The quilt I made on Beyonce's birthday

I overheard that Beyonce turned 33 today, one of the little quilt squares the radio handed me this morning as I was rushing out the door. Every day I make a quilt from these handouts: worn bits of fabric, the crusts of bread cut from sandwiches, sneezes and spilled popcorn and half-comprehended news bulletins from the radio. I thread them clumsily together throughout the day, grabbing a moment to stitch and form a seam, fumbling through the hallways of academic buildings as the threads come unspooled.

I will try to wind them around the spool later as I sit by the beds of my children; I am held a willing hostage to the Frozen soundtrack, which we cannot let go of--the irony.

I try to add the moment this morning where I stood outside of my son's classroom, a spectator to him calling his sister, already at the other end of the hall. I grab the square where she turned on her heels and came back and hugged her little brother. Where we could have had loose ends, a gaping hole in the quilt where the hallway meltdown ripped apart our efforts to all have a good morning, our girl busted out one important stitch.

I will patch the part later where our boy told me my stomach was the size of a chicken. I will try not allow that patch to call too much attention to itself, as did our boy when he told me over frozen yogurt, "Well, your tummy IS really BIG." I will remember how I accepted his apology, just as the other quilt squares will absorb this unwieldy one into the whole.

This is the quilt I will wrap myself in at the end of the day, pondering what Beyonce will do as she begins this new year of life. What kind of silks and imported fibers will she have to work with for her own quilt; how will the couture fitting go and will she wear it better than anyone else?

I am the only one who will see my quilt, who will know the places where I pricked myself trying to bridge all the scattered pieces. I will run my hand over its ripples and edges and shoddy patchwork and I will call it significant, real, mine, beautiful.

P.S. Happy Birthday, Bey.

28 years apart.

Tomorrow my oldest starts first grade. I started first grade 28 years ago. Most days, I walked from my babysitter's to my public school. There were 3 clustered classrooms in one large classroom and I spent a good portion of the day looking over at the hand washing station in front of the restrooms. It was shaped like a carousel and had automatic sensors that squirted out. I marveled at it and budgeted how many times I could visit it in the span of a school day. Our phones were still connected to cords, then, people. Also, ADD wasn't yet a thing.

I didn't know how to read when I started first grade. I have no memory of my writing abilities. In the afternoons, I watched She-Ra and played on my swingset. In late October of my first grade year, my family moved suburbs and I started at a Catholic school. I was among very few students who couldn't read. I wore a uniform. The lunch attendant asked me my first day if I needed to use the lavatory. I had no idea what that was, so I said, No, and went back to my seat and wondered whether there was a wash room in the school.

***

My oldest will put on a school uniform for the first time tomorrow and get in our car and be dropped off right in front of her school. We will likely walk her to her classroom for as many days as she allows us. She knows almost all of her classmates as she has gone to the same school and church with most of them for the past three years. Her teacher is the same as she has had for the past three years, as well.

She can read and do simple multiplication. In the afternoons, she comes home and plays games on a laptop computer and will do compulsory reading and arithmetic lessons.

Shortly after dinner, she will ask to go outside and play on her swingset and she will get a far-off gaze in her eye and ask how many days until summer vacation again.

The difference

This post was originally shared in 2008. I am waiting for the hot soccer player with the pretty hair, and I have not thought all the right things through. I haven't explained to him how to get to my dorm room, and I haven't offered to meet him at a more central location. It is a first date and all I have been able to focus on up until this point is what I am to wear and what music will I be listening to when he knocks on my door. I am starting to get that nervous adrenaline that makes my voice rise an octave and my feet twitch.

I live in the women's hall that always smells like Bath & Body Works, on the floor with the lavender walls. I sit on my bed with the yellow gingham bedspread, the one I picked out two years ago when I thought yellow gingham said "cheerfulness" and not "little girl tea party."

I finally settle on a compilation tape of the Beatles that my friend made me. Neutral.

I start to wonder if he is coming. I grab a highlighter because I should look busy instead of like I have had nothing to do all day besides prepare for this moment. My floor is immaculate, every drawer and closet door closed; there are no clothes helter skelter. I am the RA on the lavender floor and my room looks more like a kindergarten room ready for the new school year to begin.

I need to do something and quick before my date comes to my door and discovers he is taking a girl from an Edward Hopper painting out for pizza. I throw a hoodie over the Issues chair. I knock over the stack of floppies. I kick my shoes across the room.

I am so uncomfortable now. My room is trying to be messy and trying not to be contrived about it. I am overthinking the floppy disks toppling over. That's normal, right? For people to just let them topple and not pick them up?

***

Loverpants and I are picking up the living room before he runs the Roomba. Saturday night ritual in our first year of parenting. I am coming up the spiral staircase and as I step into the living room, I see my foot kicking something across the room. There is always detritus on our floor these days because Baby Girl is apparently preparing for hibernation, as she squirrels away finger foods between her thigh rolls. We are not perturbed by wads of food all over the floor; we sweep several times throughout the day. Or sometimes we don't, because, why? So I look down and am just a flash away from picking up a bite of the Cocoa Rolo cookies I made earlier in the week. But then I ask self why would I have given Baby Girl a Cocoa Rolo cookie? That is not on the approved list of finger foods?

I ask Loverpants, Is this a cookie or...?

He leans over. I nudge it with my foot. It's hard all the way through.

He picks it up with a scrap of paper. Smells it.

"It's definitely poop."

We will not even begin to explore how it got there.