notes to myself

For the past seven or eight or so years, I've started a new at-a-glance weekly calendar every January. I'm pretty good at writing down important dates and items and numbers and things to do in it. It's the checking it daily part that always slips by. Which pretty much loses the whole point. I forget to make that pressing phonecall, I skip through a whole week thinking that an upcoming doctor's appointment is on Tuesday, not Wednesday. But I keep buying them and I keep scribbling away inside of them and I keep filing them away at the close of every year into boxes of memorabilia. Why? Because I really like to look through and remember later. I really like having records that remind me of the tiniest pieces of our days, the little scraps that can be stapled and scotch-taped and pasted together, to make a hollow shape of this here life. This time right now, these days which seem so full of slogging through the unpleasant parts and dull work that I almost want to choke it down, swallow it quickly and get it over with already. Almost. But the sweetness on my lips lingers long enough for me to know that someday I'd gladly have more scudgey bathrooms or menacing mounds of laundry or, even, tearful, sleepy cries for MAMA! as I'm settling in on the couch with a movie to just be here, right now, again, a little longer. The sweet parts will grow even sweeter and the bitter parts won't hold so tightly onto their acrid tang. But the problem with constructing some shape, in the future, of this time when my children are still young, out of day planners and digital data and children's saved artwork and store receipts that get washed and dried and turned into fuzzy little balls at the bottoms of pockets, is that it won't stand up on its own. I won't be able to crawl inside of it and stand very still and hear them breathing while they sleep.