Escape to Malibu: Part 10

Adelaide nursed welll & voraciously & grew quickly as I expected her to, sucking nourishment & life out of my body faster than I could replace it. Feeling bereft of sexiness & beauty & personal freedom, I, as is my style, let her, hoping she would suck all the flab off my body & into hers through the breastfeeding process. I dd sit-ups & aerobics to try to look like Jane Fonda did in her work-out tapes. I even bought a striped terry leotard to inspire me. I went to Weight-Watchers.

I escaped when I could my dreary domestic cabin wih Archangel for some stolen moments of delicious adulthood & romance which I felt would never again be recaptured. I sang with Barbara Streisand at the top of my lungs while doing housework & folding laundry, staring at my figure critically daily in reflections of my window panes & jumping up to catch a glimpse of the whole thing in the bathroom mirror.

I tended the woodstove & puzzled over how to keep Joshua from careening into it & getting third degree burns. One of the days before the paramedics came, at Bernie's request, to "take me away", was the low-light of this post-partum period. It started out as usual, up before dawn with Adelaide nursing & Bernie off to school. (He could pour a bowl of cereal for himself & toast a piece of bread & pack his own lunch by now as he knew I craved those precious moments in my cozy bed between the first feed & the time I would rise to make the kids' breakfast.)

I stumbled down to the cold kitchen & stoked the woodstove, blowing light & warmth into the coals & rekindling logs I laid in. I plopped Adelaide into her high chair & got her baby cereal mixed with applesauce & sat her at the dining table Bernie had made in a woodworking class for my wedding present, absently & morosely eating my own non-descript breakfast.

Adelaide was at the stage where she was wanting to feed herself, grabbing at the spoon & aiming for her mouth hitting every other part of her face & hair in the process. Cereal splattered all over the high chair tray, her hair & me. Resignedly I began to drag the high chair across the kitchen floor when out of nowhere, kerplunk, yellow doo-doo fell out of the ceiling onto Adelaide's head & highchair tray.

I must be hallucinating, I thought. Excrement does not fall out of the air from nowhere. Jung has a word for such an event; synchronicity. It was the perfect metaphor for the way I was feeling on the inside those days. Crap was falling from heaven.

My left brain took over as my right brain tripped on this poetic event. Sure enough, the logical answer was easily found; the grate in the ceiling allowing heat from the woodstove to rise was mistaken by my toddler for a toilet.

As I peered up I saw two rosy cheeks & a boyish face looking down with great pride. "Momma I go potty," Joshua pronounced with royal pride. I dissolved into peals of laughter. The day was already too absurd for words.