John and I are afraid the mice will attract snakes like the one I discovered on our front porch last year, like the one that surprised me this spring as I was unfurling the garden hose and turning the spigot on to fill the little plastic pool the neighbor had dragged across the grass, into our backyard. But Archie, Kit and Jack are simply excited to see those mice running from here to there, and then back again.

“I saw another mouse on your porch,” my mom told me this morning when I got back to the house. She’d been watching Kit and Jack while I was at the gym.

I sighed and rolled my eyes before I answered. “I know. John told me to call our exterminator.”

That’s when Kit, who was standing in the kitchen and looking out our patio doors into the backyard, spoke up. “Excuse me, Nana?” My kids never address me when my mother’s around. They prefer her attention to mine when it’s theirs for the taking. “I have a good idea.”

Kit still stutters when she’s got a complex thought to share, so it took her a while to get the next little bit out. “Why don’t we make a pie and put it outside and when a mouse comes to eat it we can just get ’em?” She jumped up in the air as she finished her sentence, my daughter did, and pulled her arms and hands in close to her chest as if she were plucking something out of the air right there in the middle of our kitchen. She laughed, and Jack laughed, and my mother and I nodded at each other with our eyes opened wide before we agreed aloud that Kit’s idea was, in fact, a good one.

Although Kit and Jack still have a couple weeks before they begin their new school year, Archie started classes last week. I gave both Kit and Jack one of those snack packs of pretzels to eat in the station wagon this afternoon as we left the house to pick up Archie from school. Sometimes they’ll fall asleep on our drive across town, and when that happens it usually means Kit and Jack will cry and whine and throw their flailing bodies all over the hallway while we’re walking to Archie’s classroom to bring him home from school. But those snacks, sometimes they’ll stave off the sleep.

So today I’m driving and the twins are eating their pretzels, and I’m stopped at an intersection when Jack holds up a pretzel in a way he knows I’ll be able to see it by looking in the rearview mirror. “Hey, Mom. This pretzel looks like a letter B.” A beat or two later Jack spoke again, correcting himself, “No. I think it really looks like a number 8.”

Later, when we’re home again, Archie retreats to the kids’ playroom upstairs, turns on the television, and then closes the room’s double doors. A little later I go into the playroom to check on him and that’s when I find that Archie has tossed the trains and trucks to and fro, dumped the dolls across the floor, and toppled the table in the corner of the room. When I look to him for an explanation, before I’m able to utter a word, Archie says, “Is it funny?”

“The mess?” I want clarification.

“Yeah,” he answers.

“No, it’s not funny.” I am not laughing, but he is so hard that his sides are shaking.

Before I leave the room I want to know how his day went at school. I’ve read the teacher report in Archie’s folder and saw that he “had trouble following directions today.” But all Archie has to say about my inquiry is, “I don’t wanna talk about it.” Would someone please tell my oldest boy that he’s going on six, not sixteen?

Kit and Jack’s birthday is on Sunday. They will be four years old. We were at the beach, on the Isle of Palms, a few weeks ago and I wondered where my babies had gone while watching my youngest two children play in the sand. Jack played swamp wave with his cousins in the surf, and Kit made friends with a little girl who was swimming in the same tidal pool we’d discovered. “These are my parents,” she told the girl as they made their way around the edge of the water together. “And this is my grandma,” she introduced my mother, too, moving a cupped palm in her direction.

And Archie… My God, Archie. He faced the sea like its fearless foe. He’d stand in the surf, staring out toward the horizon, walking forward, and when a wave managed to knock him down he’d get right back up and charge on again. I don’t know what he was doing, or where he thought he was going, but he was committed and courageous and humored by it all to the point of hilarity.

My parents rented the beach house we stayed in, and John cooked our meals, and we moms and dads, aunts and uncles, my parents, too, shared childcare responsibilities. The kids were mostly happy, and Jack kept asking again and again where John’s parents were. He wanted to know why my parents, his grandma and grandpa, would do all these things for him, but why he didn’t know John’s parents at all.

“Because they’re dead,” John tried to explain to Jack, but still Jack didn’t understand.

“What does dead mean?” he pressed.

So one afternoon John and I piled Archie, Kit and Jack into our station wagon and drove over the bridges and down the roads that connect the Isle of Palms to James Island. John showed the kids where he lived, where he played, where he went to school. And then he told them stories all the way to the cemetery where we got out of the car, where we took our children’s hands, and picked our way through the headstones until we found the ones we were looking for. John explained that this is where his parents were, where Archie, Kit and Jack’s grandparents are, and John showed them his grandparents’ graves, too. The kids had questions, of course, and John and I tried to sum up those questions with a simple explanation, “Well, they’re with God now.”

“You mean they’re in our hearts?” Kit wanted to know. That is what she’s learned at school about God, after all.

“Oh! I have them right here in my heart!” Jack hollered, his hands against the center of his chest as he jumped up and down, up and down. His excitement was palpable.

Archie repeated quietly, “Heart.”

Where have they come from, these children of mine? The babies they were are long gone and we are marching forward, moving on. Thank God, wherever He is, whoever He is, we are still here, the five of us, putting each foot in front of the other.

I wonder if you’re aware, Archie, that your dad and I always check on you every night before we crawl into our own bed. Sometimes we stand in your doorway together, the both of us moving this way or that so our bodies won’t block the light from the hallway, the one that cuts through the dark stillness enveloping your room and falls upon your bed where you lay soundlessly breathing through an open mouth.

Sometimes, on the nights I go to bed earlier than your father, I check on you alone. Those are the times I straighten you as you slumber, moving your head from the foot of your bed to your pillow and then tucking your blankets in all around you. This summer I’ve straightened your nightgown, too, pulling it down from your armpits and untwisting it from your torso.

It doesn’t matter, though, how we check on you at night, Archie, because the question your dad and I ask each other is always the same whether one of us calls up the steps or whispers across the hallway. “How’s my Archie girl?” we both want to know these days, and what I want you to know when you are older, Archie, is that your dad and I will always allow you to be the person you want to be, the person you are, that we’re letting you show us the way.

Jack, someday when you are older and confronted by a situation neither you nor I anticipated, I hope you remember the time you bit your brother on the back so hard that your teeth cut into his skin because he was playing with a ball you wanted, and how your dad and I punished you by not permitting you to eat sweets for a whole week. You cried and whined every time your sister got a cookie or candy and you didn’t, but your dad and I didn’t waver in our resolve. I even sent a note to school in your lunchbox so your teachers would be informed and have patience with you as you gnashed your teeth and rolled your eyes while your classmates, your sister included, got a treat from the ice cream truck that comes on Wednesday and you didn’t.

It wasn’t easy for me, Jack, to watch your heart break every time you missed out on dessert. I wanted to give you a cookie, too, to pull a popsicle from the fridge for you like I did for your sister, but I hope you know I remained adamant about following through with your punishment for your own good. When you are older I hope you’ll remember what your dad and I are teaching you about actions and consequences. Life is chockfull of gray areas, Jack, but I want you to know that there are unwavering truths that make up the black and white spaces with which we all define our own silhouettes.

Kit, someday when you are older and confronted by a situation neither you nor I anticipated, I hope you remember that one weekend long ago your dad loaded you and your brothers into our station wagon so you could help him run some errands before picking up breakfast at the bagel shop, and that on your way home, in the middle of that road that crosses in front of our neighborhood, you passed me as I was running along the shoulder, underneath the tree branches that hung out over the asphalt.

I hope you’ll remember how your dad slowed down and how he rolled down your window because your car seat was closest to me out there on the road, and I that I waved at you when you passed and then lifted my legs higher so I could run faster and chase our car up the hill, all five of us almost home. Your blonde hair blew in the wind as you strained against the chest straps of your car seat to look as long as you could out the car window at me, to turn your face in my direction until I fell too far behind.

I’ll remember how your eyes flashed and how your smile started at one end of your face and didn’t stop until it reached the other, and how flattered I felt to know you were awestruck watching me, how it felt to feel your pride reach from our backseat to the side of that road. And I’ll remember, too, how later that morning you insisted on wearing your sneakers, the ones that you think look like my running shoes, because you wanted to be like me, you said. I’ll know how that made me feel, and how I think it made you feel.

I’ll remember that morning and those things and I hope you will, too, when you’re older so you’ll know a little bit about what it takes to get a job done and how to do it well. Because if there’s something you’re going to have to know, Kit, it’s going to be how to preserve no matter what. That’s a promise I can make and keep, one I anticipate you’ll know intimately someday out there in this world of unknowable things.

Like maybe Archie, Kit and Jack were non-stop hounding me to take them to the pool, or maybe the little boy up the street rang our doorbell and I had to go outside and sit on our front stoop while my kids played with him. Or maybe Archie wanted me to read another book to him, or maybe Kit asked me over and over again until I finally agreed to color with her, or maybe Jack talked me into building another parking garage with the three tubs of wooden blocks sitting on the rug outside my office door.

And then there’s the laundry, and the housework, and the yard work, and that ear infection I had. I’ve had butts to wipe, and errands to run, and some days it’s just so hot and humid all I really want to do is sit on the couch with Archie, Kit and Jack tucked in around me and watch cartoons on television.

There was that holiday, too, and John was home and we had things to do, and I’ve got e-mails to answer and web sites to read, and then there’s always facebook with its endless list of status updates that usually just serve to piss me off so why I waste my time reading them I’m not entirely sure, but… there it is…

Yesterday was the first day all three kids had something to do away from home at the same time since school ended in May. Archie’s enrolled in summer classes at his school, and Kit and Jack are enrolled in summer camp at their school, but with all the breaks and staggered starts neither schools were in session at the same time until yesterday.

When I dropped Archie off he was downright gleeful to see Miss Janelle, one of the assistant teacher’s in his classroom, when she came out to the parking lot to help him from our car. When I took Kit and Jack to their school they were immediately put to work making lion faces out of paper plates for safari week, their classes’ theme for the next few days.

I watched them painting their plates from the window after I’d left, those twins, before I got into my car. Kit, who calls herself an artist, appeared to be thoughtfully working. Each meticulous stroke of her paintbrush looked deliberate, well planned. But Jack was making a face as he painted, his nose scrunched up into his eyes, his lips pulled back far enough to lay his teeth bare. At first I thought that face meant Jack would rather not work on the project, but when I noted the ferocity with which he pressed his brush against the plate I suspected that he was actually affecting his best inner beast for inspiration’s sake. I shook my head and laughed as I walked the rest of the way to the parking lot.

When I went back to school a few hours later to pick Kit and Jack up, I got to laugh again as both kids held those lion faces in front of their own as we walked from the classroom to our car. All three of us roared a few times, and one of the other mothers we passed along the way feigned fear for fun, and I’d be lying if I told you that the little things like that walk to the car yesterday afternoon didn’t make up for the three times I had to put both kids in timeout two mornings ago.

Then there was this morning’s drive to school, too, when Archie called out the names to the songs from my iPod that I played over the car stereo. “That’s Human,” he said first. And then later, “This is Airstream Driver.” But Walcott received his most enthusiastic response. “Oh! There it is!” he proclaimed before he placed both palms atop each of his knees and began shaking his head from side to side in time with the beat. I’m unsure from where Archie’s proclivity for music comes, but knowing he likes the same music as I do makes those shortcomings over which he has no control feel like less of a kick in the teeth.

Yesterday afternoon, after we got home from school, I sat beside Kit on the couch in the playroom. She watched me write in the notebook in my lap, her head resting on my shoulder. “What’s that spints?” she wanted to know. When I asked Kit what she was talking about she pointed to the word I’d printed across the top of the paper.

“Did you read that word?” I wanted to know and Kit answered by shaking her head up and down, up and down.

To be honest, I’d written spinx, not spints as Kit had said. But still.

Brian, my trainer at the gym, knows that Kit floats when she runs so when I told him today the story of her reading that word in my notebook Brian remarked about how awesome it’ll be if one day Kit tears it up out there on the track and I can tell her that the first word she ever read was the first entry in my training log for my next race, the Spinx half-marathon in October.

Do you know what else is awesome? On the Fourth of July Kit woke up and declared that she was done with her pacifier. Finished. As in, “Please throw them all away, Mommy.” She was only allowed to use her pacifier at night, in her bed, and Kit knew that John and I were going to make her give up her collection of pacifiers on her fourth birthday, ready or not. Kit wasn’t enthusiastic about that deadline, I know, so it surprised me when she declared her independence from that little plastic nub on Independence Day. It surprised me, but I was happy for it and all together amazed when Kit only cried for a little bit that night at bedtime before she fell asleep. She hasn’t mentioned those pacifiers since.

Finally, finally we are moving forward around here.

Together with their Uncle John those nieces and nephews manufactured a lot of memories surrounding family trips, triumphs and tragedies. My arrival heralded a new dynamic in John’s relationship with his sister and brothers, his brother-in-law and sisters-in-law, and all those nieces and nephews. The brother and uncle everyone knew disappeared and was replaced with someone who had to consider his wife, and in short order his children, too, before he could carry out the sort of commitments he once did. Maybe this is why only some of John’s siblings’ children occasionally refer to me as their aunt, and I don’t have the type of relationship with them that their other aunts enjoy.

Whatever the case may be, the truth is that it took me a long time to feel comfortable around John’s family, and that eight years into our marriage and three children later I still don’t feel like a true part of the Moore family. That may be my own misinterpreation of our family’s relationship, I admit, but I’m just saying.

I’m telling you all of this as a round about way of explaining that while we enjoyed our weekend in Charleston with John’s family, it was still a weekend in Charleston with John’s family. And I hope I don’t get in trouble for saying that, although I suspect everyone who knows anything about it all would expect me to say exactly this kind of thing.

2.) My parents took Archie, Kit and Jack to Charlotte to spend the weekend with my brother, my sister-in-law, Camille, and my nephews Hayes and Rhys. If you click on that link you’ll see that my children enjoyed their weekend wholeheartedly. And because it was Hayes’s third birthday, Archie, Kit and Jack’s time with their cousins was extraordinarily special.

3.) When John and I got back to our hotel on Friday night after the rehearsal dinner, we rode the elevator up to the rooftop bar and holy cow was that place packed. We ordered a drink, found an open spot along the wrought-iron railing lining the roof’s perimeter, and enjoyed our stories-high view of downtown Charleston.

It didn’t take very long for John and I to agree that we felt old and out-of-place and entirely not cool enough to hang with the bar’s late-night crowd so we finished our drinks and called it a night. Before that happened, though, I had an opportunity to take a long, hard look at the Ravenel Bridge over the Cooper River, and from my spot on that roof I could finally see how damn steep the bridge’s incline really is. “I ran that mile in about eight minutes,” I reminded John, pointing to the steady climb on the Mt. Pleasant side of the bridge.

“That’s ’cause you rock,” my husband replied, and I’ll confess right now that it took a beat or two before any sort of self-depreciating thought crossed my mind.

4.) I think there’s something wrong with me because I still woke up at six o’clock Saturday morning even without my children there to coax me out of bed. I thought about walking down the hall to the coffee urns and plate of pastries I remembered the hotel staff sets up outside the elevator on each floor of the hotel, but decided against it when I realized I was still dressed in my pajamas.

So I turned on the television instead and discovered that TNT airs back-to-back episodes of Angel on Saturday mornings. You better believe I was all over that, and you ought to know, too, that when John woke up and saw what I was watching on television he rolled his eyes and moaned, “Oh, God. Don’t get obsessed with this again.”

5.) It took a little doing, but I convinced John to run with me Saturday morning. Before we left for Charleston he was all yeah-I’d-be-happy-to-run-with-you, but when it came right down to it John had a last minute freak-out and snipped at me for a while before I started to act like he had no choice and changed from my pajamas into my running clothes. That nearly backfired when I realized the bellhop had left my shoes, all wrapped up in a blue plastic BI-LO bag, in the back of our station wagon when he’d unloaded our car upon our arrival at the hotel.

6.) We did eventually get outside to run, John and I, and I promised John I’d run his pace, no matter what. So I did even if while doing so I longingly watched a pack of guys pass by us, headed in the opposite direction, running at what looked like my pace, and I managed to stay just a few steps in front of John even when another couple passed us on our left and I knew I could surpass them in no time at all if I could just take my foot of the breaks for a few blocks.

Once while we were running beside Battery Park I dropped back behind John, matching my stride to his cadence, and said, affecting my best brogue, “I don’t enjoy breathing like a pregnant walrus.” I was reciting a line from this commercial, and John knew it so he started to laugh which only made it more difficult for him to catch his breathe. That commercial is part of a joke John and I share so when I said it I knew what would come next.

7.) Later that morning I went to the bridal luncheon which was hosted at the home of a close friend of the bride’s family. The house was old but regal, situated at the end of an unpaved stretch of Coburg Road, lined on either side with live oaks. For a moment or two I wondered if Scarlet O’Hara would answer the door, but she didn’t, obviously, and before the luncheon was over I found myself seated to the right of a woman I didn’t know who was gossiping with the woman seated to her left. Maybe she didn’t see the place card marking my spot at the table, and maybe she didn’t care, but somehow she’d entwined my life with my sister-in-law’s, insisting that, “She adopted all those kids because, you know, she lost that Down’s baby…”

Um, no and not really, I thought about saying, but instead I lifted my chin way up high and smiled hugely at my sister-in-law seated across from me on the other side of the table. A few years ago I would have eaten that woman for dessert, but I’m happy to have finally learned who’s worth contradicting, and who is better off ignored.

8.) John and I spent the remainder of the afternoon visiting the shops along King Street. Before we went back to our room to get dressed for the seven o’clock wedding ceremony, John and I went to Magnolia’s on East Bay where we ordered appetizers and a drink, or two. We probably wouldn’t eat until late, John and I assumed, and if this wedding reception was like most Southern wedding receptions with seven hundred guests and appetizer-lined buffet tables we probably wouldn’t have much of an opportunity to eat anyway.

Our assumption was correct after all, but John and I wouldn’t know as much until after my husband squeezed my thigh, hard, during the wedding ceremony as the bride’s vows included the word obey, hot on the heels of at least two readings that asserted a husband’s dominance over his wife, and I breathed aloud, “Really?” Because, really?

9.) At the reception I ate two pieces of wedding cake, and danced to a big band with John whom I’m reminded each time we’re required to dance together learned a lot during his days in Cotillion and you have to believe me when I tell you that something about that always, always, always makes me laugh.

10.) My father answered my mother’s cell phone on Sunday morning when I called to check on Archie, Kit and Jack. My grandmother had died Saturday night, he explained.

When I talked to my mother Saturday morning she’d told me that Grandma had been transported from the nursing home to the hospital and that no one expected her to last much longer. John and I offered to come back early so Mom could catch a flight to Pennsylvania, but she asked us to leave when we got up on Sunday morning instead. I checked in with my mother a few times on Saturday, but her request remained the same.

Grandma turned ninety years old last week, but she didn’t look a day older than sixty at her funeral. They’d painted her face with make-up, and put her in a push-up bra, too, even though no one can remember Grandma wearing make-up or a any sort of supportive undergarments. Her daughters, my mother and her sisters, couldn’t believe how gorgeous Grandma looked. The priest called her stunning.

I bet she’s stunning now, too, wherever she is, wherever we go when we die. She was smart, and strong, and beautiful, and I will consider myself a fortunate woman if I am those three things myself when I’m ninety years old and leaving this place to find out what it is that comes next.

I wanted to begin writing this post two days ago as I was waiting for the plumber to knock on our front door, but when I sat down to share my thoughts with you Kit and Jack announced that they were hungry and wanted a snack. The plumber arrived before I had an opportunity to sit down in front of this computer again, when I had to stand sentinel at the bathroom doors to keep my children out of his way as that plumber worked to fix our toilets, one upstairs and another downstairs, because it is always two things at a time that break around here.

And I wanted to begin writing this post on Monday afternoon as I was waiting for John to call me, to tell me it was time for Archie, Kit, Jack and I to pick him up from work. His car was in the shop and he’d need our help to pick it up, to bring it home.

We were driving around Friday night, John and I, scouting out the course for Saturday morning’s race when I told him I smelled something burning. I’d rolled down my window, my elbow resting on top of the glass, and the fiery smell was so acrid it filled the car before I was able to finish my sentence. “Whoever’s car that is, is gonna be in trouble!” John replied, nearly shouting.

By the time we pulled into our driveway there was smoke billowing out of the car’s right wheel well. A neighbor walked across the street to help us. John pulled the green garden hose from the side of our house, from underneath the blooming hydrangea bushes, and turned its water on the smoke.

I tried to write this post again yesterday, but I was tired and the kids were whiney and I had clothes to iron and Archie wanted to finger paint the Kraft-colored paper we’d bought earlier in the day to wrap my nephew’s birthday presents. So I did what I needed to do instead of what I wanted to do, and suddenly it was bedtime and I was tucking Archie, Kit and Jack into their beds, under their blankets, and I was done. I was done.

I know I won’t finish writing this by the time John gets home.

I hope I’ll find the time to finish it today.

Yesterday morning Rachel came over with Sophia. Our children played upstairs in the bonus room filled with toys and children’s books and all sorts of nonsense while Rachel and I huddled around the island in the middle of the kitchen and talked about all sorts of things. I tell Rachel things I’ve traditionally kept to myself, but she never balks so I just keep telling her. She’s my failsafe that way, offering her opinion when I need to hear it, setting me straight again.

The other day Rachel was talking about Sophia’s lose tooth, her first, and told me that her mother kept all the baby teeth belonging to Rachel’s siblings and herself in a jewelry box. I told her that I have Archie’s hospital identification bracelets in my jewelry box, every last one of them.

“They are treasures,” Rachel replied. She understood what I meant.

Encouragement often comes from friends, but sometimes it comes from unlikely places, too. On Friday the man who came to clean the rug underneath our kitchen table, the ottoman in our family room, talked to me about his uncle who has Down syndrome. Last week an older woman sitting on the front porch of her house, watching her cat leap through the tall grass from one side of her lawn to the other, pumped her fist in the air as I ran passed. “You go, girl!” she shouted as I waved back. I’ve never seen that woman before even though I cross in front of her house every time I run. I hope I see her again.

While we were cleaning up the dinner dishes on Saturday night John turned to me and said, “Happy anniversary.” I stared at him and blinked hard. A few beats passed as I ticked off all the important dates that bookend our lives together inside my head.

My bewilderment amused John, but he left me off the hook when he explained what he’d meant. “Remember when you said all you wanted for our anniversary was for me to run the 5K?” he offered. “I gave you more than you asked for, and you got your gift a little early, too.”

A few months ago I told John the best gift he could give me to celebrate our wedding anniversary in October was to prepare for and race in the three-miler at the Spinx Run Fest. He took my request to heart, found a beginner runners’ training program, and got himself up to speed in time for the Sunrise Run 8K last weekend. Along the way John improved his base fitness level, lost a significant amount of weight and discovered that he, too, really enjoys running. John’s success showed when he crossed the finish line in 51:49.

My parents kept Archie, Kit and Jack while I ran the race as well, crossing the finish line in 38:26. I was the 20th female finisher of 618 runners, and was the seventh fastest runner in my age group.

John’s run was one unexpected gift, but I have another one to tell you about, too. I was sitting with Archie one afternoon last week when he asked me to rub his hand. This is something we do, he and I. He asks me to rub his back, or leg, or neck as he cuddles into my lap, against my chest, and I always oblige.

If you know anything about Down syndrome, then you’re aware that there are a handful of physical characteristics common to children and adults with the diagnosis. One of these characteristics is a single, deep crease across the center of the palm of the hand. Only one of Archie’s palms has this crease, and that is the one he offered me on this particular afternoon last week.

I’d forgotten about Archie’s crease so it surprised me anew when I saw it again. “Oh, Archie! Your sweet hand!” I exclaimed as I traced that crease on Archie’s palm with my finger.

Jack was in the room, too, watching us and he wanted to know what I was talking about so I showed him Archie’s hand and told Jack about Archie’s special Down syndrome line. Jack insisted that he wanted one as well, a Down syndrome line, but I told Jack that the line was something unique to Archie that makes him extra special to us, and then I reminded Jack that he has characteristics that make him extra special to us, too. Jack went away then, and Archie, who’d already tired of our time together on the chair, followed his little brother out of the room.

A few days ago on our way home from dropping Archie off at school Jack announced, out of the blue, that Archie isn’t human, he’s Down syndrome, and then added that he wished he had a hand like Archie’s so he could be Down syndrome, too.

I corrected Jack’s syntax, as well as his reasoning, but that exchange Jack and I shared in the car on our way home has left me thinking these past few days, filled as they have been with chores and obligations and bills and realizations, that maybe we are doing something right around here after all.

Last week John’s sister, Kate, rearranged the rooms in her house again. She lives in a ranch-style home behind her business on busy Haywood Road with her husband and six children. Kate needed to make more space for growing boys, she explained, so she had an auctioneer’s lot of family heirlooms that needed a new home and she wanted to know if anyone wanted anything. This is what the Moore’s do when they’re ready to part with a piece of that houseful of furniture Bill made them carry away; they offer it to each other first before they give it to someone else.

Nearly each piece of furniture has someone’s name written on a scrap of tablet paper taped to the back or bottom of it. John’s mother made the labels when she knew she was dying, and with them she took great care to divvy out her things to her children so they wouldn’t have to do it themselves. I’m not sure where Bill was while all this was happening, but I know he honored her decisions and left those scraps of paper on all of Ann’s things until their children came to take them away. We’ve done the same here in our home. Everything we have that belonged to Ann still has its label with John’s name written in her hand affixed to its bottom or backside or base.

So this time Kate’s rearranging brought us a small collection of things including an old clock John remembers from the fireplace mantle in the James Island house on Jim Isle Drive. Right now that clock is to my right, in the bookshelves in our office, and it’s tick-tick-ticking, tick-tick-ticking. John winds that clock with its tarnished brass key every morning, and even now after all these years it still keeps good time. Before it was his mother’s clock it came from a grandparent, or maybe one of the great aunts who lived on that farm in Wisconsin, and it smells a little like the musty plough mud lining the marshes of Ellis Creek, the same dark, soft stuff John and his siblings played in during the summers of their childhoods.

