To the patrons of Blind Faith Café last Wednesday night: Thank you for mobilizing when our little train wreck walked in the door, wailing for food. Thank you, nice stranger lady, who helped Mia to get some self-serve water while I was holding Nora and waiting in line. Thank you, kind woman who wasn’t a musician, for offering your pretty purple pen and some lined musical notation paper while we waited for our rice and broccoli. Thank you, beautiful grandmother who didn’t look like you had four grandkids, for the conversation and crayons when our toast didn’t come. It took a village that night.
I apologize if we disturbed the peace of your dinner. I appreciate your stepping up. I hope you felt good about helping some people who needed it.
Randy and those of you who were not there may have little sympathy. “That was your first mistake,” he says when I describe driving to the restaurant after the park and a visit to Ehran’s house at 6:15 because I was too hungry to drive home. “And then you got an energy bar out of your backpack?” he asks, knowing the answer.
Carol Coven Grannick in this month’s Chicago Parent describes optimism as recognizing life’s slings and arrows as 1) temporary, 2) not universal and 3) external. In other words, "This will pass, it’s only about this one thing and it has nothing to with me."
Even as I was eating my soul on the drive toward the food, even as the girls screamed and tried to slap each other from their carseats, I knew this was temporary. I knew this would pass as soon as we got our blood sugar up. And the other part of me looked up from its unholy meal, chin dripping with soul blood, and said, “You also know that you have had this feeling before. Why don’t you prevent it from happening?”
Our new mantra, (thanks to Matt Baron and his blog Role Model Reality) is “I am in control of my emotions.” Boy do we need this. Matt writes:
“Bridgett and I agree that it’s important to validate others, including our children, when they experience a wide range of emotions. But we vehemently oppose any suggestion, or outright assertion, that we are at the mercy of our “moods.” To us, it would be irresponsible to give our children the idea that they are in control of neither how they respond to the world around them, nor of the emotions welling up within them.”
Matt was responding to the implied message he finds in some children’s books : “Hey kids, it’s okay for you to blame your behavior on your “mood,” because, well, your mood at any given moment can simply take over your life and who knows where that can lead, right?”
This sounds chillingly familiar. When I recite the new slogan to Mia, “You are in control of your feelings,” she wails, “NOOOOOOOOOO!!”
Where did she learn drama? Hmm. . . . I wonder. How can I correct what I am guilty of? I really wonder.
Mother’s Day was wonderful. Randy kept the girls quiet and busy so I slept all the way til eight, then woke to my sweet family carrying a tray with a nice full-strength cappie and fruit and homemade cards. We had a contented while chaotic brunch in a crowded bistro and selected a fastigiated beech for the back yard. I had time to write and a piece (okay, pieces) of chocolate cake. A great day.
But the day before, I was a shameful mess. Waves of fury, a busy signal when I tried to call Aunt Ruth, a deadly shriek that made the girls cry, arguing with Randy, falling to the ground in frustration, a helpless shuffle of a walk by myself up the block with nowhere to go, an abandoned plan to visit my mother’s grave, crying under the covers. Exhaustion and guilt.
Without displacing any of my responsibility, I think, “This is a stug.” In the language of grief literature, a “STUG,” or “subsequent, temporary upsurge of grief,” is an upwelling of overwhelming feelings of loss, spurred by a significant life event, like a wedding, or in this case, an emotionally laden holiday. Hope Edelman, in her book Motherless Mothers, describes these intense and painful periods as capable of ushering in “a new realization of what was lost, lifting the mourner to a level of awareness she wasn’t able to reach before.” Thank you, Hope. I hope so.
On my desktop is a sticky note: “Whenever possible, follow your child’s need. Whenever necessary, take charge. Always be bigger, stronger, wiser, and kind.”
The wiser me is a little ways away. I can see her up the street, on her way. But right now, I’m still reeling at the memory of my two year old patting my arm, kissing my lips and saying, “Oh Mommy, don’t cry.” And the memory of my four year old’s silence.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Thursday, May 10, 2007
My Big News!
First Place, Baby!! Thank you, John Wood Community College!
(Okay, I really think of myself as a glass half full person, but like my beloved Catherine Newman, I can’t help seeing the speck in the milk. And this speck was the little voice in my head as I grinned at the win. It chided me for the pretentious reversal of the second adjective in the title.
“Why not call it a History Brief?” sneered the voice. And my other little voice, the one with a sense of humor, cracks up at the rhyme. “A History Brief of Overdue Grief.”)
Wait, there’s More!
Mom Writer’s Lit Magazine is publishing one of my pieces! (Please don’t say anything about the apostrophe. I KNOW. Oh, there's that speck voice again.)
Their June 21 issue will carry my review of Brooke Shield’s Down Came the Rain.
