fantastic four!

Dear Jack--

Someday, when you can't wait to greet your daddy at the door for a game of touch rugby, I want to remember this time in your life--this period that is bittersweet in its brevity--in which the sun (or is it son?) rises and sets between you and me. Your little face is the first one I really see each morning and mine is often the last you see at night. That said, you hate to go to bed. You get this from me. Your daddy does not mind bedtime one single bit and on the rare occasion that he does fall asleep on the couch before he takes himself off to his room, it takes only a word or two and he shuffles away. You are not like this. You require more than a gentle nudge. You require lulling and singing and bouncing and shushing and still sometimes we find that the best thing is to let you tire yourself out (just a little) with tears before bedtime. Believe me, I understand the urge to fight it. I have been rebelling against bedtime for decades now. I have also been tired for about 25 years. So, I try to be patient with you because I know that even when you can't keep your eyes open, it's nice to feel like you are still in the thick of things, that you won't miss out on anything good, that you are safely within arm's reach of the action. For this reason, as we jiggle and rock and lay down beside you, I often find myself whispering in your ear that you are indeed safe and snug.

After all, we haven't given up swaddling you--even though you are probably getting too long and strong for this. It's just that your startle reflex still seems strong and it causes your little arms to fly over your head and wake you up at the sound of a loud laugh. And baby, there's plenty to laugh about in this house!

Actually, while you have a smile for just about everyone, you have been slow to laugh. We've gotten a couple of "heh heh"s out of you, but only after dancing around and shaking our heads like fools. Basically, you go in big for physical humor at the moment. On the other hand, you aren't really a fan of other people's laughter. Several times this month, a group of people has started to laugh around you and it makes you jump and cry. I am reminded of how it felt to say something in a crowd of grown-ups and have them burst out laughing when I meant to be serious. It can be hard to be a kid.

You're beginning to hold your own though--and some of my stuff along with it! You reached for some papers on my desk the other day and it was one more reminder of why your days at the office are numbered. (even though we really do love having you there. you have won the heart of even the most hardened baby-digusted. it's that cheeky little smile.) I'm excited that you'll spend the summer with Daddy and I'm excited to be able to type out a four line email in under an hour again, but I will miss you all day long. I just know it.

Anyway, you reach for things and grab them and bring them to your mouth. Often, you look like a puppy with a chew toy as you shake your head and a sad stuffed bunny writhes between your gums. (As an aside, I fear you may be an early teether.) You are ferocious in your determination to get what you want or to get going.

When things get really tough and you just won't settle, we take a walk outside. You watch for birds and cats and squirrels and suddenly you are quiet and contemplative. This makes me think that Daddy's prediction about you (before you were even born) could well come true. You may just be an eco warrior based in Australia. Well, if you are an eco warrior in Australia, little bunny, I will be peace that brings you home again. At least for Christmas!

love you always and always,
mommy

work to live. live to work.

Dear Jack,

One of the first lies of your life was that you and I would have four months at home together. In my defense, I really did plan to have a nice long (by American standards) maternity leave with time to work on your routine, to cuddle and sing, to marvel at and celebrate you.

So much for that, kid.

Your Bibi works her bottom off now and did just the same when I was your age. Your Nanny finally "retired" sometime after she turned seventy and then started a new career just a few years later. Her mother went door to door with homemade candies when there was no work to be had in this country. What can I say? We Ruth girls are a working people. We do it to take care of our own mental health. We do it to take care of our families. Sometimes we do it because we have no choice.

On February 10, I returned to work--two months to the day after I left work for the last time, the night before you were born. Two days before, you and I went to San Antonio to meet with my boss and my boss's boss. They asked if I could be a part in planning a party to launch the Imagine No Malaria campaign to the rest of the United Methodist Church. I had already spent most of the fall working on this campaign in Austin. So had you for that matter. And it is a cause that I find so compelling, a dream for the whole world that might be made true before you start kindergarten, that I said I was in on one condition.

You. I came back to work with the understanding that you had to come with me.

We've spent nearly a month in the new routine of getting up and dressed, of getting outside our own home and outside our selves. This isn't easy. It requires you to have more patience than the average infant. It requires me to have more...I'm not sure. More of me. To be present to my work. To be present to you. All in the same space and time and without putting my head on my desk and crying.

