Life in Chicago

The Stuff of Myths

Dear Little Bug,

We've been in Los Angeles for the last couple of days, our first mother-daughter trip. You've been a trooper so far and I've toted you all over the place already, meeting various friends and soaking up the sunshine and ocean air. I don't want to go home.

I lived here for 5 years. I moved to Los Angeles just after my 24th birthday, after having lived in Manhattan for four years. I didn't think I would ever leave New York but my father was living in Southern California, his health rapidly declining, and I wanted to be closer to him.

The first few months there were tough. The wide open boulevards and the palm trees were all in stark contrast to my old home in the East Village. I missed the grit and the immediacy of New York. But being closer to my father was why I had moved and any time I caught myself lamenting this fact I had only to look into my father's eyes to remind myself of why I had to leave New York.

Over that first year I slowly came to love Los Angeles. My first apartment was in an old building on the top of Ivar Hill, overlooking Hollywood and the Tower Records building. I used to sit out on the back steps smoking a cigarette and letting the condensation from a bottle of beer seep into the wooden railing beside me as I gazed out over the dusky landscape of LA. There was a flowering tree in the yard and its fat, waxy blossoms fell across the grass, their thick, sweet aroma permeating the air.

I worked as an editorial assistant at Vanity Fair that first year, getting up early to drive down to Wilshire Boulevard, my high heels clicking across the concrete of the parking garage as I made my way up to the office where I would spend 8 hours getting yelled at by an insatiable boss. My father was getting sicker all the while, the radiation treatments on the cancer in his hips rendering him incapable of walking.

Eventually I quit my job and instead drove down to Orange County in the mornings to care for my father. He died in August, a little over a year after I had moved there. I had moved in with him by then, had given up my Hollywood apartment and resigned myself to a life of scrubbing dentures and emptying urinals. But, as I was quick to be reminded, nothing lasts forever, and my father died not long after I had moved in with him. I was holding his hand that balmy, August evening when he took his last breaths and when he was gone I moved outside to the little patio, gazing out across the pool and the palm fronds, California suddenly a place all my own.

I moved to the beach after that, to a little apartment on the Venice canals. Ducks quacked softly at dusk and bougainvillea covered the little, white bridges lacing over the water. At night the ocean breeze blew through the screens and for the first time in a long time, I felt peaceful. Those four years have since taken on a mythical quality, my little home there and the friends I made during that time all remembered with a golden-hued glow.

That's where I was living when I met your father. Back then, when he asked me to move here to Chicago I didn't hesitate to say yes. My life, my world, California, it all seemed an irrevocable thing. And my love for your father and the life I knew we could have together, greater than anything I had then.

It hurts to come back here. I miss the air and the light, and my friends here, so much. It feels like home still and I wish it were. I wish I were at least from here, had grown up here, so that I could lay some claim to this place.  But perhaps it will simply be my adopted home, my mythical home, and a place I know I'll return to someday.

Thanks for coming here with me little bug.

Love,

Mom

Friday Morning Worries

Dear Bug,

If something were ever to happen to me, this is the letter I would most want you to read.

I think a lot about what it would be like for you to grow up without me, your mother. I suppose it has a lot to do with my having lost my own mother and the fact that I constantly fret about my own mortality. Well, actually I go back and forth between incredibly serene moments of understanding about the ebbs and flows of life and death and then extreme anxiety about having to leave this world before I'm ready. And your presence my dear, makes me feel like I'm not ready.

There are so many things I want you to know, so many things I could say. I could write you a letter every day for the rest of my life and probably not say it all. Nonetheless, there are a few choice things I would definitely want you to know if I weren't around.

I think a lot about how, if I were to die now, you wouldn't remember me. You would have no memories of our sweet, little relationship. I think about how that's true for the next three or four years. That in order for you to remember your mother I have to stay alive for several more years. I do know that even if you didn't remember me I know that I would have still had an effect on the person you are. I take comfort in the fact that all the love I've given you, all the care I've provided will always make you that much more of a secure person.