Check it out!
Since the published book review will be an abbreviated version, I'm including the full review here:
Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression by Brooke Shields. Hyperion, 2005. ISBN 1-4013-0189-4. New in paperback: $11.21
My Friend Brooke
Brooke Shields and I are the same age. The actress and model has always felt familiar to me, as if she was a high school acquaintance done good. I might have seen ten minutes or so of Blue Lagoon, flipping through the cable channels. Oh, and her guest turn on Friends, of course. I never bought a magazine because she was on the cover; it was the person, not her career, to which I felt a connection.
Perhaps it was rumors of her notoriously heavy-handed mother, or the universal criticism of her acting skills. Perhaps it was D-lister Kathy Griffin gossiping in her stand-up routine about Brooke’s wedding. It may have been the casually dismissive comment of a friend’s boyfriend who had a class with her at Princeton: “She’s not even the prettiest girl in the class.” Whatever the reason, I suspect the closeness I felt was akin to the sympathy my mother’s generation felt for brave Debbie Reynolds, abandoned by husband Eddie Fisher for that vampy Elizabeth Taylor.
This affinity continued when we both became pregnant and had daughters in the same year. But when I heard that she had suffered from postpartum depression, I had a sympathetic connection so strong it surprised me.
I luckily dodged full-blown postpartum depression but my baby blues did linger long in a particularly deep shade of indigo. My daughter Mia cried so much as an infant, I feared that she had tapped into the sadness of this wide old world. I felt responsible, as if she had caught one of my moods. Her infancy, during the darkest months of the year, was a difficult time, fraught with insomnia, anxiety, tentativeness. At that time we lived in an old converted bank building on a busy city street. Our home that had served so perfectly for parties before the baby arrived now felt cavernous and cold, echoing with Mia’s wails and often my own.
I made it through that first year, thanks to a couple of supportive mommy groups, long walks along the woody north branch of the Chicago river and stolen naps while the baby slept. Randy and I left the cold tile floors of the bank for a smaller home with a garden. We had a second daughter, mellow and easy.
As news of the birth of Brooke’s second daughter hit the newsstands, I picked up her book, Down Came the Rain, an account of her battle with post-partum depression after the birth of her first child. It was a startling new way to see my old friend.
Writing in an informal, conversational style, Shields speaks candidly about her struggles to become pregnant through in vitro fertilization, an emotionally devastating miscarriage and the joy with which she and her husband, the writer Chris Henchy, finally received the news of a successful pregnancy. “I excitedly began making plans,” she writes. “A girl? A boy? Blue room, pink, or a safe yellow? Showers, maternity clothes! Books to buy! A healthy eating plan!”
After much anticipation and preparation for the baby, including “appearing on the cover of Vogue magazine pregnant and looking like (she) was enjoying true harmony with life,” Shields finds herself knocked off kilter by her reactions to the baby’s arrival. Inexplicable rage and overwhelming fear for the baby’s life, as well as her own, alternate with periods of listlessness, apathy and guilt.
She writes, “Rowan kept crying and I suddenly began to fear the moment when Chris would bring her back to me. I started to experience a sick sensation in my stomach; it was as if a vise was tightening around my chest. Instead of the nervous anxiety that often accompanies panic, a feeling of quiet devastation overcame me.”
Shield’s reasonable expectations for happiness and the unexpected onset of her illness delayed her realizing she had set sail for family life into a perfect storm of risk factors. After the difficult trials of conception, Shields underwent a rushed emergency c-section three weeks after the death of her father from cancer. The baby girl was born healthy, but jaundiced, and with hip dysplasia, requiring an unwieldy ultraviolet light paddle and a harness under her clothes. Every hour and a half, day and night, newborn Rowan cried to be fed in an apartment filled with packed boxes where Shields and Henchy had moved only days before the birth. Stresses such as these can only intensify the hormonal upheavals that doctors believe contribute to postpartum emotional distress.
In her darkest days, the depression detaches Shields to the point where she starts imagining the worst. “I remember looking out the window and envisioning myself jumping. I concluded that it wouldn’t be too effective, because we weren’t high enough. . . . I sat holding my newborn and could not avoid the image of her flying through the air and hitting the wall in front of me. . . I was horrified, and although I knew deep in my soul that I would not harm her, the image all but destroyed me.”
Eventually, with medication (famously criticized by Tom Cruise) and therapy and time, the depression relaxes its grip.
