Larger than this: ballads, liver donations, and story

January 26th, 2012 § 0

This morning I was listening to a favorite song, “When the Roses Bloom Again”– an old ballad sort of song about a solider going off to war. He promises to return to his sweetheart when the roses bloom again, but is killed. As he’s dying, he requests/promises/ wishes to be with her again someday. I have a penchant for sad story put to song. The poignancy of simple stories and stringed instruments cut to something elemental and familiar in me.

I appreciate that torn  rawness that that sort of story can call forth. I think of my grandfather, who so easily cried when he heard music, and I nod to some yet unknown gene that connects us, even in his absence, this way.

Perhaps I am simply drawn to these sad things. I am reading a book by Studs Terkel called May the Circle be Unbroken. It is oral history– short transcriptions of conversations with people talking about what death is to them. It is organized by chapters: medical workers (doctors, ER workers, nurses), mothers and sons,  military/soldiers, religious  leaders. It is captivating and touches that same space that music and ballad does.

Last night I read a chapter by a man who donated part of his liver to a man he didn’t know–to a local newspaper writer.  And then before too long that writer, despite the new liver, died. It was captivating: this man’s giving of an organ we possess which can remake itself. This man’s belief around what he is here for, and then the painful experience of his good will, his literal suffering, still not saving this man. Another man speaking of his experience with stage 3 cancer told of laughing hysterically with a friend when his spleen was hurting him from cancer. He said “my spleen is killing me.” And then recounts that he and his friend laughed hysterically for a long time because they looked at one another and realized that literally, his spleen, filled with cancer, was killing him. And yet, he doesn’t die of the cancer– he’s recounting the story 20 or 30 years later.

As I listen to “When the Roses Bloom Again,”  I see black and white images of my grandparents before the war. Stories from Terkel’s book by soldiers who have come home from war and who describe the loss and death in war, flash in my mind too. I am amazed that I exist. What strange force protected my grandfather in that time in the Pacific that he could return and continue this family? Or my other grandfather in Korea?  How easy it would have been for this song to be the story that either of their lives told,  rather than their stories continuing in the lives of their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren?

Earlier in the week a friend and I talked about the challenge of living outside of organized religion: who is there to hold you in loss? What can you turn to when you face death and tragedy? Her husband, she said, thinks that religious belief/god is magical thinking. And I wonder, what is magic, and what is the opposite of magic? I can’t say that I have a good answer for that.

As I read the short stories people tell about death in Terkel’s book, I find myself feeling something that is not rational in each person’s narrative, something that nods to large-ness, or larger than this-ness. It is vague and won’t be tied down, which is what I love about the book. It is simply people’s experiences, as they face loss of loved ones, or death, and how they learn to navigate existence afterwards. There are no answers, just stories. One women in her 80s no longer believes in the catholic god as she once did. But finds herself haunted by worry suddenly after years of confidence in her decision: ‘what if ?’she asks.

Perhaps that is the unavoidable “magic” or “not magic” we all face: what if, what then? The unknown.

Perhaps we answer this with science, religion, logic, magic, fantasy, but in the end all we know is that we don’t really know.

I think this is what makes ballad touch me so: that they do not try to explain the why of it all. They simple tell a story: there was a man who went to war, and he wanted to return. He didn’t, but even as he was dying, he wished and hoped that he would somehow, reconnect to the one he loved.

Children accept this differently that we do. Still  developing rational thinking, they cannot explain the things around them as we might. *

Last week as I was finishing reading my 4 year old a good night story– his ankles crossed over one another in tie dyed socks he had made, two toes sticking out of one of them– I stopped and looked at him. “I love you Jonas,” I said, “you and Papi, and Elias.” (His dad and brother.)

He said: “Mom, when I die you will be not so sad because Elias will still be here.”

I don’ t know where this came from. He looked at me so matter of factually. “Well, Jonas,” I said, “usually children live longer than their parents.”  “I know” he said, “but Elias will help you.” (Very short pause). “Let’s be slow cats now, ” he says, headed to the base of our staircase, where, every night after we read, we crawl slowly up the steps– him under me– meowing until we reach the top of the steps, where we stand up again, returning to ourselves.

“Good night Jonas” I say, taking Elias, freshly bathed, from his dad to rock him to sleep. On this particular night, I found myself humming “When the roses bloom again” as the rocker squeaked and he nursed, which is what led me to play the song today.