But enough of all that. Here's what I want you to know.

I love you like I've never loved anyone. I love you in a way I didn't realize was possible. I love you in this profoundly transcendent way. This way that, even if I weren't here, you would still be surrounded by my love. It's a love so big that it's never going away. Not when you're 20, not when you're 47, not when you're in your seventies and a grandmother.

I want you to know that I'm always going to proud of you. Even if I were to die today, you can be certain that when you're making your first science fair project or running your first track meet or graduating high school or college or losing a tooth or skinny a knee or taking your first step or going to your first dance or getting engaged or having a baby, that I'm proud of you. Even if it seems like I couldn't possibly be proud of you because I'm not there, I just will be and you have to accept that.

Death is such a strange thing, little bug. It happens to all of us. And it can be so sad and so scary and so unwanted. But the truth of it is that because of death, life is important. Think about it for a moment. It's true. Death gives us meaning. It gives us goals and aspirations and makes us think about just how much we love one another.

I don't know why I think about it all the time. I guess because both of my parents died so early. And because I work in hospice (really need to get a new job next year). But I do. I think about how long I have to live this life. How long I have to love you. To love your father. To be a mother, a wife, a woman, a writer. I think about places I want to see and things that I want to taste and feel. I think about having more babies and I think about you, you, you and your life and all the things I want to see you do and taste and feel.

And all those things make me certain that I just couldn't bear to go yet. And then I think, well, if I did have to go, I'm so very grateful for what I've done and felt and tasted here in my 31 years. You and your father and my mother and father have the height of it all. There's just nothing more important than the people we love.

But I digress. It's a drizzly Friday morning in October. You're 4 and a half months old. You weigh sixteen pounds (my aching back reminds me of this often). You love to suck on your big right toe and you've been squealing and laughing more than ever this past week. You don't have too much hair but you have the prettiest blue eyes and the softest rose-colored lips. You're nursing as I type this and one hand continually brushes against my shoulder, pulling at my sweater and grazing my face. Your eyelashes cast soft shadows on your cheeks and your warm little body is flush against mine.

There is no way I could love you more than I do in this moment. And it's something that will last forever.

I'm certain of it. 

Love,

Mom

Letter

Dear Veronica,

You are still asleep as I write this. In our bed, where it is warm still from my body and your father's.

Last night you awoke around 2am, as usual, and I brought you into the bed with me and nursed you until we both fell back asleep. I awoke a while later, your restless body pushing and kicking against mine and I took you back to the nursery and put you in the crib. I watched you stretch, your arms reaching high above your head, your cheek nuzzling the sheet, and I mourned the nights when you slept comfortably in my arms.

Ever since the first night you were born you've slept with me at least part of the night. That first night in the hospital, after I'd nursed you for the first time and after they cleaned you up, the nurses swaddled you and placed you in a bassinet between your father and me. I immediately fell into a deep sleep, exhausted from the labor, but awoke instantly a couple of hours later when I heard your soft little cries.

I remember how dark the room was. I could barely make out your father's sleeping figure on the pull-out couch. I called to him, unsure of whether I could even stand yet and he got up and brought you to me in the bed. I tried again to nurse you but I don't think either of us really knew what we were doing yet, little bug. So we fell asleep again, you in the crook of my arm, my life forever changed.

For the next 6 weeks you slept in my arms every night. I didn't know what else to do with you. You refused to be swaddled and if we put you down for any time at all you would begin to wail, so each night I tucked you into the crook of my arm and we slept like that, waking on and off through the dark hours. Gone were my comfortable nights of changing positions at leisure, of stretching out across the mattress, of snuggling with your father. I now had a little creature nestled up against me, your snorting and snuffling ensuring only the lightest sleep for us all.

Finally at 6 weeks you began to allow us the slightest reprieve by sleeping in your bassinet in our room for the first few hours of every night. After that you would join us in bed until morning. And then when you were 3 months old you grew too big for the bassinet! And by then I was so used to you in our room, in our bed, in our sleep, that I had to fight to keep myself from crying the first night we put you in your crib in the nursery.

