Mom and Dad's House

Sharing childhoods with my babies

I’m writing this from my bathtub, the water scalding as I type with my thumbs on my notes app. I’m thinking about my senior thesis, when I wrote about what it means to be an editor of your own writing. In it, I journeyed through my time as a young writer, pieces I wrote and where I had written them. At my childhood kitchen table as the sun bled through the windows and I listened to Michael Bublé on the CD player. In the bleachers after getting hit out of dodgeball in the eighth grade, a worn spiral bound notebook in my lap. At my desks in my dorm rooms, at my desk in the college newsroom. At the table in front of the window on the top floor of the neighboring college library, where nobody knew me as I wound through walls of books in silence. I wrote about how environment is important to my writing. The music, the view from the window, the open notebooks around me. The summer I got pregnant with Kit, I wrote part one of a novel from my office at the inn. That summer, it felt as if there was a thunderstorm every afternoon, and I would sit at the window streaked with humidity, my scribbles of notes spread haphazardly on the window seat, and the words poured from me like blood. I had never felt that near to a story before, gazing out at the rain and the lightning and the swaying trees almost sideways with wind.

But with motherhood, and with a tiny house, my environment isn’t up to choice. As I write this from the bathtub, creeping towards midnight. Rather, writing has become scribbled thoughts and ideas, ideas that more than likely will never be returned to, because the sad fact of the matter is, when the babies are tucked into bed and my time becomes my own, the draw to watch The West Wing and fall asleep on the couch is much, much stronger. Sad, but true.

A few weeks ago, we had our roof redone. Which is an incredible nuisance, but a necessary one apparently. Even if your roof isn’t really even that bad. But I digress.

Thankfully, I have the advantage of being able to pack up and spend the day at my mom and dad’s house, instead of bearing the beating of our own all day long. And that is where this story begins: my return to childhood as a keeper of another’s.

Now, I am over at my parents’ house plenty, given I live less than two minutes away and my mom is my best friend. But I hadn’t been there alone in quite some time, and alone with my babies, ever. We arrived early, early, the coffee just ground and the Today show still in its first hour. Kit stayed with Mom as she took her hair rollers out before work, and I gave Henry a bottle in the living room. I started thinking, as I opened and closed the fridge, nestled into the chair, smelled Mom’s coffee and heard Marty whimpering from his crate (my mom’s dog, who especially loves to kiss babies on the mouth, so had been put in his room a little early), how odd it is that I once existed in this house as a resident. That my routines and pajamas and mornings existed here, opening and closing this very same fridge, but yet, I can’t quite remember the intimacy of it. Everything is the same…but a tad different. Of course, as nearly ten years has passed since I left for college. As the day went on, I’d catch myself searching for things…a towel rack that was never there or a trash can in the bathroom. I’d smile when I hit the right light switch without thinking, proud there was still evidence this was my home too. It made me realize this place had changed in my mind, changed from our house to theirs, despite the fact I know it will always be mine if I want it to be.

After breakfast, I took the babies and Annie outside, to the backyard where my mom tends to her flower beds and makes little rock pathways for her grandchildren to meander through. We moved to this house when I was in the fifth grade, a little past my time of playing outside, so my memories in the yard are of sitting with our golden retrievers on the back patio or suntanning on the roof outside my upstairs window. Kit and Annie ran through the milky grass, the sun golden on their curly heads. Her pajamas quickly collected mulch and leaves, but I didn’t dare stop her, for she was having so much fun. I sat on the patio with Henry in my lap, listening to the birds and the crickets, sounds that make me feel 17, make me feel as if the same families of birds and bugs live in that yard still. Annie’s breath was smoke in the cool air, her eyes lit up with freedom to run behind the hydrangeas, through the pebble paths, behind the shingled shed where Mom once tried a compost pile.