As I reflect on the song now, I am struck by the line:  “And their hearts were filled with sorrow, For their thoughts were of tomorrow.” Tomorrow isn’t yet really a solid concept for a 4 year old– who needn’t be paralyzed by the thought that any of us might die, because right now, we’re not dead, we’re just here.  He doesn’t need magic– things seem to be just what they are for him, for now.  We can talk about dieing and then crawl up the steps pretending to be cats.

My husband and I had a poem read at our wedding, by Erich Fried, in which Love is personified, and to each rebuttal given, answers: “it is what it is says love.” I think so. Which is why story is so powerful– they simply are what they are: people’s stories/experiences in living. Individual stories are somehow, in their small-ness, so much larger than all the other things that they make up (logic, rationality, science, religion, belief, history).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apples, Halloween lights and Donuts: Love is the in Details

October 24th, 2011 § 0

Yesterday I peeled a bushel of apples. I made apple butter in the crock pot, apple coffee cake, savory apple turnovers. The house smelled of caramelized onions, apples, cinnamon and allspice. The air from outside, as my husband and almost 4 year old came in and out smelled of cooler air that somehow carries less of the heavy chemical city air  that the summer holds. The day before we had traveled 40 miles to NJ to Moon’s Farm with friends. We took a hayride, had apple cider donuts, cider, and bought apples and pumpkins to bring home.

Standing in the middle of the farm stand, breathing in the sweet tart of apple as my eyes scanned the names– Pink Lady, Cortland, Red Delicious, I could see my grandfather’s hands in my mind’s eye. I could picture him pulling himself out of his suburban in east Tennessee, to head into a farm stand, his hand as it reached for a bushel of apples, a jar of pickles. “Get what you want Trace” he would say.

“Mom, mom, I can’t wait, can I have a donut?” Jonas asked, the smell of the freshly made donuts making my own mouth water.  “Yes, yes– get your dad– I’ll have one too.” I say.

With my grandparents, it was vegetables, fruit– food– that was given, more than toys. I hadn’t thought it that way before, but it is true.  I watch Jonas bit his donut. I wonder if his hands will be like Pop’s. “I want to be a farmer” he had told me recently. “That’s a nice idea” I said.

When I was on those road trips with Pop, I’d occasionally drift off to imaginings of me in the future– farm savvy and ready to meet the world the way he did. With an innate sense of the rhythm of things grown and growing. And then, my grandmother, always in tow. The one to prepare all of the goods he purchased and grew . The first time I took my husband to meet my grandparents, long before we were married, we sat on the porch of their home in Shady Valley for hours and broke green beans, the quiet barely audible sound of them dropping on top of one another mixing with the sound of my grandparents’ voices for hours. There was a meditative quality to the time it took to break a whole season’s worth of forerunners.

We recently finished our last jar of green beans  from my grandparent’s  garden, the last jar of Pop’s honey , and the final one of grandmother’s apple butter. The passing of this season of my life– when I was fed by the literal fruits of my family’s garden, is passing. And I wonder: what of these arts can I pass on? How can I bring that magic to my children, as a city dweller ?

Not these words, but the essence and spirit of them filled me yesterday as I made my own, my first, batch of apple butter. Jonas commenting on how yummy it smelled each time he came in or out of the house. As the day progressed, I dove more deeply into the quest to make things. As though in the art and act of preparing these things I was able to connect to that space and time, to those people no longer with me. I found myself very driven, as though, somehow, something critical depended on the tasks at hand: to preserve the season’s harvest for another time.

As I swayed Elias to sleep in the afternoon, laundry spread all over the floor, my eyes scanned the room. For a moment I saw the space not as I sometimes do: a place to clean, straighten, windows to repair. But as a home. My home; my children’s. I had the desire to make photographs of each section of the room— with all of its clutter and disarray. To then spread those photos out on the floor and start to name each thing I saw– to sketch out the poetry in each item, placed or misplaced as it was. The small line of yellow on the window frame, a mark left from the window crayons Jonas used for a week after his brother was born, to paint pictures, write his name, and pass the strange time of adjustment he had in becoming a big brother.

The long thin tube shaped grey piece of foam discarded in the corner, a left over piece of insulation we tried to use last year to block the draft under our front door. Since, it has been a scarf, a telephone, a weapon, and many other things in dramatic play.

In the living room, the plastic pumpkin lights flash where they hang on the mirror. Last year my parents brought them to Jonas as a gift. This year, a magic experience for my son: finding somewhere to hang them and turning them on. He sat watching them for at least 5 minutes of rapture. “They are beautiful” he said.