We're lucky--you and I. We have the support of the office--even when we do cry. You are greeted by many smiling faces. My coworkers and all who visit the office want a little bit of Jack time and you oblige, like the benevolent little prince (of our hearts) that you are. You smile and coo and eat lots and require at least two wardrobe changes a day.

And most days I think I am going to survive. In fact, most days I think that we both will.

love you always and always,
mommy

two-riffic months

Dear Jack,
Two months! Man, it flies by. Sometimes, I think I can literally see you growing in my arms. Now that I know you've gained four inches in the last six weeks, I know I was right.

We're starting to settle into a routine as a family. Actually, we were getting the hang of things and then I went back to work and you and Daddy and I are still working on finding equilibrium. The balance between work and play has always been hard for both of us, but I promise that we're working on it. (See what I mean: working on play. ack!) I wish I could say that once we get the hang of this, it will be steady-as-you-go easy and that we'll know what we're doing and we'll never forget your diaper bag or show up late to a meeting or come home with work to be finished. Our life together (before you and with you) has been an awesome adventure so far, but adventures aren't adventures without twists and turns and I think we'll all have our fair share of those. Besides, no boy who grows as fast as you do can be that adverse to change!

On that note, you are wearing size 1 diapers. You outgrew the newborn diapers at about five and a half weeks. It probably would have been sooner if you hadn't lost a little bit of weight in your first week--and if your mother had noticed that the newborn size was starting to look like a speedo on you.

This month you are sleeping for longer periods. You go to bed between seven and eight every night and then you get up again at about 11 and then again at 4 or 5. You still take at least three naps each day, but when you are awake, you are more alert every day. Whether eating or sleeping, you go from zero to sixty in four seconds. That is, you are perfectly content and then, well, you aren't. You are learning how to fall asleep on your own. You aren't learning that YOU MUST TRY TO BURP AT THE END OF EVERY MEAL. Instead, you scream as soon as the milk is taken away and only once you've let out at least one whopper of a burp and been given a pacifier do you really calm down. We go through this between seven and eight times a day.

This month, you and I went to San Antonio four times. What a star traveller you are!! I hope this means you'll eventually be up for a trans-Atlantic flight. Let me just say that while there are many, many disadvantages to having half of your family in another country (like missing them all the time) there are some perks when they live in Europe and not, oh I don't know, Kentucky. Just remember that it takes as long to get to Kentucky in a car as it does to get to London in a plane. And there are no potty breaks in the car. Or opportunities to eat anything. Not with your Grandaddy.


You have adapted wonderfully to going to work with me. We usually stay for about six hours and you nap and eat and play. You also get loved on by all of my coworkers and any visitors who happen to stop by. You are far more popular than I am. At the end of the day, after all that attention, you are wiped out--and so is your mother. While it isn't ideal to be back to work so soon, I find it easier to make this transition when you are no more than a few feet away. I'm just not ready to give you over yet.

In the last couple of weeks, you are doing some social smiling. You are super sneaky and it is hard for me to catch it on film; actually, it is nearly impossible. Once you get a little bit better at it, I am determined to capture it as your smiles melt me. And you are a pretty laid-back little guy, so I think we may just find that you are smiling all the time soon.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a mother and I have wondered whose mother I would be. (When I was a little girl, I would pretend that I was being interviewed about my life story. I had a million fantasies about what it would be like to grow up.) Now, I know. I am Jack Stafford's mommy and I can't imagine it any other way.

Thanks for letting me begin to know you.
Love you always and always,
Mommy

welcome home again.

A baby really does change everything. This morning we were up and ready to go to church by 8:30 when only a month ago we found ourselves struggling to be ready by 11. It was the weekend afterall. But as babies don't seem to understand the concept of weekends (every day is play day!) Jack got us up and going before we could say "This Week with George Stephanopolous."

He fell asleep on the five minute ride over and continued to snore softly (although at one point i shook his foot to stop him as it seemed really loud) through the entire hour. When we were gathering our things to leave, the little boy sitting behind us said, "he is so cute. i started looking at him when you came in and i just kept looking." So sweet!

