Over the weekend, Landon and I watched “28 Years Later” — a post-apocalyptic zombie thriller — and I mentioned that I think that movies that baldly grapple with virus, contagion, and sickness are an important part of our collective reckoning with the experience of living through a pandemic. (The history books will tell us what happened; the art will tell us how we felt about it.) In this particular movie, Ralph Fiennes plays the role of a compassionate doctor who models profound empathy towards the infected. It was a fascinatingly soft center in the midst of a movie that participates in a broader genre of “othering” the ill.

The next morning, I decided to investigate what I’d written around the start of the pandemic. One unusual benefit of bloodletting through this blog on a daily basis: I have a detailed record of my inner world across the years. I was surprised to find that early into the lockdown, I was still writing about very normal things. In fact, throughout a lot of the pandemic, I was principally writing about the everyday experience of motherhood, aging, writing, New York. It comforts me that even while enduring incredible stress and illness (I caught a brutal case of COVID when it first hit New York and spent 21 days inside our apartment; I could barely walk from one end of the hall to the other without needing to sit down), the heart tends to its own basic functions.

Anyhow, amidst my forensics, I discovered this piece written in March 2020 and was touched by the opportunity to visit with buried memories of my three year old daughter. I had no recollection of her saying “this is a problem” on 22nd Street or “I love you” in the pew at Church, and rediscovering them felt like a hug. It was also a welcome reminder to go to my daughter and hold her. She is eight and can project a big attitude, but she is also, as always, my other heartbeat.

******

I first saw you in the face of my baby doll. I first heard you in the cries of my three little sisters.

While my friends talked about “playing house,” my sisters and I referred to it as “playing mother. “Home” was shorthand for “mom” because our mother was the center and circumference of our world. As the eldest daughter, I pantomimed her ministrations and movements. I called my little sisters “the girls,” just the way she did, even though I was technically one of them from her vantage. I carried my youngest sister around even when she was over half my height. I quietly assumed the task of helping her dress in the morning because no one else was as efficient with the specific modes of bribery it required. I absorbed my mother’s gestures, too — the way she wiped down the counter in big swirls, wrote in loopy cursive in her planner at her desk, removed her left earring to cradle the telephone — a gesture I would air-perform at my own desk, as I was not yet permitted to get my ears pierced. I’d watch, admiringly, the way she talked to her own mother on the telephone, often while perched on the edge of her bed, or looking absently out her bedroom window, across the gray stoned patio of our home, discussing news of her siblings, or the roast chicken she’d had out to dinner with my father. I would stand in the doorframe, tracing my fingers up the wall, listening to her and longing to be her.

For many summers, I worked as a mother’s helper, and then a baby-sitter, and then a nanny for family friends and relatives — and I saw you in many of those children I cared for. I was especially fond of a girl named Caroline and her little brother Tom, and I spent hours of my teenage years playing “monster” with them in the basement, slicing grapes and peanut butter sandwiches for them in their kitchen, telling them stories long after I knew their parents wanted them to be asleep. I snuck them extra goldfish and surprised them with toys borrowed from my own sisters and permitted them that extra few minutes at the playground, though I was deeply responsible and felt the pinch of anxiety as I calculated just how late we’d be in getting home. I loved when Caroline would ask me to tuck her in and beg for an extra story about “Daniel and Tyler,” two semi-fictitious characters that peopled the tall tales I’d told my sister Elizabeth when we started sharing a bedroom at the ages of 5 and 7. I saw glimpses of you in Caroline, and in the infectious way she threw her head back with abandon when laughing, and in the startled wideness of her eyes when I’d tell her a scary story — and, mainly, in the way I wanted to protect and care for her.

When Mr. Magpie and I first started talking about the future, I told him plainly I wanted it to include children. And I saw you then, too, in a realer sense.

In short, I was waiting for you my entire life.

Your birth was a shock, but then there was you. My smart, beautiful, brave, kind you. I can’t fathom how we’ve gone from our first embrace on the hospital gurney as I was wheeled out of the operating room around 8 a.m. on March 5, 2017 to the way you leaned into my arms at Church this past Sunday to say “Mama?” — your eyes searching mine — “I love you.” Unprompted, sincere, startlingly capable. You are a familiar lump in my throat. And I still can’t believe you are mine, even though I know you better than the back of my own hand. I know you from your stubborn cowlick to the tips of your toes and can read your mood from across the playground.

But yesterday, as you scooted home from school, the clouds parted and rain spattered our faces. “Oh no, mama,” you said. “This is a problem.” Your precociousness caused three gruff-looking men in hardhats to laugh out loud, but I privately puzzled over the provenance of that phrase. It didn’t sound like something your dad or I would say. And it dawned on me then, as it has with increasing frequency since you started school, that your growing up means sharing you with the world and all its many people. There was a time not long ago that I was usually able to piece together the seeming non-sequiturs of your logic — like why you said you saw ducklings while crossing Fifth Ave on the way to the doctor a few weeks back, and why you connected our dining room with my diamond ring. But now some of you is beyond my ken, and I’ve got to make peace with that.

There’s a phrase about having children — that it’s like walking around with your heart outside your body. And that is true. But for the past three years, it’s also felt like walking around with two hearts inside my body, because I feel every wound and injury you bear. Your existence is so engrained in my own that it almost feels like you are an extension of me. It’s going to be tough to let you go off on your own with increasing measures of independence and self-direction, to accept that there will be times when your heart is beating all on its own, outside of my embrace and supervision.

In the meantime, my other heartbeat, just know I love absolutely all of you.

Post-Scripts.

+We carry all the versions of our children inside.

+The saltings of motherhood.

+The cat bird and the rat snake.

Shopping Break.

+Me+Em just dropped another insanely chic collection — this chocolate cord-velour dress (!), a short sleeved leopard knit, a maxi-length satin skirt, a velvet evening gown in a showstopping caramel color, barely there layering knits…! It’s all so good.

+Just stocked up on these turtlenecks for fall while 40% off. I also love the look of this pointelle tee in the olive color. Great layering basics. In the winter, I almost exclusively wear cotton / cotton blends next to my skin!

+Ordered this waffle henley for myself. The most cozy.

+Cute fall dress from Tuckernuck. I don’t love the shoe styling shown on site — I’d style with a suede heel like this.

+On CloudNovas in good fall colors.

+La Ligne is majorly leading the pack on current-season trends right now: fringe, cropped suede jackets, chartreuse…! I already have this cherry red dress in my closet for a fall or even holiday occasion!

+Fun patterned statement jacket. I was packing for Boston this week and wishing I had something bold like this to layer over the neutral pieces I packed!

+This dress (almost sold out) is also in my closet — great for layering this fall with a smart boot and a great jacket or cardigan or cape.

+Chic mocha colored cardi.

+Aspen vibes.

+This SEA cape is on sale! And a seriously cool twist on a barn jacket.

+A major investment but I did order these leather pants this season — they are SO GOOD. The fit! The color! Go one size up if you do take the plunge. Will look so good with chunky knits, cashmere, silk, suede!

+Two insanely chic clutches that look like they cost over $2000 but are closer to $600: this Little Liffner and this Hunting Season.

+Gorgeous burgundy and lace cocktail dress.

+Cashmere bandana scarves.

+Handsome sweater for Mr. Magpie.

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