The Horizon Line

The cottonwood seeds are adrift and the peony heads are heavy with almost-blooms and it is an earlier summer than I ever remember after a shorter and milder winter in this place which defines itself by extremes.  We don’t know who we are when the ground thaws earlier year by year and birds overwinter in a place once thought too inhospitable for them.

Sometimes I have this overwhelming sense of hurtling through space and time —  last week I was on the grass looking up at the sky, Z with me.  I pointed out a plane, the leaves quaking in the wind — a tree where when I lived in Colorado it was aspen but here is colloquially known as ‘popple’ —  I talk with her alot about being in the silence, listening to the leaves, the birds calling, the spring when the frogs began to sing from the pond.

Time seems to have telescoped: the most minute and obscure of memories coming back to me… a snippet of jump-rope song, the kites that hung from the ceiling of my fourth grade best-friend, a half-french girl whose mother wore striped shirts with bateau necks as she towered over us in her espadrilles.  I’ve been trying, as these things float by, to catch some glimpse of myself as a girl — to recapture something other than what my stubborn brain holds on to — my mother’s rages…I remember, and excuse the bad paraphrase here, Margaret Atwood saying in an essay (talking about large policy decisions/nations) that we are most likely to remember the wrongs done to us — and most likely to forget the wrongs we’ve done to others — and if I’m left with any feeling about parenthood in these days when we are asked to line up on one side or another — that it’s only in our unbalanced and unfettered anger that we fail as parents.

My mother did so many things right in the earliest years — they are inscribed in me and I feel it in my bond with Z.  A few things have come back to me recently but it impossible to separate them things I’ve been told, photographs I’ve seen — my mother has told me about the years after she separated from my father when I was three — but before his death when I was five — she told me how she took up running briefly — and how she would tell me to pull up a chair and to look outside the kitchen window — out to the cornfield where I would be able to see her running.  I imagine her in the red bandana that she tied around her hair when we played softball — I imagine the cornfields, the sky — the horizon line.  I used to ask her if she and my father fought, which they did -brutally though she would deny it later — I knew because I took it into my very being and absorbed it all — and it’s for that very reasons why I tell G that I want him to check his anger around Z, or why I can’t stomach the violent video games W plays and want her nowhere near them — why I value the principles of the school she is in which safeguards their very essence in the gentleness of childhood — the magic time it is — I don’t believe that children are blank slates — that they somehow are immune to the winds that rage around them;  I know better.

I am working very hard on forgiveness as a gift to myself rather than to my mother.  I know in my broken heart that she has done and continues to do the very best she can.  I wrote this post about her if you are new here… and also a link to the piece I wrote about  my father’s murder. I can’t even bring myself to write what’s been going on with that aspect of my life in any more detail — she and my brother are still estranged;  she is making that choice and his heart is broken.  I hold him in my heart and do my best to make space for her.  It is difficult.

We are traversing the landscape of grief here in this household, still.  I was trying to articulate it to my mother and I said something about how there is a writing exercise — I think coined by Natalie Goldberg — about the beginner’s mind — and how you have to bring yourself back to that place of being a beginner;  it seems strange in this context to talk about beginning grief — but by that I mean that everyone’s life at some point is touched by loss — and until its you — you have no real way to understand how your heart and mind will react, how it will reshape your breath, rewire you.  She had the misfortune of an embarrassment of griefs — and I of an early one — so early that it tore me open and set me on an open road where I doubted everything and only found my own core through a series of terrible errors.  I don’t even recognize the invulnerable and hard-drinking woman I was fifteen years ago.  My husband will argue that she just surfaced for a few years and that I really have always been this open and loving soul trying to find its home; I hate to agree because it makes me uncomfortable and sound soft when I’d prefer to pretend that I am unyielding and tough.  Its difficult to watch my husband’s grief if only because I am so helpless in front of it;  I made the mistake of saying something like “it will get better” and he said how on earth would it get better because his brother would be forever dead and I realized that of course it would never get better, it would get different, but things would never, will never, be the same.  He isn’t the same man he was before February 15th.  Death has been living here with us, but of course, as Buddhism reminds me — it is always with us and any denial of it is an illusion — but how to live with the dissonance and fear it creates in us — that’s where G and I are.

I’ve started running again — which is probably why I haven’t posted much lately — that precious hour is given over to running rather than writing — though I need both.  Even just visiting here and dusting it off feels good for the soul even though I doubt many people are out there anymore…hello???? Are you out there????