I listened to that clock as it marked this morning’s five o’clock hour with its old gears creak-creak-creaking before they softly ding-ding-dinged. I was drinking coffee while sitting on the floor with ice packs resting on my shins, all the while lacing up my running shoes and waiting for John to return from the gym. I was thinking of what I could do today with Archie, Kit and Jack, and I was remembering the fun my children had last night when they, dressed in underwear and white t-shirts splattered by dripping ice cream, stood on the slope behind our neighbors’ house and counted backwards from ten to one then jumped forward, down the slope, landing in the grass at the bottom of the hill on their hands and knees.

Lying in the grass at the bottom of the hill Archie, Kit and Jack would laugh and loll about, sharing their fun with Sophia and William. Sophia’s backyard is caddy-corner to our own, and William’s backyard sidles up to hers making these five friends neighbors, too. I was thinking this morning that watching all those kids have fun together last night reminded me of summer evenings when I was small, the ones when my brother and I played outside with our neighbors until bedtime had come and gone. I remembered how I was then, watching them last night, and it occurred to me how they may someday be. When Sophia’s father took a photo with his camera of the five kids on top of the hill I mused out loud, “Someday one of them will get married and that photo will be included in the collection displayed at the rehearsal dinner.”

By the time John and I collected our kids and brought them inside again the gears inside our new old clock were grinding into place, creak-creak-creak, and then the chimes ding-ding-dinged to mark the half-hour, one full hour passed Archie, Kit and Jack’s bedtime. I tossed a load of laundry into the washing machine downstairs as John took our children upstairs to give them a bath and put them to bed all soft and all warm just like the characters in one of Archie’s favorite storybooks.

The melting ice cream and the lolling in the grass, all that laughing while game-making-upping, those are the sorts of things Archie, Kit and Jack have been enjoying these first few weeks of summer. In the mornings Archie sits in the leather chair in our library and recites aloud a pile of storybooks with characters so familiar they feel like family while Kit paints with watercolors at the kitchen table while Jack stands sentinel at the window, waiting for the black birds to swoop into our vegetable garden, or perch atop our bird feeder. When they do Jack surprises them by banging on the glass and hollering through it, “Go away, black birds!” just like John taught him to do a few weekends ago.

In the afternoons Archie, Kit, Jack and I play something or play with someone or go to our neighborhood pool. They’re learning to love the water, these three children of mine, and I suspect this will be the year they begin to swim. When we get home from the pool I pick up around the house or mop the floor or fold the laundry while I listen to the clock in the office mark our hours in fifteen-minute increments. It seems silly to say as much, but this is the first summer I’ve spent with Archie, Kit and Jack that feels familiar to me, that seems like the ones I knew myself when I was young. Saying as much is the sort of admission that both surprises a parent and puts things into perspective at exactly the same time. My children are growing up.

Each time John and his siblings swap their mother’s furniture some sort of squabble transpires. Someone thinks it’s unfair that one sibling should get Helen’s table, or the drop leaf that belonged to Mary Mills. Someone else says another sibling shouldn’t be given both Gigi’s spindle-back rocker and that grandfather clock he made from the kit that one summer in the garage out back. Phone calls will be made, and e-mails will be written, and sooner or later everyone will agree that the furniture belongs with someone who will take care of it. This time, the one that brought us the old clock, Kate summed up the dialogue when she wrote an e-mail that read, “I think it is neat that the pieces keep traveling around, like Mom is visiting us all.”

Archie cried when I dropped him off at school today. He takes summer classes in the morning and then comes home to play with me, with Kit and Jack, in the afternoons. My boy who loves his teachers and classmates and school-time activities preferred he stay home instead. Kit sleeps late in the mornings and when she wakes she tells me that she’s tired from all the things we did the day before. Jack explodes in professions of adoration for me at least four times a day. He’s the kind of kid who does this when someone captures his attention with a novel activity, the kind of kid who loves you best when you’re engaging him and he mistakes it as getting his own way. Right now our days feel full and fun, but I know they’re fleeting, too.

These summer days that run together, the ones that leave my children drunk on the season’s humidity and heady with its absence of routines, their minutes are collected here in my office in creaks and dings. We carry on and an old clock marks our time together when someone remembers to wind it with its tarnished brass key.

It’s hard to remember, really, because it feels as if there’s no time now for reflective thoughts.  Archie, Kit and Jack are all finished with school and so far this summer vacation we’ve enjoyed picnics, and pool parties, and play dates.  It’s time consuming, all this fun, and our comings and goings have left me with little time to sit here, in front of the computer visiting with you.

On the last day of school Kit and Jack took bouquets of fresh cut flowers to their teachers, Katie and Melissa.  I tucked a gift certificate for a lunch date into those bouquets’ cello wrappers, too, and included a personal note to each teacher, written on pieces of paper folded in half that had been decorated by Kit.   “Last night as I was taking apart your bouquet so I could place all the flowers in water, Kit insisted I allow her to set up her paper and crayons right there, right next to the vase on the counter, so that she could draw what she saw,” I wrote in Katie’s note.  “I’m telling you this because when Kit and Jack started class with you and Melissa last fall she didn’t draw like this, and neither she nor Jack could write their names.”   

And then I continued, “But last night Kit drew your flowers in a vase, and beside it she colored the two plastic bowels I placed on the counter to hold the stem reservoirs until I needed them again this morning when I’d reassemble your bouquet.  She drew in the rectangular kitchen cabinets above the counter and the circular jars on the counter, in the corner, right behind the vase of flowers.  ‘This is for Katie,’ Kit told me when she finished, all proud and pleased with her work.” 

I wrote another paragraph in Katie’s note, too, one about how much I appreciated all she’d done for my children this year.  I did the same for Melissa as well, but tailored my notes’ introduction to the drawing Kit created specifically for her.

My note to Melissa began similarly, but I ended the second paragraph of the note like this: “Kit took great care to draw your flowers in a vase, each and every one of them, and then she printed her name in the upper right-hand corner of her picture.  ‘This one has good flowers and it’s for Melissa,’ Kit explained to me, and so it is.”  

Archie delivered hand-tied bouquets of pink roses and yellow gerbera daises to his teachers on his last day as well, and he also took Nardia, his classroom’s lead teacher who is getting married in a few weeks, a gift from her bridal registry.  Archie told me he wanted to give Nardia a Backyardigan toy, but I suspected she’d appreciate something of her own choosing that she could use for a long, long time and each time she did the piece may remind Nardia of her time in the classroom with Archie.

I didn’t write Nardia or the assistant teachers in Archie’s classroom a note of appreciation.  I’d just done as much a week ago as part of a thank-you note writing initiative celebrating staff appreciation day at Archie’s school.  I wrote those notes to Archie’s teachers and therapists and then Archie made them his own by signing each one with his distinctive letter “A.”  In those notes Archie and I thanked each staff member for her patience, and confidence, and love.

So school is over, our teacher gifts have been delivered, and we are home, the kids and I, and together we’re marking our days in little things like shared walks to the mailbox and big things like the one last Thursday that put my parents on an early flight to Pennsylvania Friday morning.  My eighty-nine year old grandmother had an awful day on Thursday that culminated in her being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. My grandmother lives with my Aunt Peggy, and when she called for that ambulance my aunt wasn’t sure my grandmother was alive.  

Grandma is wearing out.  She knows this and she’s made peace with her place in this world, so she and her doctor wrote a living will with specific advance care directives not too long ago and what Grandma wrote and how she wrote it kept my aunt from calling for that ambulance until she finally did.  After she called the ambulance Aunt Peggy called my mother, who then called me.  When my mom called she was crying and our conversation that followed was a variation on a theme my friend Rachel and I discuss often, the one about us becoming grown-up’s who occasionally find ourselves in the position of parenting our own parents. 

In the case of my mother’s phone call the roll reversal felt right.  It felt like the normal turn of events, much like I’m sure it feels for my mother and aunt today in Pittsburg where they’re caring for my grandmother who yesterday was moved from the intensive care unit to her own room.  “Great Nana just sat in a wheelchair and rode up and down the hall,” my mother reported to me a few hours ago during a phone call.  “How about that?” 

The notes I wrote to my children’s teachers, they marked the passage of this past year.  That note my grandmother wrote with her doctor’s help, it marked the passage of her life.  My mother taught me to write, and her mother taught her to write.  Now my children are learning to write, too.  All this writing makes me think about what may come next, of what each of us may mark down this week, this month, this year. 

If my children become parents I hope they’ll write notes on behalf of their sons’ and daughters’, too.  My mother may write a note like my grandmother’s one day, and I may also do the same.  But whatever we write, all of us, I hope we won’t do it to benefit ourselves.  Instead I hope we do it for each other, in the interest of what is right, as an impetus for forward movement.  How about that?  

“I saw my buddy Archie!” Albert hollered at me across the apples and oranges and tomatoes and sweet potatoes. “He’s famous!”

Albert is the produce manager at our grocery store, and when he called out to me he was talking about the BI-LO weekly circular that hit the newsstands this morning. Albert knows Archie as the little boy who once plucked his mother’s Venti-sized-Breve-Latte-with-one-shot-of-vanilla-please out of the cup holder on her cart and threw it on the floor, right in front of the peppers and prepackaged lettuce. Albert was the store employee who got a mop and bucket to clean up the spilled coffee after I took Archie by the hand and marched him to the front of the store to explain what he’d done, to apologize for the mess he’d made. I remember that Albert listened patiently to Archie’s explanation. I remember, too, that he allowed Archie the time he needed to find his words, and that Albert waited for me to interpret Archie’s stumbling sentences only after he tried a few times to do so himself. So that is why I smiled hugely when I replied to Albert, calling out back over the fruits and vegetables, “Or maybe infamous!”

This week, beginning on page seven, the supermarket chain’s circular celebrates the BI-LO Charity Classic, an annual charity golf tournament that has raised over $44 million in its twenty-five year history to benefit charitable organizations located in the South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee communities served by BI-LO grocery stores. I didn’t know Archie’s photo and story would be used for this advertising circular when I took him to that photo shoot in February, but I’m happy to tell you how surprised I was when John called me over to look at his laptop a few Friday evenings ago and showed me a rough draft of the circular, one a friend of his in the charity’s department had attached to an e-mail. The friend wanted our permission to run the ad, and John and I were so pleased and proud that we granted it immediately.

It turns out that Archie’s image is also being used on the tournament’s golf ball sleeves, and that the photo of Archie on the swing, in the park, was placed right up front in the player’s book alongside a quote from the Meyer Center’s executive director.

John was asked to have Archie and Kit, whose photo also appears in the publication, sign those player’s books that would be presented as keepsakes to a few very important people. So one evening not too long ago I sat at our kitchen table watching Kit effortlessly pen her name in each book next to her own photo, and then stood up to reach around Archie’s shoulders, to steady the page while he worked long and hard to mark his photo with a letter “A,” scribble-scrabble style.

When John came home from work the next day he told me a friend in the charity’s department told him one of those very important people got more than a little choked up when they saw Archie’s signature, right there on the page beside his photo. That touches me in a way I find difficult to explain here, but at least it reminds me that I’ve got company. The truth is that when I saw the rough draft of the ad circular on John’s laptop that Friday evening my throat felt full, too, and I had to put my hands against chest, right over my heart, to hold in all my joy.

I also wanted to write something about all of that joy here, before I close this post. You may remember that John and I attended the Charity Classic’s President’s party last year and that I shared with you how talking with Archie’s oncologist that night granted me an insight I hadn’t yet perceived. Turns out that Archie’s involvement with this year’s Charity Classic has offered me another opportunity to write a new definition for another frame of reference affecting my life.

I recently shared the news about the ad circular and Archie’s involvement in it with a friend. She wanted to know how I felt about Archie’s image and story being used this way. “Great!” I told her unabashedly. But she persisted, explaining that she wondered what it was like for a mother whose child is being used in an ad pertaining to disability and the necessity for aid. I stumbled over my own words trying to answer her question that day in the park, but what I should have said was this: It doesn’t bother me at all.

Archie is what he is, and his needs are what they are. I don’t want to live a life filled with denial. It’s true: Archie is disabled, but not unable. I believe that by acknowledging Archie’s strengths and weaknesses I’m ultimately empowering him. I believe that celebrating who Archie is grants him the confidence he needs to be his best self. I don’t define Archie by his diagnosis; rather I strive to accept it as an undeniable part of his identity.

I understand that each family of every child with a disability has their own outlook and that those outlooks differ greatly. I respect our different opinions and am happy for them. After all, we are all trying to do our best by our babies. In the end, through our own, individual efforts we’re only helping each other move forward one day at a time. And I guess that’s why in our home we’re so enthusiastic about this circular.

My oldest son, my first child, has Down syndrome and attends a special education program at a preschool for children with disabilities. For now, he rides the short bus. I’m not ashamed of that, and it doesn’t bother me like I feared it once would. I never expected to be glad for it either, and I never anticipated feeling as grateful as I do, every single day, for a school that celebrates Archie’s abilities but also works to help him overcome his disabilities, and for all the organizations and individuals who support his school.

He is my biggest boy and I’m so grateful for who he is, for who he’ll become, for each extra chromosome in his body.

Last Friday night I ran the inaugural Greenville Hospital System’s Swamp Rabbit Trail 5K in Travelers Rest. This event was the first official race on the newly-paved trail, but I ran a few miles on the trail’s stretch through downtown Greenville when I competed in the Spinx Run Fest’s half-marathon last October.

The first thing you should know is that I haven’t run in the evening since I finished the Greenville 5K Candlelight Run last June. I train in the mornings, usually beginning my runs around 6 o’clock, and I prefer to compete in the mornings, too. That said I realized last Friday evening early on in the race that I hadn’t eaten or hydrated properly to ensure I was prepared for optimum performance. And then there’s the fact that caring for three little kids all day long drains a mother’s energy even if that mother is doing her best to “take it easy” before her evening race.

The other thing you should know is that nearly 2,000 people showed up for the race. That was a large number of people to funnel down a footpath. The race’s start was congested, and it took much longer than usual for the crowd to thin out as we made our way down the trail. Weaving was inevitable, and then there was this one turn when the girl two footfalls in front of me completely stopped in her tracks when she realized she’d cut the cone and had to double back to avoid being disqualified. I ran right into her back.

It didn’t help either that more than one runner pushing a double stroller positioned him or herself close to the starting line, in the middle of the six-minute milers. Sure, the corrals were informal, marked only by cardboard signs with handwritten titles like, “6-minute milers,” “7-minute milers,” and “8-minute milers,” but I’d hoped the race organizers would have at least asked the runners with strollers to move back, please.

So the first mile was congested, the second mile included a sharp, steep climb up a hill in Grandview Cemetery, and the third mile sent us runners back the way we came, down the same trail we’d already traveled and into the runners and walkers who were still working their way toward the cemetery. That made for a special kind of congestion, for sure.

My first mile split was 7:51. That wasn’t ideal, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I did the best I could under the conditions. There was no two-mile marker so I didn’t get a split, and I don’t have a three-mile split either. I have ordered another Garmin, however, since my husband recently commandeered the one I bought last summer so I shouldn’t have these sort of record-keeping issues in the future. By mile three the heat and humidity was really bothering me, and I found myself repeating the lyrics from one of the Yo Gabba Gabba! song Archie likes so much, “Don’t stop, don’t give up. Keep trying, keep trying. Never stop, never give up.”

I finished the race in 24:10, which is the slowest I’ve run a 5K in a long time. There were no timing chips, though, and it was a gun-start race so who knows what my personal race time really was anyway. I did end up placing third in my age group, which is encouraging, and I finished 154th overall out of 1,606 runners who completed the course.

I also want to confess that this 5K was the first race I’ve ever run without earphones and music. I did so purposefully because I felt confident in my ability to cover the distance without needing the music’s distraction, and I’m glad I made the decision I did. The race took on a new dimension for me, and it was a true treat to hear the cadence simultaneous footfalls can keep when similarly paced runners find each other and hang together out there on the trail.

So there’s that, but then there’s this, too. I’d planned to forego the gym the morning before the race so when my alarm sounded I took a shower, dried my hair and dressed for the day. I chose something nice to wear, too, because I was expected at Kit and Jack’s school around lunchtime for a Mother’s Day celebration.

Most mornings I’m walking in the front door from a run before my children see me for the first time each day. I’m sweaty and smelly, and I’m wearing running clothes. I’ll exchange those clothes for another set of workout clothes before we leave for school, the kids and I. If all three kids have school I’ll go to the gym and workout with weights before I go home and shower. If only Archie has school I’ll wear my workout clothing until I have an opportunity to shower. I never know when it’ll come, that opportunity, since my day’s accomplishments are often dictated by my children’s play dates and appointments.

The Friday morning before the race I was emptying the dishwasher when Jack spoke up and wanted to know, “Where’s my other mommy?”

“What do you mean, your other mommy?” I asked in response even though I could anticipate Jack’s explanation.

Jack got embarrassed then and stumbled over his answer, stringing together words and mumbles that only halfway made sense but still I understood what he was trying to say.

“Do you want to know where your stinky mommy who wears old workout clothes and doesn’t comb her hair is? Do you wonder where this mommy who’s clean, and who’s wearing make-up, and who smells good came from?” I laughed as I spoke and Jack did, too, because what I said, that’s exactly what he’d meant.

I’ve been thinking of that conversation I shared with Jack in terms of what I’d write about here pertaining to last Friday’s race. We parents are all people will multiple interests. Some define us for our children, and some pass them by unnoticed. We find friends to compliment each of our life’s endeavors. It isn’t until our children are older that they can see how their parents parse out their personalities in so many ways. It takes a while for our children to learn that we’re the same person in all aspects of our lives, but yet we’re different, too. But some days, like last Friday, we get to show our children how we overlap.

When Archie was small I’d have to catch him before I could clean his ear with a warm washcloth, before I could put those prescribed drops into his ear. I tried to schedule the doses for times during the day when I knew I’d have another adult around to help me. One of us would have to hold Archie down while the other one made quick business of his treatment routine.

If I was alone I’d try to lay on top of Archie, or pin him between my legs while I finished what had to be done, but that never really worked because Archie, in spite of his muscles’ poor tone, would break free of my stronghold every, single time. It’s true: No matter what approach we used to administer Archie’s medicine, I’m sure we wasted more eardrops than we used. The whole process frustrated me, and it terrified Archie. During the days or weeks his ears were gunky, I’d often find myself standing in our kitchen and picking at my cuticles, wondering at the value of it all.

But this morning Archie came to me without complaint when I asked him to, when I told him it was time to clean his ear and do his drops. “My ear is gunky,” he told me, searching my eyes for confirmation.

When Archie looks at me that way, the one in which he locks his eyes onto my own with an intensity that seems nearly palpable, I always feel as if Archie is looking way down deep into the truest part of me for a sort of assurance he knows he’ll only find there. If I say it’s so he’ll believe it, no matter what. And I think I should admit right now that sometimes Archie’s unwavering trust feels like a heady sort of power, but that sometimes it feels like a heavy weight to bear.

“Yes, your ear is gunky,” I answered this morning when Archie inquired, and then I waited for what would come next. To my surprise Archie didn’t protest at all; instead he laid his head in my lap, turned to the right so that I could look down into his gunky ear. As I cleaned Archie’s ear he whined a little, but that was all. He whined a little more loudly when I put the drops in his ear, but he held his head still and didn’t fight against the weight of my hand against his shoulders, or the way I tugged his earlobe to encourage the drops that had pooled in the top of his canal to drain in towards his middle ear.

Yesterday afternoon I marveled at how big Archie looked as he walked toward me in my friend’s driveway. She and I were standing beside each other, watching our children play. He’s grown tall, my Archie, and I find that I’m regularly struck by what a boy he’s becoming when he, dressed in shorts that accentuate the length of his legs, ambles around outside with his siblings, his friends. When that happens I can see that Archie’s baby-self looks as if it’s long gone now. I can see that he’s growing up.

I write that, but then there’s this, too. Archie may always look like a big boy, but he doesn’t consistently act it. The comparison creates a cognitive dissonance, I know, and sometimes it’s challenging to determine how to strike a balance between Archie’s appearance and his actions. As his mother, I struggle to find a way to help Archie fit together all of his personal parallels.

But then time rolls on and suddenly, without pronouncement, there are mornings like today’s when Archie’s actions defy my expectations and I find myself encouraged and hopeful. My biggest boy is showing me that we’re moving forward. Here’s the proof, I acknowledge silently way down deep inside the truest part of myself. He’s closing the gap.

We just took Archie to school, Kit, Jack and I. While we were there we collected gift baskets from the PTA president, ones we’ll distribute tomorrow morning to the school’s teachers, therapists and staff in celebration of Teacher Appreciation Week a week late. It’s the thought that counts, I say, even when you think it a little late.

On our way home from school we stopped by the grocery store so I could buy myself more yogurt and so Jack could collect a hug from his friend David, one of the baggers. I mean it when I tell you that man is always, always, always pleased to see my children. When we’re missing a child, any of the three, David will always ask about their whereabouts if he doesn’t already know where the absent one is. “Is Archie at school today?” he asked this morning even though he already knew the answer. David has memorized our schedule, I’ve concluded, and there’s something comforting to my children and I in the intimacy that familiarity brings.

The twins rode their tricycles ’round and ’round the driveway when we got home from the grocery store. I was carrying the gift baskets from the back of my station wagon to our dining room table where right now all thirteen are lined up side by side, wrapped in clear cellophane. I’ve made little piles on my sideboard, too, of thank-you notes penned by parents. Each pile represents a department or classroom and it’s kind of sad, I think, that every therapist or teacher isn’t represented by at least one note. We’d asked all the parents to send in thank-you notes and they should have even if they didn’t.

As I type this I’m listening to Kit and Jack chatter, chatter, chatter. They’re sitting at the kitchen table, using markers and crayons to fill coloring books they remembered Santa brought them for Christmas. One of my favorite things to do these days is initiate an activity with Archie, Kit and Jack, to get all three children interested in something and started on a project, then disappear to eavesdrop on their conversation from a room a wall away.

When they’re coloring they talk about sharing crayons; when they’re playing with dolls Kit calls Jack the brother daddy and together she and he occasionally leave one particular baby in Archie’s care. He’s the babysitter, they say, and it’s gratifying to observe how thoroughly he cares for his charge.

Last weekend I found all three children sitting atop Archie’s bed. Kit and Jack were listening intently as Archie recited One Duck Stuck, word for word, page by page. I reveled in the twins’ attentiveness, and marveled at Archie’s careful annunciation of each pages’ animal sound.

Standing there in the doorway I felt like a single person split in two. Part of me, the analytical self who has sat through conferences with teachers and therapists and reviewed the research and dealt with the doctors and their diagnosis’s, wondered how it is Archie does that, why it is he can do that. The other part of me, the illogical self that is mostly a proud mother, felt sorry for my first self, the one that was searching for some sort of clinical explanation. The answer is simple, this second self wants to believe. It’s just because he’s smart.

Right now in the other room Kit has abandoned her crayons and is leaning against the couch, her two feet still on the ground, watching television. Jack, who is walking in circles, has a plastic yellow kazoo in one hand and a rubber chicken in the other hand. He’s mashing the chicken’s inflated belly with the kazoo and every time he does the chicken emits this asthmatic expiratory wheeze. It’s funny, really, to hear that bird’s comical squawk juxtaposed against Jack’s expressionless face.

Later today, after school, I may take Archie, Kit and Jack to the park. While we’re there we may play monster. When we do we four stumble around lock-kneed, rocking from one foot to the other, our arms stretched out in front of us affecting our best Frankenstein impersonations. Archie delights in this game and I can’t help but think that’s because he’s discovered this particular pretend play is one in which his success is predetermined. Archie has discovered that he’s chromosomally predisposed to move speedily on shaky legs, and he’s learned that this game is one that celebrates that tendency.

We’ll take it, of course, the twins and I, and all three of us will laugh and squeal at Archie’s impeccable impersonation until his feigned growls become rolling guffaws, the kind you only get to laugh when you really get it after all.

John and I had struck a deal with the kids: Good behavior in exchange for a new book of their choice. Archie, Kit and Jack had made good on their promise so it was John and my turn to uphold our own.

But when we arrived at the bookstore Archie was overwhelmed by the rows and rows of brightly-colored books, or the shoppers who got a little too close when they passed us by, or the low hum of voices bouncing off the stacks and shelves. He was overwhelmed and it was beginning to show so I decided not to stop Archie when he dove to the ground in front of the Step Into Reading book display and began pulling all the books with characters he recognized on their covers off the shelf, then stacking them in a pile between his legs.

I could see that Archie intended to hoard the books, to find comfort in their familiarity as he shuffled through the pile one book at a time, reciting aloud the titles he’d already memorized and asking me to help him learn the titles he didn’t yet know. Experience has taught me that this behavior of Archie’s, the repetitious stacking and shuffling of books, the way he insists that either he or I say it each time he picks up a new book with a new title, will at best allow him to alleviate his anxiety. At worst, I’ve learned, this self-stimulating behavior is just a precursor to an impending meltdown. So there at the bookstore I tolerated it because I was hoping the moment would pass, that Archie would find his equilibrium again and I wouldn’t end up dragging my oldest son out of the store as he carried on and on, turning heads as he and I made our way from one end of the building to the other.

While I was watching Archie’s constitution unravel before my eyes, a lady was sitting on the stage at one end of the children’s books section reading a copy of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. There were parents and children sitting on the benches arranged in front of her, all of them pressed up against each other, and I knew they could hear Archie as he recited the books’ titles loudly and hemmed and hawed, but I hoped that they wouldn’t mind, that they’d understand I was doing what I could to help Archie over the hump.

I was thinking that when Archie saw them, too, and that’s when I knew it was all over. Just the other day my father took Archie for a haircut and when they got to the barbershop and walked through the door Dad and Archie found themselves in the middle of a crowd of waiting customers. My father said that Archie looked at the people on one side of the room, and then he looked at the people on the other side of the room. After he finished all that looking Archie took a few steps forward before he declared loudly and with authority, “I’m nnnnnneeeeeext!” He’s just that way, this oldest boy of mine. He thrives on spotlights and audiences and I can’t say I blame him for it because it isn’t as if that apple fell too far from this tree.

