You are not in your house. You are in their house. You step over toys and jackets and broken colored pencils and Lego crumbs and spelling tests and dried up gorilla glues and yesterday’s half bagel, the cream cheese petrified, and a lacy pair of undies you were probably not meant to see. You try to find a quiet corner in the chaos. You try to disappear.
And then you try to help—empty the dishwasher, fold the clothes that are stacked in heaps everywhere, feed the dog, water the roses, the ones you pruned last time you visited, wondering if anyone noticed. The roses noticed. You go out to visit them, still there, thank heavens, undaunted by the mountain of dog chews and Ninja swords and broken bits of plastic toys that might have stifled their tender roots but didn’t.
You go back inside, in case you’re needed, which you are not so much anymore, not like a few years’ back when the little ones were still drinking out of sippy cups, dirtying their diapers with casual abandon, needing to be picked up or put down, needing to be rocked gently, and you were so good at that. Back and forth you rocked them, stroking their downy heads, whispering them into temporary fugue states. In those days you felt like an extremely competent grandmother.
Not so much now. Not so much amid the buzzing, beeping I-Pad games, the drawers-full of snacks too numerous to catalogue, the demands whose meanings you barely recognize so how can you begin to meet them. With tiny swift fingers, they download apps on to your smartphone, and in this small way, you can still satisfy their raging curiosities.
You can almost feel yourself growing useless, benignly inconvenient. Yet the kisses still come, the sweet full-on hugs that manage to reach all the way around your back and linger for a moment longer than you’d expected, a moment less than you hoped for. Theirs are honest hugs, and you take pleasure pretending that you’ve make a difference in their rapidly changing lives.
But you can’t be sure of anything anymore. The clean wipes of their buttery bottoms you were sure of. The last little suck of cereal dripping down their gleaming wet chins, you were one hundred percent sure of all that.
Now, you watch them from a nearby doorway, and you wonder Who are they? Who will they become? The one who curls up in the corner, blissfully lost in her chapter books; the one who climbs too high then spins around on one foot, daring you to catch her in mid-air; the one who studies the undersides of rocks, of spiders, asking impossible-to-answer questions; the one who puts all her allowance money in the UNICEF box. They are already off and running in their rightful directions so you leave your quiet corner, pick up the bottom half of someone’s pajamas, and look around in vain for the top half, as though finding it will secure your place inside their kaleidoscopic futures.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adina Sara is an Oakland writer whose work includes a novel, Blind Shady Bend, and two collections of essays and poetry: The Imperfect Garden and 100 Words Per Minute: Tales From Behind Law Office Doors. Her essays have appeared in The Workplace Anthology, Peregrine—Amherst Writer’s Press, Persimmon Tree, and East Bay Express. For over ten years she was the feature garden columnist for The MacArthur Metro, a Bay Area newspaper. More information is available on www.adinasara.com.