Born Third

Dear Max,

Today I went to the store and bought you diapers. I've decided that makes it official: we're ready for you. And I think, little boy, that you are just about ready for the world.

You are busy moving all the time, and I know that things are getting to be pretty cramped quarters in there. I feel your pain...since I share it.

I have spent a good deal of time trying to figure you out, your personality, your quirks, even what you might look like. Don't worry. I'm not foolish enough to commit to any preconceived notions just yet. I knew that your big brother Noah would be nothing like your big brother Joey, and I was right. I also know that while I can't imagine a third personality in the mix, that you'll come out and surprise us all by being just completely you.

Being born third is a big deal, I think. I was third in my family, and, like you, I was born much later than my older siblings. This can be hard, little boy, because there are going to be times you'll feel left out, lonely, and even forgotten. I've learned over time that that last is never true: nobody forgets you. They keep right on loving you, even when you don't realize it. Especially in our family.

There will come a time when your big brothers will seem impossibly grown up. It might even be right away, because Joey is eight and when you're very small, eight is a big deal. You are going to feel like you will never catch up to them. I hope you won't try, little boy. You are a blessing to all of us, to slow us down and help us hang on to a magic that was almost lost to us. You will be the sparkles in the air around us when we all want is to be hard and cynical and mature. That's an important job, and don't forget it.

There will come a time when your big brothers really will be all grown up, and you will feel so far from adulthood that it will be like having four parents and no siblings at all. It's the time when the third-born feels like an only child. I understand this all too well, and guess what? If you play your cards right, it's pretty great. You get all the benefits of having a big family that loves you, but of being the complete center of attention. It can get annoying, true, with everyone focusing on all your mistakes and overloading you with unsolicited advice, but love it up while you can. Because before you blink you'll be a grownup, too. That's not something I even want to think about.

And don't forget that while you're still small and your brothers are big, you'll quietly witness all of their mistakes. You'll watch them fail and struggle and make good choices and bad choices. The best thing to do, buddy, is just hang back and absorb it all. They'll never want to hear what you think, no, no--you'll be young and inconsequential during their moments of spectacular failure (a thing you shouldn't feel bad about, since they are struggling and don't want to imagine their baby brother might know better than they do). But do listen. Do pay attention. And by all means, do remember. Because your tracks will cross all those same paths, Max, and when they do, you'll be prepared. You'll have seen it all before, sometimes twice, and you'll already know what works and what doesn't. And you'll have spent so much time admiring your brothers, and sometimes hating them, that you'll get to pick and choose which things about them you'd like to keep for yourself and which things simply don't work. You'll see Noah's unending stubbornness and know when to use it and when to let it go. You'll see Joey's heart of gold and know when it's time to put up a protective armor to keep yourself safe.

You, my darling boy, will be the very best of us all.

Because that is what being born third, late, and last means. And in the meantime, we are waiting to meet you. We are excited! We love you so much already, whoever and whatever you will be. That's how our family works, Max. No matter what, and always.

Love,

Mom

First Words

Since I've been pregnant, bedtime has gone from a military sort of affair to a chaotic one. The larger I grow, the harder it is for me to crouch down with Noah or keep up with Joey. For the most part, I think both boys mean to be considerate and helpful, but let's face it. They're two little boys who have a thousand, no, make that a million times more energy and agility than I do right now. I'm pretty sure they look at me and see the lamest, most stick-in-the-mud mom ever. And poor Joey. When I'm stuck on the floor like a turtle on its back, he's usually the one who has to help shove me up in the air. UNPLEASANT, I'm sure.

But sometimes things do go just right, like the other night while Joey showered and Noah, all fresh and clean and smelling delicious, snuggled up to my side in my bed, leaned against me, and said, "Momma?  Can we do stories tonight?"

I love when he calls me Momma, because it's become rare. It's usually Mom, with an occasional Mommy. I also love "doing stories," though it's something my husband started and that he is more likely to get to do. Noah assumes we all have our roles, and he doesn't much like us to be outside of them. So if Daddy came up with "doing stories," it's Daddy who must be the one to do them. But every once in awhile, I get lucky.

