I see my light come shining

In the morning, I have to get on a plane. To prepare, I am following my husband around, saying things like, "You will have to be both a mother and a father to them," and "Listen carefully. I am about to give you the Netflix password." All of these statements are, of course, prefaced with the unspoken, "Should anything happen to me...".

This week, several of my favorite bloggers synchronistically gave voice to this condition; what Erma Bombeck described as the state of living with your heart walking around outside your body after you become a parent. When I had my first child I remember reeling between two waves that kept coming at me from opposite shores. One was the astonishment and joy of realizing how much I could love somebody. The other was the shock and terror of understanding how much I now had to lose. It has been my experience that deep truths always come in paradox.

The saving grace of life with kids is the grind of it. You can't just stand there paralyzed with love and fear; there are diapers to change, report cards to sign. So most of the time, the sea inside is relatively nagivable , if not exactly placid. Think small whitecaps. But then I have to go away somewhere for a weekend, or a car pulls out in front of me, or one of the boys decides its funny to hide under the clothing racks at Target for a second, and the surge takes me under.

Here is another pronouncement born of hard-won experience (and if you are over the age of thirty, you will have figured this out by now): it is in those moments that life is most vivid. Your heart moves into your throat, and you see differently, almost psychedelically. The winter sun comes streaming in to make a halo around the baby, and you think, never let me forget this. You see.

Okay, listen carefully. Should anything happen to me, you get the name of a certain literary agent in New York from my husband. You call her up with the news, hysterically wailing, "Are you happy now??? She never would have gotten on that plane if she had been having lunch with you!"

Haha. Actually, she was a very nice agent, so we will let her off the hook. Curiously, most of them (all two I have contacted so far) seem to be very kind and accommodating. Does that mean I am an exceptionally hopeless case? Maybe the kind words are secret agent code for, "your writing is so abysmal, I am moved to pity. Now go away."

I will, of course, post the last NaBloPoMo post tomorrow. Before I get on the plane.

p.s. Don't forget to put your name in the hat for a cd of my Christmas iMix by commenting on the the Christmas iMix post!