At the bookstore, in the children’s section, Archie collected his books and lurched, arms full, toward the stage. When he got there he sat down, front and center, then began shuffling through his stack. He looked at me and I held my finger to my lips to make a shushing face. Archie smiled and then, in deliberate defiance of my request, lifted a book over his head as he insisted loudly and with authority, “Momma, say it!” That’s when I excused my way through the crowd, grabbed Archie’s arm and then dragged him, kicking and hollering, from the stage.

I put Archie’s stack of books back on the shelf, and then I hollered to John that our time was up. He was with Kit and Jack and the three of them were just feet away from us in the opposite direction of the stage, but somehow that husband of mine was oblivious to Archie’s outburst. John what and how’d as he turned his head this way and then that way, blinking hard in both directions, before he shrugged his shoulders and acquiesced to my assessment.

At the front of the store, in the checkout line, Archie was still yeah-yeah-yeahing with one hand shoved all the way inside his mouth. He wasn’t kicking and hollering anymore, but his legs had gone wet-noodle and I was holding him up off the floor by his other hand, the one not stuffed between his teeth. That’s when I remembered that there was a magazine I wanted to buy so I lifted Archie onto John’s feet and deposited him there, all limp and floppy. “I’ll be right back,” I promised.

I could still hear Archie’s whining when I was standing in front of the magazine rack, scanning the titles for the one I wanted. He was loud, for sure, but his vocalizations were controlled, nearly rhythmic. What I mean is that by now the noise Archie was making really wasn’t that big of a deal and if it bothered the other people waiting in the check-out line they weren’t making their discomfort known. But the woman standing next to me in the periodicals section wearing rolled-up Capri jeans and talking to her daughter, she was.

“Do you hear that?” she asked her daughter who couldn’t have been any older than ten. “It’s soooooooo annoying! What an awful noise that child is making!”

When a child is acting out in a public place and we mothers look away, ignore the tantrum and forego passing judgment because we knew we’ve been there, too, that our own children have acted out like that before as well, that’s what my friend Rachel calls the mommy pass. I guess the woman wearing rolled-up Capri jeans knew as much about the mommy pass as she did fashion because it was obvious: She was judging the child; she was judging his parents.

I weighed my options as I listened to her complain. I don’t think the woman’s vantage point enabled her to see that Archie has Down syndrome. I’m not sure if knowing as much would have changed her mind about speaking out; I don’t know. I do know that she, up here at the front of the store, had no knowledge of the back story behind Archie’s whining, and I wondered if I could set her straight about it all without sounding as if I were making excuses. I was angry. I was hurt. My mind whirred and I thought of several things to say, but in the end I said nothing. I just walked away.

But I was upset enough when I got back to the counter at the end of the checkout line to loudly announce, “That woman over there near the magazine rack is saying rude things about Archie.” I wanted more people than just John to hear what I had to say.

John wanted to know if I’d said anything to her, to the woman filled with rude comments. I told him I hadn’t because I was too flustered and afraid of what may come out of my mouth. The cashier listened to all of this and then offered to say something to the woman, and I hope he did, too, after we left.

It has been a few days since we’ve been in the bookstore, but what happened there is still bothering me. I’m not entirely sure why, but this I do know: Once upon a time I was such critical person that my comments often earned a chastisement from my father to keep my opinions to myself unless they were kind. He’d warn me as much, and then he’d preach tolerance over and over again. But back then I rarely listened to him.

In the end it took an extra chromosome for me to understand the value of my father’s advice. Children change their parents, I know, but I’d be lying to you if I didn’t admit that Archie’s effect on my life is more profound, more pronounced, than any other influence I’ve ever known. I may have arrived at this place in my own good time, but for sure Archie hastened my pace.

And I guess that’s what bothers me the most about the woman standing next to me in the periodicals section wearing rolled-up Capri jeans, talking to her daughter. I hate knowing that I used to say things like she did, that once I thoughtlessly hurt people with my words as she hurt me the other day in the bookstore. I can’t change the past, I know, but I hope to change the future.

See, there are these three little kids I know and I’m not biased, or anything, but they’re the most receptive learners…

That’s what Coach Dan said to my husband Tuesday night during John’s No Boundaries beginning runners’ clinic. When John shared his and Coach Dan’s exchange with me over his cell phone after the clinic was over, during John’s drive home from Cleveland Park, I was stunned. “How does he know me?” I wanted to know.

John replied that he’d asked Coach Dan that same question, and that Coach Dan had told him that he knew how I finished in my most recent race. “Really?” I asked my husband incredulously because, to be honest, I didn’t know anyone in our running community knew my name, or even really noticed me at all.

“Really,” John answered matter-of-factly.

I suspect Coach Dan may have made the connection between John and myself because I had stopped by the running store where the coach works weekends to pick up my age-group award earlier that day, and in doing so I did have to tell the store’s co-owner my name. That co-owner may have recognized my name as the girl who kinda-sorta accosted the other co-owner Saturday morning before the run when he was walking out of a door I was walking into and I stopped him, stumbling all over myself as I declared, “Hey, you ran Boston!” and then blurted out like some sort of groupie girl, “How’d it go?”

He wanted to know my name, that running store co-owner who ran this year’s Boston Marathon, which I told him before I explained that my husband ran with him up McDaniel Avenue during Coach Dan’s clinic that Thursday before the race. And then, later, I saw that this co-owner drew that connection again, the one between John and me, when I high-fived him after crossing the finishing line, before tearing off the bottom part of my bib to hand to the race officials at the end of the finisher’s shoot.

And maybe that co-owner saw me approach the finish line with D. J., who I heard took a client to the running store later that day to pick out a pair of shoes. Everybody at the running store knows D. J., and maybe Coach Dan was working that afternoon and someone said something to someone else and the connection was drawn again, from John to me, and then between the two of us and back again to D. J.

I don’t know how Coach Dan figured out who I am, or who I was in relation to John, but he did and he mentioned it and when he did he said my name as if I were someone and I’d be omitting an important part of this story if I didn’t admit that Coach Dan’s recognition made me feel at least a little important. Everyone at the Meyer Center, or the doctor’s offices, or the hospital may know me as Archie’s mom, and everyone at St. Mary Magdalene’s, or the park, or the reading group at the bookstore on Tuesday and Thursday mornings may know me as Kit and Jack’s mom, and there’s a whole other group of people who know me as John’s wife, and another group still who recognizes me as my parents’ daughter, but there aren’t many people left who acknowledge me for my own accomplishments anymore. I’m not sure where it’s gone or when exactly I lost sight of it, but sometimes my own identity feels so far off that I have to strain to see it again.

But now I’m going on and on.

So I’ll tell you that I’m thinking about all of this because today at the gym as I was on the parallel bars counting out twenty-one dips and the rest of my class was out the door, running a lap, my trainer Michael laughed and then said to me, “You’ll be a legend by the time I’m finished with you.” He was talking about how my knee bleed when I nicked it with my fingernail Friday while I was doing dead lifts, and how I didn’t notice the blood until he’d said something, and how he’s now exaggerating the whole story by telling everyone, including the rest of my class, that I lost a pint of blood. He was talking about that, but what he said makes me think of something else.

On Thursday I had an appointment at the hospital with a radiologist. The appointment had been scheduled for early in the morning, during my doctor’s rounds, and since it involved the x-ray department I knew I couldn’t bring Kit and Jack along with me. John would take Archie to school, we decided, and I would drop the twins off at my parent’s house where my mother agreed to watch them.

Because my parents live near an elementary school, I wanted to be sure I left our house early enough to avoid the traffic associated with the start of school. I’d have to pass the school on my way to my parent’s house, and then again on the way to the hospital, so I’d do well to err on the side of early, I estimated. This meant that Kit, Jack and I left our home an hour and a half before we usually do. The sun had risen by the time we walked outside, but the day was still brand new. When we left the house to get into my car, parked in our driveway, Jack asked, “What’s that smell?”

“It’s six eh-em,” I answered, just like that. It wasn’t until later, during the drive to my parents’ house, that I realized Kit and Jack had never been outside in this world so early in the morning. Their world during the six o’clock hour involves Mister Roger’s, breakfast bars and peanut butter, getting dressed and waiting for me to walk through the front door, fresh from a run. Until that day they didn’t know about all of this, the cars, the kids waiting at the bus stop, the runners along the side of the road, the scent of the climbing roses over our garage wafting like a perfume’s top note before it evaporates into the warm-weather musty smell of our lawn, the one that rises up from the roots way down deep underneath the thick, top thatch of our Bermuda grass.

Those runners we saw alongside the road, they made me think of this. Even from the front seat of my car I could tell that they were beginner runners, like John and his classmates in Coach Dan’s clinic, and seeing them reminded me that it’d been about a year ago that I started running with commitment. I didn’t run in high school, and I didn’t run in college, so everything I know now I’ve learned since then. I’ve learned so much, and those runners like John along the side of the road need to learn so much like I did, but still I have so much more to learn.

I thought about how much I still need to know, and I remembered how Kit and Jack sauntered to our car that morning, parked in the driveway. They don’t know a thing about being on time or being late, about sitting in traffic or avoiding the hassle altogether. I rush through my days, from task to task, minute to minute, and I forget that the little boy holding my hand and leaning into my legs so much so he slows my progress, thinks we have all the time in the world.

Someday that little boy may let his hair grow long or dye it black, and someday he and his brother and sister will probably wear clothing riddled with intentional holes. They’ll slam doors, all three of them, and each of them will probably tell me that they hate me during some argument we’ll share with such an intensity in their voices that I’ll be tempted to believe them. They’ll do all these things and I’ll wish them young again before they learned so much, before I learned so much, when there was still so much in front of all of us to learn.

That will come to pass, I know, but now Jack asks me to make little houses for him on our couch with throw pillows and baby blankets Kit takes from her dresser drawer while he watches his television shows, and Kit asks me to help her dress in her princess costumes in the afternoon after school and when I do she declares herself beautiful, and Archie runs down the upstairs hall in the morning from his room toward mine too early, before anyone’s bedside alarm has sounded, his arms thrown wide from side to side and he is nearly singing, Good morning, Momma! What are we going to do today?

And that is what I was thinking about when Michael mentioned my legendary status this morning. He was joking, but in a way he was right. I wonder where my identity’s gone, but really it’s right here in front of me. I am all of these things wrapped up together, a series of selves overlapping each other. A part of me can’t exist without the other, and all these parts tossed together make me who I am.

When my children are grown they’ll remember how we are together now, and it’ll shape who they’ll become then. They’ll know what people have said about me, and they’ll know what they’ve said, too. Somewhere in these years ahead of us a switch will flip and they’ll stop leaning on my legs and instead they’ll begin to push me in the right direction. I wonder when that will happen, when the little houses, and princess costumes, and carefree mornings will dissipate like the scent of those roses into the trodden ground, and I wonder what they’ll think of me then, what my legend will be after all?

I took a dinner plate from the cupboard and filled it with fruit. I cut an apple into wedges, peeled an orange, grabbed a handful of blueberries, and pulled the last of the red, seedless grapes, all of them still stuck to a picked-over vine, out of the produce drawer in our refrigerator. When I carried that plate outside and placed it on the table top between Rachel and Jack my three-year-old son breathed, “Ahh, f*uck… I wanted Goldfish.”

I may have asked Rachel if Jack said what I thought I heard him say, or I may have asked Jack what he’d said. I can’t remember. But I do remember feeling embarrassed, and trying to hide my shocked expression from Jack, then resisting the urge to laugh because, really, Jack had uttered the phrase so appropriately and with such perfect diction that there was no denying he’s heard it used before, and often.

Since becoming a mother I have made a concerted effort to clean up my language. I really have. You should have heard the crap that regularly spouted out of my mouth in the dormitories, the cafeteria, the halls of the classroom buildings when I was an undergraduate, and then the colorful phrases I could string together when I was working and doing my best to describe the ridiculousness that occurred in my department to coworkers, or the nonsensicalities that happened everyday in our office to John when I came home from work at night. But I admit that even though my language has been sanitized, it still isn’t squeaky clean. There may be a thesaurus filled with more appropriate word choices, but sometimes the one that feels most satisfying is still a solid “f” bomb.

At least Jack said it in front of Rachel, who didn’t care. At least he didn’t say it in school, like my brother did when he was small and called another kid on the bus a little f*cker for one reason or another. We’d just come home from visiting our grandmother, my brother and I, and that’s where Patrick had learned to deftly employ that phrase. “He has this Aunt Rosie…” my mother tried to explain to the principal who had called her later to discuss the incident our bus driver had reported to him after she’d delivered us to school the next day.

Aunt Rosie wasn’t really my aunt. She was my grandmother’s sister, my father’s aunt, but we cousins called Rosie what our parents did as if she were our aunt, too. Our extended family was large in the way Catholic families were just a generation ago, so it helped to ignore the specifics and instead group people into categories. Not matter who she was in relation to me, Aunt Rosie could pepper a sentence with cuss words like no one’s business. And since she talked a lot, she had occasion to swear often.

I remember that if you had something to say and wanted to interrupt Aunt Rosie’s talking, talking, talking so you could say it, she’d turn a pointed finger on you, pause to take a drag from her cigarette, and then speak from a place way down deep inside her chest as she exhaled, “Okay-you-little-f*cker-you-have-one-minute-starting-right-now.” Because she was intimidating to begin with, and because you knew that Aunt Rosie just called you a bad word, I remember that it was often difficult to instantaneously recall what you’d wanted to say in the first place and that your allotted time would usually expire before you could manage to translate your thoughts into words.

Writing all this makes Aunt Rosie sound like a callous person, but she wasn’t. She was demonstrative and her warmth was infectious. I mean it when I say that Aunt Rosie was as quick to kiss a kid as she was to scold us scamps into silence. I miss her sitting at that cherry-wood dining room table too big for the room, covered in lace tablecloths too formal for my grandmother’s house. I miss them all. They would have loved my three children, even when they swear. Especially when they swear.

It seems as if being off my game at home has thrown me for a loop out on the road, too. Finding my stride while running has been mostly difficult, and sometimes even impossible. I mean it when I say that workouts have felt torturous. So now that a good run has suddenly become an elusive thing, I wasn’t sure what to expect this morning when I showed up for the Greer Earth Day Run 5K.

I was hoping for a PR, but I missed one by two-tenths of a second, finishing in 23:47. I will say, though, that my watch had me in at 23:33, and the race organizers did elect to go green and run a race without timing chips, so who knows. What I do know is this: I was the fifth female finisher in today’s 5K, and I won my age group by three minutes.

The appropriate, self-effacing thing to write here is that obviously the fast girls didn’t show up to run this morning. But I’ll also write that when the race announcer awarded the women’s first place finisher her award he commented that she was smokin’ out there on this hot, South Carolina morning. She only beat me by two minutes.

I’ll tell you, though, all that is well and good, but the best part of the morning had to be when D. J., my trainer who recently resigned his position at the gym to pursue more profitable endeavors, surprised me on the course somewhere along mile three and ran me into the finish. I was grateful for that, and flattered, too. He’s been telling me all along that I’d be a better runner if I had a rabbit to chase, and I know that’s true, especially if that rabbit was as encouraging as D. J. is.

After I crossed that finish line I called John to check on the kids. When I called, John was getting ready to take Archie and Kit to the doctor’s office. Turns out Archie was feverish and complaining that his neck hurt (he meant his throat), and Kit kept insisting that her ear hurt. She was up all night screaming, that Kit, so her complaint wasn’t that much of a shocker.

Two co-payments later and its true: Both Archie and Kit have Strep throat. Awesome.

Which means we missed out on a neighbor’s birthday party later this afternoon. Boo.

But those are the breaks, right? The highs and lows, the good and the bad, all of it mixed together to make up the constitution of our days.

What will come next?

Its odd, really, that I’m admitting that to myself because I usually won’t until my shit has been gotten together, past-tense. It’s weirder still that I’m saying so publicly. Just the same the truth is that everything is humming along around here at its normal quick-clip pace, but I’m just not feeling it. Does that make sense? If it doesn’t then maybe this real-life explanation will.

As I type there’s a load of laundry in the dryer and another load in the washing machine. Both machines’ cycles finished a few minutes ago, their built-in alarms beeping aloud to signal as much. I know I need to fold the laundry in the dryer and I know I need to transfer the second load from the washing machine to the dryer, but I just don’t want to. At all. In fact, the idea that this task remains unfinished at this time irritates me. A lot. But that’s not motivation enough for me to actually finish the chore; in fact, my irritation, any irritation, only seems to mutate into frustration these days until that’s all I’ve got.

For example, Kit is sitting at the kitchen table, painting. She’s a pretty good artist, that Kit, and I’m sure what she’s putting down on paper is all kinds of nice, but all I can see when I look at my daughter sitting there, diligently dipping her brush in the little plastic tumbler filled with murky, gray water then dabbing that brush in the mucked-up tray of watercolors I set in front of her a few minutes ago, is the mess she’s going to leave for me to clean up in about twenty minutes. I know, I should make her clean up her own mess, and for the most part I do, but still. She’s three-years old and her idea of clean does not parallel my own.

Also, in the hour he’s been home from school Jack has peed all over himself and the powder room floor, spilled chocolate milk down the front of his shirt, and antagonized the dog into a frenzied butt-tucking frolic around the first floor of our house. Furthermore, that youngest boy of mine just came in here, placed one hand on the desk for balance and then used the other to pull off his underwear which he left on the floor beside me when he ran out of this room in pursuit of his sister who is headed upstairs, she tells me, to pull two blankets out of the dresser in her room. She and Jack are going to play picnic with her dolls, Kit says, and that’s wonderful and I’m tickled by their creative, imaginative play, but to be honest all I can think as I watch Kit and Jack spread those two blankets out across the floor is, Damn. More laundry.

And then there’s Archie who wants yogi milk, in a cup with a straw. The first time he approached me with this specific request of his I obliged. When I opened the refrigerator door to retrieve the milk with which to mix the packet of Carnation Instant Breakfast, vanilla please, I found a cup already filled with Archie’s favorite drink leftover from breakfast so I took that one out of the refrigerator and gave it to Archie instead of making a new drink. He protested initially, but then agreed to taste it after I convinced him to do so. After he did Archie clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth a few times before be looked at me and declared, “That’s peach. No peach.” Although I’m happy that Archie’s sense of taste is keen enough to ensure he’ll be a shoe-in as a sommelier one day, that observation of his was enough to set me off on one of my internal tirades aimed at John, who insists on mixing these yogurt drinks he got free last week at the grocery store with coupons he clipped from the paper into Archie’s yogi milk even though it’s obvious Archie prefers his drink shaken, not stirred, and just vanilla, please. Suffice it to say I told Archie he was out of luck and so he left that cup with the straw at the table, still full, and he’s already come in here to ask me for another drink about three times since I left the kitchen and each time he does my stress level ratchets itself up another notch and I’m here to tell you that, really, my head may explode by the end of the day. But still I keep telling Archie no, he cannot have a different yogi milk, but with all the whiney please-please-pleasing he’s doing I just may give in if he comes in here again. I’m gonna do a stellar job with the discipline this week, I can tell already.

And that’s the thing, really. If all this irritation, and frustration, and aggravation where limited to just this week I think I could be o. k. with that. But it’s not because I felt like this last week, too, and things felt so bad one night that during bath time I called a staff meeting.

John wasn’t home yet, and I had the three kids lined up in the tub in birth order from left to right when someone did something that made me want to scream. Instead of screaming, though, I sighed REALLY LOUD and said, “O. K., fine. That’s it. We’re having a brainstorming session.”

None of my kids understood what I meant by that of course so I explained, “When Daddy’s at work and things stop going well sometimes he has to go to brainstorm meetings to try to figure out how to make everything good again. So we’re gonna have one right now, a brainstorming session.”

That made Archie, Kit and Jack smile so I continued, encouraged by their enthusiasm. “I’m gonna give you all a chance to tell me how to make things better around here. All ideas are good; none are bad. Jack, you’re first. Go.”

Jack launched into this halfway articulate paragraph out of which I could glean the phrases makes me sad and call an ambulance. For the sake of clarification when he finished talking I asked Jack, “So if we make it through the day and we don’t have to call an ambulance than you’ll be happy, not sad?”

Jack smiled broadly then and enthusiastically nodded his agreement with my assessment. Which is good, I think, because surely I can measure up to this standard of excellence.

Kit, who was seated in the middle of the tub sandwiched between her brothers, was next. “Mommy, don’t be mad,” she implored while shaking a finger in my face.

“I try not to get mad, Kit.”

“And don’t do ’dat ting with your eyebrows,” she continued.

“What thing?”

Kit couldn’t explain with words, but she pushed against my brow with that pointing finger of hers. “’Dat ting,” she tried to demonstrate as she pushed my eyebrow up and then pulled it down.

“O. K., I’ll try,” I promised.

It was Archie’s turn to speak next. I looked at him and repeated my question, “What can I do to make things better around here?”

“Have big ideas,” he answered.

I repeated his sentence as I usually do. I like to think that doing so let’s Archie know I understood him, really heard what he said. And then I asked, “Like what?”

He stared at me for a long time in response and somewhere crickets chirped in the woods.

“Have big ideas like what?” I prompted again.

“Pinky-Dinky-Doo,” Archie answered finally.

“Have big ideas like Pinky-Dinky-Doo,” I repeated, then promised. “I don’t know if I can have big ideas all the time, but I’ll try.”

That tub talk happened last week and I’m still trying not to lose my patience, get mad, and then frown with my eyebrows even though I have since then and I still do. I may have had an idea or two since the kids and I had our conversation that qualifies as big, then again maybe I haven’t. I’ll have to ask Archie. But I’m sure I haven’t called an ambulance, not even once, so at least that means Jack won’t be sad. And that’s something, I guess.

Just the same I’m not feeling it. Kit is rolling around the floor by my desk right now, asking for a snack, and Archie wants me to read a book to him, one I’ve already read ten times today, and Jack is still running around without underwear. I haven’t started dinner, and the laundry remains undone. I’m frustrated, and irritated, and… hell, how do I fix this?

“We won’t be here Wednesday,” I told Kit and Jack’s teachers yesterday morning during the class’s drop-off time.

“We’re going to the Special Oh-impics,” Jack injected, finishing my declaration for me.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing. All six of us will join Archie, his classmates and teachers tomorrow morning at Furman University for the Greenville County Recreation District’s Special Olympics of Greenville. Archie will participate in the games as a member of the Young Athletes Program, a Special Olympics initiative aimed at increasing children’s strength and coordination in preparation for sports participation.

When representatives of the Special Olympics participated in a PTA meeting at Archie’s school last fall, they explained to us that the Young Athlete’s Program is a great way to introduce children to group play, cooperation and awareness to rules, while also focusing on socialization, interaction and fun. I’ll admit now that I have no idea at all in what event Archie is scheduled to participate tomorrow, but I’ll tell you, too, that my ignorance does nothing to douse my enthusiasm for Archie’s involvement in the day’s activities.

That’s why we’re all making such a big deal out of Archie’s small part in this year’s games, I think. Because we enthusiastically support Archie and celebrate his abilities, because we want to share our confidence in Archie’s potential, as well as in the potential of his peers, with other people who believe in each of them, too.

As I was thinking of all this yesterday afternoon I realized that Archie doesn’t have a pair of tennis shoes that fit him. We just bought Archie new boat shoes, but the pair of tennis shoes lying on the floor of his bedroom closet are at least three sizes too small. So this morning Kit, Jack and I stopped by Target after we dropped Archie off at school to buy shoes appropriate for tomorrow’s activities.

I’ve mentioned before that every morning Archie insists I explain to him exactly what we’ll be doing during the day. When I told him this morning that his sister, brother and I would be going to the store while he was at school Archie asked me to extrapolate. “For… ?” he wanted to know.

“For shoes you can wear tomorrow to the Special Olympics.”

“Oh!” Archie declared enthusiastically, his eyes popping open wide as he spoke. “For Oh-limp-ick Shoes!”

Later at the store I asked Kit and Jack to pick out the tennis shoes we’d buy for Archie. “Should we get this pair, or this pair?” I asked them, holding a box in each hand.

“Those should be Archie’s Oh-impics shoes,” Kit answered, pointing to the box in my right hand. And so they are.

That’s the other thing, too. The biggest thing, really, at least this time around. Our whole family will attend the Special Olympics tomorrow morning because we believe in Archie’s efforts, but also because I want Kit and Jack to see us supporting Archie, supporting his peers. I want them to have the exposure necessary to understand. I want them to get it as small children in a way I didn’t even begin to comprehend as a teenaged volunteer at the Special Olympics in our high school’s stadium, in a way so many adults can’t understand even now. Because if our family’s enthusiasm can teach them this one thing… well then, that would be something, right?

I asked Kit about the stickers decorating her doll’s sleeper when they came to me, Kit and her baby, as I was sitting on our powder room toilet. “Why does your baby have all those stickers?” I inquired of my daughter as casually as if we were comparing our days’ activities at the table over dinner. I’ve been a mother too long to feel embarrassed about excrement.

“My bay-bee got the stickers ’cause she was good at ahh grocery store,” Kit answered while she bent down to adjust the blanket she’d tucked into the stroller beside her doll.

When my three children are well-behaved at the grocery store, they’re usually awarded with PAID stickers, pressed against their small chests by baggers and cashiers who have made it their business to always remember Archie, Kit and Jack’s names. To my children those stickers feel like a fine reward, and I’ll tell you, too, that the sight of the word PAID in large print stuck to my children’s shirts like some sort of honor badge always makes me want to laugh a small, private kind of laugh because, yes, I agree. These three babies have been paid for, with sweat and tears and blood.

Today was the first day back to school after spring break. This year Archie, Kit, Jack and I spent our time together drawing and painting, reading books and watching t. v., taking trips to the store, the doctor’s office, to our own backyard. I admit I wished them back to school a few times, but mostly we four coexisted comfortably.

