Rockabye Baby: The Remix

My little sister was born when I was a teenager. I was so excited to sing lullabies to her. However, once I began to sing the classic "Rockabye Baby," I was horrified at the words, which I'd never really noticed as a child. Since then, I've heard a lot of other people express amused horror that our favorite lullaby depicts a baby falling out of a tree. So I thought I'd share the alternate words I made up as a 15-year-old. The tune is the same, of course, although I did add a few more syllables. Sing it aloud a couple times, and I bet you'll get the gist.

Rockabye baby, in the treetop
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock
Hear the tree whisper in the soft breeze
Sunlight is falling through all the leaves
A brown birdy sings you a lullaby
Now fall asleep, out under the sky


Enjoy!

Timekeeping

Your focus is absolute.

Your sticky fingers cup each apricot, giving it a gentle turn

to find the blush of ripeness. You have not seen the thundercloud

that’s slumping overhead, grumbling with the weight of rain.

The bird calls halt into an urgent stillness. In that hush

the pears become pendulums, the flagpole a sundial,

and Time slides by between canal-banks.

I barely keep from leaping in to gather up the water to my body,

to pile it and hoard it, anything  to hold on to your babyhood,

which has left you while I wasn’t looking, swiftly as the apricots

that ripen overnight.     

Already my memory fails me.

 I know that when I’m older it will wash away

and leave me clutching only silt and this:

a photograph of you at nearly four

running through an orchard in the rain. 

28/30: What You Gave Me

The best memories involve some blindness.

There’s a reason we close our eyes to dream.

Nightfall, or in this case a matte white mist,

your finger’s point, a hush, a fog-gray fox

who felt invisible beneath our oaks.

Each night, the stories, the self-respecting epics,

nothing with the stink of grade school on it,

another last chapter, until your eyelids drooped,

slowly turning your own words to dreams

as we held in our collective breath.

Dozing in our clothes, waiting for the moon to set

so we could match the punched-out patterns

in empty tuna cans up to the autumn stars.

With handfuls of constellations, we felt

big enough for joy beneath that vastness.

You neglected your yardwork but made a maze

through the head-topping subtropic grass.

We lost each other by flashlight each night,

hoping if we lingered long enough,

our bedtimes and the daylight world of baths,

neat lawns, and back-to-school would fade

like tired fireflies, our mother

would give up calling us and live a life

of clean quiet houses and grownup chats,

and we’d be left to grow shaggy and wild,

to live on berries and the smell of earth.

For my father

21/30: Trees on a Windy Day

I think that trees are ticklish.
When wind comes by
and touches them
they get so very wiggle-ish!

written for my small Chloe

16/30: I Don't Love You Just a Bit

I don’t love you just a bit

Not a marble-sized amount that fits

between my finger and my thumb;

I don’t love you just a gram

Not a dollop in my hand,

a little bigger than a crumb;

I don’t love you just a swarm

Nothing fitting in my arms

like some buzzing happy thoughts;

I don’t love you like a map

that I could spread out on my lap

And mark in squares with pens and dots;

I love you more than I could show

by standing on my tippy-toes!

I love you more than I could draw

if the line crossed all I saw!

I love you like the great big sky

that stretches wide and stretches high

and wanders off to outer space!

Can you see love light my face?

for Chloe, who is three and a half

13/30: Don't Let Disney Teach You Love

Daughter,

      Don’t let no

slab-haired Disney queen

teach you about love

and being a woman.

Slay your own dragons.

Be a better witch

than your enemy.

Your phalanx of allies

should not be composed

entirely of squirrels.

Only creeps kiss you

while you’re comatose,

and riding into sunsets

burns your corneas.

You can’t ‘fix’ a Beast.

But if you’re also

an animal, then

I guess that’s okay.

Instincts

Warning: This post talks about poop. If you can't handle that, go read Pinterest posts about scrapbooks or something. 

Yesterday morning I got a really sheepish call from my daughter's home-daycare provider, a really sweet woman who is not really named Nell, but for the sake of not dragging people's real lives all over the internet, totally is named Nell. She is probably the most ladylike redneck I've ever met, and it pains her to deliver bad news. Poor Nell informed me that one of the daycare's little boys, who had attended the morning before with my daughter, had strange blisters that turned out to be Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease. Not to be confused with Foot-and-Mouth, otherwise known as Mad Cow, or Foot-in-Mouth, which is what I suffer from.

Turns out HFMD is super contagious for little ones, and causes painful blisters on the aforementioned areas, but has an incubation period of a few days, so we won't actually know if anyone in our household is sick until after the weekend. We've partially quarantined ourselves and I've been cleaning like a crazy person. Today I went to Walgreens (it is literally next door to our house) to get some more cleaning supplies. This detail is important. I went there to PREVENT DISEASES AND GENERAL NASTINESS. I told Little Bean to walk, so she wouldn't get germs on the carts, and to hold my hand and try not to touch anything. She mostly complied, because she's sweet and obedient and I don't know where she gets that from. But then, sometime after the awkward transvestite in Aisle 2 and immediately before heading to checkout, my beautiful precious princess shat her pants. 

I should have listened to my inner Mommy Instincts, which told me to just leave her saggy britches on her, check out my small basket of supplies in a hurry, and walk her across the parking lot to our home, where I could clean her up properly and change her clothes. But then my Other People's Opinions Voice told me that was a weird and disgusting idea and that everyone would TOTALLY SMELL the poop and it would be awful. So like many young moms with only one kid, I allowed my sense of Other People and Their Opinions to make me do a stupid thing. I took Little Bean to the restroom and tried to clean her up.

 Do you remember that game Operation? In which you had to use tweezers to carefully remove the organs of your plastic patient without touching the sides of their compartments, lest you set off an alarm? Let's ignore the part about how it's basically a training game for organ harvesting, and focus on the part about how hard it was to keep the tweezers from bumping the side. That's the game I played today--with poop. And I lost.It ended up on her legs, her hands, the floor, the stall door, the toilet, her shoes, and every item of clothing except her pants. 

After thirty feet of paper towels and a lot of effort to be nice ("NO!! I mean, no, Sweetie. When I said you can't sit naked on the public restroom floor, I also meant, please don't hop on all fours and be a naked bunny on the public restroom floor"), I finally headed to check out. The cashier assured me that they wouldn't mind sanitizing the restroom again. She put me at ease with a story of her twins simultaneously playing in the fireplace ashes and the toilet. People are really nice sometimes, you know? I DID neglect to mention that my child might be starting some kind of an epidemic, but I did what I could and if somebody yelled at me then I would have burst into tears. 

So I got Little Bean home and in the tub, and we both felt a lot better. Eventually I got her down for a nap, and I realized I was starving. I had some delicious soup that was calling my name. But apparently my can opener has rusted to the point of not functioning. Although my ox of a husband could have forced it to work, he was exasperated by some sort of work-related disaster and practically growled at me for asking. So I used my lame can opener to punch holes all the way around the can until the top was barely hanging on, and pushed down. At this point I once again got a little nudge from my instinct, which said: that is going to spray you in the face. I ignored it because my hands were already completing the motion. Guess what? It sprayed me in the face. There was bean soup in my hair. There was bean soup in my left ear. There was bean soup in my bra. There was bean soup in my shoes. Did I mention it was in my ear?

The moral of this very longwinded story: just trust yourself. I mean, check yourself every now and again. Take your meds. I do. But it seems like most of these worst-day-ever stories from my life occur after I have doubted myself, and most of my gratifying successes come after I listen to my instincts and stick to my beliefs.