Throughout the book the actress makes casual references to the trappings of a wealthy and celebrated life. Rather than distancing the reader, her stories of homes on both coasts, first class flights, personal assistants and baby advice from Antonio Banderas backstage only underline the fact that even someone with all the resources in the world can be overwhelmed with first time motherhood. Shields does acknowledge her unusually vast support system – attentive friends and family, the financial resources to pay for quality child-care and psychiatric help. In a poignantly funny scene, she tries to gather her wits to interview a baby nurse. After two brief questions, she falls silent, lost. The nurse gently asks, “ ‘Would you like to see my resume or talk to any of my references?’” Shields writes, “I shook my head again, silently, then looked at her and said, ‘Can you start now?’”
Through all this honest and informative reporting, a genuine sweetness in the author’s voice shines through. Perhaps as a result of an over-protected despite highly publicized childhood, she still displays a childlike innocence. I sense it when she describes asking “some friends to help with the beautifying process” to meet the paparazzi cameras as she leaves the hospital. I can hear it when she enjoys her husband’s endless teasing about her many malapropisms and awkward jokes, even about Valentine’s Day over-preparation. “By the time we got to the heart-shaped cookies, Cupid cake and red sugar cubes, I had been completely ridiculed,” she recalls with delight. “Everyone laughed at my expense and it felt good to be back.”
In her teen years this lack of guile floated Shields above the media storms about her highly sexualized film roles and advertisements. When she writes: “A documented life is one of the weirdest consequences of celebrity . . . details about my orthodontist appointments, my first period, and my virginity have all be publicized,” the actress seems somehow untouched by the media’s invasive touch. Her earnest striving to be a good mother also tempers my distaste to her first choice of job after the baby: a baby formula commercial, despite her commitment to breast-feed her own child. But such are the disagreements between old friends.
Of all the misunderstandings our culture sustains about mental illness, the origins, frequency and intensity of postpartum depression may be some of the most confusing. Leave it to a citizen of the pages of People magazine to enlighten her legions of best friends.
(Okay, I really think of myself as a glass half full person, but like my beloved Catherine Newman, I can’t help seeing the speck in the milk. And this speck was the little voice in my head as I grinned at the win. It chided me for the pretentious reversal of the second adjective in the title.
“Why not call it a History Brief?” sneered the voice. And my other little voice, the one with a sense of humor, cracks up at the rhyme. “A History Brief of Overdue Grief.”)
Wait, there’s More!
Mom Writer’s Lit Magazine is publishing one of my pieces! (Please don’t say anything about the apostrophe. I KNOW. Oh, there's that speck voice again.)
Their June 21 issue will carry my review of Brooke Shield’s Down Came the Rain.
Check it out!
Since the published book review will be an abbreviated version, I'm including the full review here:
Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression by Brooke Shields. Hyperion, 2005. ISBN 1-4013-0189-4. New in paperback: $11.21
My Friend Brooke
Brooke Shields and I are the same age. The actress and model has always felt familiar to me, as if she was a high school acquaintance done good. I might have seen ten minutes or so of Blue Lagoon, flipping through the cable channels. Oh, and her guest turn on Friends, of course. I never bought a magazine because she was on the cover; it was the person, not her career, to which I felt a connection.
Perhaps it was rumors of her notoriously heavy-handed mother, or the universal criticism of her acting skills. Perhaps it was D-lister Kathy Griffin gossiping in her stand-up routine about Brooke’s wedding. It may have been the casually dismissive comment of a friend’s boyfriend who had a class with her at Princeton: “She’s not even the prettiest girl in the class.” Whatever the reason, I suspect the closeness I felt was akin to the sympathy my mother’s generation felt for brave Debbie Reynolds, abandoned by husband Eddie Fisher for that vampy Elizabeth Taylor.
This affinity continued when we both became pregnant and had daughters in the same year. But when I heard that she had suffered from postpartum depression, I had a sympathetic connection so strong it surprised me.
I luckily dodged full-blown postpartum depression but my baby blues did linger long in a particularly deep shade of indigo. My daughter Mia cried so much as an infant, I feared that she had tapped into the sadness of this wide old world. I felt responsible, as if she had caught one of my moods. Her infancy, during the darkest months of the year, was a difficult time, fraught with insomnia, anxiety, tentativeness. At that time we lived in an old converted bank building on a busy city street. Our home that had served so perfectly for parties before the baby arrived now felt cavernous and cold, echoing with Mia’s wails and often my own.
I made it through that first year, thanks to a couple of supportive mommy groups, long walks along the woody north branch of the Chicago river and stolen naps while the baby slept. Randy and I left the cold tile floors of the bank for a smaller home with a garden. We had a second daughter, mellow and easy.
As news of the birth of Brooke’s second daughter hit the newsstands, I picked up her book, Down Came the Rain, an account of her battle with post-partum depression after the birth of her first child. It was a startling new way to see my old friend.