Three years ago on the Friday before Easter I stood in the checkout line at the grocery store, wondering why the lights above me seemed so bright, why all the stimuli surrounding me seemed to be coming in so slow but then stirred around inside my skull so fast, why nothing about this ordinary trip to the store on an ordinary day seemed very ordinary at all.

Archie had been home all week, and the twins were only one. I’d only meant to pick up a few things at the store and I was sure I could manage the trip alone, but the twins were crying and Archie was doing his wha-wha-wha-whining thing with half of his hand shoved into his mouth, and I was tired, and hungry, and oh-good-god-already I’ve had enough.

Later that afternoon John took me to the urgent treatment center because I was sure I was having a stroke and that’s where a patient doctor listened to me as I tried to find the words to describe what was happening inside my head. After I finished my nonsensical description that doctor explained to me that I was experiencing an anxiety attack, then he emptied a syringe of liquid into the fleshy part of my hip and instructed John to take me home and put me to bed. I slept like a woman without worry that night three years ago and I’ll say now that although I may not always manage Archie, Kit and Jack with aplomb, we four do better these days than we used to.

On Saturday afternoon John and I took the kids to the grocery store again. John loaded Kit and Jack into a racecar shopping cart, and I let Archie pick out a metal cart he could ride in while I pushed. A few aisles into our shopping trip Kit and Jack asked John if they could get out of the cart and walk beside it instead. “If you promise to behave and stay close,” John negotiated.

When Archie saw his father lift his brother and sister out of the cart he asked me if he could get down, too. “No,” I answered as I paid more attention to what was on the shelf beside me than to what the little boy in front of me was asking.

“Yes, I can,” Archie growled at me, the timber of his voice rising up inside his throat.

“No, you can’t,” I insisted thinking then of the boy who likes to empty shelves and laugh wholeheartedly at the ensuing mess.

Archie growled again, his tone as insistent as my own this time. “I can.”

That’s when I really heard my son. He can. And that’s when I heard what Archie was hearing in my answer, I say you can’t. The realization humbled me.

As I lifted Archie from the shopping cart I struck the same bargain with him as John had with Kit and Jack. “No funny business, buddy,” I concluded.

And there wasn’t any either. Archie walked beside me up and down the aisles. He held my hand. He could. He was right. Once Archie turned his face into my hand and kissed it. My chest felt full and I smiled at everyone we passed. Our steps were small, Archie-sized, but even tiny treads can complete a course.

Over coffee on Friday afternoon my friend and I talked about the trip we took to the museum with our children earlier that week. Jack was at the doctor’s office with John, Archie was watching Noggin’, and Kit and Sophia were seated at the kitchen table near Rachel and me. They were painting, and we were talking.

Rachel told me that she’d talked to her husband over dinner about the way other people at the museum looked at Archie, about the way they watched all of us. I told her that I’d noticed it as well, but that I usually notice people watching Archie, watching me and Kit and Jack and John with him, too, that I’ve learned to not notice their noticing.

Rachel and I agreed that many people smiled when we acknowledged them acknowledging us, but that some other people looked away, refusing to make eye contact with either she or me. “I always assume those people are thinking unkind things,” I confided to Rachel.

“I noticed people moving away from us, too,” Rachel said.

I hadn’t noticed that at the museum, but it’s happened before, I know. I told Rachel about the Gymboree classes I used to take Archie to when he was small, about how all the other babies progressed through the classes more quickly than Archie did, about how this meant we met a lot of new classmates whose mothers sometimes paused when it was my turn to introduce Archie, say his name and his age, and then stumble all over myself as I tried to explain his diagnosis and make excuses for his obvious delays.

I told Rachel that one day during class a mother pulled her baby away from Archie when he rolled across the mat to smile hugely at that other baby, to laugh and snort excitedly as he lay on his chest and pump his arms and legs in the air as if he were trying to swim or fly. I told Rachel how that woman and her gesture, intentional and unkind, destroyed me that day. I didn’t say anything to that other mother, and I didn’t cry right there on the mat, or leave the class either. Instead I reached out to retrieve my baby and later carried him and that woman’s calloused action home with me way down deep at the bottom of a pit inside my stomach.

“The momma bear in me wanted to come out at the museum,” Rachel confessed as she sat across from me at my kitchen table. She puffed up her chest when she said so, pulling her elbows tight against her sides, making fists with her hands. Her shoulders rose up around her neck. “We all have issues. He just wears his out here,” Rachel said then, waving her hand in front of her face.

I implicitly understood Rachel’s reaction. I’ve felt that way, too, at those Gymboree classes when Archie was small, and then again, and again. There are some days when looks or gestures bother me more than they do other days, but mostly I’ve learned to smile at anyone who may look at us a little too long. And when I smile I hope that my face says, I love him. I wish you would open your heart to him, too.

I’ve learned to wish, but not to force. I’m also learning to listen. To myself, to Archie, to Kit and Jack, too. And I have to say that writing these things right now makes me realize that my children aren’t the only ones who are growing up.

That link above will take you to an article that appeared in today’s New York Times. It was written by a mother whose son is autistic. The following quote from the article struck Maya as significant, and it impacted me in a similar way:

Annie Lubliner Lehmann writes, “[W]hen I look at him I can’t help wondering if the past years weren’t some heaven-directed scheme meant to humble us and teach us the value of acceptance. Understanding that we couldn’t change him had changed us.”

What would my answer be if I turned that musing of Lehmann’s back on myself? I know it, and I bet you readers do, too.

Also, I was the 1,734th person to cross the finish line. That sounds like something to thumb your nose at, I know, but it’s not when you consider that approximately 39,000 people ran or walked the race. That’s a lot of race participants to pack into one place, don’t you think?

There’s a lot I could tell you about the run. I could write about how I blew out the first three miles, including the bridge’s ascent, in just 23 minutes. Or I could tell you about the amazingly quick fourth mile I ran, and then the subsequent fifth mile during which I wished for death so I could at least exit from the course gracefully. That’s when I swore I’d never run again, that I’d give this whole, insane pursuit up entirely if the race could be over-already-right-now, please.

But mentioning those things alone wouldn’t be telling the whole story because, for me, the true grit of a runner’s tale can be found in her final mile. That’s when I dug as deep as I could go, that’s when I turned the corners from Meeting Street to John Street, from John to King Street, from King to Wentworth Street, as fast as I could, and that’s where I let the bottom fall out, on Wentworth, when I sprinted that final length to the finish line.

After I finished, after John found me and I ate an orange and a banana and drank a bottle of water, we visited with John’s younger brother Lewis at the Knight’s of Columbus, then bounced around the streets downtown visiting one shop then another, waiting for the race to end so we could cross the street and get back to our car. Two or three hours would pass from the time I’d crossed the finish line before the race officials and law enforcement officers would open the race course to traffic again.

As soon the barricades were gone and we were able to cross the street, John and I began to pick our way toward our car. As I turned my head to look for oncoming cars down King Street, I saw her. She was holding onto the arm of an old man and she was slowly, carefully walking down the street to make that next-to-last turn toward the finish line.

She limped as she walked, as if she had Cerebral Palsy or had suffered a stroke. Two police officers road their motorcycles in front of her, their headlights on, indicating that she would be the last race participant to cross the finish line. We people strewn across the sides of the street paused as she neared. Everyone stopped talking, stopped hollering, and all you could hear was the hum of the cruisers’ engines, the sound of the street cleaner swooshing water across the pavement a block away.

Someone started to clap. I put down the things I was carrying in my hands so I could clap, too. John did the same. I think I was the first person to yell out to her, the last race participant, and as soon as I did other people began to whistle and cheer, too. We kept it up until she passed us, turning that next-to-last corner toward the finish line.

After she passed I bent over to pick up the things I’d laid down in front of me. People began to walk again, to talk again, and John and I turned away from King Street to make our way home. That’s when I felt like crying and I told John as much.

As soon as I’d found John after I finished running I had to hold onto his arm until my legs steadied themselves again. I’d given my best effort, and this woman on another man’s arm was, too. What I’d accomplished that morning was important to me, but what this woman was doing felt bigger. Her efforts belonged to her, but they seemed universal, too. It’s trite to say so, I know, but I’m thankful her triumph gave me that perspective this past Saturday morning in Charleston. I really am.

“Most people don’t think of this word as hate speech, but that’s exactly what it feels like to millions of people with intellectual disabilities, their families and friends,” writes Sean Carroll of the Special Olympics. “Using ‘retard’ as a term of derision is just as cruel and offensive as any other slur.”

I’m participating in this movement because… well, this is why…

When someone says the words “retard” or “retarded” in front of me I’m instantly transported back in time to that summer afternoon I stood in front of the kitchen sink in my parents house, holding my hands under the water running out of the faucet. I’d just received a call from the doctor who preformed my amniocentesis after he discovered an abnormality in my baby’s heart, one that the doctor explained was largely indicative of a diagnosis of Down syndrome.

He’d lied, that doctor, and told me that the geneticist hadn’t yet shared with him the results from my test, but that he’d like John and me to come see him in his office later that afternoon. John and I knew what the doctor meant to do, and we agreed that we’d feel more capable of handling the news coming our way if my parents accompanied us to that appointment. I’d leave work and John would do the same, we agreed, and we’d meet at my Mom and Dad’s house before driving the distance to the doctor’s office.

So I was standing in front of that kitchen sink when my dad walked in the door. He was grim-faced and his shoulders hung forward, and I remember how wounded his countenance made me feel. “Do you mind if we come along?” my father asked me then.

Why are you asking me this?, I remember thinking, frustrated and angered by my father’s politeness. We already told you we wanted you to be there! That’s what I said inside my own head, but instead I sighed aloud and then spit out, “No, you can come. But I don’t know why we all have to go to find out that our baby is retarded.”

When I said that word then I spoke out of the hurt inside my heart. When I think that word today it also originates from a place of tenderness, a place of vulnerability. When you say that word aloud in my presence it reminds me of the ignorance I once had regarding my son’s diagnosis, of the ignorance I fear will always influence society’s perception of my son.

You see, that day in front of the kitchen sink I didn’t expect Archie to change my view of intellectual disabilities as completely as he has. I didn’t know how bright my baby would be in spite of his diagnosis, in spite of all the medications he’s received that indicated possible cognitive impairment.

I didn’t know that one day my five-year-old son would be able to recite a pile of books, word for word, or count to 67 as I pushed him on the swing at the park one spring afternoon. I didn’t know then that one day he’d have a younger sister of whom he would implore, “Kit, let me see your hand,” when she sat at our family’s kitchen table one evening, frowning hugely and whining about her sore finger. I didn’t know either that this morning, just today, Archie would say to me, his speech still thick with sleep, “Mama, don’t go running. It’s still dark outside.”

All of this is why when you say the words “retard” or “retarded” to describe something stupid, dumb, or annoying your flippancy hurts me. You may not think that my son is retarded, and although I thank you for thinking so, you should know that your words still wound me in a way I struggle to describe aloud.

If what I’ve said effected you, or if you share a similar perspective and you’d like to join me in participating in the Special Olympic’s Spread the Word to End the Word campaign, you can do so in any of the following ways:

Go here and sign the pledge.

Write a post on your blog that describes why you should end the use of the “R” word.

As always, thanks for reading.

My answer this morning sounded a lot like my answer yesterday morning, as well as my answer the morning before that. “First we’re going to eat breakfast. Then Daddy will help you get dressed. After that you can listen to the popcorn song. Then we’ll go to school.”

“Go to school to see Nardia!” Archie concurred excitedly, clapping his hands as he turned his eyes up toward the ceiling and jutted his chin way out. Nardia is Archie’s teacher and he likes her very much.

“Yes, you’ll go to school to see Nardia,” I repeated. Most days our shared language is of the call-and-response variety, Archie’s and mine.

Later in the car, on the way to school, Archie and I shared the exact same conversation except this one didn’t end when Archie became more interested in what I’d set in front of him at the kitchen table than what I had to say. And this second time around Archie told me he was going to school to see Nardia, then asked me, “And then we’ll…”

I was supposed to fill in the blank he left at the end of the sentence. “Don’t know,” I told him. “We’ll have to figure that out this afternoon.”

“Huh,” Archie grunted from the backseat of the car. He doesn’t like blank pages in the storybooks of his days, that boy of mine. I can’t say I blame him either. Routine breeds security, and direction feels purposeful. I know this, and I suppose I’m passing the knowledge along to my children, too.

Earlier this week the company John works for filed a voluntary Chapter 11 petition. We’d sensed this was coming for some time, John and I, and as John understands it the filing was a smart, business-savvy move. The good news is that BI-LO’s sales have risen significantly in the past few months and we believe that things will soon turn around in the company’s favor, but still. But still inside our own home it feels like we’re just going through the motions every day, planning for the worst, hoping for the best, and waiting to see what happens.

So I dropped Archie off at school this morning with a promise that we’d just hang out together this afternoon, he, his brother and sister, and I. Then I turned my car around and drove back the way I came, across town, toward Kit and Jack’s school. John had tossed a pile of clothing he wanted me to take to the dry cleaner’s today on the passenger seat in my car, so when I saw that I’d made it to Kit and Jack’s school early I passed it by and drove down the road just a mile more to drop off this load of dress shirts and pants and pick up another.

“It’s Dhanesh’s dad!” Jack proclaimed with enthusiasm when we pulled up to the drive-thru window. We’ve been going to the same dry cleaner’s for years, since before Archie was born. When we started going there we took my work clothing to be cleaned, too. Some days that revelation makes me laugh, especially when my car’s a cacophony filled with cranky kids.

When I was pregnant with Archie, after we’d learned of his diagnosis, John shared our news with the dry cleaner and he in turn shared his home phone number with my husband. The dry cleaner knew that John traveled a lot for work and he wanted to be sure I had someone to call at night if I needed anything. I remember that kind gesture made me cry then, back during those early days when my emotions rode high in my throat and I was learning to accept what I’d been given. Now all these years later, I don’t cry as much as I used to, John doesn’t travel much for work anymore, we have twins in addition to Archie, and one of the dry cleaner’s three sons, a twin himself, is in Kit and Jack’s classroom at school.

As I handed my debit card to the dry cleaner he handed a business card to Jack. I could see that there were numbers written on the back of the card in a child’s hand. “Give that to Dhanesh,” the dry cleaner instructed Jack. Then he handed another card with more numbers to Kit. “Here is one for you to give Dhanesh, too,” he told her.

“What is it?” she wanted to know.

“Dhanesh was practicing his writing. That card will let him know you came here before school and he’ll be excited about it,” the dry cleaner explained.

At school a few minutes later Kit and Jack ran down the hall toward their classroom, those cards tucked into the palms of their hands. As I watched them run ahead of me, looking for their friend, I marveled at the way time works. I used to think I had control over what comes next based on the decisions I make, but every day I believe a little more that time just is and circumstances just are.

After I left Kit and Jack’s school I went to the gym. Before I got on the elliptical to warm up before my workout began, I stooped to tie my shoes. When I get a new pair of trainers for running, I retire my old ones from the road and use them instead at the gym. But my most recent trainers are really, really road-worn so I’m trying to figure out now how to justify purchasing new gym shoes when I just bought new trainers.

Judy, one of the ladies with whom I work out, was watching me so I looked up at her from my place on the floor. “I need new shoes,” I offered.

“So go buy some,” she responded.

“But I feel guilty…” I began to reply, but Judy interrupted me there.

“A mother should never feel guilty,” she intoned. Judy has three adult daughters herself and buckets full of sage parenting advice hewn from her own experience. “I know shoes are expensive, but if John had to hire someone to do what you do every day he’d have to pay them one-hundred-grand.”

Since John and I had already agreed that I should buy another pair of shoes for the gym, and since Judy had encouraged me to do so, too, I sat down at this desk when I got home, in front of this computer, and ordered a new pair of racing flats I’ve coveted for a while now online. I decided to retire my old flats to the gym and instead wear the racing equivalent of my trainers next weekend in Charleston. I’m signed up for the Cooper River Bridge Run again this year except this time around I know what to expect and what to do, and I’ve earned a place in a faster heat.

Maybe I should feel remorseful for buying those shoes, but I don’t. There are things we know, I’ve learned, and things we can only guess at. I believe here in our home we’ll be going through the motions again next week, waiting to see what happens. But I know I’ll be in Charleston next Saturday morning, standing behind a starting gate swathed in dawn’s early light. And that’s something for which I can prepare myself, no matter what.

I usually encourage Jack’s interest in the president, but I didn’t feel like enthusiastically discussing the administration during that drive home so I let Jack’s comment dissipate without debate. Jack, however, wasn’t satisfied by my silence. “Mommy, I saaaaiiiiid it’s Barack Obama!”

“No, Jack,” I sighed. Then I explained tersely, tightly, “It’s an American flag. Barack Obama is our president, not our flag.”

Jack didn’t reply, but Kit did. “Mommy, what’s wrong?” she asked. I looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror and saw that Kit was frowning, that she looked concerned.

“Nothing,” I lied.

“Mmmmmmooooommmmmyyyyy!” Kit and Jack yelled in unison and you should know that try as I may, I cannot lie to my children.

“I’m upset,” I answered, keeping my explanation straightforward, succinct.

“Why?” Kit pushed.

I weighed my options in the string of seconds that followed. Should I disregard my children’s concern and attempt to change the subject? Or should I turn my disappointment into an opportunity to teach my children about something they’ll surely experience themselves some day soon?

“My feelings are hurt,” I answered.

“Why?” the twins asked together.

“Because Barack Obama hurt my feelings,” I said plainly, making an effort to limit my response to a description Kit and Jack would understand. They believe I know the president personally, I’m sure, so I hoped this explanation would satiate their curiosity.

But still Kit pressed some more, “Why?” The tone in her voice alerted me that she was genuinely concerned.

That’s when I sensed it was time to lay all my cards on the table. “Because he made fun of Archie and his friends who are like him, and that disappointed me a lot and really hurt my feelings because I never expected the president to say something like that.”

“Oh,” Kit and Jack breathed at the same time. Kit stared downward, toward the floor, and Jack raised his hand to his mouth and stuck the tip of one fingernail between his teeth.

“My feelings are hurt, too,” Kit told me after she considered my explanation for a few beats. We three were silent then, our car passing a few more houses before Kit asked, “But why?”

“Why what?” I wondered aloud.

“Why did he say ‘dat?”

John and I have spoken to Kit and Jack before about Down syndrome, about what it means for Archie, what it means to us. When we did they’d asked questions, simple ones, and in turn we always tried to provide Kit and Jack with concise answers that addressed their questions precisely, honestly. It always felt like the fair thing to do, the right thing to do. And this occasion, driving home from school in the car, didn’t feel much different.

Again I looked at Kit’s reflection in the rearview mirror. She looked back and I knew she was hanging on my every word, waiting for an answer to her question.

“You know how Archie’s a little different than you guys?” We’ve covered this material before, Archie, Kit, Jack, John and I.

Both Kit and Jack nodded in response and answered, “Ah-huh.”

“And you know how Dad and I told you that Archie’s differences aren’t bad, that they just explain the way he is? Well, the president was making fun of that difference.”

Kit crinkled her nose as she thought. “Of Archie’s eyes?” she wanted to know and I’ll tell you now that I’ll never profess to understand the way in which a three-year-old’s mind works.

“Kind of,” I answered. “But really he was talking about the way Archie learns.”

“Oh,” said Kit.

That’s when Jack launched into a tirade. “Barack Obama, I say you’re a bad man! I say that you no make a-fun of my Archie! I think-a you need to go to a timeout!”

I didn’t know how to respond to Jack’s outburst other than to validate his feelings. “It’s o.k. to feel angry, Jack.” And then after we passed the gas station on the corner I added, “I’m angry, too.”

This afternoon I filled out a form Archie’s teacher sent home from school, an application for participation in the Special Olympics. In just a few weeks Archie will compete for the first time in these games as a member of the Young Athletes Program. Archie’s teacher reports that he’s been practicing for these Olympic games each week as part of his classroom learning activities. She says, too, that my oldest boy and his classmates will march in the opening ceremonies parade, and together they’ll participate in the traditional lighting of the Olympic torch.

As I worked my way down through the release form the teacher sent home, checking off the appropriate boxes that describe Archie’s complicated health history in short and snappy phrases, I wondered to myself how Special Olympics became associated with inability rather than ability.

I freely admit that Archie is no athlete, that in fact he can barely walk the distance from our parked car to a building’s entrance without succumbing to the urge to sit and rest a bit. I say that in one breathe, but in the next I’ll tell you of the baby who once lay in an isolette attached to a variety of beeping and undulating machines over whom his physicians would shake their heads, shrug their shoulders, then admit aloud, “Mrs. Moore, I just don’t understand what’s happening here.”

I tell you that Archie can barely land on his feet after jumping two inches across the floor, but I’ll tell you, too, of the toddler whose disease was so pronounced at diagnosis that his abdomen was hard and distended in a way that it prohibited me from fastening his pants before we’d left our home, panicked and disbelieving, to meet the cancer specialists waiting for us at the hospital.

I’ll write here that Archie can’t throw a small, big, nor medium-sized ball very far no matter how hard he tries, but that story wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t tell you the rest of it, the part during which Archie runs with all his might, his shoulders shaking with laughter the entire way across our backyard, when I pretend that I can’t field his pitch, when my pantomimed actions imply that maybe he can beat me to the ball lying still in the grass this time if he runs fast enough, if he tries hard enough.

He hopes, this boy of mine. He always has and in doing so he’s taught me how to hope, too, how to learn to believe. He’s changed me in a way that means I’ll never, ever utter a derogatory quip about people who are disabled again, nor laugh along when someone else does. I just can’t tolerate it, no matter who makes the joke.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

It won’t always be this way, I remind myself when I feel like complaining about it all. I’d rather do this than comfort my children when they discover they weren’t invited to this event, or another, I reason some more. Because those days will come, I know. This, too, the preschooler’s popularity fueled by coerced inclusion, shall pass. Until that happens, though, I’ll accompany Archie, Kit and Jack to all these parties even if it isn’t always convenient to do so, and I’ll try not to feel slighted when I spend more on birthday gifts for my children’s friends than I do updating my own wardrobe.

Saturday morning’s party was a pajama party. Our neighbor served donuts and other breakfast treats, and all the children wore pajamas. My mother suggested I wear them, too, and I did but I never would have thought to do so myself if she hadn’t suggested it first. But I’ll tell you that I didn’t look as fashionable as my children, especially Archie in his polyester plaid pajama bottoms and baby-blue bathrobe who John proclaimed looked just like Hugh Hefner (and he did).

Underneath Archie’s bathrobe he wore a Wonder Pets pajama top. When John helped Archie pull the shirt over his head on Saturday morning Archie belted out a line from the cartoon’s theme song, loudly and out-of-tune. “What’s gonna work?” he crooned and then paused to breathe. “Teeeeeeeeaaam work!” John and I laughed out loud when Archie finished drawing that “k” in “work” out to its last syllable, then this morning as I ran alongside the road in the dark I thought of John and my laughter, and of Archie’s singing, and then thought to myself that if our family had its own theme song we’d have to claim that lyrical line as our own.

Yesterday’s party was for one of Kit and Jack’s classmates. While we were eating birthday cake Jack asked the mother sitting beside me about her baby who was sleeping in the stroller parked next to her legs. A few beats later Jack told that other mother a joke pertaining to her baby, and so she responded with a silly question of her own. “Does your mommy have her own baby?” the mother asked even though she knew the answer to that question already.

“Noooooo,” Jack answered, laughing and shaking his head from side to side. “I’m my mommy’s baby.”

Kit was seated across the table from Jack, next to the other mother’s daughter. Both girls had been following along with the conversation, but Kit had nothing to say until then. “We don’t have a baby,” she explained. “We have ah Archie.”

Jack agreed. “Yes, we have ah Archie. He’s our sister.”

“Brother,” I corrected as I thought to myself how exactly right Kit was. Yes. We have an Archie.

Kit was still upstairs sleeping when I got back from my run this morning. Archie and Jack were at the kitchen table, Jack eating a blob of peanut butter with a spoon and Archie sipping his yogi milk from a straw cup. John had already set out Kit’s breakfast, packed the twins’ lunch boxes, and emptied the dishwasher so as the boys finished breakfast and I waited for the coffee to brew I folded the load of clean towels I’d tossed into the dryer before going upstairs to bed last night.

After I put the dishtowels, washrags and bibs away in the kitchen I climbed the steps with our bath towels and floor mats. I carried that armful into my bathroom, put the towels away in the linen closet and laid the mats on the floor in front of the tub, outside the shower door, then I walked down the hall to Kit’s room.

I had to shake Kit, my hand on her shoulder, a few times to wake her and when I finally did she wouldn’t open her eyes. “Mommy, I’m tired,” Kit told me, her eyes still closed. “Me ah no want to get up yet.”

“I know it,” I promised her. “I’m tired, too.”

That’s when Kit sat up in her bed, opened her eyes, and began to untangle herself from her covers. Archie, who had followed me up the stairs and into Kit’s room, hugged his sister. “It’s Kit,” he proclaimed. “Miss Kit!” When they’d finished hugging Archie grabbed onto one of Kit’s hands and I reached for her other hand. Together the three of us walked down the hall toward the top of the staircase. Archie let go of Kit’s hand and sat so he could slide down the steps on his bottom, but I continued to hold onto Kit’s hand until she and I reached the last step, the one at the foot of the stairs.

I ran back upstairs then, back to my bathroom again, to change out of my running clothes and into something dry. I washed my face and brushed my teeth, made the beds and collected a pile of dirty clothes, then went downstairs. Archie was reading a book in the living room, Jack was laying his train tracks across the family room floor, and Kit was at the kitchen table, licking the jelly and butter off her toast and staring out the French doors into our back yard.

It was drizzling outside and the rising sun wasn’t doing much to brighten the morning. “It’s a fuzzy day,” Kit observed.

“You mean foggy,” I corrected her without laughing, thinking then of that line from a John Updike story I read for a class in college in which a father comments that his daughter is “determined not to let language slip on her tongue and tumble her so that we laugh.”

Kit got that adjective wrong this morning, but just yesterday while seated at that same seat at this same table my daughter got something else exactly right.

