I blame pancakes.
I made pancakes for breakfast because it felt like a special occasion to have us all home and together but the problem with pancakes is that they seem cozy and delicious and they are--but an hour and a half later the entire family is suffering from a sugar crash and one son is refusing to wear shoes and your husband is saying "Maybe I should go back to New York," and the other son is sobbing, "You promised we would go to mini-golf!" when the only way you'd ever make a promise like that is under the influence of Percoset.
Maybe this is just the nature of a homecoming when one person has been away making money and the other person has been home being a single parent. Everyone feels overworked and out of balance, and everyone has been holding it together as well as they can, and the second the family unit is back in place you almost have to have a fight to clear the air.
Eventually Tommy took the children to mini-golf and I went for a walk with my friend Domenica, where I told her the whole story.
"Pancakes!" She said. "There's nothing like them to make an entire family tired, bloated, and irritable."
"Exactly," I said, happy to be understood, and also happy to be on a walk with my friend. It was a cloudy day, but the best thing about living in upstate New York in the fall is that even on a gray day the scenery is luminous, maybe even more luminous with that steely background, and things like a black bird on branch of orange sumac in front of a bright green pasture seem like miracles. When we parted ways at the crosswalk near my house after covering the subjects of work, our home lives, and the backwards ways we all try to help people we love, I was in a much better mood.
I walked in the living room where Dawson was hiding under a couch holding a cloth devil's tail waiting to jump up and scare me.
All of the Halloween decorations were out and in the corner by the windows where we put the Christmas tree was an eight foot tall black branch with dark brown leaves that had dried as if they were still blowing in the wind.
"Oh!" I said. "It's beautiful."
"Do you like it?" said Liam.
"Boo!" yelled Dawson without coming out from under the couch.
"I LOVE it," I said. "It's fantastic. We should keep it up forever."
"Daddy helped us," Liam said. "We had to go down to the creek but we're not supposed to tell you."
"It needs some color," my husband said. "Maybe some streamers."
I looked at him and was so happy he was back. Halloween is the holiday I love the most and one of my favorite parts of it is getting a Halloween tree. I hadn't had time to even think about it while he was gone and then when he'd come home I'd started yelling at him about how we needed to get some systems in place to make our children help out more and then I'd gone for a walk, and here he had taken the kids and picked out this magnificent thing, which was better than anything I would have found on my own. I looked at the room, with half of our old costumes strewn across the floor and my husband standing in the middle of it hanging a plastic skeleton on the tree. This is why I married him, I thought. No one else would know how to make me such a beautiful, perfect gift.
So here is a picture of our tree. It doesn't quite do it justice, but you get an idea.
Posts