After a while, I changed everyones diapers and dressed them in sweaters for our walk, heading out on the route I used to run during the summertime in college, a route significantly harder with a double stroller, but how would I have known? When we got home, we made our way upstairs to my bedroom, where I pulled out my old Fischer Price dollhouse and a Rubbermaid of little people and furniture. Kit rummaged through the toys, interested primarily in the toy minivan and the tiny, tiny baby. So I started setting the house up for her, placing beds and chairs and cribs where I’d always placed them. The entire time, I had this feeling of familiarity, but even more so than just simply that. I felt like I was on the very edge of a door, almost like the leftover wisps of a dream, where one tiny detail of your day brings you back, but just barely. I couldn’t capture the entire feeling, just the edges of childhood, the edges of that dollhouse two decades ago. I felt that when reading Barnaby Goes To School later that day, this feeling of I’ve been here before. Or when I opened the collector’s Disney princess books with Kit later that afternoon, picking a book for nap time, unable to pinpoint what exactly I was remembering. Or when I untied a tiny pink and purple backpack with my name on it to find a notebook with a note to my baby’s teacher, listing everything I was sending with her to school: a bookmark, an eraser, a pencil, and a book of family pictures (with some of Gabriella and Troy throughout), like a tiny little time capsule I hadn’t meant to make.

My mom has always called the downstairs guest room the “nursery,” a fact I once told my ex-boyfriend’s mother and might shouldn’t have. But my mom knew all along the purpose of that room was not to hold old friends or siblings or even me for the stints I wanted to sleep downstairs and not in my own bed, but to hold her babies toys for mine to play with, to fill nightstands with blankets and hats Gabe and I once wrapped ourselves in, to stuff our crib in the corner so Kit would have a place to rest so we don’t have to go home after lunch. I got her to lay down that afternoon, and then Henry and I went out to the living room, where I nestled into a chair-and-a-half with a frozen chocolate chip cookie (a favorite of Mom’s) and a Dr. Pepper Zero, Henry asleep in my arms, and Annie curled up beside me. I worked my way around the kitchen, looking for a measuring cup for formula, a tiny plate for cookies. The counters are filled with my mom’s things, as they always have been. But it was just another thought of mine…thinking about my kitchen, and about how this is hers. Her stick of butter, her copper canisters, her pile of preferred dishes drying in the sink, her coffee waiting to be microwaved after work, her picture of her late brother above the sink. This is their house.

And mine. But you know what I mean.

A few days later, we had to come back again, while my kitchen floor was replaced (yet another incredibly unfortunate home project that had to be done). This time, I made the mistake of showing Kit picture albums from high school. She tired of me quickly and went off to discover a vase full of my brother’s abandoned spare Lego pieces, but I sat there with tears in my eyes over how young everyone looked, at pictures of Charlie, the golden retriever we brought home in kindergarten, and who has been gone for 10 years now.

Then we went upstairs, where I cracked open a copy of Lady and the Tramp, startled to see scrawled in my eight-year-old-self’s handwriting “Kit” on the inside cover. I looked up at my daughter, peering at me as she waited for the story to start. I was 25 when she was born, but had been waiting on her my entire life. Kit Kittredge was my American Girl doll of choice, for her love of the typewriter and neighborhood newspapers and her attic bedroom. She was the doll I sent to school, who I scribbled ownership into my books and sent on her way. My daughter is not a doll, but look! Here she is, her skin pink and soft and her hair curly and her laugh loud. I did not name her after Kit Kittredge, but I might as well have, for the doll’s life was a fabric of my hopeful imagination for what I might have in real life one day: my baby girl, Kit.

I count it as such a gift that I am able to return to this place, these memories I didn’t unlock until I bought my children with me. It’s as if the house grew alongside me until Kit and Henry arrived, and then it went back, went back to my world of childhood, and I know how blessed I am to experience it. A childhood home is to be treasured. So much so, my father’s brother moved heaven and earth to carry their beloved parsonage, where my granny and papaw raised all four of their babies, down the road when the church Papaw preached at for fifty years decided a parking lot would serve them better, as the pastor has his home elsewhere. The parsonage rests at the back of my Uncle Jeff’s land now, and while they’ve since renovated it, for a while, it felt like stepping back in time, the kitchen and bedrooms exactly as they remembered it long, long ago.

Two Christmases ago, I gave Mom a needlepoint for the nursery that said this: just when a mother feels her purpose is gone, she becomes a grandmother. And really, the same could be said for these houses, too.