"Sure," I said. "Should it be a 'Once upon a time?'"

Noah thought about this. "No," he said. His face turned up to mine with a huge glowing smile. "I like the one about how you met Daddy."

Noah is my little romantic. When watching Disney movies, he makes everyone be quiet for the "love part."

I smiled at him. "Okay," I said. "Should I start, or do you want to?"

"You tell it."

"Okay. A long, long time ago, when Mommy was just a young girl, only fourteen years old, she went to a dance at a school called Canisius High School."

"Mommy?" Noah interrupted.

"Yes?"

"Can we skip this part?"

"Well, what part do you want to hear?"

"What's the first thing Dad ever said to you?"

And somehow, the way his voice became all mystified and whispery, I knew Joe had never actually included that in his own telling of our story. In fact, I realized it was something I hadn't thought about in quite a long time. So long that I didn't immediately remember the answer.

What was the first thing Joe Bielecki ever said to me? And then, it hit me. As the memory flooded into my mind, I found myself grinning as my eyes watered.

I looked down at our little boy, so like us both.

"The first thing Daddy ever said to me was, 'You're short.'"

Noah's eyes widened as this sank in. And then, he opened his mouth wide with a hoot of laughter, flopping over backwards into the pillows and clutching his tiny belly.

"He said that?" he gasped out. "'You're short!'" And then exploded into more giggles.

Yup. Sometimes it doesn't take much to fill your heart with joy and love.

New Beginnings

Well, this is it. Tonight is it. It is the final hour of my stint as a Super Awesome Stay At Home Mom. Everyone keeps asking me, "How do you feel?" It's a question with fifty meanings of course, because I'm eight months pregnant and it's hot out and tomorrow I'm leaving my children and returning to work after two years of not working. Not that being home with Joey and Noah hasn't been work. It's just that doing something you love every day, and wearing whatever you want when you do it, and having a bathroom at your immediate disposal, doesn't feel as much like work as...well, work.

I am excited. It's an adventure to go back and have a room filled with faces who are waiting to hear me speak. I'm not their mother, so listening to me isn't being nagged as much as it's about getting good grades and establishing a positive reputation. They laugh at all my jokes. Middle schoolers think I'm really funny. I do know basing my self-worth on the opinion of a seventh grader isn't ideal, but there are days where it really makes a positive difference in my life. I love when people laugh at my jokes, and it's a very small, select circle of people who do. Middle schoolers just happen to fall into that circle.

I'm also excited to read poetry and write essays and talk about the crafts of reading and writing. I love when students walk into my classroom for the first time, a place I like to call "Bielecki Land" (which comes complete with its own queen--ME--and laws I can make up as I go). Their faces are so expectant and open. They have no idea what I'll be like (I'm told I'm very loud) or what they'll learn, and even the very worst ones have a light, an optimistic spark, on the first day.

It's just that in my heart, I can't stop repeating an old favorite movie quote again and again: "Well, I'm gonna get out of bed every morning...breathe in and out all day long. Then, after a while I won't have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out...and, then after a while, I won't have to think about how I had it great and perfect for a while." (It's from Sleepless in Seattle. A little melodramatic, but par for the course if you know me).

What I remind myself of is this: No matter how hard it is to go back to work--and this is the really important part--it's temporary. Temporary is a concept I struggle with. When Joey was born and went through his colicky phase, everyone kept promising me, "It's only temporary," and I felt like punching them all in the face. "Temporary?" I wanted to scream. "Screw you! He screams for hours for no reason!" But what I've learned is...everything is temporary. Life is all ups and downs and lots of changes. Even the things that last manage to evolve so much over time that at the end of a journey, you can't believe what it was when it began.

So I'm telling myself: If I can do this thing, a thing that in great scope of life is small and quick, if I can get through it, it will be that much sooner that I hold my brand new baby boy in my arms. I will introduce him to his brothers and cuddle him for those amazing first few weeks. I will get this incredible chance that I didn't think I would have again. And that will be temporary, too, but if there is anything I have learned in being a Super Amazing Stay At Home Mom, it's that loving and raising a child is the most super amazing thing I'll ever get to do.

