Moments

Lately I have been seeing moments in slow motion, with a mundane poignancy.  To re-install the car seat - a physical act that I have done countless times, the nuances of which I am essentially intimate with - I must crawl inside the seat, on my knees, facing backwards and press my cheek and mouth into the backrest while I blindly (but so deftly) thread the seat belt through the correct channels.  When I complete this task the seat implodes inward, downward, sucks straight into the car's backbone.  I am very good at making sure that car seat is secure.
At night, in the middle of the night, when my husband and I are trying or are in fact, sleeping, things happen.  Not sex, (although that used to happen wordlessly in the middle of the night - I am hoping that by the time our kids are out of the bed we won't be too old or have forgotten how to rouse ourselves like that) but all sorts of unspoken or muttered communications.  My husband does this thing where he sweeps the proscribed area that he thinks of as "his" on the bed with his leg and like a bulldozer emotionlessly pushes all out of his way - the thing in his way is typically me or my blanket and sometimes (because we often end up sleeping head-to-toe) my pillow or face.  It bugs the hell out of me.  It makes me so resentful, so righteous.  I always assume he is angry at me, resenting me right back.  But he isn't - he is unconsciously trying to get comfortable.  Sometimes, when I am being swept by the leg and a child is telling me his nightmare and another child is literally climbing my head looking for a good nesting spot, I think, "Who on earth does this?".  Who?

In the morning when I meditate sitting up, my three year old sometimes wakes.  He is already in bed with me but since I am now sitting up, he is no longer pressed against my body properly and so must get closer.  He snuggles in, half sitting, half slumped and begins the process of finding my nipple.  With his hand he travels under the comforter, navigates his way through the layers, finds the edge of my shirt and travels over the wiggly rungs of loose flesh on my stomach.  As his pudgy soft hand covers every contour of my skin I am forced to think of how this intimate exercise will influence him.  This (assuming he is going to be straight) is how he will measure all female bodies - against the texture, shape and in all honestly, flabbiness, of his mother.  It is no wonder that the vast majority of men who have told me such information have admitted that a woman with some meat is the sexiest of all.  The skinny models in lingerie catalogs are not appealing.  It is no wonder.  My son's first experience with comfort, love, with the sensual experience, is with a post-partum woman.  And we all know what a post-partum woman looks like.  To me, this is a beautiful thing. 
These are the minute details of daily life that I am struck by.  Basic and perhaps not, at first glance, particularly intriguing.  I don't know where the zoom lens of the mind has come from but it certainly has given me good material for writing...