And last night, as I watched you stretch out comfortably in your own little bed, I was reminded of the little person you are swiftly becoming, of how you are happy to be on your own sometimes, happy to have your own little space in the world, just for you. Albeit one with purple sheets and stuffed monkeys.

Someday soon the day will come when the only time you join us in bed is when you run in on Saturday mornings, waking us up and leaping around. And I'll love that too. But for now, I cherish the little hours you allow me to snuggle with you, your snuffles and grunts and kicks letting me know that you are you.

Love, Mom

p.s. We are going to show this video to your first boyfriend.

Letter (from Dad)

A letter from Greg:

Hey kid,

Your mother asked me two nights ago to write you a letter, so away we go.

You turned four months old yesterday. Your Mom took your weekly photo in the morning, propping you up on the futon next to that stuffed monkey that you will either one day hate or refuse to travel without, and I danced behind her in my business casual outfit, snapping my fingers and waving my arms, trying to get you to smile. You were a tough customer. I need to work on my dance moves. My finger snapping, however, is there.

While your Mom showered this morning, I quietly got back into our bed where you were lightly sleeping on your back, your body framed by three pillows, the edge of the bed sheet stuffed into your mouth, you unconsciously sucking and drooling on it. I pretended to be your mother by sticking you under my armpit, but you were too smart and called me out by opening your eyes to  squint at me. And then there we were: My doppelganger and me, both talking gibberish and snorting up invisible snot, a half-minute into a staring contest that we both knew I had no chance of winning. Tomorrow morning, I bring freshly cut onions. And a thimble of pepper.

And this is how my mornings are playing out now. A year ago, I was out the door by 7:30 on my way to the train station, off to work at job that bored me stiff. Now, I'm snuggling with my baby daughter who looks eerily just like me, under the covers and cooing while the clock reads 7:35 and later.

I'm totally a Dad.

Totally your Dad.

Totally the guy who will teach you how to drive and how to cry to get out of a speeding ticket. The guy, your Dad, who will be holding your hand across a park and then giving you bread crumbs to throw in the faces of ungrateful ducks, who will force you to wash your hands after touching strange dogs or after being held by strange people, who will fantasize about pushing you out of the way of runaway buses only to be crushed himself (ask your Mother about this, about how I day dream of survival situations), who will pay for your guitar and tennis lessons, who will melt every time you call him "Dad."

"Yes, Veronica?" I'll ask back.

"Dad, I just set the bathroom curtains on fire while trying to pierce my own lip," you'll say.

 For now, though, you are a day past being four months old and the bathroom curtains are just fine and your lips, although they leak like a sieve, are sans self-inflicted holes. And for now, I'm not being called Dad and you are not being called by your birth certificate name, Veronica, because your Mother thinks it's simply too big of a name for a baby as small as you. Rather, you are being called Bug, Party Bug, You, V, Miss V, Miss Purple-y Pants. This morning, while you were spitting up next to me in bed, I called you Mark Spitz and you smiled. So now you're Mark Spitz for a couple days.

My Grandpa Boose used to call his grandkids (he had 40 of them) birds. "Uh oh. What are these birds up to?" he'd ask from his recliner, craning to see my brothers and sister and me file through his side door. "We're not birds!" we'd yell back. And it was our little cute family thing, my father eventually calling his own kids birds. He'll probably call you a bird at some point, too, but don't get all self-righteous on him. We know you're not a bird. And we know you're not a bug. And that's about all we really know about you so far, but that doesn't mean I don't love everything I've seen up until this point, Mark Spitz.

Always,
Dad

Weekly Wednesday Photo

Veronica, 16 weeks.

(Click here to view all the weekly photos.)

Dear Veronica,

You are 4 months old today. That seems so old! Like a real baby or something. I'm so proud of myself and your dad for making it this far, for taking such good care of you that you were able to make it to four months. Not that I ever doubted that we would but man, it's been challenging on more than one occasion.