We'll brave the bigger service once the peak of flu season is behind us, but in the meantime, I so much wanted Jack to go there--to the church that has been my home for fifteen years, to the people who have been our family when our family couldn't be present.

I started thinking that the first Sunday my family was at Oak Hill, I was sitting with another John Phillip. (Luckily Pawpee didn't sleep through the service! But he did sing off key.) That was the last weekend that my family spent with my grandfather. My grandfather was an extremely friendly person and so he met many people at Oak Hill that Sunday. When he died, they sent literally hundreds of cards. They made dozens of casseroles. They even came in and emptied our refrigerator of rotten food when we didn't return from the funeral as quickly as planned. They welcomed him--they welcomed every member of my family--into their hearts as if we were old friends.

And here I am, so many years later with this John Phillip, who was also welcomed even before he was known.

I hope he always calls the holy ground of this place home.

light and lighter, part one...

Dear Jack,

Sometime in the summer, I wrote you a letter about the day you would be born. I wanted some things on the record. So many people told me that once you were here, I would barely be able to remember life without you. They are right. And they are wrong.

I do remember my fears about your safety. I remember obsessing over each of your little kicks, but I don't remember what those kicks felt like. Not exactly anyway. I remember that I loved you but I don't remember what it felt like not to know your face, your cry, your little (big) fingers wrapped around my own. Not exactly anyway.

Then you were a beautiful mystery, a boy wonder (as in wonder how we're going to do this, wonder who this boy will look like, wonder what his dreams will be).

When I think about telling you about the day you were born, I know that all the thoughts I had about it before are a part of it, a little (big) footnote.

So here it is, an echo from a time when you were real and present and at the same time still a shadow, a movement in the dark, a slow and steady train of a heartbeat.

---

Yesterday we got a call that we've been waiting for. We finally found out that we'll meet you via C-section. I told everyone that it didn't matter to me one way or another. Actually, I let people believe that it might even be my preference. Scheduled. Medicated. Quick.

When it came down to it, I cried when Daddy told me the news. (I didn't want other people--other mothers--to say how silly it was to want the pain, the uncertainty, the hours of breathing in and out, the swearing or screaming, the pleading and praying.)

All the same, lots of people have already told me how lucky I am, how much easier this is going to be, and maybe I cried because it makes me angry to be treated like this way--our way--is the way out. As if you and I are going to get a pass on this right of passage.


More than that, though, it broke my heart to think that I won't have a story to give you. After all, I love stories. I believe in their power--to change you, to inspire you, to make you fall in love. What story is more important than the one about how you came to be in the world. I so wanted you to have this: a collection of funny details, a sense of the drama, a glorious moment of resolution and revelation. I thought that you and I were being robbed of our birthright.

But tonight I realized that your story doesn't start some day in December. It began a long time ago. Some part of it started ninety years ago with another baby boy by the same name. Some part of it reverberates to the tune of old pub songs. Some part began with a question, with "where have you been?"

For my part and Daddy's, there were beers in Berlin and a sad, squeaky confession. There were tears in London and sodden, shoeless proposal. Your father and I have laughted and cried and walked down an aisle together. We danced our way to the dotted line and sometimes, we had to fight and plead and pray. We spent some days just breathing in and out to get to this place. To be here for you. To be here with you.


Baby boy, your birth isn't the beginning of your story. Far from it. The story of you is already in full swing. There are plenty of funny asides and when you are older, I'm sure we'll tell you some of them. And believe me when I tell you that there will be moments--so many moments--of glorious revelation.

I, for one, can't wait to see what happens next.

---

You are still a beautiful mystery. But you are also a wriggling Houdini of a boy, with bluish eyes and reddish hair and rosebud lips. I think you're going to be a bit of a character and I maintain that you have a story, a story that stretches way back before you were two cells together and one that I can only hope will stretch way beyond my own lifetime.

I'm going to try to hold as much of that story here for you. I promise that the next post will be that birth story that I was so worried about. As it turns out...you had your own kind of drama, your own special beginning.

Like I said, I can't wait to see what happens next.