Right before Ian and I got married, Ian had a co-worker/friend who would often relate tales of his highly imaginative son, who apparently had a whole secret underground fantasy life as a superhero. The friend (whose name eludes me, if I ever knew it at all) confessed to Ian that the depth and scope of the fantasy life worried him somewhat, but Ian and I both enjoyed stories of the son (whose name also eludes me, although I remember that his superhero alternate identity was "The Bat"), and we both expressed the hope that our own future children would be equally imaginative and interesting.
Ladies and gentlemen, enter Max, stage left, and his "next life".
Max has been talking about his next life for awhile now. I don't remember exactly when it began, but the first specific thing I can remember was Max's assertion, shortly before Thanksgiving, that his "next grandfather" was building a spaceship for him and his cousin.
Weird, thought Ian and I, and then we forgot about it. Then, one afternoon at preschool, Max was crying and saying that he wanted his mommy, and when I reminded him, "but you
have your mommy. I'm right here!", Max tearfully corrected, "No, I want my
next mommy!" Since then, Max's "next life" stories have grown to include a next house, which has an upstairs, blue and white walls, and seems to be located in a grove of palm trees near the Taco Bell we occasionally pass on the freeway. In this fabled dwelling, there seems to be an alternate for every person in Max's family. There is a next mama, a next dad, a next baby sister, etc. Our next selves seem, from Max's portrayals, to be very similar to our current selves, but with critical flaws and annoying habits corrected and eliminated. Max's next mommy, for instance, changes his diaper very rarely, and never cuts his nails. Max's next sister plays with him on demand and does not show any interest in his private property. Max's next cousin seems identical to Joey in every way except proximity -- Next Joey lives upstairs in Max's next house, presumably ready and waiting to be played with whenever Max is feeling social. In addition to these more or less familiar characters, colorful visitors show up from time to time and keep it all fresh and new -- Donald Pink, Baby Worms Who Have No Pockets, Santa, etc. We asked the universe for a child with an active imagination, and the universe delivered in spades. I could not be more delighted with him if I had chosen every single one of his characteristics off of a list and designed him by hand.
Maggie, as of yesterday, is now 20 months old. This is notable in that she is now more than halfway to being a two-year old, which I am pretending is not true, and in that she is now the age that Max was when she was born. Looking at Maggie as she currently exists, I cannot imagine having a newborn and a twenty-month old and surviving the experience, but we did, because here we all are, more or less intact. To celebrate Maggie's month-hood, we got her some hair ties and gave her her first ever hairdo. (One of my never-to-be-violated rules of parenthood is that no one gets any kind of hair accessory until they have the hair to necessitate it, and it is one of the few that I have stood by. Everyone has to draw some kind of line in some kind of sand sometime.) It made her look like such a big girl that I got a little mushy and nostalgic, and started to think that maybe, someday, sort of soonish, another baby wouldn't be too... and then, today, Maggie has been so freaking crabby and clingy and cantankerous and she screamed and threw things and snotted all the way through a brief but purgatorial grocery store trip, and now I am of the mind that there is enough going on for the time being. In fact, I have gone the opposite direction, and instead of adding to our current family unit, I am considering farming the already existing offspring out to whatever circus is lucky enough to pass through our neck of the woods first. Okay, not really. We all know I'm a sucker for beponytailed little mamas who rub snot on me and throw their baby dolls at me while screaming in my ear in public. The circus should be sad, though, because Maggie is very strong and very charming and sort of bizarrely flexible, and I think her talents would be useful in a number of acrobatic/elephant wrangling/carny-style rube-fooling ways.
Maggie (who I incorrectly thought was napping) to Max (who I correctly thought was napping, at least until the moment our scene opens): Hey! Hey! Mac. What are you doooing?
I definitely do not think that this blog is the right place to discuss politics or religion or much of anything other than how cute our kids are, and I am not going to do so now, except to say the following: the world changed this morning, and Max and Maggie are young enough that this new world will be the only one they ever remember or know. And I am so very, very, glad.
Max to Maggie: zzzaa twee dam bada trees.
Thank you for everything that you do, give, make, and bring to and for our family. We miss you and hope your day is delightful.
Max (entering the bathroom from the vicinity of the living room) to Maggie (sitting on the bathroom floor, unravelling toilet paper while Mama is in the shower): Maggie! Hey Maggie!
For awhile now, I have been saying that it will soon be time to wean Maggie, and for awhile now I have been coming up with all sorts of inventive and compelling reasons why I can't do it right this second. Or this one. Or this one, either. Part of the problem is that Maggie does not at all feel that it is time to wean, and I thought that it would be easier when she was a tiny bit older and I could explain it all to her a little bit, but it is actually harder because she is so freakishly verbal that she is explaining things to me, instead. ("Sit here, Mama. I want milk! Milk, Mama? Yeah, yeah!") Part of the problem is that she is still waking up quite often at night, and as much as I know that it's a bad habit, it is easier to just nurse her back to sleep than it is to negotiate with her highly opinionated little self at 4 in the morning. Part of it is that I have no prior experience, which I know seems weird because Maggie is not, after all, the first child I have weaned, but weaning Max was a completely different experience because he was not an exclusive nurser, because he was a more enthusiastic solid food eater, and because I got pregnant with Maggie when Max was 11 months old and he more or less weaned himself when my milk dried up. With no pressure of an impending new baby, it is much harder to cut off the relationship. I think mostly, though, it is hard because I have loved it so much, and treasured the closeness of that bond, and because, now that Maggie can walk, talk, solve complex mathematical equations, and more or less rule the world, breastfeeding is the last tenuous strand connecting this bold amazon of a toddler with babyhood, and I am not ready for her not to be a baby. Do you suppose there is some sort of solution that allows me to keep Maggie a soft cuddly baby forever and ever, and yet also allows me to sleep through the night once in awhile?