I still look back on those first few weeks, on the shock and awe I felt by how much my life had changed. It hadn't gotten good yet back then and I wish I'd known just how good it would get. Because, dear little bug, it's so good now.

I was thinking last night, as I lay awake in bed at 2am for no apparent reason, that if something were to happen to me and these four months were all we had, then I would always want you to know just how fiercely I've loved you. Even if you went the whole rest of your life and only had these four months with me I would want you to know that I've already loved your enough for a lifetime, that no matter where you go or who you are, I have enough love for you in this moment right now to last through anything. Know that.

Love,

Mom

One Year Ago (Letter)

One year ago today I found out I was pregnant. I wrote the below letter to the Veronica, even though I didn't know that she was Veronica yet. 

This letter was the first of many, many that I wrote to her throughout my pregnancy. I crafted them all into a book as I did so, telling her stories about my life in between the letters. I'll give it to her one day.

September 27, 2008

Dear Baby,

Your father and I found out last night that I'm pregnant with you. It's strange to think that by the time you read this we will have long been your parents. I'm writing this book to tell you about a few things. Things that I want you to know about where you come from, about who your parents are and where they come from, things about life and death…but most especially about life.

It's a Sunday afternoon in late September and I'm thirty years old. I’m sitting at my desk in the house I live in with your father in Chicago. This is the only place we've ever lived together and it hasn’t been for very long. We’ve only been married for 2 months. The sky outside is overcast and it's cooler today than it has been all summer. The lights are on in the living room, even though it’s midday, and they cast a warm glow throughout the room. Robert Johnson plays his old blues on the stereo and I'm alone in the house, save for the cats, all three of them listing about underneath various tables and chairs.

I feel queasy and dulled. I've been feeling this way for a few days and I suspected that it might be true, that I might be pregnant, before I took the test last night. You're no accident, but we didn't expect that I’d get pregnant so quickly either. We had dinner last night with your father's siblings, all of them my in-laws now, but I'm still getting used to calling them that. We drove up to Wilmette, north of the city, to have dinner with them and I didn't feel good then either. I was quiet when we all went to the park in the afternoon together and later too, at the dinner table. Even though I wasn’t feeling well I'm still getting used to being part of a family again and sometimes I have trouble finding my place. Sometimes it’s easier to just be quiet.

I asked your father to stop at a drugstore on the way home so that I could buy a pregnancy test. The queasiness wasn't going away and my period hadn't showed either. Your father didn't believe me when I told him I thought I might be pregnant. He playfully accused me of wishful thinking and laughed as I took the little plastic stick into the bathroom when we got home. At first I thought it was negative, one pink line bleeding into view straight away but, before I could take a breath or even gauge an inkling of how I might feel, a second pink line crossed the first and I bent over the ledge of the sink, peering into that little plastic window, knowing you were here.

Your father still isn’t quite convinced, although a funny smile has perched itself on his lips. He says he’ll believe it when the doctor confirms, even though I told him that doctors use the same tests that you can buy at the drugstore. He’s just trying to buy a few more days of our reality, I think. Men can be like that sometimes. Stubborn and slow to come around to the truth.

Now it's Sunday and I'm here in the house writing this to you and trying to wrap my head around the idea that I'm pregnant. I thought about this book, about writing these letters to you, a while ago, back when the first idea of you ever occurred to me. I've always been a writer. It's the only way I've ever truly been able to see the world, to take it in and make sense of it. Words and letters, sentences, and the careful formation of paragraphs -- those things are more familiar to me than the smell of the ocean.

I just stared out the window for a beat, watching a car drive down the street, my knuckles pressed to my lips as a chill ran over me. The leaves are just beginning to fall, little golden pools of them collecting in drifts on the still-green grass. Winter is coming soon and I'm glad you'll be here with me for it. Last winter was lonely and cold, the days too short, too dark, the world a dead place.

