Oh Honey Remember

Remember when all we used the internet for after he was born was sending pictures via email to all our friends and family? Remember how in that upward moving house, three stores stacked tightly on top of eachother, we would lay in bed with that bundle between us and watch Bollywood flick after Bollywood flick and eat cartons of Kosher Chinese? Sometimes replies to our internet birth announcement would come: "Congratulations! He is perfect" "Oh...you two look great! What a cute baby!" "What a perfect new family...Congrats!" When you went back to work I sat with the baby next to me on the bed sipping strawberry milkshakes (too many it turned out) and surfing the net for baby clothes and toys we couldn't afford. Remember how after we moved to that little farmhouse on Livingston Ave. we would all cuddle down on the rug and take more pictures of him beginning to roll and sit up and crawl. We would send them out via email to friends and family. They would write back: "He's getting so big!" He looks just like his mama!" "Can't wait to see you all at Christmas!" Remember how I would lock myself in that little sun room and you would play with him all day. I would write, and write, and write, and finally use the internet to send a draft to a colleague, and come out to fresh cornbread and beans and we would bundle up in the van and go on long brisk walks along the canal. We would take his first pictures in his snowsuit and pretend we were in Colorado. Then, we would send them out to our friends and family via the internet, and they would write back... Oh honey, remember? So how is it that now I hear you raise from bed too early in the morning. I find you on the couch with the glow of the computer outlining the back of your head like a halo. Facebook again, or maybe a blog, or perhaps a quick glance at twitter, or one of 3 email accounts. How is it that you were faced with a steely gaze all winter when all my warmth went into a computer screen, where the intimate space of the home echoed hollowly in a cold cybereffect detachment. I scan your page for pictures of me--looking for some material presence of our familialness in this other reality that you occupy. I find myself waking early, earlier than you, and getting there first...my face glued to my own alternate realities. The children, both of them, are there too...only when people comment on them they comment to you or to me...not to us. Oh honey remember those few years, too few, we didn't even know how few they were before all of that overwhlemed all of this? When our lives were defined more by our home than our computers?