All of these things around me– they make this our home. I can feel the weight of each mundane thing, and by weight, I mean power. These are things  that shape us when we are busy living our lives. These are the details that we recall later: the Halloween lights made in China, the way our grandfather exhales as he steps out of the car, the sound of his boots on the farm stand concrete, the smell of apples and peanut shells on the side of the road, the apple cider donut that we eat warm, the smell of apple butter cooking as we come in and out of the yard on a late October morning.

It makes me feel the power of this moment and it holds me accountable to living deeply as long as I can.

Curiousity, Monkeys, and Children: The Measure & Value of Play

September 22nd, 2011 § 0

This morning, as most mornings, my 3.6 year old popped into my room and into my bed. After snuggling with his little brother, and tossing him enthusiastically from his belly where he had hoisted him to hug and bounce and sort of toss him around, he jumped out of bed and headed straight to work. He picked up an imaginary object that required him to reach his arms out in front and stretch them around the invisible container, which demanded a deep “umphf” to lift.

“I have to get the maple syrup from this tree” he said as he hauled the still empty container over to the maple tree growing at the foot of the bed. Some careful fine motor work tapped the tree with something very tiny, that then filled the container super fast. Then he lugged the filled container  back over to the side of the bed. “Here mom” he said, “here’s your glass of syrup– it came out really fast today.”

To meet the world with this energy and imagination!  How do we cultivate that curiosity as adults & support its longevity in our children?

The preschool I run recently received a big box of books as donations. As the school is commercial free, I pulled out the ones with commercial characters and made a stack to donate. My son discovered the stack and has latched onto a “learn to read” Curious George story.

As we read it ,I noted the message in the oft repeated phrase: George was a curious monkey who tried not to be bad. The naturally curious monkey is always in trouble, being bad, etc. Sure, he always ends up being a hero, but it’s a bit of a convoluted message. He’s naturally curious, but his curiosity gets him in trouble. And, yet, it also, often saves the day for someone.

My son and I  have read another Curious George story, also from a pile to pass on,  in which George is visiting the dentist and a woman and child are with him in the waiting room. The child is afraid of the dentist so the mother goes first. While the mother is in the dentist chair (her daughter is in the waiting room), George sneaks into the exam room and spins her around and around in the chair as he tries out all of the levers and buttons on it. Just as George is about to get in trouble, the little girl comes in from the waiting room and laughs, thus undoing her fear and , lucky for George, transforming him from a trouble maker about to get a lecture into a saving force who has shown the little girl that the dentist can be fun.

So what’s the message?  Curiosity shouldn’t cause harm to someone else? Curiosity is only of value when it serves/helps someone else?  Curiosity needs to be monitored?  What is the value of curiosity? And how do we learn to navigate the natural impulse of curiosity within a community?

It seems to me that our relationship to curiosity reveals a lot about our relationship to play.

In young children, play is the work they need to engage in to learn about the world, to process their lives and the small and large concepts they are trying to make sense of for the first time: sameness/difference; life/death, separation/community, connection/independence, cause/effect.

In effect, these are concepts we never really have a solid hold on, even as adults. There are “whys” that our children will bring to us that are easier to answer, at least with the help of a little research. Some specific examples from this week: “Why is asphalt hard?” “Why is the sidewall grey and not black like the road?” ; “Will this stick grow in the ground with real roots if we put it there?”; “Why does icecream have to melt?”

But we would be harder pressed to simply answer the questions that play sometimes tries to sort out, or that pulse underneath what seems more superficial: what does it mean to be born? What happens when we die? What is permanent? What is power and how do I use it? How can I be a member of community and still have my own thoughts/desires?

Often, as adults, we grow accustomed to living as though we know the answers to these sorts of questions. And yet, most of us, when faced with an earnest 3 year old’s questions, the loss of a friend, an experience of being ostracized from a group we thought of as family, will find that the knowing was really much less known than we thought.

It’s really as though the play of children, by embracing the  question in the present moment as they play it/act it out,  is a more honest way to live with these questions.

I know that children need to come to understand how to live in the world, to learn how to respect others, how to share, how to care for themselves. But it also seems to me that in supporting them to understand this, we overstep our own knowledge a lot. We presume to know things that cannot be known.

How can we leave space for our children to live with the unknown, even as we model for them how to engage with the known/the seen/the measured? How can we allow ourselves more time and space to cultivate curiosity about those things we really cannot know? How can we honor the power of play and make more space for it– for our children, and for ourselves?

This teacher’s blog, and this particular blog post, illustrate the power of children’s play beautifully:  Marla McLean, Atelierista.

What would I have done if not this?

