Night Light

Today I bought my son a night light. Before that I bought him a hat. Before that I bought wifey the tools needed to make a birthday cake that looks like the Death Star.


I bought a lot of things I didn't think I would buy.
Shopping is always a good distraction.
I think I was trying to shop away death.


Death has been crossing my path lately. My grandfather is getting close to 90 and has decided he is done with this world. He stopped eating and drinking 2 weeks ago. His heart is strong. A life time of healthy eating has primed him for eternity. The doctor said with his heart he could live to be 120.
But he doesn't want to.
We went to say Good Bye.
Baby J jumped on grandfathers bed. I stroked grandfathers cheek. He lifted his crooked hand from out of his sheet and baby J grabbed his finger. I told him baby J almost had his name. It could be interpreted as if baby J was named after him. Which is neither true, nor untrue.
But I thought it would make grandfather happy to think so.

Wifey was asked by my mother to wait outside.
A lesbian wife is not welcomed in the room of a dying grandfather. She will have to sit out. I understand that the fear is she will speed up the process. The excuse was that they had never met before.
My cousins boyfriend was invited to sit with my grandfather. They had never met before either.
I said nothing about it.
My heart took note and another brick was secured in the wall that separates a lesbian family from an accepted family.

We slept in my grandparents house. I had not been there since my grandmother passed away over 15 yrs ago. All the furniture, the pictures, the smells and the way the sun broke through the window panes was the same.
Baby J played on the same rug I had played on as a baby.
Christmases, Easters, summers. Those long lost days of childhood.
As we drove out of town I missed my grandmother, my dog, and the days when life seemed simpler.

In some ways life is still simple I suppose.
My son is afraid of the dark. So I buy him a night light.
He is still not aware that there are things in life mama can't fix.
I will wrap his childhood around him like a warm, secure blanket. And in days to come, even in the valley of the shadow, he will fear no evil. He will remember deep inside of him that there is a love so vast and all consuming no darkness can creep in. There is always a Night Light.

The Strangest Hour

This past night a mother died.
She never saw her baby. Never held her, outside her womb.

I knew her in the way you know the close friend of a close friend. You see them from time to time as time goes by, and time goes by so quickly.

And then comes the day.
And the hour.
The strangest hour.
When you lay in your bed sleeping. Your baby waving his little fists in the middle of a dream. All is calm. Peaceful. And in some other part of the City, in a hospital room; a last exhale.
A heart stops.
Leaves behind a man.
A baby.
And a thousand tears.

And you can not understand.
Because she was here.
And now she is not.
She was alive.
And now she is not.

It is so incomprehensible the words go dry. All that remain is sadness.

Co-sleeping with Bruce Lee

Baby J has turned our family bed into a night time martial arts center. I awake with a small head pushing into my ribs. I awake yet again with a tiny foot kicking my forehead. But inbetween, I wake up from baby laughter, or a tiny hand pulling on my breast, wanting to nurse. Ok, sometimes that little hand is pinching my nipple, waking me up REAL fast.