Writing in an informal, conversational style, Shields speaks candidly about her struggles to become pregnant through in vitro fertilization, an emotionally devastating miscarriage and the joy with which she and her husband, the writer Chris Henchy, finally received the news of a successful pregnancy. “I excitedly began making plans,” she writes. “A girl? A boy? Blue room, pink, or a safe yellow? Showers, maternity clothes! Books to buy! A healthy eating plan!”
After much anticipation and preparation for the baby, including “appearing on the cover of Vogue magazine pregnant and looking like (she) was enjoying true harmony with life,” Shields finds herself knocked off kilter by her reactions to the baby’s arrival. Inexplicable rage and overwhelming fear for the baby’s life, as well as her own, alternate with periods of listlessness, apathy and guilt.
She writes, “Rowan kept crying and I suddenly began to fear the moment when Chris would bring her back to me. I started to experience a sick sensation in my stomach; it was as if a vise was tightening around my chest. Instead of the nervous anxiety that often accompanies panic, a feeling of quiet devastation overcame me.”
Shield’s reasonable expectations for happiness and the unexpected onset of her illness delayed her realizing she had set sail for family life into a perfect storm of risk factors. After the difficult trials of conception, Shields underwent a rushed emergency c-section three weeks after the death of her father from cancer. The baby girl was born healthy, but jaundiced, and with hip dysplasia, requiring an unwieldy ultraviolet light paddle and a harness under her clothes. Every hour and a half, day and night, newborn Rowan cried to be fed in an apartment filled with packed boxes where Shields and Henchy had moved only days before the birth. Stresses such as these can only intensify the hormonal upheavals that doctors believe contribute to postpartum emotional distress.
In her darkest days, the depression detaches Shields to the point where she starts imagining the worst. “I remember looking out the window and envisioning myself jumping. I concluded that it wouldn’t be too effective, because we weren’t high enough. . . . I sat holding my newborn and could not avoid the image of her flying through the air and hitting the wall in front of me. . . I was horrified, and although I knew deep in my soul that I would not harm her, the image all but destroyed me.”
Eventually, with medication (famously criticized by Tom Cruise) and therapy and time, the depression relaxes its grip.
Throughout the book the actress makes casual references to the trappings of a wealthy and celebrated life. Rather than distancing the reader, her stories of homes on both coasts, first class flights, personal assistants and baby advice from Antonio Banderas backstage only underline the fact that even someone with all the resources in the world can be overwhelmed with first time motherhood. Shields does acknowledge her unusually vast support system – attentive friends and family, the financial resources to pay for quality child-care and psychiatric help. In a poignantly funny scene, she tries to gather her wits to interview a baby nurse. After two brief questions, she falls silent, lost. The nurse gently asks, “ ‘Would you like to see my resume or talk to any of my references?’” Shields writes, “I shook my head again, silently, then looked at her and said, ‘Can you start now?’”
Through all this honest and informative reporting, a genuine sweetness in the author’s voice shines through. Perhaps as a result of an over-protected despite highly publicized childhood, she still displays a childlike innocence. I sense it when she describes asking “some friends to help with the beautifying process” to meet the paparazzi cameras as she leaves the hospital. I can hear it when she enjoys her husband’s endless teasing about her many malapropisms and awkward jokes, even about Valentine’s Day over-preparation. “By the time we got to the heart-shaped cookies, Cupid cake and red sugar cubes, I had been completely ridiculed,” she recalls with delight. “Everyone laughed at my expense and it felt good to be back.”
In her teen years this lack of guile floated Shields above the media storms about her highly sexualized film roles and advertisements. When she writes: “A documented life is one of the weirdest consequences of celebrity . . . details about my orthodontist appointments, my first period, and my virginity have all be publicized,” the actress seems somehow untouched by the media’s invasive touch. Her earnest striving to be a good mother also tempers my distaste to her first choice of job after the baby: a baby formula commercial, despite her commitment to breast-feed her own child. But such are the disagreements between old friends.
Of all the misunderstandings our culture sustains about mental illness, the origins, frequency and intensity of postpartum depression may be some of the most confusing. Leave it to a citizen of the pages of People magazine to enlighten her legions of best friends.
Twelve Recent Laughs
1. Melody our babysitter imitating her sad Shitzhu, Spike.
2. Mia wearing underwear on her head. Classic.
3. Dwight Schrute slouching into The Office, trying to act like Jim Halpert.
4. A little African school-girl giggling as Simon Cowell interrogates one of her classmates who drew a picture of him with breasts.
“What are these? Like a woman? I am not very happy with you, Caroline. I’m not so sure these school kits are a good idea.”
5. TelevisionWithoutPity.com
6. Bedtime with the girls giggling madly over Sandra Boynton’s jumpy-bumpy rhymes in But Not the Armadillo, and Mo Willems’ latest, My Friend is Sad.
7. Little Nora pushing the boogie-board toward the ocean, as determined as a baby sea turtle, driven to be a surfer.
8. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.