I’ve decided that our guest bedroom is being dismantled to create a meditation space.  G, in a rare moment though if asked would deny it, said he might, just maybe, be willing to meditate with me.

Look out there on the horizon and you’ll see me…running.

How are you.  Please delurk because I miss you.

The Oleander & the Groves

Your story. It is either the thing that shapes you – your breath, your gait — the drive motoring inside you — or it is the mind’s trickery. Either it is everything or it is nothing. I always thought that in telling my story I might be released as if my life might follow the arc of some fictional character and that somehow, in the knowledge of how I came to be and what has swirled around me that I might move on, move past… but there are times when it seems the very thing that keeps me tethered to this plodding and intractable earth.

My brother asked me to join him and the mothers of his children — one of the mother’s parent’s having rented a beautiful and large beach house on a stretch of relatively private oceanfront on the Atlantic coast of Florida not far from where my brother was raised, where my father was murdered, where my parents first met, where my mother and I traveled that February day in 1978 for his funeral.

For my brother the land held so much more than that for it shaped him — with its spanish moss and the old moneyed houses along the bay set far back along their lots — bordered by mango and avocado groves long walled off by chainlink and topped with barbed wire. As he drove the car he told me how he used to bike along this road and how I said every child had a neighborhood like that — one they drove past and wished they belonged to — a place where the rules of life seemed fundamentally different than their own… he showed me the low limestone house — white with a tiled roof and broad leafed plants unfurled everywhere among tiny red blossoms no larger than a grown man’s fingertip –and told me how it was the house his parents built — meaning his mother and our father — and the park where, he said, they had to shoot the monkey’s out of the trees when the neighborhoods were first carved out of the tropics here.

“And there” he said, as we passed by the flat and ambiguous strip malls that could be anywhere — save the white highways I remembered from childhood so different from the asphalt I was so familiar with –”that’s the hospital where dad was pronounced dead” — he’d asked if I wanted to see the place where it had happened but I said no — it would be one thing if he’d died in that spot and then there would seem something almost sacred about it — but I could picture it well enough in my head. He pointed the place where he’d had his deposition taken. The police department and I thought of that kind woman all those years ago who sent me all the documents in the mail when I told her I was writing a book about my father’s murder.

I had a strange moment when we were driving on A1A. I don’t remember if it had been raining that day but it was in the evening and we were returning from somewhere and he asked if I remembered the condominium where we stayed when we came for the funeral — I didn’t and all I could conjure up from that time was the vague impression of pews and the backs of people’s heads and how my mother says I rushed to sit with my brothers, excited to be with them and so she was left in the back with near strangers. I was thinking of that memory and then how I’d had a recurring nightmare since that time…a dream would open like the beginning sequences of a film — and it would pan out to show you a multi-level building with doors and stairs along each end — each end and each floor lit by the red of the exit signs — bathing the entire scene in a red light — and as I was thinking that my brother asked me if I recognized anything and I looked up to one of the anonymous stucco condo complexes along the beach — this one seeming a pale aqua in the early evening light and as we passed in the car I saw the edge of the complex and each door of each floor lit with exit signs — and I thought of how it was the first word I could spell and I lost my breath for a moment because I understood with a kind of calm clarity that this was a building that had remained lodged in my psyche for over thirty years now. And then we drove past because mostly we were concerned with the dailiness of life with toddlers and though my brother seemed untouched by it all I could do was look out to that stretch of beach and think of a photograph my mother kept of the year she met my father. 1966.

She is in a bikini, her hair is wet and in her face and her arm is thrust out to the side as if she’s trying to steady herself as she emerges from the surf — it is not a flattering photograph particularly — and though she is, I’m almost certain, sober — I can’t disentangle it from the photographs I have of her from another night where she is not — and how she told me the night she met my father she got drunk and tried to drown herself in the surf. My brother did say for the first time that he’d overheard our father talking to his twin brother — maybe about how it is that he was becoming steadily more involved with this young woman — when his marriage was failing and he had three very young boys — and how my brother remembers my father saying “you don’t understand. She is like a child. I could try to explain it to her but she wouldn’t understand. She is like a child.” I thought of that after my brother told me — as if all of the ghosts of their younger selves were out there on the beach — and it was only when I came home that I remember the further irony that my mother’s birthfather – the man who abandoned my grandmother and my three year old mother — he’d settled and made a life, had children in the very town where I was now dug into the sand watching my daughter pour out pails of sand. My mother’s half-brother was in that town — I may have seen him surf-casting — maybe it was his boat we saw motoring past as we stood on the jetty…

I’ve been having a bit of a mid-life crisis over here. I’m turning forty and feel in all ways insignificant. I go back and forth between feeling like a failure in terms of my creative life and then it’s usually G who hands me a bit of perspective about Z and my role in her life — and W’s too of course.