September 20th, 2011 § 1

Everything has its honeymoon period. I believe that I have just exited my honeymoon with West Philadelphia. At least I’ve observed this pattern often enough to know that it always comes and doesn’t have to constitute a crisis, just careful observation and measured response. The summer was hot; the humidity high, the city loud, dirty, and stinky. Many of our friends were on vacation, and I felt a bit caged. And then, after a trip to upstate NY for work, where we were for ten days, we are catapulted into Fall. My oldest son has started preschool 5 days a week, the rhythm of our days is tightly measured now. And I wonder if that slow sticky summer was something I imagined– a heat induced state of strange imagery and slow motion.

Where a few weeks ago I wondered: how will I make it through summer without school to entertain my oldest son, now I wonder, what do I do when he’s gone five days a week?

Inside of this is also an unsought after question arising: what would I have done if not this? What life would I be living if not this one? An ordinary enough question, I know it well, having generally leapt into that next thing when it comes for years. And yet, now, I sense a need to be a more cautious leaper. I own a house, run a community school, have two children, and a husband with a tenure track job.

Perhaps it is not so much the question ” what would I have done if not this” but more “what is this life I have right now?” What is it that I actually am living day to day? How is it that I am spending this one life I’ve been given with this unexpected array of characters, colors, sights, sounds? As I sit on my brown couch and hear the sirens passing frequently on 49th Street, my youngest son asleep despite these sounds, how do I measure the worth of this moment? Why am I habitually prone to that question? What is the need to measure worth at all? And how can I recover from it? Couldn’t this be it? Sitting here, hearing, seeing, breathing, without the measuring of these things?

I feel the pull of this call to growth from deep inside of me, asking me: How do I sit fully in the midst of the love, the grief, the monotony, the loss, the joy that is unavoidable? I wonder if I can step up, and sit with it, right here, and right now without being swept into the next motion to be measured later when this moment is past.

 

Giving Birth Makes the Mind Mortal

July 30th, 2011 § 0

Last night my  3.5 year old got into bed with me. I slept between him and my 5 month old– as Jonas said when he woke up “you’re like a big burrito with us wrapping around you, Mom.” Exactly how I felt, I guess, as I woke and noted the matted state of my hair from tossing and turning and trying to stay comfortable between them all night.

A glance in the mirror as I got out of bed reminded me that I have two, more or less triangle shaped, bald spots above my temples from hair that is falling out. Last pregnancy, too, you could trace my path by following the hair I left everywhere I went. Shedding. At least this time, I know that this will end and my hair will return. I know my body will continue to  change over the next two years and somehow, I feel so much more able to just relax into these things.

I think that Elias’ birth, the second birth, may have finally cracked  something I otherwise have never been able to crack: the hypersensitive relationship to my own body– the complicated love and hate of having a body married to a mind that wraps itself around culture and expectations, and is, yet, merely mortal. How can one articulate the depth of a woman’s struggle to inhabit her body mind with grace? Birth has taught me something about this that I find hard to articulate– birth has taught me a love of myself that is intricately tied to a painful sense of my mortality, and the mortality of my children.

I am working on a series of poems– trying on that form of reflection that I once wore so comfortably– I find that it is helping me to discover something of the power of this new place , this new space, I find myself in. Here’s one of my most recent drafts:

As the horizon holds the morning

This body grew like morning–

abruptly  in my mother’s womb

jettisoned into light and motion

as flesh bones sound muscle.

 

It came to know itself as girl woman mother–

a study done and redone, but so seldom

held as the horizon holds the morning.

 

The mind and body meeting

in me found conflicts of interest

that bolted through sinews

to become strange currents

of movement and of thought.

 

Giving birth makes the mind

as mortal as the flesh.

And the horizon that holds

our rising becomes tender–

as painful as soft feet on small pebbles.

 

The grace of being here for this strangely passing

season of light and dark, gives me a largeness

of  body, a hugeness of  limited space, to welcome

life and love and softness for a time–

 

Did I really google “Am I a bad mother”?

July 23rd, 2011 § 0

We live in the age of internet searches. My son recently wanted to knit a scarf. He’s 3.5. It’s been so long since I knitted that I told him I couldn’t remember how. He bent his arms, pulled his elbows in towards his sides, opened his hands towards the ceiling and said, “actually, Mom, you can just google that.”