Here's to new beginnings.

Bob Marley & Me

I'm listening to Bob Marley just because, and it occurs to me that Bob Marley will forever remind me of the time when I was 6, had the chicken pox, and my parents chose THAT day to go out and buy Slip'N'Slide. They set it up in the backyard while my brother and sister ran upstairs and gleefully changed into their swimming suits. I stood by forlornly as they dashed past me, towels over their arms, and ran out the back door.

I started off staring out the back window, my heart in my throat, but decided I wouldn't be a victim. I had a child-sized folding chair, which I dragged into the family room and opened up. I got my own towel and spread it out over the chair. I taped a paper sun over the lamp that hung over the computer table, and brought two bunches of bananas from the kitchen counter and set them on the coffee and end tables. As a finishing touch, I popped my parents' Bob Marley cassette into the tape deck and prepared to relax.

I don't even think five minutes went by before my mom discovered me. "What's this!" she cried, abruptly hitting the stop button on the music. "Bananas do not belong in here! We'll get bugs! And THIS!" She tore my beautiful paper sun off the lamp. "A fire hazard! You better be glad I found this and not your father! What were you thinking?"

I clearly remember being six years old, in my pajamas, pathetically covered in my pox, and hearing the joyous screams of my siblings, just outside the window, loving up the Slip'N'Slide.

And people wonder why I am the way I am.

Rookie Mistakes

I get a lot of judge-y looks when I say this, but if you've ever seen me or a picture of me holding a small baby, you can see for yourself that I'm super uncomfortable. Babies make me really nervous.

Therefore, as I approach the nesting period of my pregnancy, I'm determined to use my past experience and avoid all rookie error. I have an especially great opportunity here, because I hadn't planned for a third child and rid my house of all things baby. I can actually start all over again and try to only acquire things that I know I will use and that make sense. Here are some of the things I'm focusing on:

1) Clothes without snaps. I don't know if it's a boy thing or a "my offspring" thing, but I've had especially kicky babies. Changing time was always a wrestling match that I only ever won by a hair, and it usually involved a lot of self-encouraging statements on my part like, "You are the mom. You can do this. You will not be defeated by the insanely strong arms and legs of your eight pound infant child." Every time, every time, I finished dressing my child in clothes with snap buttons they ended up so mismatched that the poor kid couldn't even fully straighten one leg (while the other one stretched out luxuriously in miles of extra leg room).

2) Clothes with built-in footie covers. I don't know if anyone else has had this problem, but I find that baby socks are a ridiculous inconvenience. They don't stay on. Period. Whether it's from wild activity or poor design, those cute little booties are always dangling off a toe, or else leaving trails behind us through the house. And you never discover one is missing until a cold, clammy little foot brushes against your skin, and then it's, "Gah! You lost your sock! Let's go find it!" Of course, if you're anything like me, you eventually just throw a blanket over it and hope nobody notices.

3) Hats. I've heard a lot of complaining about baby hats: They never keep them on, they fall off of their own accord, they're silly. I've had exceptionally bald babies, so I want their little heads covered. I want a variety of little hats.

4) Avoid bags/gowns. I've owned exactly one baby "bag" that I loved. It had a drawstring bottom so that I could tie their little feet in. And that's just the issue. When you put a baby in a gown, yes, it's convenient for diapering, but quite honestly, the rest of the time there is a major ride-up issue. Those scrawny little legs keep slooping out the bottom, the whole thing gets bunched up around the tummy/chest region, and, if you recall point number 2, they create a need for socks. I think I'll be boycotting the whole situation.

5) Avoid white ANYTHING. I seem to produce only refluxers, so every beautiful cream or white article of clothing we've owned has inevitably ended up with a yellowish/brownish stain down the front. With Joey, whose reflux was particularly rough, there was also a starchiness to those stains that never quite went away.