9. “My humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps.” This is so utterly stupid, I can’t help but love it.
10. Randy’s housewarming present to Brent and Serena: a remote controlled bust of an ape. From Target.
11. A war story from last week’s playgroup. After a rough day with the boys, Cole and Grant’s mommy ended up walking into our annual Christmas cookie exchange party with an opened bottle of red wine in a paper bag. And no cookies. I love this.
12. Nora making that horrible and rough throat-clearing sound when she is trying to neigh like a horse.
2. Mia wearing underwear on her head. Classic.
3. Dwight Schrute slouching into The Office, trying to act like Jim Halpert.
4. A little African school-girl giggling as Simon Cowell interrogates one of her classmates who drew a picture of him with breasts.
“What are these? Like a woman? I am not very happy with you, Caroline. I’m not so sure these school kits are a good idea.”
5. TelevisionWithoutPity.com
6. Bedtime with the girls giggling madly over Sandra Boynton’s jumpy-bumpy rhymes in But Not the Armadillo, and Mo Willems’ latest, My Friend is Sad.
7. Little Nora pushing the boogie-board toward the ocean, as determined as a baby sea turtle, driven to be a surfer.8. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.
9. “My humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps.” This is so utterly stupid, I can’t help but love it.
10. Randy’s housewarming present to Brent and Serena: a remote controlled bust of an ape. From Target.
11. A war story from last week’s playgroup. After a rough day with the boys, Cole and Grant’s mommy ended up walking into our annual Christmas cookie exchange party with an opened bottle of red wine in a paper bag. And no cookies. I love this.
12. Nora making that horrible and rough throat-clearing sound when she is trying to neigh like a horse.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Weekend in Michigan
Randy is in San Jose, playing golf.
Our little red rental house may be haunted. Doors swing open suddenly. I was awakened at dawn by a woman’s voice calling, “hello?” downstairs. I dozed off again when only silence followed. This afternoon Mia ran out to the backyard fort, then returned to ask, “Is there someone in the house with us?”
“No,” I said, starting to feel like we were in a horror movie trailer. “Why?”
“I heard voices,” she said.
Time Machine
With this trip to Saugatuck, where the spring is slower to arrive than on our western side of the lake, we’ve managed to move back in time. The buds are still new, many trees still winter-bare. Out a window is some shagged barked tree, a hickory? “It looks like bacon,” says my cousin Sal of the strips peeling off its trunk. Tendrils of branches pour down from overhead, bearing blossom-like clusters of new leaves.
We have made spring linger. We have gone back in time. What will you do with extra time? What would you do with a second chance?
During our last-night game of Charades (simplified down for the kids to What Animal Am I?) Eleanor demands space in my lap. I look down at her entire body fitting in the space between my hip and knee. I say, “you’re just a little thing, aren’t you? Little feet. Little knees. Little hands.” I enclose each part of her body with my grown hands.
She pulls her thumb out of her mouth long enough to insist, “I’m a big gull!”
I know she is my last child. I feel pushed and pulled, melting over the traces of babyness she still holds, yet delighting in every new development.
When she was an infant, I would catch a glimpse of a rabbit in the yard or a petting zoo goat and say to Randy, “That reminds me of Eleanor!” Was it the soft forehead, the innocent eyes? I remember this feeling now, but the sense of actually feeling it is gone. She is a girl of language now. I won’t recognize her in that animal way again.
Eleanor is two years, four months old. Mia has four years and seven months old under her belt. It’s a pink belt, of course, that she needs to keep her skirts from falling off her non-existent hips.
I tell Randy, “Nora is the age that Mia was when Nora was born.”
“Mia’s always seemed this age,” he replies. I know what he means. They grow so slowly but change so quickly. Parents know this old truth as intimately as Northerners know the ancient relief and joy of spring’s return.
We had a lovely weekend. A walk in the Michigan woods, a kitschy visit to ye olde Windmill Island in Holland. Erik made bread and periodically ran off to fight barn fires.
But I am happy to come home, happy to be back in our time, happy my children change and grow.
Designated Guardians
After the absurdity and slowly decaying frenzy of bedtime, I climb down the creaking stairs of our haunted rental house to find an orderly kitchen and suddenly spacious living room. How big everything looks without a sprinkling of toys! Erik and Sally have cleaned up. How strangely pleasant the house suddenly feels - like when we first walked in.
Sally builds model Viking ships, blows glass in the basement. Erik manicures the yard, considers car care as an extension of his daily shower and shave. He takes a walk while we watch Sleeping Beauty with the girls, then returns, comments how quiet it was in the garden.
Meanwhile, our hybrid carries the detritus of a four day road trip: crumbled snacks, abandoned diversions, shed clothing, scattered hand wipes . . . Oh I'll admit it! Our car always looks like this.