On Sunday morning I fought Archie through breakfast. He wouldn’t eat, and I wouldn’t back down. He cried. I yelled. And then Archie flung his spoon to the ground in defiance and when he did his hand hit my face. That surprised him and stopped me short. As I got up from the table to get a washrag from the drawer beside the sink, I exhaled deeply and spoke aloud, clear and cold. “When you get like this, Archie, I just want to pick you up and throw you across the kitchen.”

I didn’t, and I wouldn’t, of course. But I was frustrated so I said as much. When I did John shot me a dirty look from his place in front of the toaster. I didn’t care.

But I did care when my daughter called out to me across the silence. “You can’t do dat, Mommy!” Kit chastised. “He’s our family!”

No one said anything more until I spoke again. I told Kit she was right, and I admitted I’d been wrong. I apologized, too, and then the entire incident dissipated into the corners of the room like family arguments often do. Archie decided to eat after all, the twins carried their dirty plates from the kitchen table to the sink, and John buttered his toast. All the while I leaned against the kitchen island, paging through the newspaper and drinking my coffee.

Our family. Yes, this is it.

That’s true, I know.

So I ran the 32nd Annual Reedy River 10K Saturday morning. For the uninitiated that’s 6.2 miles over downtown Greenville’s streets, trails and footbridges. I finished in 48:25 minutes, averaging a 7:50 mile. I bettered my previous 10K time by eight minutes, placed ninth in my age group, and finished 50th out of 645 female runners (official race results can be found here).

I set out to finish the race under 49 minutes, so I was pleased with how I performed. When I crossed the finish line I looked at John who was standing directly in front of me on the other side of the barricades separating the runners from the spectators and breathed, “I did it!” Because I had. And that felt awesome.

There’s a song on my iPod I listen to most mornings when I’m out on the road, running along the shoulder. It begins with a short, synthesized guitar riff and then Brandon Flowers intones, “I did my best to notice, when the call came down the line. Up to the platform of surrender, I was brought but I was kind.”

“And sometimes I get nervous when I see an open door,” he continues. “Close your eyes, clear your heart… Cut the cord.”

I’ve written before about the start of a race, and hearing this song again today made me think of Saturday morning on Main Street. It made me think about waking up Saturday, too, about when the alarm went off and I actually smiled before I slipped out of bed. I wanted to run the race; I was ready.

Not too long ago I used to approach the starting line with a rolling stomach, but now I stand there as if I’m utterly confident in myself, in what I’m doing. I’m not sure how that happened, but I’m glad it did. It’s as if I’ve given in to myself and this is the reward. To be honest, it feels like a kind of redemption, really, but I don’t know from what I thought I needed to be redeemed. I guess I’m still figuring that part out.

“Go for it,” I replied turning away from the computer screen to look at my daughter.

Kit put her hands behind her back and leaned against the wall beside the window before she started to talk. “Um, um, um, umm…,” Kit began and you should know in case you couldn’t figure it out by the way I wrote it that Kit sometimes stutters when she talks. “Ummm… Jackie Moore tried to go ah potty like, um, Daddy, but… um, um, um… he missed ah potty and, ahhhh… um, he make a big mess.”

“He did?” I asked with mock incredulity and Kit nodded in response. We’ve taught Jack to sit on a toilet to pee, to use his pointer finger to tuck himself down into the toilet bowel so he won’t pee on the seat. I know he uses the urinals in the lavatory at school like the other boys in his class, but until yesterday I had no idea Jack wanted to try standing in front of a toilet to pee at home.

“He’s in my bathroom,” she snitched.

Upstairs I found Jack standing against the wall in that small space between the toilet and the sink. His jeans and underwear were down around his ankles and he was holding his hands in fists against his lips. I could tell he was anxious about what my reaction to his attempt at peeing while standing may be.

“Kit said you tried to pee like Daddy,” I offered.

Jack launched into this rambling explanation about where he’d stood to pee, the trajectory his urine took, how he’d wanted it to go into the potty instead. I smiled as Jack talked and assured him he wasn’t in trouble when he finished speaking. “Hey, you tried,” I told him. “That’s what counts. Pull up your pants and I’ll go get a towel so we can clean this up.”

In truth, Jack didn’t make that much of a mess. There weren’t any puddles on the floor, and there were only a few drops of urine sprayed against the raised toilet lid. Honestly, I have to say that I was impressed.

In other liquid-related news, Kit and Jack recently developed an affinity for grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. I used to feed them grilled cheese sandwiches when they were younger, the kind I grew up eating in Pennsylvania with butter slathered on the outside of each piece of bread, both sides of the sandwich grilled brown in a hot skillet on the stovetop, with two pieces of processed cheese melted in the middle, but I stopped for a while for whatever reason.

Sunday’s snow and Monday’s school cancellation reminded me of similar days from my own childhood when my mother would usher my brother and I inside from the cold and place this menu, grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, on the kitchen table in front of us. So I made it, too, for my own children and ever since Kit’s asked for tomato soup and that bread with cheese sandwich for each meal.

Mostly I’ve indulged her request and each time I have she eats what I place in front of her with relish. Jack does, too, which is both refreshing and satisfying because that boy, he rarely eats. I was even able to talk Archie into tasting a few spoonfuls of soup the other day, into touching his tongue to the spoon, please, Archie, I’d appreciate it so very much. He did, and I did, and that was a new kind of something to celebrate as we four sat around the kitchen table, Archie and me smiling hugely and Kit and Jack clapping for their big brother.

So Kit was eating her sandwich and soup yesterday afternoon, polishing off her sixth request for this menu, when she paused, spoon in air, and then looked at me. “I’m fat,” she said.

“Are you kidding me?,” I wanted to holler in response. “This? Already? But you’re only freakin’ three years old and you’re small and willow-y and I think you’re built like me, like my grandfather all sinewy and solid, or your father’s grandmother who was all kinds of tiny, and that you probably won’t ever be fat even when you first go to college and gain the freshman fifteen!”

That is what I thought, sitting there at the kitchen table across from Kit, but instead I replied, “Do you mean you feel full?”

“No, um, I mean I’m um, um, um… fat,” Kit clarified.

My mind clicked and whirred, faster than fast. I was searching for the appropriate response, but I wasn’t sure what that was. I can’t remember the last time I commented aloud on my own weight. To be honest, I don’t think about my weight very much at all. I eat well; I exercise. I’m fortunate that the rest of the equation falls into place based on those two variables.

John doesn’t talk about his weight, or his diet, or even his appearance for that matter. He works out, too, and when we talk together about our time at the gym John and I don’t compare how many calories we burned, rather we talk about how difficult it was to finish today’s set of crazy eights, or step-up’s, or all those pull-up’s the trainer at the gym fit into the middle of today’s workout. But I don’t think we ever utter the word fat, neither to describe ourselves, or others.

I wanted to ask Kit so many things, but instead I just said, “You’re not fat, Kit,” then let it go at that.

Maybe this fat bit is just another little girl thing? Kit is more insightful than her brothers, and more concerned, too. There isn’t much she misses, and she’ll always ask John or I to explain or clarify those things that she doesn’t understand.

Just yesterday I sent Kit to our time-out spot on the bottom step of the staircase because she knocked Jack’s blocks down in frustration when he told her he’d rather she not help him build the road and bridges he was setting up across the family room floor. She kicked the blocks and sent them flying, then yelled out, and I swooped in and marched her off to serve her time on the stairs. “We don’t do mean things like that to our brothers,” I reprimanded. And then to Jack I suggested, “You should share your blocks with your sister. You’d have more fun building that road if she played with you, too.”

After Kit was released from time-out, after she’d apologized to Jack, after they played together with the blocks for a while, my girl came to me and wanted to know, “Mommy, do you still love me?”

“Of course I love you,” I confirmed. “What makes you think I wouldn’t?”

“Um, um… because I was bad and had to um, um, um go to ah time-out,” she explained.

My goodness.

This morning Archie awoke early again. He’s been doing this for days now, and when he does he wants me to get up with him, too. John’s gone to the gym that time of the morning and I’m usually preparing to leave the house to run as soon as John walks through the door, home again, so it isn’t such a big thing to get up with Archie, to bring him downstairs with me. So I do and together we cut into the darkness of the family room, me carrying my oldest boy down the stairs on my hip. These past few mornings we’ve sat together in darkness, Archie and I. He is tucked into my lap and I’m flipping through the channels on the television set.

When it snowed we lost our cable connection. John pulled an antenna out of the hall closet, hooked it up to the television set, and for a couple days we watched only the stations we could find in standard-definition. One morning while flipping through the channels I came upon an episode of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. We’d watched the series last summer, Archie, Kit, Jack and I, but then the station that aired it altered it’s programming and Mister Roger’s was lost to us. We’re happy to have found it again, and on these early mornings when Archie joins me downstairs I use the television clicker to turn off our cable connection and together Archie and I sit in the dark, watching Mister Roger’s together.

I am racing tomorrow morning, so I’ve been tapering this week. That means I’ve skipped my morning runs since Wednesday and have been home for the end of the show when Mister Roger’s sings, “It’s a good feeling to know you’re alive…” Archie sings that song with Mister Roger’s, too, every word of it, and my god I can’t tell you how it makes me smile every time he does.

Do you know what else made me smile today? After I took Archie, Kit and Jack to school this morning I went downtown to pick up my race packet for tomorrow’s Reedy River 10K Run. It’s usually difficult to find a parking space along Main Street, but somehow, someway I was able to park in the first spot right outside the Poinsett Hotel where the run expo was located. There was a time when I would have acknowledged this as a sign of my impending greatness, but since I’ve become a mother and wised up about some very important things I’ve realized that I make my own luck, that I’m forging my own fate.

Before the half-marathon in Myrtle Beach I didn’t tell you that I’d been sick with some sort of upper-respiratory infection and that my right foot was giving me all sorts of problems. I imaged such an admission would only elicit an e-mail from my brother that read simply enough, “Making excuses already?” So I kept it to myself and pushed on.

After the run, after I was home again and still feeling washed out, I went to the doctor who diagnosed me with bronchitis and Achilles tendonitis. So I’ve been taking prescription medications for my cough, and I’ve been doing stretches for my foot, and things are better nearly all the way around. Which is good and makes me feel ready for tomorrow’s run. Which makes me smile, too, when I think of that parking space right in front of the hotel and the runner’s expo that made me feel for a moment that all these things that matter to me today are falling into place.

When I left the expo I dropped by the running shoe store where I like to shop. Clive was working again this morning, and he agreed to accept the trainers I wanted to return, the ones I wore that I suspect contributed to my Achilles tendonitis, in exchange for a new pair of my old favorite trainers, thank goodness.

In reality Clive and I talked shoes. I showed him the ones I’d brought back packed inside their box, and he took my name, my phone number and my shoe size so he could order the shoes I wanted.

But inside my head I was a better customer, one who reached to touch Clive’s elbow as he wrote my information on the store’s order form, one who explained that he fitted me for the shoes in which I ran my first half-marathon, the same ones I used again a few weekends ago to run my second. Inside my head I thanked Clive for helping me along the way to that place out on the race route where I found my confidence, to that instant in time that I made my mind my friend again.

So there’s all this, a whole, big mixed bag, but I just saw Kit and Jack walk past the office door on their way to the bathroom. I guess I better see what they’re doing, and clean up pee again if Jack wants to try to go like his Daddy, standing up in front of the toliet.

We share conversations, real ones with actual subjects, beginnings, middles and ends. And we play games, made-up amusements that end in fits of laughter as well as structured exercises designed to teach preschool stuff like letters, and numbers, and colors, and shapes. Sure, Archie, Kit and Jack have nearly memorized all those things already, but the fun of it is watching them reveal in the realization of how much they already know.

You’re so smart, I tell each of them one hundred times a day. And I’m so proud of you. When they three are older and find themselves sitting in a desk in math class, not knowing how in the world their teacher is figuring the problem inked out on the transparency film set upon the overhead projector at the front of the class, I hope they remember how adamantly I believe in their ability to succeed.

While getting to share all these new intimacies with my children is reward enough for giving up naptime, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the beneficial effects our new schedule has had on bedtime. It’s earlier, for one thing. Archie, Kit and Jack actually ask to take a warm bath and then to go to bed now, please. And they mean that, too, the part about rushing off to bed with immediacy because once their father and I have tucked each of them into bed all three children are blissfully asleep in no time at all. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that alone is award enough for our long afternoons, one that’s all wrapped up in wonderment.

All the snow lying on the ground the past two evenings has reflected the day’s last light through our windows, brightening both bedtimes. Even still Kit and Jack insisted on keeping their bedside lamps lit as they are both determined never to sleep in a darkened room. Their older brother’s preference for nighttime ambiance is different, though. Archie likes the room dark, almost black. “Turn off the light, Momma,” he reminds me every night as if I’d somehow forgotten since I’d last tucked him into bed.

Last night I lay awake wondering if it meant something that the twins like to sleep swathed in light, that Archie likes to sleep steeped in shadows. I do this a lot, this seeking to assign meaning to hollow things. After all, how can all these things we do and don’t do not be related in some significant way? Shouldn’t it all be tied together, all these decisions we make, across the days and weeks and months?

So last night while I lay in bed I thought of Archie’s goodnights. That made me think of his goodbyes and then his hellos, and the way Archie introduces himself to everyone he meets and how he never forgets a name. When I pick Archie up at school he stops off in his therapists’ offices or their treatment rooms on our way down the hall, toward the door. He’ll wait in the doorways until those therapists turn to look at him, acknowledging his presence, and then Archie will stick his right arm way up high over his head and touch his thumb to his pointer finger, both digits stiffly fixed in space.

Bye, Chery, or Ashley, or Courtney, or Wendy, he’ll say, and then Archie will wait until they answer in turn. He says goodbye to all the students we encounter, too, Burke, and Mary Sullivan, and Melissa, and Nicholas. Sometimes Archie will stop to hug another child, and other times he’ll just walk passed them as if this hallway was in a high school somewhere and he, late for another class, only had time for a hurried hello, a smile and a nod. Always I follow behind Archie, allowing him to lead the way.

Outside the school’s administration offices Archie bids farewell to the executive director, development associate, assistant director and secretary. He doesn’t know what they do, but he knows their names. They know his, too, so they always stop what they’re doing to take the time to answer in turn, Goodbye, Archie. See you tomorrow, and their saying his name out loud makes me think of my grandfather, my father’s father, after whom Archie was named and how he once won a prize in a good citizenship class, a copy of Dale’s Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People, and how my father and aunts and uncle always laugh when they tell that story because if there was one thing their father knew how to do instinctively without any book’s help it was win friends and influence people. Last night as I lay thinking in bed I wondered if this was one of the ways in which Archie’s birthright transcends his birth defect.

Last week in the car on our way to school Jack was telling stories. “I saw the big, bad wolf,” he said, looking out the window at a bank of trees alongside the road.

“You did?” I asked Jack as I looked at him in the rearview mirror, sensing that he wanted me to say something.

My question gave Jack pause. “He’s a little, bitty dog. He’s not a very bad wolf.”

Everyone always says that Jack looks like John, but he doesn’t. He looks just like my own father did when he was Jack’s age, and in a way Jack is more my son than John’s. Sometimes I watch Jack assess a situation, picking at his cuticles as he takes it all in. When I go to him afterwards and he folds himself into my arms, jumping up and clinging to me with his legs squeezed tight, I know it’s true: Like me, Jack’s a fanatic, too.

I thought of Jack and his wolf last night, and I also thought of something Kit and I have been talking about. She says there are girls at school who don’t want to be her friend, and when she first mentioned it two weeks ago in the car on our way home from school her words made my breathe catch in my throat.

“I asked them if I could play with them and they said ‘no-sorry-bye,” Kit explained that afternoon in the car. Another day she said one girl wouldn’t eat the sugar cookies I sent in for an “S” week snack, but then last week Kit shared with me that the same girl told her she’d like to be friends after all. I’ve talked to Kit, and I’ve talked to her teachers. We four agree that all is satisfactory now, but still I can see Kit’s adolescent years lined up before me and I wish I didn’t know them so well.

Two weekends ago we had friends over for dinner. We served cake for dessert. Archie thought that meant it was someone’s birthday so he sat alone at the kids’ table long after the other children had finished eating, working on his own plateful and singing the birthday song again and again. After he finished his dessert, Archie made his way around the dinner table where we adults still lingered, our words falling in pieces around us, our sentences scattered about the floor. He touched each person’s back, naming them as he did. I sat at the head of the table and watched Archie do this and all the while I was grateful for him and for friends who choose to ignore the dessert plate Archie flung upon the floor just because he could, for friends who strive to see my oldest son as I do.

Last week John brought home a copy of the BI-LO Charity Classic golf tournament invitation. A photo of Archie on a swing in the park swallows up the booklet’s third page. Next to it is a quote from the Meyer Center’s executive director, the same one Archie bids farewell each day on his way out of school. In the quote she is talking about BI-LO Charities and what they’ve done for the Center, about what it feels like to see a child progress.

I’ve written before about the day that photo was taken, but what I didn’t tell you then was how the photographer commented at the end of our time together that he’d collected enough shots of Archie’s tongue. Half of me wanted to strike at the photographer for saying so, but the half of me who agreed with his comment wholeheartedly kept me from doing anything at all.

The advertising agency was taking another boy’s photo that day, too, for the same publication. He was a hired model, and Archie was a suggestion made by the charity director, the agency’s customer. That charity director is a fan of both Archie and his father, and she was excited to have the opportunity to showcase someone who has benefited from her work, someone whose life overlaps with her own.

The other boy at the park that day, the one who is a model, was dressed a little shabbily I’d thought then and again now after I’ve looked through the invitation in its entirety. In addition to outlining the weekend’s activities, the booklet also names the charities supported by the event’s proceeds. So there are other photos in it, too, of people representing different organizations, people from various walks of life. I looked through the booklet and thought of the photographer and how I suspected he preferred the model, the other boy who was neither disabled, nor underprivileged, nor a survivor of some acute illness, and I thought how that boy was dressed then I wondered last night as I lay in bed thinking what it all meant after all.

I remembered picking out clothing for Kit and Jack to wear to school last week. It was Tuesday night, and I knew they’d go to church the next day in celebration of Ash Wednesday. Their teachers and the parish priest would introduce them to the practice of placing ashes on the foreheads of the faithful. I haven’t been to church in one hundred years, but still I made sure to lie out dress outfits for my children to wear. I may have questioned my commitment to the religion I was taught long ago, but I know that once my children’s father, and their grandfather, uncles and cousins, too, were altar boys all, each of them serving mass every Sunday morning. And that felt like something significant last week when I picked the clothes Kit and Jack would wear to school.

When I got to Archie’s dresser drawers that evening I passed over a long-sleeved t-shirt with a robot printed on front. I knew Archie would not go to mass that next day so I didn’t need to choose dress clothing for him, and I was sure the shirt would match the sweatshirt I’d already laid atop the dresser, but still I didn’t fold back the corners of all the shirts stacked on top of it so that I could pull it free from the pile without rumpling what I left behind. The school district was testing Archie’s cognitive ability that week, an assessment devised to fulfill a state requirement, and that night in front of Archie’s dresser I was afraid the social worker would begin their time together by asking Archie what was on his shirt and that he wouldn’t know. I didn’t want to play into her preconceptions, I decided. I’d pick another shirt.

School was cancelled again today as a result of Sunday’s snow and the precipitous driving conditions it left behind. Archie wanted to take a shower with John before he left for work. There were no schedules to keep so John invited Archie in. Kit and Jack watched a children’s program on PBS as I went into their rooms, made their beds, turned out their table lamps and picked out their clothing for the day. Today I pulled the long-sleeved robot t-shirt from Archie’s dresser drawer and brought it with me back to my room.

When he finished showering with his father I rubbed Archie’s skin with handfuls of thick lotion, then helped him lie back so I could affix his diaper into place. After I pulled his sweatpants up around his waist, I slipped the shirt over Archie’s head. He looked at it and then exclaimed, “Oh! There’s a robot on my shirt!”

This evening I’ll write here that Archie sleeps in the dark comfortably because he knows his own heart, because he has what it takes to confidently pick his own way through it all. It turns out that Archie is everything I always hoped he would be both because of me and in spite of me. What luck. He’s raising me right, that boy of mine.

All afternoon these kids of mine want me to read to them, too, book after book, and help them with puzzles and put-together toys and putty and paint. Then they want cookies, or a boost onto the potty, or help wiping up a spill by the sink leftover from a mediocre, although independent, attempt at washing hands.

It’s as if we’ve just rounded a corner onto a road we’ve never walked before and the three children keeping time beside me are suddenly taller, more aware, and they’re stepping out in front of me calling back over their shoulders, wondering, “Can you keep up, Mom? How did you get so slow?”

So that’s what I’ve been doing this past little while, keeping up with my kids. I just wanted to say so here, to let you know if you’d been wondering.

I write this now, but last night as I lay in bed I thought of Archie, Kit and Jack sleeping in their own rooms. I recalled what we did over the weekend and looked forward to what we’d do today, and then I remembered the lyrics to a song I’d listened to on my iPod while I was running down the road that morning, my footsteps falling on pavement made brighter by the advent of an earlier dawn. That’s when it coalesced for me, all those moments, and I knew what I’d write about here today if I could just find the time.

I still haven’t found the time.

But I hope to soon. I’m hanging in there.

That’s a photograph of me after I finished my second half-marathon in Myrtle Beach. If we’re facebook friends then you probably saw the photos John took early Saturday morning as he posted them to the site. John, my tech geek of a husband, got a kick out of doing that, let me tell you. But it was fun, and he was excited for me so it was all done with the best intentions.

I completed the run in 1:49:39, averaging 8:27 minute miles. I’ll tell you that I have all my mile splits written down on a scrap of paper that’s lying on the desk right here in front of me, but please know, too, that I’ll spare you those details. You’re thanking me right now, I know.

The marathon’s web site says that I placed 470th out of 2,829 half-marathon runners, women and men combined, but I don’t know how accurate that number is. What I mean by that is the timing system determined those places based on each runner’s gun time, not his or her chip time, and I know it took me at least a minute to cross the start line after the gun fired.

That’s how it is in popular races, though. And while it can be frustrating to be caught up in the crowd there’s something incredible about it, too, so much so that it gives me goose bumps to think about it. And that’s what I want to write about here today, the way I was overcome by the amazing oneness of the start this past Saturday morning.

If you’ve ever run a race you know how it is. You roll out of bed really early, wash your face and brush your teeth, and then you put on your running clothes, dressing as lightly as you’re able based on the weather forecast. Maybe you eat something before you leave the house, maybe you grab a protein bar to take along with you and eat in the car. No matter where you eat, sometime during your drive to the race venue you chug a bottle of water. Before you know it you’ve parked your car and you’re milling around the starting line, outside in the dark.

There are other people there, too, who can be a lot of fun to watch. You can usually tell who’s a better runner than you are just by looking (although there are always exceptions to the Rule of First Impressions when you’re talking about runners), but you’ll always know based on appearance alone who’s filled with nervous energy and who’s fueled by quiet confidence. I like the confidently quiet people, and always try to position myself beside them for the start.

Time passes and you shed your extra clothing, stuffing it in your race bag or passing it off to the friend or family member who agreed to get you to the starting line that morning. You’ll have to pass your race bag off to a volunteer before it gets much closer to the run’s start time, and if you’re lucky your friend or family member will just know when it’s time for him to quietly fade away into the crowd of spectators.

And then someone will read a long list of announcements over the PA system, and then someone else will sing the National Anthem. There’s a lot of movement then, among the runners. We squeeze together as closely as we can, pushing against the starting line. It’ll get awfully quiet all of sudden, too, after the singing and the enormity of that has this way of hitting you hard especially when you realize that a lot of people packed together without regard for one another’s personal space requirements aren’t making any sound at all except when they breathe, inhaling and exhaling, in and out.

And then someone fires a gun and the pack of runners begins to move. People are walking behind you, trying not to step on your heels, and you’re pushing against the people in front of you, trying yourself not to bump into them. You’re all moving together, walking but moving more quickly than if you were just walking, each of you waiting for that moment you can finally begin to do what you can came here for… run.

Just like that you realize that the silence preceding the starting gun’s shot has dissipated. There are people cheering, spectators are clanging cow bells, and the timing pad covering the starting line beeps every time a runner with a chip fixed to her shoe crosses over it, officially beginning her own race right at that very moment. When you cross the timing pad and your chip beeeeeeps into life you hit the button on your wristwatch starting your own timer, the one you’ll carry with you throughout the race route, and you’re gone, caught up in the crowd of runners surrounding you.

And that’s the part that got me this past Saturday morning. It was quiet, and then it was loud, and then it was quiet again much quicker than I anticipated after I’d passed the start. It was dark and I was running outside like I do nearly every morning only this time I wasn’t alone. Other runners, all of us shoulder to shoulder, surrounded me those first few miles, and we were moving together, stride by stride. Every now and then someone would say something, but mostly it was quiet except for the slapping of our shoes against the pavement. We were a wave of bodies, caught up in motion, moving inland toward the breadth of sand between the water and pavement a few miles down the road. Together we were a breaker, waiting for our instance to crash against the shore, to turn back toward the finish line and pick our way home again. We runners were singular in purpose; determined to finish what we’d started.

It was amazing.

I’ve written before about how I run, and I’ve mentioned a few times how John cares for Archie, Kit and Jack in the mornings before school, feeding them breakfast and getting them dressed, while I’m outside on the side of the road, logging mileage up one direction away from home and then back again another. We are early risers here and I’m always home from my run by 7 o’clock, but still John covers the time I’m gone so seamlessly that the kids prefer him to feed them, to dress them, even on the mornings I don’t run and am instead home when Archie, Kit and Jack awake, eager to greet the day.

Although the mornings I run may vary from one week to another, I always run on Saturday mornings. In the summer when it’s hot and humid I leave before dawn and do my best to make it home before the sun rises too high in the sky. In the winter when it’s cold and damp I drag my feet as long as I can, hoping my delay will make for a warmer run. But no matter the season John is always left alone with Archie, Kit and Jack while I’m out completing my long run, knocking off mile after mile as the morning burns away.

