too?
Where do we store all those invisible years? Are our mental attics big and accessible enough to really do justice to all the wonder of these times? I have already forgotten so much it astounds me. I saw a woman the other day on some errand, her belly round and full with late pregnancy and she was poking into the swell below her navel and I stared full-faced at her in a sort of panic when I realized that I had somehow completely forgotten how it felt to be pregnant. I know that I made those very same motions not long ago - but where had that sense memory gone? How could such a monumental feeling steal so quickly away?
I asked my mother when she was here about Trevor. I have two small framed photos on a low-slung Indian table that Nahanni loves to cart around. She holds them up to me: "Grandfather - Pipi! Trevor! Uncle!'. She held them up to me and I looked into the face of my long-departed brother, bangs cut askew, a dab of food on his cheek, gorgeous unknowing eyes beneath those impossible lashes and a fear gripped me; a fear of forgetting. I looked at my mother and asked if she could still remember him, remember how he was as a little boy. I wanted to weep with the fear that she was sure to say no, that most of it had faded with time, but she never missed a beat before replying 'Of course!'. I felt a great sense of relief at that, that you could even still remember the life of a child who lived over thirty years ago for a mere 1,504 days (how could that be so!?). I saw in her eyes the truth of it, and though it pains me enormously right now as I absorb the weight of that number I just figured out, it effuses me too with hope that I will not lose these memories of my daughter's young life. That as she grows and prospers and moves inevitably away from me I will not lose but gain. I have to believe that the experience of raising a child is not reductive, like stone carving, but additive, like sculpture - building over a thin wire frame, adding clay over time to create a sculpture of her life. All the layers will be there, but time will have smoothed some of them over, covered them up thickly here, thinly there. Yes, she will be like that for me - a work of art that we have all built together.
Nahanni is, by my count, now 590 days old. I have been with her every morning and every night of those 590 days and somewhere in the recesses of my hippocampus lie every minute of every one of those 590 days. It is a thin layer of clay, still delicate and fresh and every day she adds a little here, a little there. She recites the better part of the alphabet (already!?) and another thin piece of wire is covered over. She counts to five, or triumphantly adds 'cuatro!' to my uno-dos-tres and yet another wispy layer is added.
It is tempting to think of that new clay being stripped off of you as a parent, so great are the responsibilities and energies of raising a child, especially in this modern age. But of course, part of the magic of this experience is that there is no finite amount of this mythical clay. Like the expansion and exponential multiplication of love that comes with the birth of each child, so it is with this supply. I should not fear losing the ties to these days because even if they are buried under thick layers someday, there is no doubt that they are there - they exist irrefutably. Perhaps I will have to turn back to these pages, these words to find the link to them, but in my heart I know that they will never be truly lost. Like Trevor, like Pepe; the layers live back in time, but there is no subtraction. I think back to Brockmeier's wonderful, evocative book 'A Brief History of the Dead' which posits a post-mortem netherworld where you remain 'alive' only so long as someone on earth still remembers you and it seems the ultimate affirmation of that of which I speak. So Trevor remains alive in the 'hamburger story' or the watch-on-the-ankle story, Pepe in the myriad odd tales the are still told of his quirky life. And so too, Nahanni's young life and my experience of motherhood and pregnancy and all of it will remain alive and promise to feed me well into the future.
May there be a millenium of clay.
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