It’s actually pretty funny. We eye each other with curiosity – who are these strange foreign animal with their odd habits of den and nest?
Sally is my cousin. She was born the month before my sister Nancy. We’ve always had so much to talk about, even as our lives diverged after childhood. The girls adore her.
So we drive by the Saugatuck high school and I’m thinking, but in no way tempted to say, “Look, Mia! Here’s where you could go to high school!”
I am not talking about our family moving here for Daddy’s work. I am thinking of where the girls would live if Randy and I suddenly were gone.
Who thinks this way? I do. Methodically anticipating the details of an earthquake.
Years ago, when I started to bluntly ask Sally about putting her name on our will, she interrupted me with the simplest, most loving confirmation of my trust. “Don’t worry about it.” So I didn’t.
But what an upheaval for her and Erik. I would be asking them to give up their lives. Walking again into their immaculate house, their full and satisfying schedules, I consider the upset and surrender of Ruth and Phil’s family. But no one asked Ruth and Phil to take the four of us in; they did the asking themselves. Who knows? Did my aunt and uncle, like other happy couples, dream separately and surreptitiously of a sudden alternative, a blameless reversal of the simple pattern the possibilities of their youth had fallen into?
Our little red rental house may be haunted. Doors swing open suddenly. I was awakened at dawn by a woman’s voice calling, “hello?” downstairs. I dozed off again when only silence followed. This afternoon Mia ran out to the backyard fort, then returned to ask, “Is there someone in the house with us?”
“No,” I said, starting to feel like we were in a horror movie trailer. “Why?”
“I heard voices,” she said.
Time Machine
With this trip to Saugatuck, where the spring is slower to arrive than on our western side of the lake, we’ve managed to move back in time. The buds are still new, many trees still winter-bare. Out a window is some shagged barked tree, a hickory? “It looks like bacon,” says my cousin Sal of the strips peeling off its trunk. Tendrils of branches pour down from overhead, bearing blossom-like clusters of new leaves.
We have made spring linger. We have gone back in time. What will you do with extra time? What would you do with a second chance?
During our last-night game of Charades (simplified down for the kids to What Animal Am I?) Eleanor demands space in my lap. I look down at her entire body fitting in the space between my hip and knee. I say, “you’re just a little thing, aren’t you? Little feet. Little knees. Little hands.” I enclose each part of her body with my grown hands.
She pulls her thumb out of her mouth long enough to insist, “I’m a big gull!”
I know she is my last child. I feel pushed and pulled, melting over the traces of babyness she still holds, yet delighting in every new development.
When she was an infant, I would catch a glimpse of a rabbit in the yard or a petting zoo goat and say to Randy, “That reminds me of Eleanor!” Was it the soft forehead, the innocent eyes? I remember this feeling now, but the sense of actually feeling it is gone. She is a girl of language now. I won’t recognize her in that animal way again.
Eleanor is two years, four months old. Mia has four years and seven months old under her belt. It’s a pink belt, of course, that she needs to keep her skirts from falling off her non-existent hips.
I tell Randy, “Nora is the age that Mia was when Nora was born.”
“Mia’s always seemed this age,” he replies. I know what he means. They grow so slowly but change so quickly. Parents know this old truth as intimately as Northerners know the ancient relief and joy of spring’s return.
We had a lovely weekend. A walk in the Michigan woods, a kitschy visit to ye olde Windmill Island in Holland. Erik made bread and periodically ran off to fight barn fires.
But I am happy to come home, happy to be back in our time, happy my children change and grow.
Designated Guardians
After the absurdity and slowly decaying frenzy of bedtime, I climb down the creaking stairs of our haunted rental house to find an orderly kitchen and suddenly spacious living room. How big everything looks without a sprinkling of toys! Erik and Sally have cleaned up. How strangely pleasant the house suddenly feels - like when we first walked in.
Sally builds model Viking ships, blows glass in the basement. Erik manicures the yard, considers car care as an extension of his daily shower and shave. He takes a walk while we watch Sleeping Beauty with the girls, then returns, comments how quiet it was in the garden.
Meanwhile, our hybrid carries the detritus of a four day road trip: crumbled snacks, abandoned diversions, shed clothing, scattered hand wipes . . . Oh I'll admit it! Our car always looks like this.
It’s actually pretty funny. We eye each other with curiosity – who are these strange foreign animal with their odd habits of den and nest?
Sally is my cousin. She was born the month before my sister Nancy. We’ve always had so much to talk about, even as our lives diverged after childhood. The girls adore her.
So we drive by the Saugatuck high school and I’m thinking, but in no way tempted to say, “Look, Mia! Here’s where you could go to high school!”