I want to tell you about myself. About where I come from and about the things I think about. I wish that I could tell you all the secrets of the world. All the things that a person should know in order to live the perfect life. But the truth is that there are no secrets. And the best thing I can tell you is that life will never quite be what you expect it to be. There will be times when you will wish so hard for it to stop, if only just for a moment, but it never will. Life will continue on like a swiftly flowing river, carrying you along, even when you think you are swimming against it.

You’ll grow up in a different world than I did, and in a different kind of family. But I want you to know about where you come from. I want you to know about all the things that led to your father and I finding each other. We have quite a story, he and I, but it’s not without all that came before it.

Love,

Me

How I Met Your Father (Letter)

Dear Bug,

It's no secret that your Dad and I met online. I was living in LA and he was here in Chicago. We were both writers for a literary website called The Nervous Breakdown. We struck up a correspondence that eventually led to us meeting, which quickly led to us rearranging our lives to create a life together. Within two years we were married and you were here.

Sometimes I just tell people that we met through friends. It's easier. You might do the same, although it might be a fun story for you to tell instead. I always enjoyed telling how my parents met on a blind date when my mother was living in New York and my father in Atlanta, how they got married just three months later.

Sometimes I can't believe that your father and I met at all.

Sometimes I look at you and I think about how you exist because of that website, because Greg responded to a Craig's List ad looking for writers when he was living in Fargo, North Dakota, because a stranger in LA asked me to write for the site, because of a million other reasons.

I can't believe how much our relationship has changed since you were born. Things are definitely not the way they used to be between us. We're so focused on you that neither of us can really remember what it feels like to just be us, Claire and Greg. I know we'll find our way back, that we are finding our way, if not back, to somewhere even better.

A year ago we were returning from a trip to Costa Rica. We were a newly married couple. We were giddy in love and being a little careless. And now you're here and our days revolve around discussing the balance in our joint checking account, pondering what to do about all the spiders in the garage, taking turns holding you while one of us does laundry and the other cooks dinner, and falling more in love with you every single day.

Sometimes I look at your father and I can't believe that I haven't always known him, haven't always loved him, that we were once strangers going about our lives, our paths winding closer and closer to each other. Sometimes I feel sad that we didn't have more time together as newlyweds. But then I realize that would mean that you wouldn't be here and I can't imagine that at all.

Love,

Mom

--

Greg and I are reading in The Nervous Breakdown's first Chicago event tonight. If you're in Chicago come out and see us!

Letter

Dear Veronica,

We spent our first night alone together, your father gone to Ohio for his grandmother's funeral. It was seeming impossible at the time but now I wish we'd gone with him. For as hard and strange as it can be for me at times, I really love being part of his family. And now that you are here, I feel so even more.

It's Tuesday morning early and we're listening to The Beatles. It's mid-September and the day promises to be warm. This time last year I was wondering if I might be pregnant with you. Back then I tried to imagine my life with a baby and I could not. Now I cannot imagine my life without you.

I really couldn't imagine what it would be like to be a mother. It was never something I dreamed of, never something I saw myself as. I simply plowed ahead with it all, trusting that my love for your father would create something pure and beautiful, trusting that I would simply be forced to evolve, that whatever new existence came from our actions would be exactly what was meant to be.

And here you are. Three and a half months old tomorrow. From the time I met your father to the time I moved to Chicago to pursue a life with him was only three months, and they went by much slower than these last with you. With you the days rush by in a blur of milky scents and strong, fevered strength. I try to remember what it was like to be pregnant with you and I cannot. I remember that you shifted and kicked and pushed around but I don't remember what it felt like. I only know you now, outside of my body, your skin warm and flush to mine in the mornings as we open our eyes to the lazily spinning ceiling fan, the fern wrinkling in the breeze from the window.

Last night we sat on the deck together, overlooking the river, and I thought about what it used to mean to be alone. The texture and landscape of those nights so different than one spent alone with you. There is no alone now and I cannot imagine there will ever be. I hope there will never be.

