Our own navel is something we’re told we should not contemplate, but here I am at 12:53 am, in the cheap white glider chair my wife bought to replace the expensive wooden rocking chair my mother bought when our first child was born, but bought without first asking my wife what kind of comfort chair she would like as a gift, and no doubt my mother had fond memories of rocking my little brother and me as babies, and singing to us, and reading stories to us, and my own earliest memory is of a moment like one of the moments my mother must have been remembering when she bought the wooden rocking chair—I must have been three-and-a-half years old, because this was only weeks before my little brother was born, and my mother’s belly was swollen, and her navel, an innie, had uncorked and inverted because of the pressure of the growing belly against the stretching skin, and it stuck out like a fierce nipple, but whiter, even, than the stretched skin of the rest of her belly—and the weight of us in the chair, plus the extra baby weight, was more, I suppose, than the chair was able to handle, although it handled the weight through the reading of three or four picture books, and through a fair amount of singing, and since I was not a child who fell asleep quickly, we must have rocked together for twenty or thirty minutes at least in the chair not built to bear our weight, and then the chair buckled beneath us, and we went to the ground in a heap, me and my mother and my unborn little brother, and I remember that when we hit the ground, the split wood of the chair all around us, we began to laugh together that hysterical kind of laughter I only heard my mother laugh maybe four or five times after that, mostly only when one particular friend of hers had come from Georgia to visit, back in the days before my mother and this friend were estranged because my mother and father moved to Georgia after this friend said she would spend time with my mother if my father took the new job with the light bulb installation company if they moved, but then after my parents moved to Georgia, this friend—her teenage daughter had just had a baby, and maybe that’s why—didn’t really spend any time with my mother at all, and now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I have not heard my mother laugh hysterically the way she did with me when the rocking chair broke since she and my father moved back from Georgia and my mother stopped speaking with or talking about her old friend, but there on the floor, among the shards of broken wood, there was none of that kind of sadness I feel now, thinking about my mother’s broken relationship with the friend with whom she will no longer speak, or that I feel when I think about how my mother stopped speaking with her sister and forbade her children to speak with her sister for twenty-five years as a result of a stupid but, to me, not unforgiveable thing her sister did, which was to leave me unattended in her house for fifteen minutes at age five while she drove one mile down the street to pick up her own children from school, and now that I think about it, gliding back and forth as I am in my wife’s glider, this is the same sadness I felt earlier today when my mother told me she wanted to write a children’s book, and, since I am a writer and a writing teacher, could I help her get a children’s book published, and I told her I would be happy to help her get her children’s book written, and that this was the first step, you had to write the thing and make it good so other people would want to read it, so I went into the room where we keep the children’s books, and I brought them into the living room, and I asked her if she knew what all these books had in common, and she said they were all very cute, and I said that might be true, but that alone didn’t account for why my children wanted to read them night after night…

(Fall 2010)