6) Really good swaddle blankets. I'm a terrible swaddler. I don't know what happened from the time I was a small child who enthusiastically wrapped up her dolls in cozy blankets, but it's a definite ability I now lack. Again, my children were very active, so perhaps they'd break out of anybody's swaddle, but I did find that I had three swaddle blankets that were the right amount of soft and stretchy and did the job better than any other. (I also had a large variety of flannel/fuzzy/starchy ones that grew little faces every time they untucked themselves and smirked at me as if to say, "You suck at swaddling.") And as for those "Swaddle Me" things, Noah had one, but it didn't swaddle his legs. I'll have to see if that issue has been corrected in the last five years. Or, glorious wonder, have they decided that swaddling should be done away with altogether? Someone let me know!

7) No mobiles or hanging devices in the nursery. I've had Noah. I'm not going to create any sort of situation that, down the line, lends itself to catapulting, ziplining, Tarzan swinging, or general destruction. No matter how lovely it is.

8) Clothes that speak so I don't have to. I'm thinking something along the lines of jammies that read, "My mommy is a germophobe and if you touch me she will take you down."

9) I should probably make posters to hang all over my house that say, "Don't forget to have fun with this!"

Happy Anniversary: I Choose You

There are a lot of different ways my life could have gone. I think about that a lot--I know you're not supposed to, that it's considered, I don't know, ungrateful somehow to give time and energy to wondering how life could be different if you'd just turned left, instead of right, at that one fork in the road that one time.

I've come to a lot of forks. Knives and spoons, too, honestly. And sometimes I like to sit and wonder what I might be like, what anything would be like, if I'd made different choices. I just do.

I wouldn't have been a teacher. I know that for a fact. I don't know that I regret being one, because it's something that I love and that I'm good at, but it has never really felt like a place I actually belong. I've always felt a little bit like a kid playing school in the basement, with my mom's teacher manuals and an old half-used spiral notebook as my official grade book. More times than I can count, I've thought to myself, "I can't believe these kids are actually writing down what I tell them."

Joe and I got married when we were twenty-four years old. Nine years ago today. It was a beautiful wedding, really like a fairytale. At the reception, when the DJ announced us to our guests, "Mr. and Mrs. Joseph...Bielecki!" we descended from a mezzanine on a winding staircase to the theme song from Disney's Beauty and the Beast. I mean, it doesn't get any more fairytale than that. But when I look around at twenty-four-year-olds I know now, I think...Oh my God. I didn't know anything. We didn't know anything! What did we know, except that we'd already loved each other a very long time, and wanted to spend the rest of our lives feeling like we did on that magical day?

If you're thinking this is going to be all about what makes our marriage perfect and what makes one work, I'm sorry to disappoint you, because I really don't know. We are far from perfect. I really don't know how Joe and I have survived real life, and forks in the road, and really, growing up together. And not just for the nine years we've been married, or the ten years we've been together, but since we were kids. I've been calling the same person for nineteen years with my problems. And if you know me, that means Joe has received a LOT of phone calls, everything from "I'm in the ER" to "I accidentally splashed the juice of a Clorox wipe in my eye, do you think I'll go blind?" Everything from, "My heart is broken," to "My parents are going out for dinner without me!" Everything.

I can't speak for all people, especially in a world where most of them don't stay married, but maybe that's what has worked for us. The everything. Because when I look back on my life, every fork, knife, and spoon, there is one constant. One person who ended up beside me no matter what choice I made...and only half the time on purpose. I think that's pretty remarkable. I've made some pretty bad choices, if you want to know. I've made choices that deliberately put me in the opposite direction from Joe, and then turned around just to see him still right by my side. He's not always happy to be there, and I'm not always glad to discover him there. But in the end, the Universe has been pretty clear: it's where we belong.

When I was in college, my family had two dogs, Sam and Morgan. Sam was awesome and Morgan had issues. Anyway, I came home one afternoon to a house empty of everyone except Sam and Morgan, so it was my job to take them outside. We always had to take our dogs out on leashes back then since we didn't have a fenced yard. I hooked them both up, pushed open the screen door, and went to rest my foot on the top step leading down to the patio so the dogs could run past me and I could hold open the door.