Yesterday, hiding inside from the 100 degree summer heat wave, after just returning from a play date, I found myself in one of those mother melt downs. My son had been difficult at the play date– I saw it coming. We went straight from school there, he didn’t eat a snack because he was too excited to sit still, and we stayed too long. So when things escalated– he had been getting louder, his body faster– and there was a full on melt down over an engine he wanted and therefore took, I discovered that I was no longer very capable at navagating the moment. Words, I knew would not help much; he was too far gone into that place I saw him going. Physical removal of the object would result in a tantrum, and I wanted to avoid that.

With sweat dripping down my legs despite the central AC, my 5 month old tied onto me way past his nap time, what I wanted was a mode of travel like that in Harry Potter, where you just jump into the flue network and are home. But I had to navigate the conflict, wait on the other family with the sleeping baby to leave (so my screaming 3.5 year old didn’t wake him) and then walk home in the heat. ( I forgot to add what I was carrying in addition to my 5 month old: a bouquet of flowers, a portfolio of a year’s worth of my son’s art, a lunch box, a back pack,  a plastic bag filled with a pair of slippers, crackers, and my son’s special self made “paper key chain” and my purse). I knew that if I had given my son time between school and the playdate; if he had eaten a snack; if I had gone home 30 minutes earlier, we would have made it out of there. But I wanted to stay in the cool, wanted to believe that we’d somehow avoid the patterned behavior I knew so well, wanted to imagine that I didn’t have to be the grown up.

Once home my son gleefully settled into play by himself in his tent. Relived, it seemed to have quiet. I got the 5 month old to sleep, sat down and found myself googling  “am I a bad mother?” After scanning the top hits for a moment, I stopped. Did I actually just do that? Am I now turning to the internet for reassurance that I am fit to be a mom?

I find that in parenting, I encounter the deepest roots of my own issues head on. Before I had children I think I might have seen parenting as easy; might have believed that enabling children to be pleasant well adjusted people was as simple as having the right intentions. I had no idea that I’d encounter my own insecurities head on every time we had a melt down. Like a bird who has spotted prey, I swoop down every time we go there: My son is acting out, then I must have done something wrong. If I had X, then, Y. Quite often it is true, the anaylisis. And yet, sometimes, too, I think my overthinking of these things creates more of a problem. Do I possess the capacity to just let things be what they are and move on?

If I could let go of the need to be a good mom, wouldn’t I be that much better?

What is amazing, is for me to realize that this is exactly the struggle I’ve lived inside of my whole life: how I am seen by others. And, now, with children, there are two mirrors that show me myself in another light, and that (god forbid) might show others too that imperfection lives in me and in my family! Did I just admit that? The striving and grasping towards perfection is harmful. And being a mother I see unequivocally how deep the roots of this infection are. The need to be perfect prevents me from being present in the moment.

It all reminds me to breath, return to center and start again. This moment. Each moment. On and on. Just like that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He talks more than you do

July 11th, 2011 § 0

Yesterday we were driving home from a birthday party. It was nearly my children’s bathtime when we left. My three and a half year old sat in his car seat behind me and his brother beside him in his.  Jonas talked constantly.

“He talks more than you” a close friend said when she came to visit shortly after Elias was born. I gave her a hard look, not sure, at first how she meant this, being a very talkative person myself.

“Mom, what is that building over there?” Jonas asks. And then, before I can answer, he moves on “why are those cars doing that”

‘What cars…” I try to ask him, but he continues.

“Mom, I think when I am old like you and Papi, that you and Papi will die.”

Silence.

“What made you think of that Jonas?”I ask.

“I just think that you and Papi will die when I am older.” He says.

“That’s true,” his father says, “one day we will die.”

“Papi, I’m hungry” he says.

“You can have a snack when we get home”, I say, and watch the car in front of us dodge a pothole, curious about how my son came to think about this on our drive home.

As we cross the bridge into West Philadelphia, Elias is asleep. I point out the recycling center on the right, “there’s the recycling place, Jonas, we’re almost home.”

“Okay” he says, “Why was that the recycling place, mom? “

Pop is in the wind?

July 11th, 2011 § 0

We have been preparing for the holidays. Jonas has his advent’s calendar that Lisa, Tia, and I am made into the wee hours of the night last year. Each morning he eagerly pulls out a gift after standing in front of the felt calendar and asking “which one?” “Which number is today.” I didn’t consider last year, when I was making artsy number eights out of twisted ribbon– that this year my son would be learning his letters and numbers and that the abstract representations might make it hard to find particular numbers on certain days.

 

But this is the least of the unexpected surprises that parenting has brought this year.

 

Next comes: Santa. And with him, his sleigh full of presents, his flying reindeer, and his similarity to the German Nicholoaus, who comes earlier in the year than Santa and brings a gift to children who clean their boots. He leaves his gifts there, snuggled in all of the polished German boots left in front of bedroom doors.