I am not talking about our family moving here for Daddy’s work. I am thinking of where the girls would live if Randy and I suddenly were gone.
Who thinks this way? I do. Methodically anticipating the details of an earthquake.
Years ago, when I started to bluntly ask Sally about putting her name on our will, she interrupted me with the simplest, most loving confirmation of my trust. “Don’t worry about it.” So I didn’t.
But what an upheaval for her and Erik. I would be asking them to give up their lives. Walking again into their immaculate house, their full and satisfying schedules, I consider the upset and surrender of Ruth and Phil’s family. But no one asked Ruth and Phil to take the four of us in; they did the asking themselves. Who knows? Did my aunt and uncle, like other happy couples, dream separately and surreptitiously of a sudden alternative, a blameless reversal of the simple pattern the possibilities of their youth had fallen into?
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Happy May Day!
Exhilaration driving home today under the flowering pink and white crabapples on Green Bay Road, hearing Mia pitch in her little voice to the Hey La, Hey La chorus of The New Pornographer's "Bleeding Heart Show." “Turn the sound up,” she called. I had a to-go cup of sweet, sweet caffeine. It’s spring. I felt young.
We were driving home from the dentist. Mia got her first filling today. She was awesome – brave and calm. I hadn't told her much about the procedure so as not to scare her – was this selfish? Perhaps, but it turned out to be fine. I couldn’t have anticipated the dentist’s speed and euphemisms. He talked to Mia in a very soft voice and described everything he was doing. When I heard that unmistakable whizzing of the drill, he called it "cleaning your tooth."
Yes, she wore a little gray elephant mask over her nose for the nitrous oxide. I couldn't really tell how she was reacting to the gas - she didn't close her eyes or giggle or squirm or anything. I sat by her feet, gave her the fuzzy white elephant to hold. I thought, this is one of those moments when you trade control and protection for trust and you just deal with the results. I felt calm and resigned. I felt old.
He finished in twenty minutes. Mia slowly sat up and looked through the little toy box to choose a tiny purple lizard. The right side of her mouth looked a little droopy. But there were no complaints. “Alright,” she said when Dr. Dentist told her to chew on the other side of her mouth.
I’m sure the new stuffed lion, a bowl of oatmeal at Cereality and some Homer's ice cream helped too.
I found this video on Web MD about St. Louis Children’s Hospital using nitrous in their emergency rooms to alleviate kid anxiety.
We were driving home from the dentist. Mia got her first filling today. She was awesome – brave and calm. I hadn't told her much about the procedure so as not to scare her – was this selfish? Perhaps, but it turned out to be fine. I couldn’t have anticipated the dentist’s speed and euphemisms. He talked to Mia in a very soft voice and described everything he was doing. When I heard that unmistakable whizzing of the drill, he called it "cleaning your tooth."
Yes, she wore a little gray elephant mask over her nose for the nitrous oxide. I couldn't really tell how she was reacting to the gas - she didn't close her eyes or giggle or squirm or anything. I sat by her feet, gave her the fuzzy white elephant to hold. I thought, this is one of those moments when you trade control and protection for trust and you just deal with the results. I felt calm and resigned. I felt old.
He finished in twenty minutes. Mia slowly sat up and looked through the little toy box to choose a tiny purple lizard. The right side of her mouth looked a little droopy. But there were no complaints. “Alright,” she said when Dr. Dentist told her to chew on the other side of her mouth.
I’m sure the new stuffed lion, a bowl of oatmeal at Cereality and some Homer's ice cream helped too.
I found this video on Web MD about St. Louis Children’s Hospital using nitrous in their emergency rooms to alleviate kid anxiety.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
A Sonora Desert Oasis with Children
April 18, 2007, Mexico
Wednesday?
I can hear Nora’s high pitched tuneless song. If I turn to look out the window, I can see the girls burying their bikinied Barbie in the sand. Two century plants are in bloom at the edge of the yard; brilliant yellow orioles, fleet hummingbirds and mobs of bees work busily among the agave blossoms high on fifteen foot stalks.
When Maria sings to Anita, “There’s nothing to be done, not a thing I can do,” I feel her fatalistic love. We are stuck, trapped now, helpless in our love for these tiny vulnerable beings who bounce and careen around the desert yard as fluidly as balls on a pool table.
Yesterday, Tuesday, we took the children on a little walk through town, ending up at the cultural center. I found a children’s library in one corner of the building. A woman pecked away at a manual typewriter on the front desk. She unlocked a cabinet door to hand us a few pieces of computer paper for coloring. Mia drew pictures with magic markers while I badly sounded out picture books in Spanish. The three school-age children at our table watched patiently. The boy tried out the word “castle,” then blushed. They handed us their pictures as they left.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Another run to the beach. The expansive blocks of pale gold sand and dark blue are a minimalist tonic. I take deep breaths of the clean air. I could call these waves playful as I dodge the fast carpet of foam running towards my feet. But I know there is no safe contact with the water here.