The only thing was, I had completely forgotten that my parents were having the patio redone, and that the back steps which had been there my entire life were simply...gone. And not yet replaced. When I went to lean on that top step to let the dogs go by, I found myself falling out the back door, down, down, down, completely unable to stop the fall in any way, until I crashed on the concrete below, the dogs landed on top of me, and the door slammed shut above my head. (The dogs, bless their hearts, dashed madly away because doing their business was of greater importance than my well-being.)

They call it falling in love because it's just like that...it's unexpected, it's out of control. It's unbelievable! When it's happening, you think, "Oh my God! There's nothing to catch me!" but you can't help it. When Joe and I were first dating, he sent me these song lyrics: "we didn't know, we didn't even try...one minute there was road beneath us, the next just sky." 

Our lives have not continued on in that way, because just like that day with my dogs, eventually every fall ends. You land. And, if you're like me, you land on concrete and everything else lands on top of you. In the great scope of my life, it wasn't two dogs, but two children (and another one coming!). I think a lot of people hit the pavement and look around and say, "This doesn't feel as good as the falling part," and that's when they get up and walk away. It's probably never that simple, but in the end, I think the reason why I'm still married to Joe, who hasn't sent me meaningful song lyrics in years, is not because of the falling, but because of the choices. Because I choose him, and will continue to choose him. After nineteen years, I'm no longer surprised to look up and see that he's still there beside me, even when I've followed a path I thought was mine alone. Now, I expect him to be there, because it wouldn't feel right without him.

I have loved Joe through high school, when he broke my heart more than once. I have loved Joe through buying houses, and decorating them, which no one ever told me would cause arguing and disagreement, but it did. I have loved him through new jobs, and old jobs, and no jobs, and living in different cities. He has loved me through kidney stones and thirty-six hour labor and emergency c-sections. I love him every time he tries to surprise me, even though I hate surprises. He loves me despite who I am in the morning, which is something not quite human and feeds on despair and anger.

I think that, as we enter our tenth year of marriage, a milestone, a trophy of sorts, it makes perfect sense that our lives are about to change, AGAIN. And is it like this for everybody, where it can never just be a small change? I'm returning to work after two years off, and we're having a surprise baby after deciding we were out of our baby years. This is so not how I saw things working out...a phrase that makes me laugh because it reminds me of nearly every important thing that's ever happened to me, including the very night I met Joe for the first time. I had smoothed back my hair, put on my swagger, and gone to put the moves on him, Mary Pat style, when he abruptly turned to my friend and started dancing with her.

Maybe that's why I never mind spending time thinking about how different my life could have turned out. Maybe I'd be a professional writer. Maybe I'd live in England. Maybe I wouldn't be germophobic, or so quick to say no to everybody. But I also know that no matter what my life's choices are, they always seem to keep me with Joe.

Happy Anniversary, Joe Bielecki. I chose you all those years ago, and for every moment of every day, past and future, I'll choose you again. You are, in every way, my soul mate.

Boy Crazy

I grew up with just one brother, but I had plenty of boy cousins. And I babysat my next-door neighbors for some time, who had six--yes, six!--children, three of them boys. So I always thought that, despite the fact that I envisioned myself with a house full of girls (the sort of thing that would inspire people to chuckle and say, "Oh, poor Joe, with all those girls!"), I would be just fine raising boys.

It's just that there are certain things they do, collectively, that make me second-guess myself or, sometimes, want to faint. Especially now that they are big enough to play together. You might even say they're "in cahoots."

Once, I was at the house of a friend with little boys who were older than mine. Above our heads came the steady sound of thumping and possible wreckage. She sat beside me, serenely sipping coffee, smiling and not noticing my unshakable panic that perhaps someone should check on the upstairs situation. Maybe yelling was even in order. Not only did my friend do absolutely nothing, but she seemed to not notice anything was amiss.

"I'll never be like that," I declared to myself in my head.

But you see, now I have all these boys in my house. I suppose it's not so many. My uncle has six boys out of eight children, and my grandmother had four. I used to be appalled when stories were told of my grandmother's sometimes rather harsh methods of household management (opening the door and letting their beloved dogs run away, for example), but now, I'm shocked to say, I actually kind of understand.

What I do NOT understand, I've come to see, is little boys.

