At Clark's Dairy of All Places

 

Today was the big day.

We went to Cheshire--site of the "spaceship park" that was Braeden's favorite and site of the enormous Christmas tree on the town green which we visited the year I was enormously pregnant with Emma.

We went to Hamden and spied our old apartment.  We saw the way they'd spiffed up the pizza restaurant across the street.

We drove down Whitney Avenue to New Haven.  We recognized restaurants and beautiful houses and parks.  We remembered street names and what was down those streets.  It was like waking up from amnesia...we remembered things we didn't know we had forgotten.

In New Haven we found a place to park and fed the meter with a few coins I scrounged in my purse (not so different from our poverty stricken student days).  We went to Clark's Dairy for lunch...right across from The Great Wall, the Chinese restaurant where Adam loved to meet his friend Kelly for lunch.  Sitting in the dingy and pleasantly homely diner, across from Adam, that's when I started to cry.

Of all places.

As I wiped my face with the cheap, thin napkins, Adam smiled at me and nodded his head.  "It's emotional," he said.

And it was.

I can't be in Connecticut without thinking of Braeden.  We lived there in the intense period of motherhood where I went nowhere without him on my hip.  Connecticut was where I started to learn how to be a mother.  And Braeden taught me.  I saw his mittened hands and Winnie the Pooh hat on the playground outside our old apartment.  I saw his short little legs, wearing overalls among the leaves on Prospect Street.  My baby.  Now he's nearly as tall as I am with much bigger feet and much bigger ideas.  He no longer thinks everything I do is heroic.  I can no longer make everything better with fruit snacks and an Elmopalooza video.

I also can't be in Connecticut without thinking of Emma.  My Yankee doodle sweetheart, she's my Yankee doodle joy.  Born here, she's the best thing to ever come out of Connecticut if you ask me.  I thought about carrying her around, swathed in pink, while I tried to keep up with Braeden.  I thought about pushing them down the street in Hamden to the library in our double stroller.

Maybe I cried in Clark's Dairy because growing children is hard bittersweet work and their incessant growing is maybe the hardest part.

I thought about myself too (surprised?).  I wish I could go back and talk to myself back then, the self that resided in Connecticut.  Sometimes I was frightened and lonely and homesick.  As we drove on Edgehill Road among the houses that still catch my breath with their beauty, I remembered going to one of them with Adam.  His professor lived there and we were going to a party with his classmates.

I was intimidated.  I remember agonizing over what to wear and how to act.  It felt like junior high all over again.  I didn't have a good sense of who I was or why.  I wish I could go back and tell that self to relax.

Maybe I cried because I miss my friends.  The friendships I forged in Connecticut were keepers.  When driving today near their houses, I felt a pang.  We were so connected back then.  We spent pivotal years there together, in the trenches.  Our husbands were in graduate school, our children were in diapers and we were surviving on student loans.  I want to go back and be kinder to my dear friends while I had the chance and we all lived there together.  I want to go back and babysit for them, make them dinner, tell them how amazing they were and what a help they were to me.

Maybe I cried because of him.

this was taken yesterday in Central Park when it was sunny...today it only rained

Before moving to Connecticut, I had never lived more than 4 hours away from my parents and I almost always lived close to my sisters.  I hadn't really grown up or left home.

Connecticut was the refiner's fire of our marriage.  Adam and I became Us.  I look back on the fifteen plus years and feel infinite gratitude.

I love my life.  I love my husband.  I love our memories.

(and I miss our kids!)