Love,

Mom

Letter

Dear Bug,

You turned three months old this week and I can hardly believe it. I've finally gone over that ledge just recently into the phase of my life in which I just cannot imagine it without you. You have firmly burrowed your way into my heart and there will be no reversing that.

I feel like we've had a little love affair these last few weeks, smiling and cooing at each other, going to the park to lay in the grass and read books together, sleeping in on weekday mornings, all snuggled up against each other. As I type this your little face is nuzzled against my chest and your downy little head looks so soft in the morning sunlight.

I remember thinking, in my last month of pregnancy, that I was going to fall in love this summer, that according to everything my friends have ever told me about having a baby, I was on the verge of experiencing some of the most intense love I've ever felt. And it's true. My love for you is already so strong and so deep and so obsessive. And I know that it's just going to continue to expand and grow.

Back then, back in May when I was huge with you in my belly, when I didn't know what I was getting myself into and was terrified of actually meeting you and not able to imagine at all who you would be or what our relationship would be like, I kept reminding myself of this falling in love thing, even if I didn't quite believe it. And now here it is. I'm in love.

It hasn't been an easy falling in love. Not like it was with your father. This love between you and me has been messy and complicated and it's meant that I've had to change and let go of a million things about myself that I thought were true. It's also meant that I've discovered a million things about myself and the world that I never would have known otherwise. 

This week you're really into your hands. You've been holding onto anything that shows up near them, mostly burp rags, which you clutch endearingly to your chest and try, with all your might, to stuff into your mouth. You're also making the funniest squeals and little starts of laughter and your eyes couldn't be bluer and your eye lashes couldn't be longer or lovelier and your father and I couldn't be prouder or happier to wake up every morning to your wide-open smiles.

Love,

Mom

Letter

Dear Veronica,

You are now 11 weeks old. This rumored fourth trimester is coming to a close and it truly does seem as if you are finally emerging from incubation. These days you are full of smiles and funny babbling noises and all you want to do is look at the world around you.

Your father and I regularly walk you around the house and the deck, admiring the way you turn your head this way and that so you don't miss a thing. You love to look at the trees hanging over the deck and you particularly love your father's paintings hanging in the dining room.

As I write this we're on the bed together, you on your playmat looking skeptically at a weird moose creature with purple feet hanging above your head and we're listening to The Monkees on Pandora. We'll leave in half an hour or so to go to the movies. Today I'm taking you to see District 9. Last week we saw The Time Traveler's Wife and the week before that Julie and Julia.

Your dad and I have been having a lot more fun with you lately. Your smiles are infectious and sometimes you talk a blue streak, babbling on and on to us. We presume you're telling us all about how much you're going to torture us when you're a teenager. Those big, blue eyes of yours already signify serious trouble, we're sure.

Your favorite thing in the whole world these days is the ceiling fan in our bedroom. You just can't get enough of it. You're smiling at it as we speak, your warm little body flush against my leg, your lower lip sticking out defiantly as you turn your head this way and that, really taking it in. Who knew a ceiling fan could be such an endless source of entertainment?

Lately you've been fussy in the evenings and I think you need to start going to bed a little earlier. On certain nights you've been driving your father and I mad by refusing to be held by anyone but me. I'm incredibly flattered that you find me so soothing but I can't even begin to tell you how much your father loves you and how much he wants to be there for you. I know there's going to come a day soon when you run past me, arms outstretched for your dad and I'll hang back, reminiscent of the above nights when you only wanted me.

Bug, I can't even begin to tell you how glad I am that you're here. I was a little skeptical at first. I have to admit that on more than once occasion I was sure that we'd ruined our lives by bringing you home from the hospital. But don't fret -- I can positively say for certain now that I can't imagine my life without you.
I absolutely love you more than I thought possible.

I wish this letter were longer with lots more details about all the funny things you do these days, but you're making little grunting noises and kicking your legs fiercely against the bedspread in protest of your current position. So let's get out of here and go see your first alien movie!

Love,

Mom