I recognize this stretch of beach. The lagoon there, a rocky steep hill towering before me – we climbed that hill years ago, exclaimed at the view. And the waves then, as I remember them, were tumbling eighteen-wheelers, a cascade of cement mixers, every few seconds. The heavy walls of water fell a few yards from our faces. We stood on a cliff of sand, separated from the crush by a steep short slope of hard pack sand.
Last night the children cooed over Emma, a dachshund in the restaurant. After dinner we walked to an ice cream stand – “Mia, can you see the surprise? It is the bright, bright green of a really crazy apple,” Serena riddled. The funny thing is, there were two green buildings on the block. In this tiny village, (recently designated as officially "Magic" by the Mexican government, much to the snorting of the ex-pat gringos,) brilliant sensations greet you on every corner. Strawberry creams, avocado with a strawberry ice chaser, pistachio, cherry ice cream. Phenomenally good. As good as Florentine gelato. What do the girls need for their vacation? A hammock to swing in, gentle dogs and tolerant cats, water to splash and drink. Ice cream.
Brent and Serena have a talent for making people feel good. We have known them for years, but this trip I study how they practice this craft. Much ebullient and generous laughter at the jokes of others. Repeating a phrase you have said, making it sound suddenly clever. Patience for the whims of children, the moodiness of guests out of their element. A casual attitude about clutter. Generosity of spirit, specifically extending even to use of their own bedroom, their own bed for afternoon naps. In conversation, responding to the suggestions of others with an enthusiastic “yes!” even if the point is tangential. And delicious dinners, cups of tea and bottles of beer don’t hurt either. Good friends.
Baja for Beginners from The New York Times.
Wednesday?
I can hear Nora’s high pitched tuneless song. If I turn to look out the window, I can see the girls burying their bikinied Barbie in the sand. Two century plants are in bloom at the edge of the yard; brilliant yellow orioles, fleet hummingbirds and mobs of bees work busily among the agave blossoms high on fifteen foot stalks.
When Maria sings to Anita, “There’s nothing to be done, not a thing I can do,” I feel her fatalistic love. We are stuck, trapped now, helpless in our love for these tiny vulnerable beings who bounce and careen around the desert yard as fluidly as balls on a pool table.
Yesterday, Tuesday, we took the children on a little walk through town, ending up at the cultural center. I found a children’s library in one corner of the building. A woman pecked away at a manual typewriter on the front desk. She unlocked a cabinet door to hand us a few pieces of computer paper for coloring. Mia drew pictures with magic markers while I badly sounded out picture books in Spanish. The three school-age children at our table watched patiently. The boy tried out the word “castle,” then blushed. They handed us their pictures as they left.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Another run to the beach. The expansive blocks of pale gold sand and dark blue are a minimalist tonic. I take deep breaths of the clean air. I could call these waves playful as I dodge the fast carpet of foam running towards my feet. But I know there is no safe contact with the water here.
I recognize this stretch of beach. The lagoon there, a rocky steep hill towering before me – we climbed that hill years ago, exclaimed at the view. And the waves then, as I remember them, were tumbling eighteen-wheelers, a cascade of cement mixers, every few seconds. The heavy walls of water fell a few yards from our faces. We stood on a cliff of sand, separated from the crush by a steep short slope of hard pack sand.
Last night the children cooed over Emma, a dachshund in the restaurant. After dinner we walked to an ice cream stand – “Mia, can you see the surprise? It is the bright, bright green of a really crazy apple,” Serena riddled. The funny thing is, there were two green buildings on the block. In this tiny village, (recently designated as officially "Magic" by the Mexican government, much to the snorting of the ex-pat gringos,) brilliant sensations greet you on every corner. Strawberry creams, avocado with a strawberry ice chaser, pistachio, cherry ice cream. Phenomenally good. As good as Florentine gelato. What do the girls need for their vacation? A hammock to swing in, gentle dogs and tolerant cats, water to splash and drink. Ice cream.
Brent and Serena have a talent for making people feel good. We have known them for years, but this trip I study how they practice this craft. Much ebullient and generous laughter at the jokes of others. Repeating a phrase you have said, making it sound suddenly clever. Patience for the whims of children, the moodiness of guests out of their element. A casual attitude about clutter. Generosity of spirit, specifically extending even to use of their own bedroom, their own bed for afternoon naps. In conversation, responding to the suggestions of others with an enthusiastic “yes!” even if the point is tangential. And delicious dinners, cups of tea and bottles of beer don’t hurt either. Good friends.
Baja for Beginners from The New York Times.
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