Dalai Mama Blog

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

Because you're five now, here's something you can do! Watch! Watch this! You can sing low and dance high at the same time. Watch! Oh wait - your brother's getting in on the action. He's up on his tip-toes, promenading around while he groans something from The Sound of Music in an underwater kind of baritone. But no - No, Benny! - that's not what you meant. You said low and high, but you don't know why, because you meant...wait. You meant fast and slow. You're five, and you can sing a speedy, circus-y song while dancing as slow as a ballroom snail. Okay, actually you can't - by mistake you're flapping your elbows in time to the tune, like a circus chicken. So, okay. You can't sing fast and dance slow at the same time. Even though you're five.

But here's what you can do: you can wink. I know this, because when I open my eyes in the morning, I am greeted by the lit-up blue skies of early spring, and also by your ripe peach of a face, approximately one nanometer away from mine, and so scrunched with winking that it looks like the whole thing is going to turn inside out through your eye socket. You're winking! You're winking like this! Winking and also thinking hard about something. About this: When a tortoise walks? Probably it feels fast to them. You're five, and you understand relativity.

Five is no less passionate than four. You love me! Mmmm you love me so much! You are flinging your long five-year-old arms around me, wrapping your cold five-year-old hands around my neck, squeezing to warm them until I remind you about choking. Oh, right! You used to plunge your hands down my shirt, you're reminding me, you used to call it finding a warm place and you used to wedge your two- and three- and even four-year-old fingers into the place between my nursings. Like this. Which you don't do anymore. I mean, you're doing it now. But only to remind me of how you never do it anymore now that you're five and two days old. Hardly ever. Ooooh you love me! Actually, you love our whole family! Actually, you love everybody in the whole world! Well, except robbers and thieves, of course. Of course.

You don't believe in ghosts? (Which, even though you're five, you still pronounce in two syllables, like it rhymes with "hostess": ghost-ess.) But, well, you are afraid of them. Like, you know there aren't any? But sometimes when you're lying in your little bed at night without a grown-up? You hear a weensy little sound and it makes you feel worried. About the ghost-ess. I explain the word "irrational" to you - explain the way your mind might understand something perfectly well, but then your heart might feel that same thing in a different way. Like how I used to lie in my own little bed, with Uncle Rob in the top bunk right above me and Grandma and Grandpa breathing quietly asleep in the room right next door - but I could hear my own heart beating in my pillow. And I knew it was the sound of my heart beating? But still it sounded like tiny footsteps marching, maybe footsteps of tiny people who were green and climbing in the window, and it scared me.

Or - and I don't actually say this to you - the way I know you're five? I mean, my mind understands that it's been five years since the dark morning your dad and I stood under the starry-cold sky in the hospital parking lot, without you - and then emerged a few days later into sparkling heaps of fresh snow everywhere, this little pink-cheeked baby in our arms, this bundled-up beauty who was you. But my heart can't believe it. Your hands are still around my neck - gently now - and so the smell of your hair is filling my nose, my lungs, my memory. And I know it's the smell of five-year-old hair? My mind knows that? But it smells like my baby, the baby who was you one second ago, even though babies can't do any of the amazing stuff you can do, like skate on single-blade skates without holding a hand or try one tiny dot of wasabi, even though it's the spiciest thing in the whole entire world. Oh Birdy, my heart knows what it knows. Oh my baby little one.