It wouldn’t be fair for me to say that John watches the kids without complaint because he does sigh and roll his eyes occasionally when I talk about fitting in another run, just a quick one this time. But I do mean it when I tell you that my husband never, ever protests when I leave the house for any of the runs printed on my training schedule, the one that is lying in front of me right now, its corner tucked underneath this computer’s keyboard. I’m grateful for that, and I know I’m lucky to be able to say it’s so, too.

Sometimes John and the kids will surprise me on Saturday morning when I’m out on a long run. They pile into my station wagon, all four of them, and John will follow my route until he finds me. He’ll slow the car down then and roll down all the windows, then John, Archie, Kit and Jack will all holler my name and shout hip-hip-hooray as they wave their arms at me way up high over their heads. Their encouragement always propels me forward, bolstered by their affection and support.

Occasionally John and the kids will park the station wagon somewhere along my route and wait for me. When they see me coming they’ll honk the car’s horn and stick their hands out the windows. John and the kids always smile hugely when they do this, and when I see their faces I can’t help but smile myself.

Telling you all this is my way of saying that this Saturday morning I’ll compete in the Myrtle Beach Half-Marathon, my second race ever of this distance. The race begins at half-past six o’clock on Valentine’s Day morning. That feels significant to me because I know John, my partner, has played an integral part in getting me to Saturday’s starting line.

John doesn’t run himself; it’s not for him. But he understands that keeping a training schedule and running races helps me feel as if I’ve accomplished something, so he goes through the motions, delivers me to the events, cheers for me along the race route and then waits for me at the finish.

I told John the other day that I ought to take a photo of him this weekend after the run, all laden down with my race bag and discarded gear. That made John smirk because he likes to joke that he’s nothing more than a pack mule to me on racing days. That description disgruntles John, but it says something meaningful to me.

“Do you know how I’d caption that photo?” I asked John. “I’d call it ‘True Love.’”

Both John and I rolled our eyes and laughed when I said that because neither he nor I are the types of people who talk openly about the affection we have for each other. We may have both laughed out loud, but I’m sure John knows I meant it.

So Happy Valentine’s Day to all of you blog readers, and especially to you, John. Who would have ever guessed at all of this, you know?

I’m not only feeling the love from John this weekend, but from my parents, too. My mom and dad are keeping Archie, Kit and Jack so John and I can spend the weekend at the beach. The race is Saturday morning; I’ll get to watch the sun rise over the ocean as I’m running. But because of my parents’ generosity of spirit John and I will be able to hang around and enjoy dinner out Valentine’s night, then we’ll actually be able to sleep as only parents away from their small children can, like the dead. I can’t wait.

My dad isn’t the sort of father I’d describe as a domineering. He didn’t demand respect through rules or mandates; mostly he did his best to teach us right from wrong with a gentle hand, to demonstrate through example how to work hard and honor our friends and neighbors. He’s always lived for my brother and me and my mother, too, that father of mine, and now he idolizes his grandchildren in the same way. In my father’s eyes, we all walk on water.

Mostly I’d say that Dad has always earned his family’s deference in return by way of his generous spirit so it feels funny to write here that he had a favorite spot on a favorite chair that we understood to be his, no matter what.

I remember complaining one evening after dinner that I had to relinquish my claim on Dad’s chair. I sighed, and moaned, and carried on so much that my mother chided, “If you don’t like the way we do things here then you can do them differently when you grow up and have your own family.”

The funny thing is that now, as a mother myself, I often find myself imitating the manner in which my parents taught and treated my brother and me. And, really, that sentence right there is essentially the point I’d intended to make here when I sat down in front of the computer this afternoon to write. But I want to tell you, too, that the sequence of thoughts that brought me here began this morning as I drove my car out of the neighborhood, when Jack wondered aloud if his friend next door would come to our house to play again this afternoon.

“If she does, will her mommy come with her, or will her daddy come over later to pick her up?” Jack wanted to know.

Yesterday I watched my friend’s daughter because my friend is sick and needed to go to the doctor’s office. My friend usually accompanies her daughter when she comes to play, and she and I enjoy that time together then, too. Those mornings or afternoons are play dates for us as well, we big girls accompanied by our small children. But yesterday there was no friend, only her daughter, and then a father knocking on the door later in the afternoon.

The afternoon didn’t feel extraordinary to me; I was just helping a friend. But when I looked at yesterday afternoon through the framing of Jack’s question this morning, his words all lined up inside my head, I realized that my friend, her husband, myself and John, too, must look to Jack like I remember my parents and their friends looking to me when I was small. We are grown-ups, adults, women and men. I’m surprised to find that to my son I’m not simply the older version of my younger self I imagine I am.

Inside my head this morning in the car I heard my father speak in his jovial voice, the tone of his I hear most often in my memories. He was responding to the line I used a lot when I was young and trying to make a point: “But you’re a grown-up.”

“No, I’m not,” Dad would always counter, laughing. “I’m just a big kid.”

Tonight I’ll fix dinner for my family. One child will complain about what’s on her plate, and I’ll bargain with another to coax him into take another bite. John will compliment the meal even if it’s not very good, and then he’ll help me clean up the kitchen after everyone’s finished eating and left the table. He and I will talk about work, and we’ll talk to Archie, Kit and Jack about what they did at school today.

Later we’ll watch the news in the family room. The kids will complain because they’d rather watch Max and Ruby, and John and I will strain to hear the news anchor speak over their cacophony. He and I will dwell on the economic segments of the newscast, then we’ll talk again about revising our household budget and I’ll wish out loud for the fifteenth time this week that I’d taken an economics course in college. While John and I are talking, Archie, Kit and Jack will fight over a particular toy that lay discarded in a corner of the room just an hour before.

I’ll tell John that I volunteered at the twins’ school today, and I’ll speak of the errands I left undone, the ones that need to be finished tomorrow. No one will really listen to me as I talk, but I’ll be glad to have named the tasks aloud. The phone may ring, and a load of towels may need folded. Someone may finally decide to fetch the mail from the box alongside the street.

Then we’ll usher the kids upstairs, to our bathroom with the big tub. John will bathe Archie, Kit and Jack, and then he’ll dress them in the pajamas I laid out on the floor of our bedroom. All the while I’ll be putting laundry away in their rooms, picking out clothing for them to wear tomorrow. I’ll disassemble the humidifiers in each child’s bedroom, then carry the water reservoirs into their bathrooms where I’ll fill the containers with new water.

As I fill those containers with water I’ll catch my reflection in a mirror or two. In them I’ll see the face of a woman that looks a lot like a girl I used to know. The person in the mirror does a good enough job at acting grown-up that she’s able to fool her children; maybe she even fools most everyone she knows into seeing her that way, too. But the thing is that girl, the one who still feels familiar enough for me to call her myself, is just making it all up as she goes along. I’m just emulating expectations. I hope that’s enough, and I hope someday it earns me something akin to my own chair.

Jack’s teacher told me that the church organist was playing as the students took their seats. “He said the music was ‘yuck’ so I asked him what kind of music he likes,” the teacher shared with me when I picked up the twins outside their classroom at the end of the day. “Jack shook his hips, pumped his fists in the air and yelled, ‘only rock ‘n roll!’”

Coughing myself awake isn’t the worst part of the night. The worst part is afterward when I lay awake in a quiet house where everyone else is sleeping. I flip around the bed, back to side, one side to another side, then over on my back again. I toss around and will sleep to envelop me, but she plays coy and I’m left lying alone in the dark waiting for something to come that I’m just not going to get. Not now at least.

So I’ll lay there and I’ll think about how tired I’m going to be in the morning, and how feeling tired is going to make the day seem long, and then I’ll remember that long days leave me little patience and I’ll will myself, awake and alert, to do my best to tread lightly with Archie, Kit and Jack, no matter what. The words inside my brain prattle on and on.

Last night I turned on the television in our bedroom and watched a PBS documentary about polio that I’d already seen once before except this time while I watched the program, wrapped safely in the cocoon of my bed, I cried.

“It was a really great documentary,” I told my mom this afternoon when she came over to play with Kit and Jack while I left the house to pick up Archie at school. “It was all so moving, and really I didn’t know how it was then until I watched that program.”

“My dad kept Jonas Salk’s dog at our kennel,” my mom told me. My grandfather, Jack, was a police officer but he trained dogs, too, and kept a menagerie of animals on the plot of land he’d amassed outside of Pittsburgh. There was a big barn on the land and when my mother was small that barn served as a kennel. I knew that part, but not the piece about the doctor.

“Oh,” I replied stunned that this family fact had escaped me until now.

The part of the documentary that really got me, the part I didn’t talk about with my mom this afternoon, was when the historian explained that Dr. Salk tested the vaccine on children from a state hospital after he’d tested it on monkeys, but before he introduced it to a typical human audience. The historian in the documentary named the state hospital where the children were kept and the adjectives retarded and feeble-minded were in its title. That part of the program bothered me more than the photographs of the children in leg braces, or the films of the adults entrapped in iron lungs because I saw Archie’s face in the smiles of the children from the state hospital and it made my heart hurt for one hundred different reasons.

This afternoon Archie was full of questions on the way home from school. He didn’t care that I was unable to sleep last night, Archie just wanted me to answer him every time he pointed to a building or business, a tree or traffic sign, a car or empty space and asked over and over again, “Mama, what’s that?” If I didn’t fittingly name the object at which Archie was pointing he’d patiently correct me by pointing again and saying, “No, Mama… What’s that?”

We have played this game before, Archie and I, and when I failed to call an object today the same thing I called it the last time Archie quizzed me all the way home he’d let me know it. “That’s a building,” I answered as we passed a piano dealership and music workshop on the right side of the road.

“No, Mama. That’s a plan-o studio.”

There’s a traffic light near that studio and today I stopped our car there, right behind an SUV with all sorts of bumper stickers covering its rear window. One sticker read, “Honk if you don’t exist.”

“Mama, what’s that?” Archie wanted to know.

“A car with bumper stickers,” I told him. “One of them says ‘Honk if you don’t exist.’”

Archie parroted my answer when I stopped talking and was off again, trailing other thoughts before the traffic light changed. If you go that way you’ll get to the zoo and park, Archie told me. Turn here and you’ll be headed home, or to the ice cream shop, whichever place works better for you right now, he let me know when we reached another intersection. I drove as Archie was asking questions and naming roads, recalling our shared adventures and categorizing memories. The irony of it all wasn’t lost on me that Archie was doing all those things while my mind was still caught in the loop of the bumper sticker’s imperfect logic.

I don’t think Archie will ever understand one-liners such as the one on the bumper sticker, but I do think sometimes that makes him the lucky one. Maybe that’s why he’s mine, you know? To teach me a new way to think. To teach me to sleep with abandon at night, folded in half across a pillow, tangled up in a blanket, mouth wide open and breathing deeply.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Relax.

I exist. He exists. Who is lost inside whose head? Who knows the way out?

I joked with a friend a few weeks ago that my one-word resolution for the New Year is apathetic. When I look back on that lighthearted conversation now, I wonder if I meant what I said more than I realized at the time?

But still I don’t feel apathetic. I’m doing things, going places. I have goals, and priorities, and commitments. John, Archie, Kit, Jack and I are clicking, too, the whole houseful of us getting along and understanding each other better than we have for a while now. Things are good and I have so much to say about it all, but I can’t find a starting point or an ending point. It’s as if we five are falling forward through time and I can’t grab onto one thing long enough to share it here.

There’s this, though. Last night after dinner I que’ed up iTunes and clicked on ”Womanizer” and ”Single Ladies”. Archie, Kit and Jack always enjoy these songs when they’re played over the radio stations in the car so I thought I’d download them so we could listen to the songs here, too. So I washed a Pyrex dish in the sink while the music played over our stereo speakers, and all three kids bounced around the kitchen singing along with Britney and Beyoncé.

I’m sure I won’t win any parenting awards based on my wholesome song selections, but the kids relished in all the dancing and singing, and I enjoyed watching Archie, Kit and Jack try to mimic any move I made when I’d stop long enough to pull my soapy hands out of the sink, hold my arms high over my head, then crank my hips in one direction and back again in the other.

That dancing and singing was a small thing, a string of inconsequential moments ticked off one after the other by the digital clock keeping time over the stovetop, but years from now I know the memory of it all will feel bigger to my three children. I know so because I can recall similar instances from my own childhood that began the same way, but in time grew into something much different. And that is what’s important, right?

Maybe that’s the pivotal piece I’ve been looking for all along.

So… get this.

After I’d picked my kids up from school, before we made it into the house, Archie, Kit, Jack and I milled around outside a bit, enjoying today’s warmish temperatures. I decided to collect our mail, and somehow during the time it took me to walk from our car to the mailbox all three children had decided to lay down on the wet ground and roll around in the yellow, dead winter grass.

We weren’t outside very long at all, just the time it took me to collect the mail, because I was sure Archie, Kit and Jack would benefit from a nap, whiny and wretched as they were, if I were able to convince them to take one. But I’d just washed the bed sheets this morning, and I didn’t want the dirt from the wet ground, or all the yellow grass that had adhered to Archie’s clothing, or the sand from the school playground in Kit and Jack’s hair, close against their scalps, in those clean beds. So I stopped the kids as they barreled into the house then took each of their outfits off while they stood together in the kitchen, near our backdoor, before I told Archie, Kit and Jack that we were going to take a bath before naptime today.

Well, the phone rang then, and the washing machine’s beeper ding-ding-dinged so I picked up the receiver and headed into the laundry room as my three children scattered around the room, naked. I was talking on the phone, and I was switching loads of laundry between the washer and the dryer, and then I was folding a hot, clean load of white clothing on the island’s counter in our kitchen.

All the while I could see that Jack was playing with his trains, and that Kit was pretending to talk on her toy phone, just like me. He was playing and she was talking, but Archie was dancing around the floor, stopping intermittently to declare enthusiastically, “I’m gonna PEE ON THE FLOOR!” I was amazed to see him do it, too, right after he’d made his pronouncement each and every time.

I stood flabbergasted by the kitchen table as I observed that Archie was able to both pee on command, his command, as well as control his urine stream, stopping then starting again as he deemed appropriate. “What the hell?,” I wondered to myself. Still I stood and watched, not at all believing what I was seeing.

Archie continued to dance around the floor, shouting, “I’m gonna PEE ON THE FLOOR!” He’d leave one puddle before moving onto another spot where he’d repeat the process, his process, all over again. I watched Archie, allowing him to continue as I studied his actions, filing away in my brain every little thing I saw. My incredulity faded away and before I knew it my bewildered what-the-hell was replaced with a resounding gotcha.

I did step in to stop Archie’s antics as soon as he declared, “I’m gonna POOP ON THE FLOOR!” I’d seen enough to believe in the sincerity of that statement by then, and I knew it was time to grab a handful of paper towels and make Archie clean up his mess all by himself.

It seems to me as if the little boy, my little boy, who pretends to be unable to make himself pee or poop when he’s actually sitting on the potty, or pretends to be unable to control his urine stream on his way to the potty, or whatever else Archie is pretending to be unable to do… Yeah, he’s just pretending and manipulating me (And you, and you, and you, and you, too…)

So… now what?

I chose the word they rather than we because I wasn’t there in Pennsylvania with them, my mother and father, my aunts and my uncles, to take part in the ceremony, the marking of the end of a life on Earth and, depending on what you believe, perhaps the beginning of a better one someplace else.

Uncle Tom was not the first of my mother’s generation to go. My Aunt Pat, my godmother, died during those first years I was out of college, that slender bit of time between childhood and growing up when everything you’ve been trying to figure out, all the things you seek to know, begin to make some semblance of sense and you are relieved, more or less one way or another, to see that maybe you’re on the right path after all.

Just two sentence’s back when I began that last paragraph I was going to write that my aunt’s death wasn’t very long ago, but I see now after writing that second sentence that it was. Realizing this inside of these two paragraphs, within the parameters of these four sentences, makes me feel older now than I did only a few minutes ago.

So Aunt Pat’s husband was there at the funeral today standing alongside my Aunt Peggy, Uncle Tom’s wife. They were flanked by my mother and my father, who endured heart surgery not very long ago, and my Uncle Brian whose own heart surgery preceded my father’s by just a month’s time.

Aunt Penny was also there today at the funeral. She is Uncle Brian’s wife and she slogged through a battle with breast cancer herself. I remember that her hair was just growing back again when she and Uncle Brian and my cousin, Rob, too, traveled to Greenville to meet Archie when he was new, and sick, and hooked up to a ventilator in the neonatal intensive care unit at the hospital.

I’m sitting here tonight taking stock of all these illnesses because it reminds me of how far we’ve come, this family of mine. It makes me feel as if we’re all so fragile, but durable, too, at exactly the same time.

This recounting makes me think of how time ticks forward and drags us with it, in and out of the muck and through the smooth times, too. We move through our days both asleep and awake, numbed and aware, and then one day comes, a Thursday morning, when we find ourselves standing shoulder to shoulder at a funeral, taking stock of who is beside us and who’s already gone.

I remember once when I was small, playing with my cousins at my grandmother’s house. I fell on the concrete in her garage, or the gravel that paved her driveway. I can’t remember where I fell, but I know that I did and I know that as I ran toward my grandmother’s house sobbing Uncle Tom intercepted me, picking me up with one arm and tossing me across his chest into his other.

Uncle Tom had been a Marine once, trained on Paris Island, and he was strong, his voice gruff. But that day he cradled me against his chest and carried me into Grandma’s house, and the timbre of his voice sounded softer then, sweeter, as he told me to shush, assuring me that I was alright. I remember being taken aback by the way Uncle Tom handled me, gentle and soft. He felt like I remember my own father feeling when I was small, and I know that surprised me then on that day because Uncle Tom and my father had never before seemed the same way to me.

Uncle Tom and Aunt Peggy lived in that house with my grandmother for years. At first they lived next door in another house, but after my cousin died and my grandmother got older my aunt and uncle moved from their red house into Grandma’s white house.

My grandmother and Aunt Peggy are still living there now, in that house where I played and fell in the driveway, although Grandma is very old now. She doesn’t leave the house often, only for necessary doctor’s appointments, and my grandmother hadn’t seen Uncle Tom since he left that day in July when UNOS called. She’d wanted to go to the funeral home the other night, but changed her mind at the last minute. Instead my grandmother wrote Uncle Tom a letter that was placed with him inside his coffin. No one knows but she what it said.

Today I took my three children to the playground after Kit, Jack and I picked Archie up at school. I’d agreed to allow an advertising agency to photograph Archie for a publication benefiting local charity organizations so I spent most of my time at the playground up close with Archie and the photographer while I watched Kit and Jack amuse themselves on the playground’s equipment several yards away.

Kit ran from that equipment to Archie and me several times, back and forth, perpetually checking in as she often does. But Jack remained over there, by the slides and the metal climbers, interacting with a man and a little boy. I watched the three of them, Jack, the boy and the man, and never looked away for more than a few seconds. If my kids and I had been there under different circumstances I would have taken Archie by the hand, closed the distance between us and introduced myself to the man before I thanked him for smiling so wide at my little boy. But today I just waved at that man across the macadam, over the playground equipment, coupling a sincere smile with a mouthed thank you.

That man and his boy left before we were finished with the photographers. Jack was standing nearer me then and I watched as the little boy ran over and hugged Jack, calling him a friend. When the little boy swiveled around and ran away toward his retreating father I listened as Jack called out, “Bye, Matthew!”

I thought nothing of that then at the playground, but tonight as I recounted the story to John at the kitchen table during dinner the significance of the little boy’s name washed over me and warmed me from the inside out. “Oh,” I spoke and then fell silent for a beat or two while everything I’d seen at the playground clicked into place somewhere inside my head.

“That little boy had blonde hair and blue eyes,” I told John. “And the man was wearing a camouflage coat.”

I was nine years old when my cousin, Uncle Tom and Aunt Peggy’s only child, fell of his bicycle riding in a grassy field behind his school, hit his head, and died. His name was Matthew and he had blonde hair and blue eyes.

I’ve written before how I believe we all move through life in concentric circles that expand and contract, then overlap through the years here, there, and then again. Tonight I’m wondering if that doesn’t continue to happen, too, after we’re gone. Is that what the prophets mean when they talk about life after death? Does our spirit, do our souls, pass between us, from one to the other and then somehow back again?

Is it so much simpler than we ever imagined after all?

I have an explanation, but I should warn you that you may think less of me after you read it. I know this, but I’m going to tell you anyway so you can either confirm that you’re right there with more, or so you can enjoy a good laugh at my expense. Either way at least then I won’t feel as if I’ve been neglecting you, nor will I feel as if I’m withholding the sort of information that’s vital to the growth of our friendship.

So, are you ready?

I’ve fallen in love with Edward Cullen.

Seriously.

Pathetic, right? I know.

I bought the first book in the Twilight series right before Christmas, that time John and I went to the bookstore to fulfill Archie’s holiday wish list. For one thing, I was curious to see what’s behind the big fuss about the book after all. For another, I’ve never met a vampire I didn’t like so I wanted to be sure I gave this new coven of creatures a fair shake, too.

I bought that book, but it sat unopened on the pass-through between our kitchen and family room for a long time before I finally had the opportunity to surrender myself to it. Then I did and I’m here to tell you that I read that book in a day, maybe two days, tops.

After I finished that first book I honestly forgot about everything else I needed to do, rounded up my children and helped them put their warm jackets on, one by one, then loaded Archie, Kit and Jack into the backseat of our car so we four could drive the distance to the bookstore where I’d be able to buy a copy of the second book, the sequel to Twilight. I was like an addict jonesing for a fix as I moved while holding onto small, cold hands, dragging my children through the parking lot outside the store, all of us doing our best to tuck our chins into our chest, hunkering down against the rain. Archie, Kit and Jack were crying because I was walking too fast, but I didn’t care. “Come on, guys,” I coaxed anxiously. “Can’t you just cooperate with me right now?”

A few days later I took a day off from reading that second book to go see the movie with Rachel, and together she and I snickered at how bad it was, at how very Dawson’s Creek it seemed. “Oh, it’s just not good,” I sighed once or twice while laughing so hard I was nearly crying.

Just the same, I finished the second book then went back to the bookstore last week while the kids were in school, after I’d finished working out at the gym. I tucked a copy of the third and fourth books under my arm then laughed at myself as I walked toward the counter near the exit.

A twenty-something guy was working the registers that morning. When he looked at the books I was carrying, the ones I’d tucked under my arms, I rolled my eyes and smiled at the same time. “You’re not aloud to buy those,” he deadpanned.

I didn’t miss a beat. “They’re for a friend.”

He chuckled then and I did, too. “Hey, everyone and their grandmother is reading those books now. Why not you, too?”

I told that store employee that I’d been sucked in, that I couldn’t help myself anymore.

“I know. They are good books,” he allowed. We joked some more and then I left the store smiling to myself, feeling silly but pleased as well to have another few days to spend with these friends of mine right here inside these books.

That’s when my memory of Jack declaring himself beautiful as he sits in the barber’s chair, or of Kit twirling ’round and ’round across our foyer’s floor, or of Archie standing at the bottom of the steps as he yells to John perched at the top of the steps, “Daddy, I have to tell you something right now!” fade to black and are replaced by the slap, slapping sound of my running shoes against the pavement, the sensation of my chest rising and falling, rising and falling fast, and then faster still as my feet are slap, slapping more quickly and those competitive thoughts are replaced by ones that are barely coherent, thoughts summed up best in curt phrases like bang it out, or tear it up.

And then before I know it I’m home again, standing in the foyer where Kit is dancing and I’m pulling wet clothing off my back, a jacket and a shirt, another shirt and a sports bra, discarding each one on a pile in the middle of the floor. From where I stand I can see that John’s already dressed Archie, and that now he’s helping Jack take off his pajamas.

Because I’ve lived another version of this morning earlier this week, and last week, too, I know that there are breakfast dishes on the table for me to pick up after I’ve climbed the stairs and walked down the hall to my room to pull another bra and shirt out of my closet, to trade out my running shoes for another pair of trainers, to wash my face in my bathroom sink for the second time this morning.

Minutes pass, and then more minutes still, and soon we’ve pushed our way through our family’s morning routine, all five of us, and soon I’ve dropped Archie off at school, and then Kit and Jack, too. Soon I’ve run my errands, or gone to the gym, or finished whatever it was I needed to do that morning with the twins on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or without them on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Then we’re home again, just like that, my three children and I. If I’m lucky they’ll take a nap, and if I’m lucky they’ll stay awake and play happily together, or watch a favorite television show while I watch them as I fold our clean laundry on the island in the kitchen. It depends on how you want to look at it after all.

I guess that’s how it is that I’m sitting here now in front of this computer screen, still unshowered, still wearing the white cap I do when I run, wondering what I should write. My day is halfway done. Kit, Jack and I went to a doctor’s appointment earlier today, and then to the grocery store. I picked Archie up from school, and when I brought him home my mother and I were able to convince all three kids that they were tired enough to take a nice nap this afternoon. As far as I know that’s exactly what they’re doing right now.

I could tell you that I’ve been writing a lot lately, but that I can’t share it here. What I’ve written is for other people: one piece for a friend, my side of an agreement we brokered; and copy for John to use on his company’s web site. I’ve enjoyed working on those projects, banging them out and tearing them up, but doing so has meant my computer time over the past few days was spent writing those pieces and not writing anything here, on this page for you to read.

Just the same, our days move forward one by one. There have been school days and naptimes, television shows and favorite books. We’ve had our fair share of time-out’s, too, and yelling and crying, all three kids and I. Tomorrow morning I’ll take Archie to school early so I can leave him in the morning room then duck down the hall for a PTA officers meeting, and then I’ll be off to the gym again. Later I’ll go to Kit and Jack’s classroom where I’ll be the day’s mystery reader. I don’t yet know which book I’ll bring with me.

