Slippage

The wedding took place 
in a small, un-air-conditioned room 
at the back of a church in Wisconsin 
almost twenty years ago.

My mother says she remembers nothing 
about it except my husband
standing at the back of the chapel 
sweating in a suit and tie, 
our baby asleep on his shoulder, 
saying, “Please, if you can’t untie it,
just cut it off.” 

There was also a potluck supper 
with a big frosted sheet cake, 
but she has forgotten all of it. 
On one side of the church gymnasium

were long tables laden with serving dishes 
and cloth-covered rounds where my cousins sat 
visiting while little kids chased each other
across the polished wooden floor
on the other side of the room, 
dipping their plastic wands into bottles
and blowing bubbles. 

The flowers had been assembled 
back at our hotel in the days before
the ceremony by the bride 
and her sisters and mother.

The hotel had a huge indoor pool 
with real trees and a waterslide, 
and it must have been heavenly 
in the winter, but in the heat of summer
the interior was as humid as a greenhouse. 
Our side of the hotel got so hot 
that the kids couldn’t sleep; 

I placed towels over their pillows 
and cold washcloths on their foreheads
and necks, but there was no relief. 
There was no relief. 

My husband finally got up 
in the middle of the night 
and drove to CVS or Walgreens 
and bought a pair of pedestal fans 
(recalling another night, another hotel, when he
drove to a drugstore for Tylenol just because 
my head hurt so much that I couldn’t sleep). 

During the day, the baby and I hung out 
on the cool side of the hotel 
in my parents’ room. They had driven
all the way up from New Mexico. 
Do you remember? I ask now. 
Sitting in her room with my cousins, 
assembling the flowers. 

One of the women said that when he was older, 
girls would call my baby a babe. 
He was only a few months old at the time 
but has somehow turned into a young man. 

There’s a jarring sense then, 
a disorientation, an awareness 
of the slippage: 
how quickly it’s all 
getting away from me. 
When my older son was a baby, 
one of my sisters-in-law told me

that he had a sexy, scratchy voice, 
a kind of foreshadowing, 
and our child that I used to hold 
every day of his life

is a grown man now, taller than his father, 
living on his own in another country. 
Sometimes, when they were little, 
I took videos of my boys, 
letting the tape run, letting it go 
well beyond the moment I had wanted
to capture and hold 

like a firefly, something ephemeral, 
something that can never truly be 
preserved. I wanted to remember 
not just the good times, so perfect and fleeting, 

but the messiness around them. The baby 
would start to cry, and I didn’t roll 
the tape back and record over it later
because it seemed important in the future 
to remember not just the pleasure, but 
the pain of being present. I knew I would want more 
than sad nostalgia, so I needed to remember it all, 

not simply my baby’s beautiful little face, 
staring up at me with such slavish devotion, 
mirroring everything he saw
looking back at him.