Sandi Kahn Shelton

My novel misbehaves in the middle of the night. Last night it woke me up with a start at 2:14 a.m., insisting that I get up out of bed and FIND MY NOTEBOOK and a pen QUICKQUICKQUICK, which are not easy things to locate in the dark at somebody else’s house. (I have been visiting Boston for the past two days, where Ben and Amy live.)

Now it’s daytime, and I’m sitting in Panera with my laptop, and even though it’s waayy past lunchtime–already 2:45–the place is just teeming with humanity! Much of this humanity consists of people under the age of one, all of them munching on pacifiers and flirting, or occasionally flinging bottles of formula to the floor just for the pleasure of seeing perfect strangers react with surprise and then jump up to retrieve those bottles. Again and again and again. 

I have not had much sleep. With a novel waking me at 2:14, and real live adorable children coming in to see me at 6:30, there wasn’t a lot of truly good rest time in the middle.

I awoke this morning to find Charlie (a deep thinker of four years of age) sitting cross-legged next to me on my bed. “Oh, you’re awake,” he said when I opened my eyes. “I was wondering what you think about the light fixtures in here. Are they interesting?”

I looked at them. They were nice, but on the whole, as I told him, I’d rather think about them after 7 a.m.  So then I persuaded him to get under the covers with me and go back to sleep. We got exactly twenty more seconds of shut-eye, and then Josh (ten months old) woke up, and the day had officially begun. We all went upstairs (their two bedrooms and the playroom are on the third floor) where we played drum-like instruments and read stories and changed one person’s diapers and found Mickey Mouse underwear for another person, and got dressed–(”comfy clothes, no pants with snaps today!” said Charlie), and then Ben came and we all went on the Breakfast Train to the first floor, where we cooked eggs and ate pears and waffles and Cheerios. And then Ben took Charlie to preschool, and I put Josh down for a nap, which was THE most luscious time of all. Just sitting in the glider with a fat, cuddly baby drinking from a bottle with his eyes closed, is a divine experience, even when you’re tired. Maybe especially when you’re tired. Just looking upon those plump, pink arms and hearing those wonderful sucking, sighing noises he makes. The lashes on the cheek. And the way he just tucks himself right in, snuggling as close as can be. He drank and drank and drank and then, in his sleep, pushed himself away from the bottle, with milk running down his chin like a drunken sailor…and I reluctantly put him in his crib and went to take a bath.

And now I’m in Panera, and just a moment ago, I dived for my notepad to see what I’d been so driven to write in the middle of the night, since I have absolutely no memory of what was so vital, and here’s what it says, in nearly indecipherable handwriting:

“And you know what? My mother became my real mother again, just a bad year, not w/father but w/__________.

Also, in telling of past, goes on and on. Then talk about Mentor. Way he was at fault somehow. THEN we see Jeremiah. Surprise?”

This, I don’t have to tell you, is Novel Misbehavior of the highest order. The first rule I have for novels (in the middle of the night, or any time) is that they try to make some sense. And if they have to wake a person up for some all-important news flash, they need to phrase it in something approaching coherence. Something one can find the way back to, eventually.

The sun is shining on me here in my armchair here in Panera, and I see the way this could so easily go…Maybe this is the kind of message from the subconscious that will make more sense to me if I just go back to sleep for a moment or two more before I head back home to my Real Life, where there are no babies with fat arms and children who want to discuss the interestingness of the light fixtures with me, or any other deep subjects.

Yesterday when I picked up Charlie from preschool, he stared off into space in the car, clearly lost in thought.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked him.

“Well, I’m thinking about blame,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about that for a long time.”

Yeah, me too.

He may end up writing novels, himself. I just hope his novels let him sleep through the night.

I haven’t been writing much lately because, like the rest of the country apparently, I have gotten just a tiny bit addicted to politics. I am reading politics online and in the newspapers and watching politics on television and following every last “he said, she said” waaaay too much. If Obama ever gets tired and doesn’t want to deliver his well-worn speech, I am ready to jump in and deliver it for him. I think I could do it verbatim, even without the teleprompter. (”McCain can’t say I supported the war…because I didn’t. And he can’t say I gave George Bush a blank check, because I wouldn’t.  … I was born to a teenage mother. My father left when I was two, and I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents…”, etc., etc.)

Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE this speech! It plays in my head day and night. I could listen to it for ten more primaries if necessary.

Luckily I had some major distractions come to visit me this weekend. And Mike (he’s the one on the left) put my camera on a chair in the dining room and then had us all face forward (how we got babies to face forward was a minor miracle, and then he ran and jumped in the picture–and this is what we got. Amazing!

Here is just one of our runner-up pictures…before we got the main one to work.

And what is a day without a little puppy love? Jordie, who normally runs when he sees anyone under five feet tall coming toward him, was patient and submissive for this kiss. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that Miles had his nose in a vise grip.

It was a lovely Christmas, really. Besides the usual presents under the tree and stockings hung by the chimney with care, and carols playing on the stereo, we had babies taking baths, crowing at each other, sucking on washcloths, and splashing. As my friend Nancy said, “Now we know why God invented double sinks.”

We had my husband and me, sitting on the kitchen floor with the three grandchildren, laughing. That is Charlie and Josh, measuring each other, while their cousin Miles looks on with envy. He is clearly wondering who you have to know to get your own big brother around here.

And we had the dog posing as William Tell’s son, although I’m happy to report that no one shot an arrow at him.

For a while life was so chaotic here that we all seemed to be doing triage, rushing from one tumultuous situation to another. But there was plenty of food, and laughter, and music–and lots of time to cuddle children and read stories. By the time Christmas was over and we had packed everyone off to their respective homes, we were so tired we had to pretty much take to our beds. The next day I got up and mailed off all the things they had forgotten to take home with them.

Then today, Hospice called.

“Sandi? How are you doing?” the social worker said.

“Well…I’m fine,” I said. The caller ID hadn’t said anything about Hospice.

“Really?” she said. She sounded surprised, like it might not be okay to say you were fine. Not after you lost your mom to cancer just six months ago.

“It was a good Christmas,” I told her. “Of course, I miss my mother terribly, but there were babies here, and my whole family came, and there was a lot going on.”

She was silent, respectful.

I didn’t tell her about the dog with the apple on his head or the double sink, or how I played one of my mother’s favorite songs on the stereo but didn’t mention to anyone that it had been her favorite song. Or how sometimes lately I wake up at night thinking about those Christmases I had a long time ago…when my mother decorated the house with little styrofoam ornaments with toothpicks and sequins, and how she would whip up Ivory Snow detergent into what looked like snow, and have my father coat the boughs of our Christmas tree with it. Bowls and bowls of it. One year she used 24 boxes of Ivory Snow. For years the smell of Christmas was for me the lovely fragrance of laundry soap.

But when I hung up, I sat there for a long time thinking about all of that.

The best Christmases are mixed, I think. The fun of being with little children and seeing family members try to reach out toward each other…all that new bright happiness can’t help but be more lovely when it’s mixed in with the awareness of loss. And the fact that when you look around, you realize that everyone else is struggling with some form of loss as well. No one gets by untouched.

I miss my mother now almost more than I did when she first passed away. As time has gone by, I’ve replaced the memory of those last hospital days with the larger memories of when I was a child and she was the person I depended on most in the world.

It’s a wistful feeling, of course. And fleeting–just like the smell of pine needles drenched in 99 44/100% pure Ivory soap.