We had just started talking about Santa and Nicholaus on the weekend of Nicholaus. A german couple who live an hour away in Blue Bell, in a gated community in the middle of nowhere, was hosting a Nicholous celebration, to which the bearded man himself was invited. On the way there, we stopped at the largest mall on the East coast– the King of Prussia Mall. After lunch, we went shopping. We wanted to show Jonas Santa, and on the way to see him, Jonas collected a leaf from a fountain to take to him as a gift.

 

We hadn’t planned on sitting on Santa’s lap; and when we got to the center of one of 100s of beautifully marbled and overfull centers in the mall, there he was: a beautiful bearded Santa with a soft face and gentle eyes. The line was long, not feasible for an almost 3 year old to wait through and be in any mood to enjoy a visit at the end of it. But Jonas had a gift for Santa, and I knew we had to get it to him. After some serious worry and a few minutes of reflection, I decided to ask the photographer if she could give the leaf to Santa. She agreed, and Jonas was perfectly content to give the leaf to Santa’s helper for later. And there ended that near disaster. Or so we thought.

 

Later, in Blue Bell, after too many cookies had been consumed and a little bit of soup, there was a knock at the door. All of the children ran to see Nicholaus coming through the door, his polyester beard crooked. “Who is it?” asks someone. “My dad” one little girl replies.

 

 

Nicholaus, though, was in a grumpy mood and had not read up on progressive child centered parenting. He invited each 3 something child up to stand alone in the middle of all of the others and asked them if they had been good. If they said yes, he insisted he did not believe them and asked the parents about a list of tasks that he felt they should do and do well, things which no three year old does consistently and few do terribly well: do you sleep all night?; do you go to bed when told to? Do you brush your teeth and do you do it well? Do you always listen to your parents?”

 

My blood pressure was rising, and Jonas was pushing back further and further into my lap. Oh man, I thought, a year’s work to create the perfect preschool for my child, and here I am ruining nicholaus and santa for him in one terrible 10 minutes–. Before his turn, both Florian and I whispered to him just to say that he had been good. And when Nicholaus asked him, and then in turn asked us, we all said “yes, he’s been good.” Nicholaus was displeased, having no way to make a good slam, but Jonas was spared a lecture.

 

Another near disaster saved. Or so we thought.

 

We left there at bathtime to drive an hour home. Jonas, in the back seat, started to be upset. “Why didn’t Santa have my leaf” he asked? Shit. Santa wasn’t even Nicholaus. Or was he? I whispered to Florian. We didn’t know. Default decision: don’t focus on that; focus on the leaf. Um. Well. “Nicholaus came straight from work and he probably left his leaf with the elves.”

 

“But why he didn’t say thank you?” Jonas replies. Real tears. Real crisis on the horizon. “Um. He Probably forgot, with all the children there Jonas. I am sure he’s thankful.” Not good enough. The conversation continues like this. (And I am still fuming that Nicholaus had the nerve to behave as he did; and now, Mr. Nicholaus who expects three year olds to do everything well that they can’t possibly do well, has forgotten to say thank you for a gift!.) Lights on the side of the road divert Jonas’ attention, though the question returns again many times in many forms before he is asleep, way too late.

 

Then comes the googling: Nicholaus and Santa are different. Santa is the Weihnachtsman in German. We need to straighten this out tomorrow. We realize we forgot to put the boots he’d cleaned for Nicholaus that morning in front of his bedroom door, where, the story goes, is where to put them. Oh man. Florian decides to write a letter. Brillant. A letter from Santa, that Nicholaus delivers and places in his boots (which are by the front door not his bedroom door) thanking Jonas for the leaf.

 

Whew. This is difficult. But the comedy shifts over the coming weeks to something even harder to navigate.

 

Jonas and I are making Christmas cards for everyone. Jonas made one for Nana, one for Papa, one for Grandmother. Then he wants to make one for Pop. Florian had already suggested that we talk to him about how Pop won’t be at Christmas. But I have not found a way to bring this up; how do you randomly tell a 3 year old that someone as passed away?

 

Big wave of emotion overtakes me. Breath. Take a breath. I don’t know exactly what I said.

 

Jonas, Pop won’t be at Christmas.

 

We can send it to him at his house.

 

Pop isn’t at his house Jonas.

 

Why not.

 

Jonas, at some point our bodies get tired, and then we leave them: our hearts and our spirits leave our bodies and go out into the world, bigger than they were before.

 

Pop is in the wind?

