Weddings, Spies and Folk Music
I sat down to write this evening with lots to say. I was going to write about the three weddings we’ve attended in the past four weeks and my insights into what was fantastic about two of them and what was completely, utterly, bone achingly wrong about the other, which was every-last-thing, including the fact that my Mother Instinct was stalled again when I inadvertently gave my child her first taste of the bubbly. Sam was aghast but it was an innocent, very dry, very dirty Grey Goose martini-with-three-olives induced mistake. I swear. I would NEVER intentionally put booze in my baby’s glass. I honest to God thought it was Martinelli’s so if any of you over at the Department of Homeland Security (big shout out to Michael Chertoff here) are reading, and I know you are, don’t go calling CPS on me. I mean, you’ve got some pretty serious stuff to deal with right now and should be more concerned with keeping your side of the street clean. But I’m off topic.
I sat down to write and found myself perusing pictures of Ruby from the moment we met her until right now and I’m simply beside myself at how quickly the past ten months have slipped by. It’s a good thing I’ve been too exhausted/overwhelmed/inspired/thrilled/frustrated to notice, otherwise I don’t know that I would have made it this far. It has certainly helped me to BE HERE NOW and not dwell too much on what I should worry about when Ruby is, say, eight or fourteen, because future parent tasks appear so suffocatingly ominous. This is a really big challenge for me since I’m a planner. AND a worrier. It’s what I do. It’s almost defining. So if I don’t have that, then…well…I just might sleep at night. What a concept…at any rate, it’s something I work on.
Which brings me to my point that there is no greater instance of being in the moment than when I’m rocking Ruby to sleep at night. We have our routine (bath, lube, fresh diapie, jammers and reading) which culminates in my singing to her. Incidentally, my friend Samantha heard me singing to Ruby on Thursday and commented on my “lovely voice” which makes me seriously question whether she might be tone deaf. Nevertheless, I have a couple of tunes in my Night-Night repetoire. I begin with the basics: Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and/or ABC’s, since the transition is simple; I then move into my own personal, longitudinal science experiment of Fifty Nifty United States, sung at an appropriately soft and more nuanced pace than I was taught in 5th grade; I follow that with a random Joan Baez song before the finale of Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game, which Joni herself has stated is best sung off key. And every time I sing this song, with Ruby staring directly and unblinking into my eyes, infinitely connecting us as I could never have imagined possible last June, before this magical child who I get to claim as mine closes her eyes and falls asleep in my arms, I am as present in my life as I have ever been and could go on rocking her forever.
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