Tonight, after dinner and when the kids have been tucked into bed, I’ll retire to that comfortable place on our couch and visit with my imaginary friends, the ones who exist inside the book series in which I’m completely engrossed now. I’ll read as long as I’m able, until my eyes are too heavy to keep open anymore. Then I’ll climb the stairs, check on my children, one after another, brush my teeth and wash my face then go to bed. If I’m lucky John will be ready for bed, too. If I’m lucky John will need to finish another report for work before he can go to sleep, and I’ll be able to sink soundlessly into my pillow, into sleep, while watching whatever it is I want to on television. It depends on how you want to look at it after all.

“Anne, I love it! Archie’s boy skills are completely on age level!. He’s learned to fart on purpose to distract. He loves it, too! It is really hard to give him ‘angry eyes’ and not smile. Actually he got an extra hug from me and then was told it was not pretty, which he knew already by saying, ‘Not nice!’ Made me feel like my boy was still home… Hate to tell you this skill never gets better, or goes away…”

I ought to be embarrassed by my child’s behavior, but I’m not. I wrote about that already, though. Remember when I told you so?

When John got home from work Archie, Kit and Jack were already sitting at the table, eating their dinner. I heated frozen chicken nuggets in the microwave for Kit and Jack, and opened a plastic cup of yogurt for Archie, too, in case they objected to my main course offering. I also tossed a handful of the pecans John roasted on Christmas Eve, the ones remaining in the storage container on our kitchen counter, onto Kit and Jack’s plates. Kit pushed her pecans aside with a disgusted harrumph, but Jack had already finished his first helping of nuts and was working his way through a second handful by the time John walked in the door.

I remember that my father always greeted us enthusiastically when he came home from work when I was small. “Daddy’s home,” he’d sing as he opened the door. Now John usually swings our door wide open with great aplomb, waits a beat or two, and then hollers a hearty hello as loudly as he can bellow. Sometimes Archie, Kit and Jack run to greet him, but they always holler back, answering John’s greeting with an articulated affirmation of his worth, Daddy! You’re home!

My homecomings rarely elicit that sort of heartfelt greeting.

As he walked in the door tonight John saw that Jack was eating the pecans he’d made. He commented on it, and Jack concurred. “I love my Daddy’s pecans,” he said.

I can’t say for sure, but it may have been all the daddy, daddy, daddies Archie was jabbering excitedly that inspired Jack to ask John next, “What about your daddy?”

John’s father Bill passed away before the twins celebrated their first birthday. I know Jack doesn’t remember him, and he has only recently realized that we parents have parents, too. The way John’s name, Daddy, was tripping off Archie’s tongue may have stirred Jack’s specific question, but I wonder if it wasn’t spurred on instead by something more magical, something ethereal conjured up by my burning oven and the snacks stashed away in a corner of our kitchen counter.

“I have a daddy, but you probably don’t remember meeting him,” John explained as I placed his dinner plate in front of him. I’d poured honey and hot sauce over his sweet potato, and I’d piled sliced onion and peppers, green, red and orange ones, on the other side of his plate. The balsamic vinegar and olive oil I’d drizzled over the onions and peppers was fusing with the honey and the hot sauce in the middle of his plate, and John winked at me before he swiped his finger through the combination of condiments then stuck it in his mouth.

John told Jack how much his father loved roasted pecans, and how his grandfather, his father’s father, had a few pecan trees in his front yard in Charleston. “My Pop, your great-grandfather, used to make us kids pick those pecans every time we were over at his house,” John continued. “He’d be thrilled to see you eat those pecans tonight.”

A few minutes further into the meal, as we five were all eating together, John talked some more about Bill and Pop, and about how much both men liked to eat sweet potatoes. “When I was a little boy, older than you but younger than I am now, my grandfather used to make me drive him to Yates’ so he could buy the best sweet potatoes on the peninsula,” John explained to Jack. “He ate one every day with his dinner, no matter what.”

Jack giggled as John spoke directly to him, relishing out loud the extra attention John paid him tonight, all because Jack knew the right question to ask. Roasted pecans and sweet potatoes, Jack and John, and Archie, too. A mealtime conversation generated by the memories of favorite foods and fathers now gone, a complex compound served up hot to warm this dark and wet January night.

“Her nose smells like poop,” Jack told me more than once.

“And her hair looks ugly,” Kit added, too.

Of course I knew the dog smelled bad, and since I couldn’t remember when Jinx had last been trimmed I picked up the phone and made an appointment to drop her off at the dog-grooming salon this morning. When I returned home after dropping Jinx off at the salon, I found John cleaning out the kitchen cabinets. He reported to me more than once that he’d found items with years’ old expiration dates, and he expressed amazement again and again that we’d had these things in the house this long.

While John was cleaning out the cabinets, while Archie, Kit and Jack were content playing some nameless game in the corner of one room of the house, I made myself busy vacuuming the rugs, mopping the floor, washing the baseboards. I clean our floors often, usually several times a week, but still I was surprised today by how much dust had collected in the corners, how much stuff had tucked itself up against the sides of our rugs.

In truth today’s cleaning effort began last weekend when John and I combed through the pantry, and then emptied the cabinets in the laundry room. From there John moved onto the cabinets and drawers here in our office, and I went upstairs to tackle the bathroom drawers, the medicine cabinet, the linen closets. I even cleaned out my half of the master closet, filling several black, plastic trash bags with clothing I don’t wear anymore, or can’t wear anymore, or won’t wear anymore.

On New Year’s Eve, while John was still at work, I loaded those plastic trash bags into the rear of the car, and Archie, Kit and Jack into their car seats in the backseat of the car, then we four set out to run errands. We went to the store first to return something I’d bought but didn’t need after all, and then we went to the bank. After we were finished there I took the kids to the grocery store for fresh fruit, milk, diapers. When we’d filled our cart, after Jack hugged his favorite bagger, David, a retiree who is now working at the grocery store, I loaded our bags and my children into the car and then made the trip from the supermarket parking lot over to Goodwill.

At Goodwill I maneuvered our car into the long line of vehicles cueing up to pull through the drop-off line. I was driving my mother’s car because John wrecked my station wagon the week before Christmas on Woodruff Road somewhere between the movie theater and Greenridge when he looked left and said, “Hey, look… that Waffle House went out of business, too,” before he plowed into the car in front of us, idling in an intersection rendered useless by the stop-and go-traffic. My mother’s car is a particularly nice one so when it was my turn to unload the stuff I’d brought into the Goodwill bins several employees came outside to help me. I assume those employees supposed that a nice car equated nice stuff.

With the employees’ assistance I emptied my plastic trash bags into the donation bins. After I’d finished one employee asked me if I’d like a receipt. I told her I would so she went inside to get me one. When the employee returned and handed me my receipt she thanked me. “We appreciate you supporting us,” she said.

In return I offered her the biggest smile I could manage then replied, “I’ll always support you.”

As I drove away I thought of my response. I’m certain that employee was disabled. I have no idea how or why, but I know she was. When I’m out in the world and interact with a person who is disabled I always try very hard to convey that I kinda sorta get how things must be for them. That’s probably presumptuous of me to say so, but suffice it to say that in these instances I always want to speak the correct thing, or speak a compassionate thing, but usually I only manage to stumble all over myself trying to line my words up just right.

To be honest, what I want to do most of all is tell this person I don’t know, this person whom I’ve just met, all about Archie, all about how awesome I think he is, all about how what I’d like to do most of all is give he or she, the person here who is working, a huge hug because their success in life can only enhance my child’s chance for success in life… Anyway, you get the idea, I’m sure.

So I was still thinking of all this when I got home, checked my e-mailed and discovered that beginning in February Medicaid in our state will cap all therapies, speech, occupational and physical, offered to children and adults who need them. I know the specific numbers of hours and visits, too, but for the purpose of this post all you need to know is that the allowed appointments aren’t many, and that I’m sure Archie and many other children like him will reach their allotted visits by, like, April if we were to move forward maintaining the therapy schedule we do now.

I walked away from my computer then to fold some laundry, to empty the dishwasher that hadn’t been emptied yet that morning, to call a friend. Then I made my way into this office again to write another friend. “It’s frustrating that the state, or even private insurance for that matter, won’t pay for necessary services for kids with disabilities that can ultimately only help those kids to become responsible adults who are able to hold down a job and contribute to their community,” I wrote without pause. “I hate this.”

I do hate it, but because it’s one of those “great big world” things that is what it is there isn’t much I can do to change it. What I can do, I guess, is make things nice here at home. Keep a clean pet who adores my children, all three of them; keep a clean house, one in which Archie, Kit and Jack feel at home and our friends and family feel welcomed. I can take my children to the supermarket where everyone knows our names, and I can continue supporting the organizations that benefit families like our own. And I can resolve to always, without fail, offer the biggest smile I’m able to manage to people whose lives overlap my own, no matter who they are. After all goodwill and grace are contagious, I believe.

So we’d eaten too much pizza, and we’d stayed up late with our kids, and we were propped up on our bed pillows watching television, when I turned to John and asked him, “What did we do last New Year’s Eve?”

John just looked at me, and I looked at him, and as we were looking at each other I suddenly remembered what we’d done last year. “Oh, yeah…” I mumbled and then turned my face toward the television again.

Last year we’d spent the holiday with John’s family in Charleston. I could write an entire book about why that is both a good and a bad thing, and I’m sure that no family member who would read that book would disagree with anything I could write, but still. I don’t want to write it here, and you probably wouldn’t want to read it, and even if you did you may not truly understand all of the ins and outs of our story, as complicated and commonplace as they are.

What you need to know for the purpose of this post is that John and I were in Charleston last year, and that our three children had been tucked into bed long before midnight rolled around. It had been a long day. I was tired, and annoyed, and I admit that I’d drunk a lot of wine by then, too.

One of John’s siblings had finally decided to change the television station, so at least I didn’t have to listen to that irritating humming noise the crowd makes in the background during televised football games anymore, the one that rises and falls intermittently in direct reflection of the activity on the field. So someone had changed the station and now we were all crowded around the television, waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square, and just a half hour or so before it was time to ring in the New Year Barack Obama was on television in a campaign ad, wishing us happiness and prosperity.

One of my brother-in-laws began calling the Senator “Osama,” and that made half of the room laugh while the other half bristled. My brother-in-law continued joking, and when I couldn’t listen any more I piped in with something like, I’m sure that will seem funny when Senator Obama wins the whole damn thing.

My brother-in-law and I went back and forth then, trying to better the other with his knowledge of the political process and my intuition, until John gave me that look he does when he hopes I’ll just-let-it-go-right-now, please, can’t-you-just-let-it-go. I recognized the desperation in John’s eyes so I backed down and retreated to the kitchen until it was time for Dick Clark to ring in the New Year.

Then I joined everyone in front of the television set again, and I remember that I felt emotional enough when I saw Dick Clark on television that I kind of cried a little. I remember standing next to John thinking about how awesome Dick Clark was to be there, counting down the final few seconds of the year, and then I remember hearing my brother-in-law snickering at the way Dick Clark talked.

I vividly remember this next part of the story.

“Really?” I asked my brother-in-law.

He just looked at me blankly as if he had no idea what I was talking about.

“You’re going to laugh at him for the way he’s talking?”

The room was quiet then. John was looking at me again, his eyes opened wide and flashing just-let-it-go-right-now, please, can’t-you-just-let-it-go. But it had been a long day, and I was tired, and incensed, and I’d drunk a lot of wine by then, too.

“Do you know how hard he had to work to be able to do that?” I remember yelling. “Do you know how much therapy it took him to get there?” I asked while I pointed my finger at the television screen.

I remember being angry, and I remember that the room was quiet, and I remember that John asked me then, out loud, to please let it go. I did and I walked away, out of the room. I don’t remember anything at all after that.

No one’s since talked to me about that night, and I wonder sometimes if everyone’s forgotten. But I know they haven’t; I’m sure they haven’t. My husband’s family is like that after all. Everybody always knows the whole story, but no one ever talks about it. They may give you a hard time about it, but that’s all you’re going to get. That’s just the way it is.

I wanted to tell you this story so you know that although I am very Zen about Archie’s diagnosis most of the time, sometimes, every now and then, I do struggle with the general worldview of my son’s abilities. I do genuinely like my brother-in-law, but I discovered that even family members can feel like part of the collective consciousness sometimes, part of the world and what it sees, what it can’t see. What it knows, what it doesn’t know. What it can never understand until it opens its mind wide enough to take it all in.

So I do struggle, but I didn’t the other night. Instead John, Kit, Jack and I fought over who would be lucky enough to sit next to Archie while we watched the movie. Then when it was over, as John and I were helping the kids climb the stairs, I hugged Archie, and I hugged Kit and Jack, too, and I thanked each of them for making me the woman I am this year, the woman I am right now. And I meant what I said, every word of it.

I had to change Archie’s diaper before we went upstairs. He had pooped, again, so I cleaned Archie, put a new diaper on him and then pulled his overalls up, bringing the pant’s straps over his shoulders one after another so that Archie could help me to fasten the buckles against his chest. We walked over to the sink then, Archie and I, and we both washed our hands then dried them with paper towels and I have to say that Archie was as proud of himself for completing this process with me as Kit and Jack were when they successfully maneuvered through their most recent trip to the bathroom, start to finish.

To be honest, neither John nor I have done much to teach Archie to use the bathroom. We sit him on the toilet every so often, and we talk to Archie about how he should go to the bathroom in the bathroom rather than in his diaper. The good news is that Archie has experienced success on the toilet, and all five of us have praised him for a job well done on those occasions. The even better news is that Archie’s also told both John and I many times that he needed to use the toilet, and both John and I have helped Archie into the bathroom when that’s happened, but more times than not we’ve both discovered that Archie’s already gone in his diaper by the time we maneuver him into the bathroom.

I am telling you this so you understand that I’m not embarrassed at all to admit here that today I had to change my five-year-old son’s diaper before I took him upstairs and laid him on his bed, rubbed lotion on his chapped cheeks and then kissed him on the mouth before I walked out of the room, shutting the door behind me. I’m not embarrassed because Archie is doing the best he can, and John and I are doing the best we can, and with all of us pitching in our best effort I’m sure that Archie will someday learn to use the bathroom effectively.

But I am embarrassed to tell you this: While I was changing Archie’s diaper this afternoon, as I was wiping the poop from the creases in his skin with the fistful of wet wipes I held in my hand, my daughter kneeled beside me and said in a singsong voice, “Archie’s a baby because he poopy-ed in his diaper.”

At first I wanted to holler at Kit, to chastise her for teasing her brother. But before any admonition could leave my mouth, I realized those words coming out of Kit’s mouth were mine and not her own.

The truth is that over Thanksgiving weekend, while he was playing at his grandparents’ house, Jack pooped his pants. After we’d taken him to the bathroom, after we’d cleaned him up, both John and I gave Jack a hard time about what he’d done. “Babies poop in their pants, Jack,” I remember saying to my son. My brother and his family were at my parent’s house, too, so I decided then to use their youngest son as a teaching tool.

“Does Rhys poop in his diaper?” I asked Jack.

“Yyyeeeesssss…” Jack replied, whining. I remember that he was staring at his feet and holding his fists against his mouth, and I remember how I knew Jack was implicating himself right then through body language alone.

“Is Rhys a baby, Jack?”

“Yyyyyeeeessss…” Jack replied again, and by now he was squirming, trying his best to move away from me.

“Well, since you’re a big boy then you shouldn’t poop in your diaper anymore, right?”

“Yes, Mommy,” Jack agreed.

That was that and I didn’t think anything more about it until today as I changed Archie’s diaper on the rug in front of the door to the garage and Kit made the observation she did. Before we went upstairs I talked to Kit about what she said rather than reprimand her, and to myself I vowed to try very hard not to use a comparison again that may incriminate Archie through no fault of his own.

I did those two things and then after I put Archie, Kit and Jack down for their naps I ate a bowlful of macaroni and cheese and wondered to myself if most forms of mockery and meanness are manufactured by mothers teaching their children. When our children implement what they’ve been taught, when the differences in what we teach our children and what they see become incongruous, and when that lack of continuity causes our children to feel uncomfortable, is that when and how an innocent statement like Kit’s manifests into something more malevolent?

So I’m thinking about this right now, and I’m thinking, too, of a family gathering we attended the Sunday before Christmas. One of my nephews is getting married this summer and everyone was standing around the kitchen island asking him about his big wedding plans, and his grand honeymoon plans, and about this house he and his fiancé are planning to purchase. I was listening to this conversation and in the middle of my nephew’s answer to no question in particular my face flushed with anger, just like that, and I looked around the room and wondered why none of the other adults there looked as upset as me.

I wasn’t jealous, I was sure. I was just really mad and I had to try very hard to keep from spitting out accusingly, “Yeah, you think you’re big stuff now but just wait until life kicks your ass, too…” So I bit my bottom lip and I looked around the room and into the faces of all the other adults there. I know some of their hurts, and I’ve watched some of them wounded, and I sat there and wondered why they weren’t fidgeting in their seats like me, why their chins weren’t popping in the air with repugnance every so often like mine was.

It took me until the drive home to realize I was so incensed by that conversation because those words my nephew spoke sounded a lot like ones I once said standing in that same kitchen, around that same island. I’d said similar things, and no one told me then how foolhardy I sounded either. They didn’t tell me because I never would have believed them, because I wasn’t yet ready to hear what they had to say. I felt a little less angry then during that drive home, but still I shook my head, hoping my nephew will soon learn the lessons I’ve learned one way or another.

I was still shaking my head when John interrupted me. He wanted to talk about the charity housing program my brother-in-law is championing, the one John’s brother wants the whole family to sponsor together. “I told him that was a lot of money for us right now,” John confided.

John is one of six children. He is younger than his next oldest sibling by five years. Because of the age difference between John and his siblings, and because John didn’t start his family, our family, until he was in his thirties, Archie, Kit and Jack are significantly younger than most of their cousins. In other words, here in our house we are still buying diapers while many of John’s siblings are nearly finished paying for college.

I agreed with John aloud, with his confession, and then he told me, “While they were trying to talk me into it someone said they wanted to do the housing project so they could show their kids how the other half lives.”

I was silent for a few beats before I replied, “Our kids already know about that.”

Please know that I am conscious of what my family doesn’t have, and self-conscious of what we do have. And I know, too, that we five enjoy a comfortable life, but I also am convinced that both John and I are ensuring our children learn selflessness through the little lessons we teach here at home every day.

So that is one thing for sure, but I think what bothered John the most about the comment he shared with me is how completely it missed the obvious mark, the one playing on the floor in the middle of the room who goes to school with peers of all disability and socioeconomic levels. I’ve said it before, I know, but it occurs to me in moments like this one so often that I’m sure I need to repeat it again: John and I expend so much energy trying to show our family how alike Archie is, that we sometimes forget to admit how different he makes our life, too.

All lessons about misfortune aren’t economic in nature, John and I agreed there in the car. And all lessons about misfortune are better told when we talk instead of how we smile in its unsightly face each day, how we teach others to smile at it, too. John and I agreed then to conclude that is how he and strive to be our best selves, how we move forward without embarrassment over what we do, or what we have.

This is all to say that today I changed my five-year-old son’s diaper and my three-year-old daughter commented on it. If I make sure that comment of hers doesn’t become a criticism then maybe someday she won’t say the things I once did, standing around that kitchen island, and then another day still maybe she won’t have to shake her head, side to side and side to side, all the way home in the car.

An hour earlier I’d called him to ask that he pick up one last Christmas gift for me. “It’s paid for,” I’d told him. “I have to pick it up this morning, between nine and twelve, and I don’t know how I can make that work.”

“You were worried about it so I just wanted to give you some peace of mind,” Dad offered during our second phone call of the morning, after he reported that he had the gift in hand.

The gift my father had stopped to pick up on his way into work today fulfills Archie’s wish list. Since Thanksgiving time Archie and my mother have been singing Jolly Old Saint Nicholas together, only instead of naming what Johnny and Susy and Nellie want from Santa, Archie and my mother invented new lyrics to describe our family’s Christmas wishes. According to the song lyrics Archie has learned to sing, Jack wants a train, Kit wants princess and art stuff, and Archie wants a bag of books.

So that’s what my three children will find underneath the tree tomorrow morning, more or less. And that’s what my dad had to pick up on his way into work today, the bag I found last weekend made from fabric decorated with Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill, Little Boy Blue and the Itsy Bitsy Spider, the one I had embroidered with the phrase Archie’s Bag of Books.

The weekend before John and I had run around town together to work on completing our holiday shopping list. We saved the stop we’d planned to make at the bookstore for last. When we got there John and I walked directly to the children’s book section of the store and essentially dissembled the display racks exclaiming, “Get this one,” or insisting, “He’ll love this one,” and every so often interjecting with an “I loved this book when I was small so we have to get it, too.”

If you’ve visited our home you know how many children’s books we already have. And if you know me in real life you also know how I don’t like to buy toys, but that I’ll always agree to indulge my children with books, books, books. So when Archie told John and I that he wanted Santa to bring him a bag of books that felt like permission to go out and cosset my own dreams for my biggest boy, too.

You may have seen me standing in that line at the bookstore two Saturdays ago. I was standing next to my husband who held a pile of children’s books in his arms that was just as tall as the pile of books I cradled against my own chest. You would have noticed us, John and I, standing in that line because we were talking just a little too loud, like he and I often do when we’re excited, and I was doing that silly thing I do sometimes when I laugh and cry at the same time.

You may have thought I was slightly unhinged, and that may have been a valid assumption on your part because I usually am, but I wasn’t two Saturdays ago when I stood in that line at the bookstore. Absolutely not. Rather, it felt like I was one of the fortunate people who get to see the forest for the trees. That day in line I laughed aloud as I wiped my nose with my shirtsleeve, before I admitted to John, “I was so stupid when Archie was born. I never would have guessed at this.”

A few Decembers ago I couldn’t even get Archie to hold his head up straight for a photograph for our holiday card, but this year Archie asked for books and his father and I are making sure Santa remembers to drop them off in our living room tonight, in a bag bearing our son’s name, Archie. Archie.

Beautiful.

An aside… This is the first year Archie, Kit and Jack are genuinely excited about Christmas. What I mean by that is they really get it now, the whole thing, as much as a small child can anyway. All three children are eagerly awaiting Santa’s visit, and they’ve learned enough about Jesus and the Nativity at school for Jack to shout aloud to an elderly man at the post office the other day, “Hey, you! Do you know Jesus?” I know that Jack was talking about the sticker I’d patted onto his chest, the big, fake stamp from the book of stamps I was using to mail our holiday cards, the one depicting Botticelli’s “Virgin and Child with the Young John the Baptist” (chalk that one up to all those art history classes I took in college). I have no idea what the elderly man at the post office thought Jack was talking about, though.

I hope your world is beautiful, too, this Christmas.

But Archie doesn’t know how his gas passing pleases me. I am his mother so when he does it I tell him it’s impolite, and then I instruct him to ask to be excused, or even to feign embarrassment at the very least. Archie usually does as I say, but he laughs, too, great big guffaws that take his breathe away and make him red in the face. So far in the instances that mark these occasions Archie’s joviality has jumped from him to everyone within earshot so much so that these friends or strangers laugh, too, right along with my son.

Today at the store, while we were standing in line at the cash register to purchase one last Christmas gift, Archie burped and then laughed his belly-shaking string of hee, hee, hee’s. He wouldn’t stop laughing long enough to excuse himself, so when the lady behind us in line began to laugh, too, I turned to her and offered, “I’m sorry. He just learned to do this.”

“It’s fine,” she assured me. “Boys will be boys!”

That lady was still smiling when Archie and I left the store. I was smiling, too, but from a different place in my heart.

Here are the cakes I delivered to Archie’s teachers and therapists on Thursday. On Friday I took another handful of cakes, just like these, to Kit and Jack’s teachers and preschool administrators.

It was John’s idea to make the recipe we did, the College of Charleston Cake from Special Recipes from the Charleston Cake Lady. Teresa was John’s step-mother and Archie, Kit and Jack’s paternal grandmother. She passed away last year, but I’m sure Teresa would have been pleased to know that we shared one of her favorite recipes with the people who make a significant difference in her grandchildren’s lives simply by showing up to work each day.

No worries, though. At least our first batch of cakes has been distributed. Tomorrow the twins will have their own cakes to deliver, and I doubt I would have been able to stuff fifteen cakes into the back of my station wagon if I’d had to deliver them all on the same day considering that today’s load was a tight fit.

When I was small I watched my own parents make these incredible fruit and nut pastry rolls for my teachers, for my brother’s teachers. Their roll baking was a whole-day ordeal, and I remember we’d pick dried flour out of the cracks in the huge wooden butcher block that stood in the middle of our kitchen for days after that one. My parents gave that butcher block to my brother, and I suppose I inherited their penchant for producing teacher gifts at home, in the kitchen.

May you all not make the same mistake I did this morning. And may Archie enjoy one last day of mind-expanding school activities before he’s home with me until after the New Year, making mischief and keeping my days merry and bright.

Let’s say, hypothetically of course, that John and I decided to bake cakes for Archie’s teachers and therapists to present as holiday gifts. And let’s say, for the sake of this story, that I searched the Internet for colorful cake boxes, and then refreshed my screen and searched again for rolls of coordinating grosgrain ribbon to use as adornment for those cakes. Let’s say, and again I’m speaking in a what-if sort of way, that when those boxes and that ribbon were delivered last Friday afternoon that it’d rained the day before, and the day before that, but that I’d forgotten about the weather when the deliveryman carried the big brown box that contained the gross of pink cake boxes into my garage and leaned it up against the concrete wall.

Because there wasn’t any water in my garage, and because Archie, Kit, Jack and I were riding bicycles in the driveway with Sophia and her mom, the sun shining bright upon our faces, let’s say that I forgot to look at the condition of the hypothetical brown box containing the hypothetical pink boxes that will hold the hypothetical cakes that John, Archie, Kit, Jack and I will hypothetically deliver to Archie’s teachers and therapists tomorrow on Archie’s last morning of school before the holiday break.

But John did remember the rain, and on Saturday morning he thought to open the big brown box that contained the gross of pink cake boxes. It’s a good thing he did, too, because all of those pink boxes, every last one of them, was so wet on one side, the front flap side, that the thin cardboard of each box had swelled and warped from the water it’d absorbed. “Maybe you could use a hairdryer to fix them?” my mom suggested, but John and I knew that wouldn’t work.