 

Yes, Pop is in the wind, and the sky, and everywhere. And in your heart.

 

I don’t want him in my heart. I want to give him this. He says, with his crumpled red construction paper.

 

I know you do. You can make him a card. He can see it.

 

With his eyes?

 

Um, not really, but with his spirit.

 

Can he take it with him to the sky?

 

He can see it from where he is.

 

I want him to hold it. I want to see him at his house.

 

He comes to me and hugs me.

 

I’m sad. Mom. I’m sad.

 

Me too Jonas. I am sad to. I miss Pop. (tears are pouring down my face now)

 

Don’t cry Mom. Don’t cry.

 

 

The next day, Jonas is wrapping everyone’s packages. He has spent an hour cutting paper and taping it together on packages. I tell him I am going downstairs to get the laundry. He runs to the top of the steps with a piece of construction paper.

 

I am going to make a card for who is in the sky, he says

 

For Pop? I ask

 

Yeah, he says.

 

Okay.

 

And we can take it to his house.

 

We can’t take it to him Jonas, but he can see it.

 

Why he leave?

 

We all leave our bodies one day, Jonas. We are here and do many things, and do a lot of work. We play, we travel, we meet people. Then our bodies get tired and we leave them. We go out like breath and become part of everything. And we live in people’s hearts.

 

I don’t want to go out, he says. I don’t want you to go. I want to stay in our house forever.

 

Mommy will always always live in your heart Jonas.

 

If we don’t finish our work, can we stay?

 

We all get to be bigger one day Jonas.

 

Can I make this card?

 

Yes Jonas, you can.

 

 

But he doesn’t. He carries the card into the living room and starts going through the Christmas books we checked out of the library. He digs out his two favorites: Santa’s New Suit and Christmas Magic.

 

In Santa’s New Suit, Santa purchases a new plaid suit, but no one likes it– not his wife, his elves, or his reindeer. In the end, he returns to his red suit. “

 

why they don’t like that one?” he asks, referring to the new one.

 

People have trouble with change, I say.

 

“I not,” he says, gesturing his hands upward in amazement.

 

I hug him sideways. “Santa would like that I bet.”

 

“Read this one” he says, and we are off to the North Pole again. Where a lovely Santa lives in a small house and is preparing for the magic that arrives one time a year.

 

“Why the magic come Mom?”

 

To help the reindeer fly

 

Why they not walk ?

 

They couldn’t get to all of the houses and deliver all of the gifts then.

 

What is the magic Mom?

 

Something we can’t see that makes things that don’t usually happen happen.

 

Reindeer don’t fly. (emphasis on don’t)

 

With magic they do, I say

 

“Read”, he says, and snuggles up against me.

 

 

Birthdays, funerals, and motherhood

June 8th, 2011 § 0

After Jonas was born, I was sucked into a real quandary about my own mortality. There were some specific questions I could articulate (like who will raise my son if his father and I both die– a question we still haven’t answered). But more haunting than the handful of articulated questions I found myself pondering was the sensation that came, the acknowledgement, the undeniable recognition that I was mortal and the sense that I could not get away from that fact.

Mortality is obviously the one undeniable trait (besides birth, the dependence on water, sustenance) that we all share. It unites us whether or not we live in acknowledgement of that thread day to day. And yet, it is not something we can live in full awareness of each moment.

Childbirth and newborns seem to invite an inescapable acknowledgement of this. In the fuzzy eyed state of no sleep and hormones, there it is: laid bare like your face in florescent light.

This time, with Elias, my second son, the encounter has been less shocking. Perhaps because I’ve never returned to the place I lived before I become a mother. So, I was not thrown there with the arrival of this person  into my life. This time I was already in a subtle yet constant state of being there.

My grandfather ,  Louis Landon Milhorn, passed away last August. I was pregnant with Elias at the time.. A  friend once told me that our grandparents are our spiritual guides, whether we know them or not. The passing of this guide –Pop — at a time when I was ushering a new life into this world, was stunning. And the magnitude of having lost this mentor has unfolded in parallel with the coming of Elias into the world.  Family, and my sense of it has broadened, again, through both the birth of my second son and the loss of my grandfather.

When Pop died, I was unable to attend his funeral. I went to TN to help plan the funeral, took writing I had done about him that I helped plan as a part of the ceremony that was to be a tribute to his life,  but I had to leave before the funeral for a conference that I am in charge of annually.

