Emily Rosenbaum

I can only post this because I know she doesn’t read my blog.  Not that she’s likely reading any blogs right now.

She has two children.

She has friends and a husband and readers and to all of you who have loved her and still do, I send my thoughts.  She is brilliant, eloquent, and strong.

She has two children.  My heart breaks when I think of my mother dying, knowing she was leaving us with my father who couldn’t take care of us.  To be a parent and know what that love feels like and then to be dying and to know that you are leaving that love behind.

I’m not making sense here and I’m sorry.  Please, even if (like me), you haven’t known Susan well, go over and send her some love.  Please do.

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This parenting gig is so bone-crushingly exhausting and eyeball-achingly consuming that each day I have to exert the suction of my optimism against being pulled down into the mire of despair.

That said, if I could keep my kids from growing up, freeze them in this stage when we are all to one another, preserve for eternity the feeling Lilah gets every night sometime between 11:42 and 2:00 that tells her she must at this very moment get into bed with me – if I could stop it all right here and keep their littleness forever – I’d do it in a New York minute.

That she will grow up someday to have breasts and sex appeal is impossible to think when she’s telling me, “My bum-bums are stinky.”  That he will someday have a girlfriend or boyfriend back in his room on an afternoon when no one is home is also beyond possibility.  That they will someday buy one another booze or cheat on math tests or get suspended from school for setting off a stink bomb in the guidance counselor’s office is a vision from another plane of existence. That they will ever grow away from these boys who hate each other, even that’s hard to imagine.

I wish none of it away.  Not one day.  Not even the days when I am sobbing at 10:35 at night into a glass of wine, not wanting to drop Zach off at school again tomorrow because I don’t know what will happen to him when he’s there.  Not even the days when Benjamin has punched and kicked me.  Not even the afternoons when Lilah has peed on the floor and in her shoes four different times and the house smells like the stairwell to a minor New York City subway station.

I wish none of it away, no matter how hard it is, because parenting – every moment of it – is deeper and stronger and more meaningful than anything I’ve ever done.  My boys, they seek intensity, and they come by that honestly.

And then tonight, while J’s plane is homeward bound somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, I lie with Lilah in the darkness, her curls splayed across my line of vision.  I wonder for a moment what would happen if I just let myself go to sleep there.  Would the boys come and find me, or would they continue whatever it is they’re doing together in Zach’s room until their father gets home, never noticing the passage of time?  But, I’m the responsible one, and exhaustion doesn’t trump adulthood.  I get up, kiss her goodnight, come back when she calls for another kiss, and bring her the pony she absolutely must have to go to sleep.

I go off to find exactly why the boys have been so quiet together for half an hour.  I open the door to Zachary’s room, a tickle of bemused concern on my mouth.  There they are together, sitting on the bed, an open copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends between them.  For half an hour, they have made peace, and Zach has been reading to his little brother.

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