You Can't Take It With You

Last night I was lying in bed, sucking on a melatonin tablet and waxing nostalgic about the hut.

I thought, "I will only stare at these cranberry red walls before falling asleep here fifty more times."

And I got a little panicky. Because I haven't started packing, or even contracted a mover.

And because I suspect that leaving here, we'll leave some intangible part of our fledgling family behind, never to be recreated in quite the same way again.

The hut is where we brought the newborn V-meister, ensconced in her plastic Graco cocoon, set her down in the middle of the living room rug, looked at each other and said, "Ooooooooookaaaay. Now what?" (Moments later, she started meowling, I tried unsuccessfully to nurse her, she projectile vomited, I cried on and off for a year, and our question was roundly answered.)

Two years later, I elected to do it all over again, except this time it wasn't so much a question of wondering what do to with the newborn stranger as trying to figure out a way to keep him fed, clothed, and happy with a two-year-old, potty training V-meister permanently attached to my lower extremities.

Good times!

Darkish times, too. Like in the evenings of nascent motherhood when, the sun having regretfully set, I'd find my pudgy, leaking, yoga pants clad self sitting on the stinky brown couch and trying to nurse yet again, wondering why on earth I thought I could raise a human being, convinced that I had, in fact, known happiness, but it was over now.

Still, we lived a whole chapter of our lives here that we'll never be able to revisit. And while there's no going back in time regardless of one's environs, leaving here is a molting of sorts, like losing forever a piece of what we were during that bittersweet glimmer.

Strange, when I think about how wretched I felt during the PPD days and swore then that the world was closing in on me, I also recall eating bowls of Ben and Jerry's with a baby tucked safely between the P-Dawg and me on our cheap brown Sofa Express couch, watching the Colbert Report, and laughing in spite of myself.

And while I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't want to relive that time in its entirety, neither do I want to leave it here for good.


The Newborn Meister and I


V-Meister and P-Dawg


V-Meister, Hitting the Sauce


Little J's Homecoming


J-Dog, Six Weeks