So we took photos of the ruined merchandise, and John called the delivery company, and then he called the cake box manufacturer. He was put on hold a lot, and bickered with one or two people over how the damage had been caused after all, but in the end the cake box manufacturer agreed to send us a new gross of pink cake boxes in a new, and preferably dry, big brown box.

That new gross of pink boxes would be delivered today, we were told. “Keep checking the front porch,” John reminded me a few times before he left for work today. And I did check the front porch several times throughout the morning, and then again before I stripped off my wet workout clothes in the laundry room, stuffed them into the washing machine, then started a load of darks before I dashed upstairs to take a quick shower and get dressed before I was expected to pick my children up at school.

While I was in the shower I heard the dog bark like she does when someone passes in front of our house. Please don’t stop here, I thought to myself as I rushed to rinse the soap from my hair. But the dog began to bark louder, and then louder still, and I was sure that her carrying on heralded the arrival of that new gross of pink cake boxes. It was raining this morning again, as I was showering, while the deliveryman was leaving the big brown box on our front porch. I was thinking about the water, and then I was wondering what we’d do if those boxes were ruined, too, and all that thinking and wondering spurred me to hurry through the rest of my shower.

So I hurried to condition my hair, to wash my face, to rinse the soap from my body and then to towel off, but I didn’t push my way through those steps so quickly that I anticipated the delivery guy to still be in my front yard when I ran down the steps, toward our front door, wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around myself. In the shower, while I was thinking and worrying, I decided to go to the door and pull the big brown box inside as soon as I finished showering. I certainly didn’t expect the deliveryman to still be there, but there he was, sticking one of those door handle notification things with the adhesive on one side on our front door.

I saw him and he saw me, and for a moment I thought about ducking into our dining room then running back into our kitchen, away from the man peering into our front door’s window. I thought about all that, but then I saw the notification on the door and I knew I didn’t want to wait for that delivery guy to return my big brown box to the warehouse, and that I didn’t want to wait in line at that warehouse later with my three children in tow to pick up my big brown box, and that I really needed to have that gross of pink cake boxes here in my house tonight so I could package the hypothetical cakes that John is hypothetically baking right now for all of us to hypothetically deliver to Archie’s teachers and therapists tomorrow on Archie’s last morning of school before the holiday break.

So I opened the door, wearing nothing but a bath towel. And I called to the delivery guy who was walking across our yard, back toward his truck that was idling against the cul-de-sac’s curb, wearing nothing but a bath towel, “Um… Do you have a package for me?”

The delivery guy turned to me, shrugged apologetically when he saw that I was wearing only a towel, and then told me that he didn’t have a delivery for me, but that he was stopping by to pick up a return. He wanted the first gross of pink cake boxes, the ruined ones, because when John was bickering with the cake box manufacturer over how the damage had been caused after all, apparently my husband had agreed to send the waterlogged boxes back for their inspection.

So I explained that I had to open our garage door, and then I had to ask the deliveryman to meet me there. I couldn’t lift the big brown box of damaged pink cake boxes so I had to wait for the deliveryman to do it. And then I had to wait for that deliveryman to figure out if he needed my signature, or not. And, really, that deliveryman was flustered, and inside my own head I kept telling myself that I wear running shorts that are more revealing than the bath towel I had tucked underneath my arm, but still. He was embarrassed, and I was embarrassed, and all I really wanted was that new gross of pink cake boxes for the hypothetical cakes that we’re hypothetically making tonight to present as teacher and therapist gifts tomorrow morning, hypothetically speaking.

The funniest part of this entire story is not that I had to make small talk with a deliveryman wearing only a bath towel, but that it happened today after I’d shared a phone conversation with another mother with whom I’m working on a fundraising project for the Meyer Center. We were talking about a program we’re hosting tomorrow night, and I joked that I may actually take a shower before attending.

“Well, I hope that’s something you do every day anyway,” she replied dryly, almost sarcastically, and it took me a beat or two to realize this mother had no idea I was kidding around when I’d made the comment about the shower.

“Oh! Of course I take a shower every day,” I told that mother. “What I meant was that there’s a difference between the sort of shower I take after I go to the gym, and the kind of shower I take before I’m preparing to be seen somewhere.”

The mother I was talking to didn’t reply, and I felt a little insulted that she didn’t know me well enough by now to understand how obsessively compulsive I am about the cleanliness of myself, my children, our clothing and our home. But I guess that’s ok because although she doesn’t understand, I think my deliveryman does.

“Go away, Mommy,” Kit said before she tipped the red nesting cup, one of a set we use as tub toys, against her lips. Her cup, like Jack’s yellow one, was stuffed full with a wet washcloth. After she pretended to drink, when she pulled her cup away from her mouth, Kit looked up at me then announced, “Me and Jackie Moore are drinking coffee.”

I sighed, thought a beat and then asked, “Well, I wonder what Grinell would have to say about that?” Grinell is our Elf on the Shelf. He appeared on our fireplace mantle while Archie, Kit and Jack were napping the day after Thanksgiving. That elf came with a book, too, and after we read it together, John, the kids and I, we spent a few minutes considering a name for our new friend.

“It has to be something elfin,” I mused.

“How about Grinell?” Kit posed and I remember that John and I looked at each other then, and that I could tell by the look in my husband’s eyes that he was as stunned as I was by Kit’s unique, but perfect, suggestion.

In case you’ve never heard about the tradition of the Elf on the Shelf I should tell you that, in a nutshell, Grinell magically transports himself to the North Pole every night after Archie, Kit and Jack have gone to bed to report to Santa about the kids’ behavior throughout the day. He’s a tattletale, that elf, for the big Boss Man himself and so ever since that afternoon in late November Grinell’s helped John and I discipline our kids.

The minute I mentioned Grinell tonight in the bathroom, by the side of the tub, Kit dropped her makeshift coffee cup, jumped up and lifted her arms toward the towel I had draped over my outstretched arms. As I dried off my girl, before I shooed her in the direction of her father, Kit wanted to know, “Where will Grinell hide tomorrow?”

“Don’t know,” I answered. Since that elf first arrived at our house he’s perched on picture frames, stuffed himself into pottery, peered over ledges and even arranged himself inside, behind and on top of various Christmas decorations. Yesterday morning Archie, Kit and Jack found Grinell dangling from interlaced, felt hands off the corner of a framed collage of black and white photos of Kit as a baby. That made my children laugh, of course, but what surprised me was how their laughter was loud enough to fill our home with merriment so palpable it felt like bubbles floating all over the place.

Tonight after Archie and Kit were dressed and ready for bed, as I sat on the floor beside John while he zipped Jack’s sleeper tight up underneath my boy’s chin, Jack turned his face toward me and asked, “Will Grinell tell Santa to bring you a birthday present?”

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ll be 34 years old.

“Santa doesn’t bring birthday presents, Jack,” I responded.

“Oh…” Jack said before he looked away, off into a corner of the bedroom. I watched his face and could almost see his mind whir away underneath his damp hair as he processed this new piece of information about the world and the way things in it work.

“But we got you a present!” Kit offered, her voice threaded with excitement. John shushed her, Kit said sorry, and that was that.

Before I go to bed tonight I’ll drink another glass of wine, search for a new hiding spot for our elf… somewhere too high to be touched by little hands, but low enough to be seen by anxious eyes… and then I’ll steal into the rooms of my sleeping children, lean low over each of them and tuck my face in close enough to feel their breath as they sleep. Before I go to bed tonight I’ll tell John that I feel young and old, both at the same time, and then say jokingly that I know I’ll feel older still if Jack wakes at three o’clock in the morning again and insists this one more time with the sort of anticipation children feel on Christmas day, “Mommy, tell me if Grinell came back again.”

Jack likes to set up his piecemeal train set, comprised of trains from several collections and tracks of varied brand names, on a child-sized table in the middle of our playroom. He’s careful when he puts together his train set, that Jack, and he always derives much pleasure from his finished product.

So it always makes Jack scream and yell when Archie insists that the train set his younger brother has painstakingly constructed is his own. “That’s my tracks, Jack!” Archie will announce loudly, playfully.

“Noooooooo…” Jack will holler in response as he locks his knees and pushes up on his toes.

Jack’s resistance usually encourages Archie to take his teasing just a little bit further. “I’m gonna knock those tracks down!” Archie will yell, but because he speaks the words through a smile they come out sounding jovial, almost exultant.

This exchange between Jack and Archie happens nearly everyday now, but the first time it happened a couple weeks ago, the first time John and I overheard the boyish banter, we turned toward each other, opened our eyes wide and then raised our eyebrows. “He sounds like a big brother,” John observed.

When the twins were born, when I was still in the hospital, I remember my father holding Jack and talking to him. We’d made the decision not to bring Archie to the hospital to meet his new siblings because he was in the middle of the treatment protocol that by then had knocked his leukemia into remission, but that still had to be completed as a matter of course. We couldn’t risk exposing Archie to the germs in the hospital lobby, its waiting rooms, elevators and corridors, John and I had agreed and everyone whose opinion mattered, our family and friends as well as Archie’s doctors and nurses, concurred.

So my father was talking to my newborn son about his older brother and I remember clearly what I heard him say. “Soon you’ll meet your brother, Archie. He’s your big brother, but you two will have a unique relationship,” my father explained. “Although he’ll always be older than you, one day you’ll be his big brother.”

My father’s words seemed poignant to me then, even through the morphine haze that hung around my head like so much fog, and they affect me now, too, but in a different sort of way. Now we are three years into Archie’s tenure as the oldest sibling, and although he is not as accomplished as Kit and Jack in many ways, he still seems older in other, more important areas.

And things, the way situations play out between my three children, must feel the same to Kit and Jack, too. It seems to me that those twins have learned to look out for Archie in a way that mimics the manner in which I parent him, but they’ve also found a way to respect Archie like other children do with their own older brothers. It’s remarkable; really, to stand by and watch Archie, Kit and Jack learn the roles they play in each other’s lives. Sometimes doing so means I’ll have the opportunity to let go of an old misconception and admit here to you how wrong we were then.

In years past I’ve shopped fancy stationary stores, picked a thermographed design and then personalized it. But last year I realized how those cards didn’t reflect the sort of family we’ve become, so I found a photo card I liked in a craft store and spent more hours than I’d anticipated putting those paper frames together, and then mounting a photo inside them that John and I took of the kids one cold Sunday morning at the neighborhood park, the one with Archie, Kit and Jack stuffed, side by side, into a tire swing.

I liked that card a lot, the homemade one, and I still have a copy of the photo of my kids laughing the way they did that day last December on my refrigerator right now, but the truth is that I didn’t want to spend hours and hours putting together holiday cards again this year. I remember how I worked at the kitchen table, a pile of cards there, a pile of photos here, mounting tape in front of me, and envelopes that still needed to be addressed stacked on the counter, just out of reach. I remember, too, how I snapped at my children when they came by the table to see what I was doing, to ask me to play with them instead, and I liked that part of the memory least of all so I told myself earlier this month, No, not again this year; this time I will do something else.

So I scoured the Internet for photo cards, the pre-printed kind, and when I finally found a design I liked well enough I went through our recent family photos, dozens and dozens of them, to find a shot in which all three children were smiling or looking at the camera, but that endeavor proved more difficult than I’d imagined. I shared the photos I had found that sort of, maybe, if-you-go-ahead-and-turn-your-head-to–the-side-and-squint-a-little fulfilled my stipulations with John and he harrumphed then said, “We’ll take a picture this weekend that we’ll be able to use.”

That conversation happened last week, and although we took lots and lots of photos over the weekend there wasn’t a single one that made John nor I smile in a relieved sort of way and say yes, that’s the one when it popped up on the computer screen on its way from our camera’s memory chip to our computer’s hard drive. So on Sunday night I pulled clothing from my children’s bureau drawers, picking out the outfits they’d wear to school on Monday morning, the same ones they’d wear for our holiday card photo. “We’ll just take a picture of them in front of the tree before I take them to school tomorrow,” I told John when I finished looking at the weekend’s photos, resigning myself that we’d have to try again. “That’s who they are anyway, you know? They’ll look themselves this way.”

On Monday morning John dressed Archie, Kit and Jack in the outfits I’d selected, and I arranged our children in front of our decorated tree. I made them hold hands, and then hug, and then put their arms around each other’s shoulders all while John captured one image after another. Someone pulled someone else’s hair, and someone else scratched, or bit, or pushed another one. “Enough,” I finally told the kids who were growing impatient with John and I. Then I looked at my husband and asked, “Enough?”

“I’m sure I got something we can use,” John responded as he handed me the camera, then went upstairs to take a shower before leaving for work.

And he did. John took a lot of photos that could complete our card. So I went through all of them and tried to find the one in which each child looked like his or her own self, like the freeze-frame images I conjure inside my head when I think of each child’s name. As I studied the images I found several photos that portrayed Kit and Jack accurately, but fewer that captured Archie’s essence the way I know it to be.

When you instruct Archie to smile for a photo he’ll do what you ask, but many times he does so after you’ve taken the shot, after the flash has burned away. That’s just his way with photos and I can’t explain why things are this way, but I know it isn’t because he can’t follow a photographer’s instructions; rather he’s slow to do so. His actions are delayed, retarded.

So that is often how he looks in photos when the person taking the shot hurries it to capture the smiles of the other subjects. His mouth may be open, or he may be squinting, or he may be looking away from the lens and so his mind appears unengaged, vacant. This means that when I look at photos of Archie standing in a group I often see a face I don’t know staring back at me, one that doesn’t look at all like the freeze-frame image I conjure inside my head when I speak his name inside my heart, Archie. I don’t see him there inside the frame, and I’m discouraged to think this means the world may not see my son the way I know him to be either.

I was thinking of this yesterday before I placed my holiday card order, as I was out, running errands. In the car I was playing children’s music to entertain Archie, Kit, and Jack, all three of them buckled into their car seats. One song ended and then a Justin Roberts song began. I listened to the words, and then suddenly felt as if I was hearing them for the first time.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men were really quite confused
Everyday they arrive at ten and they get the same bad news

And Humpty say, and Humpty say, and Humpty say,
Oo oo oo if you only knew
If you only knew oo oo about this view
You would see folks like you and I right beyond this wall
And you would wonder why we ever built the thing so tall
And you’d do oo oo oo if you only knew
If you only knew oo oo about this view

When the song finished I hit the repeat button and played it again, then again. I played the song and I sang along, and I’m not sure if Archie, Kit and Jack were amused by my fervent singing, or startled by the intensity in my voice when I looked at them in the rearview mirror and asked, nearly shouting in excitement, “Do you get it? I mean, really, do you get it?!”

When we got home again I sat down at the computer and opened the file containing the photos John took that morning. I found one in which Kit looked caring, Jack looked cunning, and Archie looked… connected, content, composed… although still not essentially himself, but close enough. I selected the photo and uploaded it to site I’d found that would print our holiday card and told myself it would be good enough.

It seems to me sometimes that we parents of children who are differently-abled expend so much effort trying to convince the world how similar our kids are to their typical peers that we ultimately do our own children a disservice. Our kids are different, and when we don’t acknowledge that it’s as if we’re saying we’re not ok with the people our children are. I suspect sometimes that in order to protect Archie we need to expose him, his forte and as his foible.

So Archie may not look like he does inside my heart in the photo on the front of our family’s holiday card, but he looks as close to his true self as he was willing to reveal to the camera Monday morning. That’s why I decided yesterday, in the car as I listened to the words of that song, that when I ask the world to accept my child for who he is I also have to agree to show them how he is, even if its not the most flattering image I could offer.

Maybe it’s that our best self isn’t a constant, but rather a state of being that fluctuates from one situation to another. If my child shows you his best self, in a moment from a morning, then will you offer him your best self in return? Because that’s the kindest thing we can all do, I think, to reciprocate in kind. I think of that song and I wonder on what side of the wall we’re living. Maybe I’m pacing across that wall, trying my best not to fall. Or is that Archie up there, calling to me, “If you only knew oo oo, Mama! If you only knew!”

To look at more photos from our adventure aboard the Polar Express, please click here.

Here’s a video I took this morning during the Rangers Class Dance Recital at the Meyer Center. The clip is only a portion of the class’s performance, but it’s long enough to convey all the things that made the event so special. And by watching the clip you’ll be able to see that Archie and his classmates did a really great job performing the routines Vernelle, their dance instructor, taught them.

Vernelle told the parents who attended the performance that she doesn’t mind admitting that she’s eighty-six years old, and that’s she’s mostly deaf and almost blind, too. Vernelle also explained that she’d once owned a dance studio off Augusta Street, and that she taught children to dance there for something like thirty years.

Vernelle’s experience was obvious in the way she deftly managed the children. And she must have taken great care when she taught Archie and his classmates the steps for each routine because I could see Archie anticipate the next step in many instances, and watched as he performed a toe tap or arm wave a few beats before he was intended to do so. For my boy to know something that well, it usually means he’s been well practiced.

After I left Archie’s dance recital, I drove across town to pick Kit and Jack up at their school. When I did both children ran into the hall to tell me that St. Nicholas had visited them that morning and left presents in their shoes. He’d come while they were in their classrooms, the teacher explained, and left candy in the shoes each student had left pushed up against the walls in the hallway.

Kit and Jack told me that St. Nicholas rang his sleigh bells as he left and that’s how they knew he’d been there. Kit and Jack’s voices were lilting as they spoke, and their eyes were filled with wonder. As they spoke their eyes danced, and when they did the twins’ transferred their enthusiasm for the magic of Christmas to me.

At the Ladies’ Holiday Luncheon yesterday I told a reporter from News Channel 7 how fortunate I felt that a place such as Archie’s school existed. I tried to explain what Archie’s time there meant for our family, but when I watched the sound bite play during the evening news yesterday I realized the words I spoke hadn’t done my emotions justice. I wish I could somehow open my chest and tape-record the pride I feel inside on days like this when I watch Archie participate in a special school activity, or how grateful I am that Dr. Meyer went out of his way to attend the performance, too, or how it makes me feel sort of humble when a woman like Vernelle thinks it’s a worthwhile endeavor to volunteer her time to teach my boy to dance.

But the truth is that I’m just as thankful for Kit and Jack’s school, for the way it, too, feels like a perfect fit for them. Those twins are so excited when we pull into the church’s parking lot on school days that they can’t get out of the car fast enough to run the length of the sidewalk into the building, to their classroom.

And then in the car on our drive home this afternoon I listened as Kit and Jack explained St. Nicholas’s surprise visit to me, and then they talked to me a bit about today’s letter “L” show-and-tell, then I looked at the road in silence and marveled while Kit and Jack named colors in Spanish… the rojo leaves on the Maple tree, nearly ready to drop, and the azul sky over the farmer’s field, its barbed-wire fence running along right next to the road. I listened to Kit and Jack jabber, and I thought of Archie’s arabesque, and for a moment or two I felt as if everything in the world was just right, just for now.

Like I did last year, I spent the morning stuffing gift bags, one for each guest who will attend the festivities tomorrow. Into each bag I placed a handful of chocolate-covered pecans, make-up samples, a container of women’s daily vitamin supplements, a generous gift card to a local spa, and a handful of magazines and flyers. I put all of that in each gift bag, but none of those things stirred in me the feelings I felt when I looked at the cover of the Meyer Center brochure every time I picked it up, every time I tucked it into another bag.

The brochure’s cover looks a lot like the school’s web site. On it is the photograph of the same little boy and the same quote you see at the top of the site’s homepage: “If a disability is a hurdle, then this is where they learn to leap.” I don’t mind telling you that I am nearly moved to tears every time I recite that quotation inside my head. I don’t mind writing that I can barely read it aloud without my voice breaking by the sentence’s end. And I should say, too, that although I admit these things here to you now doing so feels a lot like divulging a vulnerability I’ve only just discovered myself.

That quotation about disability may make me feel exposed, but just this morning as I pulled into to the drop-off line along the backside of Archie’s school my sweet boy shouted, “There it is! There’s my school!” And then Archie called it his school again and again, the words falling from his mouth in a singsong-y sort of way, “My school, my school, my school!”

Archie’s been doing this now, calling the school his own, for several mornings in a row. He’s so proud when he says so that Archie’s little five-year-old self seems wise for his years. And that quality Archie displays when he expresses his enthusiasm for his school, for his teachers and his classmates, if it is wisdom after all, makes me wish I could be half as astute as the person my son is becoming.

After we’d left Archie at his school, while Kit, Jack and I were walking into their school, I saw the priest who visited John and I in the hospital that one particularly awful morning when Archie was newly born and very ill. Today the priest walked out of the church’s side door and he smiled at me. I know the priest didn’t remember me, or that day. But I remembered it and him, and I always will.

I guess that happens a lot for me this time of year. In my mind the holidays are so tied up with Archie’s messy beginning that it’s hard to celebrate Thanksgiving, my birthday, Christmas without remembering where we were and what happened on those days the year Archie was born. I never expected it to be this way, and it isn’t as if I walk through a world of unpleasant memories during the holiday season, but still those memories are here and they bubble up to the top sometimes when I read a quotation on the front of a brochure, or run into a person who walked through my life back then.

I was watching television last night when a character in a favorite show of mine mused aloud that if his self from twenty years ago thought of his self today, and then imagined what he’d be doing twenty years in the future, that his self then would never have guessed what his self would do today. This morning I thought of that television character and what he said as I put those brochures in all those bags.

I thought of Archie, of his diagnosis and his medical history, of his shortcomings and his struggles, of his quirks and all the little things he does that sometimes irritate me. I thought of Archie and all the things pertaining to him about which I could choose to be unhappy. Then I thought of myself twenty years ago and knew that she never would have imagined today, but instead of feeling poorly about that I felt wise like Archie and knew, just knew, it is my great, good fortune that he came along to set me straight.

Jack watches for Barack Obama’s appearance during the news programs we watch. And he searches for Barack Obama’s face on the cover of the newspapers at the grocery store, all of them stacked neatly by the sliding glass doors behind the cash registers. Jack even remembers the building where I took him and Kit to vote that Tuesday morning one month ago, and each time we drive past it he hollers, “Look! That’s where we went to vote! I ah-voted for Barack Obama. Who you ah-voted for, Mommy?”

Last Monday when I took the twins to school Jack said something about Barack Obama on his way into the classroom. One of his teachers heard him speak, too, but neither she nor I could make out what he’d said save the President-elect’s name.

Since the twins attend a Catholic preschool, I wasn’t sure how to respond to Jack’s statement. You see, a local priest, who is not in our preschool’s parish by the way, recently came out publicly against Barack Obama and his supporters, announcing to the media that no one in his congregation who voted for the Democrat should seek to receive Communion during Mass. After all, just a few days earlier one of Archie’s therapists had joked with me about the tenuousness of Jack’s attendance at a Catholic preschool after he, just like that, announced his support of Barack Obama while we were walking together, the therapist with my children and I, down the back hallway of the Meyer Center.

“Oh, you should hear him during the Pledge of Allegiance!” Jack’s teacher said to me that Monday morning when I looked at her, bewildered about how to react to Jack’s pronouncement. Miss Katie’s amusement was obvious when she went on to explain how Jack likes to call out Barack Obama’s name instead of reciting the Pledge, and when Jack does relent and recite the words with his classmates that he often substitutes Barack Obama for flag.

That’s when I explained to Miss Katie, “You know, I think he equates the flag with Barack Obama because…”

“…they always show him with the flag on television,” Miss Katie and I said together, finishing my thought in unison.

When I told my parents about Jack’s own adaptation of the Pledge of Allegiance my father declared, “Well, your grandmother would have been proud!” My grandmother, my father’s mother, was an active member of the Democratic Party, often volunteering to work as a member of the election committees in her town. I know, too, that my grandmother also put her name in for an elected office at one time or another, but I’m not sure what office she sought nor whether or not she won the bid.

While Jack’s affection for Barack Obama would have pleased my grandmother, it certainly would have annoyed my father-in-law. Bill, who had attended college and dentistry school with James Edwards headed up the Governor’s bid for office, and then later served as a member of his administration. There’s a photograph of John as a little boy playing the piano at the Governor’s mansion. Bill and Jim are standing behind John, and they are smiling as they watch John play. I remember John and his father talking about that day more than once, and I wonder sometimes if its that moment Bill remembered when he asked John to help him cast his absentee ballot for the South Carolina Republican Primary from his hospital bed at Roper in Charleston. Bill was as Red as they come, and he was determined not to let a little thing like his impending death get in the way of his support of the Republican Party.

With a family history such as our own, our household can’t help but be interested in the local and national political scene. So we watch the news together, Archie, Kit, Jack, John and I, and sometimes the kids listen to John and I argue over politics and policy, but mostly Archie, Kit and Jack listen as their parents discuss the topics at hand, the two of us noting when we agree, and where we agree to disagree.

Our doorbell rang this morning, after the twins and I had taken Archie to school, after we’d stopped by the grocery store on our way home to pick up more laundry detergent. It was Rebecca, one of our neighbors. I’d told her about Jack and Barack Obama during Bunko a couple weeks ago, and she’d enjoyed what I had to say.

She had a book for Jack. She’d found it at Target, she explained, and then remarked, “I think I know someone who’ll enjoy it very much!”

“Jack, look!” I exclaimed, holding the book’s cover up for him to see. “Who’s that?”

“It’s John McCain!” he hollered, pushing up on his tiptoes.

Rebecca and I both laughed, tossing our heads backwards, then shouted, “No!”

“It’s Barack Obama!” Jack hollered again, this time smiling, and then laughing, too.

Jack and I thanked Rebecca for the book, and she left, going about her day. After Rebecca had I gone I sat with Jack awhile, looking at the book. When we’d finished, before Jack climbed down from my lap and went about his own way, he shut the book and looked at its cover. “Is that Barack Obama?” Jack asked in the way he does when he already knows an answer but he wants me to confirm it before he declares it aloud.

“Yes, that’s him.”

“Is he beautiful?” Jack asked then.

Chills ran up and down my arms before I could open my mouth to answer. “Yes, baby. He is.”

And that right there is a point over which I know both my grandmother and Bill would agree if they were here now to talk about such things with my youngest boy.