Ulybear turned two a week ago. I know how I should feel about that (joyful, proud, excited, etc.), but I can't say that I fall into that realm. For true, I am all of those things, as another orbit around the sun has made him more robust and engaging and hardier and less likely to die from something as insidious as SIDS but there's all the baggage that goes along with having him become the individual he has always been and the reality that, truth be told, I'm far, far more lenient with him than I have been my older boys. I'm nicer to him. I always say please and thank you. I give him many more choices in things. Very few, if any, knife hands get thrown his way. I have yet to, as I once did with Gavin, force him to hold a heavy stone over his head and run around a house, shouting apologies, in penance for some now forgotten transgression. I'll likely never upend the chest of drawers, much like I did with Kiernan, and strew his clothes about the floor because he's not cleaned his room to the ordered specifications in the required time.
It's strange to me to watch (my parental progression, I mean) and I get the feeling, unfactcheckable due to mortality, that my old man had the same type conundrum with my development. That smacks of hubris in the extreme but I feel it's a valid thing to explore. I was seven and nine years removed from my brothers and I know, both through their telling and my old man's own confession, that I had it far easier than both of my elder brothers. I can remember, out of context, speaking with my brother, the middle child of us three, about how I'd had it soft because "Pop could lay on a whipping in his thirties" a decade of his to which I was little privy and memory experience of which I had none.
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| Uly on the left. |
We went up to the mountains the other day for some skiing. The day was magnificent: clear, cold, new snow - the first in what seemed quite a while, and no wind. On the way in I noted the sledding hill in a rueful manner. Otherwise, I was stricken with the place, especially the seasonal attitude of the day and the sound of the snow underfoot and the crisp surface crust of the previously drifted dunes that crunched beneath my weight but held Uly's as he and I ambled about the area while A skied solo. Uly tired, and I booted off some snow from a picnic table seat so he could rest there. We, Uly and I, sat on that bench and watched the turn of the earth and the orb of sun in the sky and listened to the sound of the woods and we were quiet as we waited the final bit for his mother to return. After, we descended and resumed our normal lives once more.
We went down the Lower 48 way this Christmastide. I met the boys in MSP and we copped a cheap motel a bit down the road. There were only two beds and the elevator was sketch af but the television worked and so did the ice machine and refrigerator and we all cobbled ourselves into the room for a single night's rest before the trip out to Winona where Uly and A stayed with my newly minted in-laws. The weather was brutal - polar vortex cold and unseasonable temps. Morning after, we drove back, listening to the newest QOTSA album and grooving furiously to the tracks.
Once in Winona, the boys, refueled by a night's sleep and despite the chill, availed themselves of the local sledding venues (not ideal but shouldered through regardless) and I watched those boys slide down the frigid and brush covered hills as A's father shoved them and followed after and the cold and the time and the fleeting nature of their childhoods came hurtling down with them into the pit that is me and I watched them go, run after run, yelling and laughing, until it was time, all too quick in coming, to head inside to warm up.
Maybe I'm just repeating myself here as I've said all these things, I know, before but I once heard a wise man say that we, as writers, are "all circling our own obsessions".
