Category Archives: Whitman

Tilting and shifting, yet abiding

At the end of every summer, my children become wretched.  They are also lovely, and we do special things like our spontaneous outing to Crane’s Beach.  But without fail, they are difficult.  I swear it’s the universe making it more bearable to go back to school, back to fall, back to the routines and strictures [...]

I don’t want to leave

We got home from Legoland at 11 at night, so the kids’ clocks were all screwy.  I woke Whit up the next day at 10am, and he’d fallen asleep in the car that afternoon, something he hasn’t done in years.  I put him to bed early, a little surprised but very glad when he curled [...]

The first day of school 2011

On our way to school on a very gloomy rainy morning.  Had to wake both of these guys up from a sound slumber!  (not so myself: the newest incarnation of my life-long friend, insomnia, is that I wake up at 4am and can’t go back to sleep.  yesterday this found me running in the pitch [...]

5 hours

He sat like this for five and a half straight hours, I swear.   Email this post

Paradise

I stood on a bridge slung low over the lazy river at Legoland’s water park, waiting to photograph them as they floated by.  When Whit saw me, he flung his arms out and shouted, “This is paradise!”   Email this post

The summer of letting go

Letting go continues to be a theme in my life.  I think about what I wrote in December and it’s all still so true: This letting go is releasing my white knuckle grip on the way I wanted my life to be. It is EM Forester’s familiar words: “We must be willing to let go [...]

wings

I always think of their shoulder blades as wings.  Their wings, poking through their skin.  And his little back has two freckles on it now, marks marring his white, skim-milk skin, my skin.  Life beginning to make its mark on my child. The wings, though, are on my mind today.  The wings. This past winter [...]

Inexorable as the tides

summer 2007 summer 2011 Still rocking the 3T seersucker suit.  What happened to my baby? first day of Beginners, September 2009 last day of Kindergarten, June 2011 My baby is 6.5  He swims competently, though inelegantly.  He reads short words.  He loves Star Wars and Legos.  He beats up on his sister.  He makes me [...]

Welcoming what is to come

Recently, Whit, Grace and I spent the afternoon at a water park.  Whit doesn’t do water slides (note: this may change soon, as he didn’t do rollercoasters until last week, when he suddenly tried one and is now a Huge Ride Guy) so we spent a lot of time in the wave pool.  We headed [...]

I know the feeling

This is, as I’ve said before (ad nauseum, you might say), a time of year tinged with sadness for me.  The endings and goodbyes come one after another, waves lapping onto the shore of my life, eroding anything I have written in the sand.  An extra farewell this year is the fact that Matt’s parents [...]