Here are some things I confidently know. The bathroom is a private place. Showers and baths are for bodily cleanup. Underpants are meant for covering things that need covering. Walking is a lovely thing to do. There is a difference between an inside voice and an outside voice. You can look with your eyes, but not with your hands. It is possible to discuss that someone might be wrong in a polite and calm way without any physical contact at all. In fact, physical contact is unnecessary in a lot of every day scenarios.

And yet, while I know things as well as I've know anything, my children do not seem to be catching on to any of it.

In our house, we have a playroom. It's downstairs. When we moved in, my husband suggested that we have the downstairs bedroom be a nursery for the baby and make the upstairs bedroom the playroom. "Wouldn't that be easier for you?" he'd asked. 

"No, no!" I'd said, amused by his foolishness. I mean, did he honestly think he should even bother coming up with ideas on the subject? Clearly I knew everything there was to know about raising our children. 

I don't think I was necessarily wrong on the matter, because it was my thought that sending children upstairs to a space of their own, out of sight and out of reach of adults, was just plain asking for trouble. "They'll never need to be in their rooms, except for sleeping," I'd announced. Really, it is sound logic, isn't it? 

It's just that today, I found myself on the couch with a book. Such a rare thing, you know. Dishwasher running, washing machine going, floors vacuumed. Total down time. And then it happened. From up above came the sound of thumping. Shrieks. Deep voices filled with bluster, which I can only imagine were meant to be warrior-like. And do you know what I did? Nothing. I did nothing!

I am shocked by my own lack of concern. I'm also shocked that somehow, it has happened that my children now have two play spaces: downstairs and upstairs. How did this come to pass? At what point did I look the other way, enough that it became just something they do? Because it certainly has. The pounding above me sounded like the devil himself would emerge through my ceiling. "My God," I said to myself. "I've become my friend, from all that time ago." And I'm not even ashamed.

The thing I've learned about having little boys is that it doesn't seem to matter how nurturing and good I am with them. They're going to think that poop and farts are hilarious (even in fancy restaurants). Last night, they spent ten minutes in their beds laughing breathlessly over the fact that Noah could snort. They flopped over backwards, barely missing banging their heads on the wall, clutching their bellies and trying to breathe, and just when they composed themselves, Noah let out yet another sound worthy of the biggest, fattest pig you ever saw and the whole thing would start all over again. I'll tell you what, there was nothing I could do but finally leave them to it. Sure, I could have stood front and center with my hands on my hips and a scary expression on my face, used my wicked witch voice and put the fear of God in them, but in the end...why?

Sometimes, in these moments, I close my eyes and imagine pink bedrooms filled with ruffles and twinkle lights and fairytale magic. I would have been fantastic with girls. I know this, and I think the Universe knows it, too. But for whatever reason, I've got all these boys. My mom says it's punishment for what a bad girl I was when I was young. I never did drugs, never drank, and really never lied to her, but somehow it happened (often) that I was grounded for being, and I quote, "Wild, out of control, and a very bad girl." I did fall in love for the first time in kindergarten, with a boy named Danny who refused to come into our classroom for three whole weeks. And then again in first grade, and second grade, and every grade thereafter until one day one of those boys was foolish enough to drop down on one knee and say, "I don't know how long I've loved you, I think I always have, and I know I always will." Thank God for that boy. Not only was he true to his word, but he also has this uncanny knack for understand little boys that, now that I've learned to listen, has saved me more than once.

 And more than that, my boys are friends. Best friends. They argue and misbehave and put their hands down their pants for no reason at all, but I've seen Joey throw himself in front of Noah to protect him from harm. I've seen Noah wordlessly squish onto the couch beside Joey, where before there had been no space at all but Joey squishes into the back cushions to make room. And they sit like that, their blond heads pressed together, breathing in sync, without speaking, with full understanding that one belongs with the other and that's just the way it is. I don't think I'll ever stop worrying about them...that thumping and shrieking is enough to give any normal person a heart attack, but I definitely love them for what they are. The Universe knew better than I did, because I don't think there is anything better on this whole earth than the little boys in my life. 

Even with their snorts and farts.