Before I left the Smokey Mountains for the Hudson Valley, I was able to visit the funeral home to view my grandfather’s body. My parents came with me. As we stood in front of Pop’s coffin, the funeral director came in. He was a tall man, his middle wide and his hair gray. He had known my grandfather. “Louis’ skin was so thin,”  he said. We had to repair the skin after we arranged his hands.”

I had been looking at his hands– his fingernails, his fingers, sunspots and veins. His hands folded across his chest. They were the same hands he’d spent his lifetime with and they were done with their work, folded. It is an image I still see sometimes– the strange finality of it, the awkward peace.

On the plane, I watched the landscape of east TN grow smaller– the land that gave birth to my family, to my roots. My children will most likely never know that land the way I do. I spent summers as passenger in the car as pop drove us around and told the stories of trees, bridges, homesteads. As we reached flying altitude, I looked at my hands. I thought of my son’s hands– placed my hand on my slightly pregnant belly and pictured  hands that  growing there in a few weeks time.

Elias’ birth has  brought me back to my voice. It has landed me here in the midst of my writing self again. It has made me brave enough to see that I need to write, to work out the knots to explore  the rawness, the boredom, the layers that make up parenthood. And so here I am, writing again. Not that I ever really stopped. And yet I found myself immobilized by that pulsating sensation I mention above– unable to face what might surface as I began to type, to explore, to write.

Pop’s birthday is tomorrow, and the year anniversary of his passing is approaching. I feel now both his absence and his presence. Like my children too; When I am not with them I am no less changed by their presence in my life– that pulsing is there now, always. My mortality is so much larger perhaps because with life, i have also given them mortality– their own limited window here to do their work. The image of Pop’s hands returns. I don’t mean to but for a split second I think of my children, of their hands. This is the ache that comes sometimes: the vastly incomprehensible truth that we all face a moment when we have to let go.

It is a strange recognition of our interconnectedness, the inescapable nature of life, of death, of loving. The memory of Pop, his life, and presence keep me going, just as the present moment with all of the kid and work life chaos does too. One sort of pushes me along from behind and the other pulls me on. Together they seem to land me squarely and achingly here in the present. And, that, is not somewhere we are accustomed to standing. But standing here I feel achingly alive.

My face

June 1st, 2011 § 0

“My children.”

“My children, ”  I find myself repeating, measuring time with the phrase- not sure if the fact that they are mine or that there are two makes this my mantra. My eyes are blurred, staring over my left shoulder out the living room window. I am sitting on the floor, where I have been for an hour. Now I am rocking side to side to get Elias to sleep. His brother, home from preschool this morning with an ear infection and a fever, is asleep in my lap, or rather sort of in my lap. He is wrapped in a brown fleecy blanket between my legs which are stretched out in a “V”. His head is on my right quadricep and his feet on my left ankle. As he was falling asleep he kept asking, “why do I have to be be sick  mama?”

He has taken to calling me Mama.

Until the end of his life–last year– my grandfather referred to his mother as “Mama.” Her name was Roxy. I have her posture, Pop always told me. And her sense of smell.

Jonas has that same sense of smell. “What do I smell?” he asks daily when I open a jar of honey, a container of peas. Sometimes, even I can’t smell anything when he asks.

“Mama?” He asks.

“Yes Jonas?” But he is already asleep. I know he feels terrible, because at 3 he has fallen asleep that suddenly no more than 2 or 3 times in his life.

“My children” I think again, rocking Elias back to sleep as his eyes blink open and then shut. I can surrender to this now: to my children. My body, caught, at this moment, under theirs. Held still by them literally. Their breathing a not quite even rhythm–first one inhales then the other. Interspersed with small noises from Elias. Elias’ breath is faster, still the quick breath of someone so new to breathing. His fists are just now opening to the world .

Standing earlier this week in front of our mirror in the living room– my figure, holding Elias, framed by its wide thick dark wood, I watched him in the mirror as he drifted off to sleep and I swayed and bounced. The sound of Jonas upstairs with his father drifting downstairs– “let’s spell Rodanthe” he says, dictating the nightly ritual of writing friends’ names with foam letters on the side of the tub.

Foggy eyed, my vision shifts from Elias’ closed eyes in the mirror to my own. Still swaying, still bouncing,the hardwood floor squeaking, I see my children in my face, rather than my own. It is as though,  with two of them,  my face has been transformed into theirs. It makes me appreciate my face– in the same way I have always appreciated the sense of smell and the posture I have from Roxy who Pop loved enough to call Mama his whole life.

“My children”, I say again, smiling as Jonas bounds down the steps, “Mama, I’m ready” he yells, as he approaches with two bedtime books in hand. Elias is awake again from the yelling.

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