Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos

Author:Stephanie Kallos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2009-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

Hope’s Diary, 1965:

A Spilling Over Life

Now I know the meaning of the expression “easy baby.” I can’t believe the effect that Gaelan is having on his sister. It’s as if he’s the twin she’s been expecting. “What took you so long?” she seems to be wondering. “I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for you.”

They stare at each other until they fall asleep.

Here’s how I manage the embarrassment of household chores, my inability to keep up: Somehow I feel that if I leave the clean laundry in the basket, it’s contained and thus tidy. Ditto with the dishes: If I fill the large soup pot with dishwashing liquid and plop the dirty dishes and silverware in there, it’s more acceptable than just leaving them about on the counter. I take on the dishes one at a time, resting in between.

I do not always feel kind to them, these babes who bless me, torture me, provide me with my greatest joy and my deepest sorrow. They are the ones, after all, who generate most of this mess. There is evidence of them everywhere—of Llewellyn and I, there is barely a trace. The children make themselves known with clutter; we, the adults, with our compulsive tidiness and grown-up ways, have erased ourselves. No one would suspect that anyone lives here except a tribe of feral homo sapiens. Our own little “Lord of the Flies” island.

Motherhood is changing my reading habits, of all things. Reading more short fiction vs. novels now, also more poetry—which seems to be the only thing I can manage at the end of a day spent with two children in diapers. A good poem gives me more food for thought than two hundred pages of “War and Peace.”

I quip. I really have no idea. I’ve never read “War and Peace,” nor am I likely to anytime soon.

Both babes teething and nothing to be done. Pretended I was in Italy and had an early drink. It was that or give over to the too tight stringing sensation in my nerve endings and scream back at them. A glass of red wine at eleven-thirty in the morning wouldn’t be out of place in Florence. That was my justification.

Larken has earned a new nickname: the little shark. She bit Gaelan on the arm the other day so hard that she drew blood. She’s been using her teeth as weapons more and more lately—although up to this incident, her primary targets were teething rings and Mommy. With me, she’s been testing: First there were little rhythmic nibbles, then the gentle chomp, then the full-fledged (and painful) bite. Her impulse doesn’t seem to arise out of a desire to hurt so much as curiosity, over whelming affection, and/or excitement—feelings that are so big that they cannot be contained in her tiny body.

Nevertheless, it’s unacceptable.

I’d been consistently ineffectual in my efforts to break her of this habit, using the same tactic over and over again, rebuking her with a harsh voice—“No biting!”(as if she were

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