When I started writing a weekly column, I promised my sons they could early-read every word about them. I rained down assurance that we would mold and shape and squish any words they didn’t like into something they found more acceptable, less embarrassing, more tolerable.
Often, I’d read a sentence out loud and before I’d even arrived at the end, they were repeating “No. No. No. No,” over and over. Once they said it so many times and so loudly that I thought the dog was hiding under my chair with one of their iPods in her mouth. “No, what?” I asked, seriously flummoxed. “No, you can’t say that,” answered one. “No way,” said the other. So we’d edit.
Each week, I called them to my office until, finally, they began to slump and grow fidgety as I read and then say, “Oh, that’s fine,” when I wasn’t even done.
They’d moved into “big whoop” territory regarding my job.
When I pointed this out to them, they agreed they were over it and we could stop the editing sessions.
They know I will write about them from time to time, but pretend I won’t. Either way, they don’t track it anymore (see “big-whoop” above), which is why this column will catch my oldest by surprise.
It’s his birthday. This column is for him, and for anyone who loves a daughter or a son or another person who’s connected to you so deeply you don’t remember what your life was before they lived.
From the start he was a tough little guy, frenetic with jolty agitation. He wriggled, and startled, and tried to clench up into a knot. He gasped and sucked air hard only to get enough breath to scream again. He blustered and kicked. Only the sound of water would soothe him.
Sometimes we camped out on the floor in front of the dishwasher, and I ran it empty just for the sound. Sometimes I made a nest of towels in the corner of the shower and set him there like a bird. We stayed until the hot water was gone and he’d finally calmed. You do what works; I was a conservationist’s nightmare.
We’re not supposed to talk all gushy about our children; it’s annoying, or braggy, or just plain boring. When we do it anyway, we can feel our selves going off some deep end; we can see the eyes of the poor listener glaze over. We’re vaguely aware we aren’t articulating the core of the story. It’s because we’re trying to speak of love. There is nothing harder.
It’s a kind of love that’s heavy, and blunt, and so big you realize the smallness of everything that came before.
Instead of telling tales about this boy, I will ask him to picture this:
I’m a small girl walking across concrete so hot if I freeze flatfooted long enough blisters would rise over the dull white pads of my feet. I walk on the outer edges, then my heels, finally, as I get to the pool’s edge, I use my toes and balance just long enough to bend my knees, raise my arms in the air, and heave myself off and out over the water.
I power through air so dry it feels like sand and powder and dust. And then I touch the water.
In a zoom of almost carbonation, my fingers cut through it first, then zip-fast it’s covering my scalp. My ears hear something close to deep drums before the sudden silence of moving even closer to the pool’s bottom. My legs and feet are in, the slash I dove through closes above my head, and submersion is total. I push with my hands off the white plaster, twirl like a fish toward the deeper end of the pool, and hang there, suspended.
What I feel next is the slow separation from the 90-plus-degree air outside. And then the complete silence of weight and blue water all around. I turn my head, wave my arm, circle my feet.
It is like this with loving. All around me is you, as if you’ve always been here, at home with me. There is nowhere else in the world to be but here.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
