Almost family

Hello, Mom, she said, over my cell- phone the night of January 3. She’s back! One of my three baby girls is back! I wasn’t expecting her until the third week of January, or so I thought anyway, but here she was and my new home was not yet totally fixed. But first she was living with her sister, one of my other baby girls, and tomorrow she was going to the beach to celebrate the 50th birthday of her good friend, one of the godmothers of her only son, Julian, my Wootie Woo. That’s what I called him when he was a baby. He was my Cutie Wootie Woo.

I remember when he was born. Sarri, my second daughter, came into my room and told me she thought she was in labor and needed to go to the hospital and I tried to be cool and succeeded on the surface of things but not underneath. Underneath all I could say was, “Omigod, she’s having a baby! What am I gonna do?”

But much later on the same day, when I saw him and held him in my arms, I adored him. He was the most beautiful baby of all. Let me say this, however. That’s the way I feel about every single baby I have ever had  I’ve had four  and all their eight babies as well. I love them, absolutely adore them all when they were babies. They smelled so good. They had such beautiful little hands and feet. I can live full time for them alone.

Last night, after he had cooked us a steak dinner, messed up my kitchen, and finally put the last piece of steak in a plastic container to give to Arnel, my houseman who had helped take care of him when he was small, I looked at Julian’s hands. They had grown big and strong. He is, after all, 15 years old now, just a little bit taller than me, and so good-looking he makes even me swoon (look at this picture of him playing an intense king in a Shakespeare play).

You have a man’s hands now, I say, nostalgic for his little baby hands that I used to kiss and play with when he was small. He held them out to me, smiling, and said, “My mom says the same thing. But my feet are small. . .”

And smelly, my daughter adds with a naughty smile, a teasing twinkle in her eye. And suddenly it hits me. This seems like old times, only all of us are older. My babies and their babies have grown, but when we are together, it feels so much like family again. It makes me happy, very fully happy.

What is a family anyway? It’s cluster of people who share blood, yes, but more than that, they share so much intimate experience. Do you remember our lizard game when you were small? I ask Julian. It was wonderful. He was around two years old. I’d get home from work and I would carry him holding either a soft plastic ruler or a hanger. Then we went around the house. That house had wide screened windows on which lizards clung from the outside. Well, we were on the inside and we would hit them with the ruler so they flew off. Did we intend to kill the lizards? No, we just hit them hard to throw them into the night. Lizards horrify me. But this game worked. He loved it, would dissolve into peals of laughter every time we got one. I loved hearing him laugh that baby laugh and I would laugh along with him. After a while we had no more lizards in the house. The rumor circulated quickly in the lizard community. Don’t go to there. They scare the living daylights out of you.

Now I wish I had fixed their room better but I had so much furniture and couldn’t even get rid of some of the throw pillows, like I had intended to, if they came later rather than earlier. But I did manage to get them good bed sheets and pillows, and I managed to buy two bags of organic rice  one white, one red  and a rice cooker, and I did manage to get the living room into shape, with my grandmother’s terno lamp hanging over my gorgeous new sofa. Imperfect as it is, I think I have managed to provide them with a home, a temporary shelter. That’s what family is about, too.

I have a dream, I confided in Sarri the other night. I dream of having my entire family around me again just one more time. Maybe it will take two years to happen. But when it does, when I am once again having a meal with my three daughters, their husbands and their children, my son, his wife and their child, all together, talking and laughing, then I will be very truly happy. Just one more time. Then we can finally become a full family for a short while instead of the almost full family we so easily always seem to be.

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