In my own life I’ve thrown around the barbed term ‘privilege’ to somehow mark those I see as existing in a kind of untouched world — where they can’t imagine anything but access and success and their lives aren’t marked by such tremendous and intense yearning — to be somewhere — beyond the cracked walls and small grid of city streets — to be out of this moment, this life — the privilege to believe the world offers abundance rather than scarcity — success rather than failure –for all my railing against the privileged I can’t think of something I want more for Z than the very belief that she can do whatever it is that she sets out to do in life rather than this poverty consciousness that I never quite seem to shake — no matter how different the circumstances of my life are now from when I was a child — and there are such vast differences.

I’ve never liked Florida for obvious reasons. It seems a place of quick schemes and false promise and drained swamps. There was a house just down the beach from the place we rented. It had large gates largely disguised by these lush and beautiful flowering trees. I would pass it each day and wonder what life would be like in a place so relentlessly blooming, sand blowing across the streets. When I mentioned the place my brother said he wished he could remember the name of those trees “they are poisonous” he said. We were on the way to the airport, past the hospital, past the ambiguous strip malls, “oleander” he said, the grand houses with their spanish moss and abandoned chained off groves far behind us. “Oleander.”

My Infertility Journey

Excuse me while I stretch these writing muscles here — I haven’t written anything in six or seven weeks — which, for me, is a long time — so things are a bit slow-going here.

When I was reading my regular round of blogs all those weeks ago when the parenting after infertility dialogue began — I found myself sitting with a particular question.  I wondered why it was that I didn’t write more about infertility — after all — I am still and will always be infertile;  G and I have a running joke each month when my cycle is (as its always been) irregular and I’ll say “I’m probably pregnant” — and he’ll say “you’re infertile” — but he’ll go and buy a pregnancy test anyway and we’ll chat about the possibility where he falls on the “it would be cool” side and I fall on the “I was such an anxious mess for more than two years I can’t go through it again regardless” side — and then, of course, I’m not because, well, I’m infertile. We are.  And for me and our blended family – with Z having a brother nine years older than she — that is a complete family in my heart — not unlike my own family — I had half-siblings much older than I but was for all intents and purposes an only child.  I don’t feel that there is anything missing in her not having a sibling closer in age — that said, when I see the other mothers of Z’s contemporaries with their fecundity — I sort of look at them as if we are a different species somehow — it’s easier in a way because I am much older than most — what I envy more than anything else is the singular experience of having a nuclear family that can focus on one or two children in a family unit — rather than our disparate blended family — G wrangling here — me wrangling there — our holidays flung between W’s mother and our mothers…our dinners at the mercy of W’s sport schedule, our very life schedule so bifurcated that I look on those families with a longing heart.

Our lives one week feel and look a certain way — on another week we are a different family.  But that’s another post entirely.

I decided to write about our infertility journey because I realized that sometimes I assume that most people reading here now have followed me from my previous blog with its running sidebar of infertility resume — but when I began this blog I really wrote nothing more than the fact that we did struggle — and conceived Z through IVF in 2008.  I wanted to write a bit about my experience here in the event that it might help someone wondering or asking the same questions I did.

G and I began dating in 2003 — but we’d known one another for seven years at that point — we’d been in the same circle of friends — and so our courtship seemed to be picking up a thread we’d dropped seven years prior — and I was 31 that year.  I knew I wanted to be married and have children — I’d been thinking about that since I’d had an epiphany at a Take Back the Night Rally  on the Missoula courthouse lawn in 1998 — a woman I knew, a poet from my program — was giving a speech about her life  as her four year old daughter wound herself around her legs — Karen’s hair blew in the wind — her husband stood behind her — she talked about the years she wandered — about being without a real home — about the dark times — and about how she felt at that time that people like her weren’t meant to have happiness — a family, a family-life — and I remember how powerfully it hit me then.  I wanted that.  I wanted a little house in Missoula and a vegetable garden — and to walk to the farmer’s market with my baby in a sling.  I wanted the dog and to walk the trails and have a little sunlit writing room in the back of an old miner’s clapboard house.

In 2000 I moved back to the city where I was raised — a cold, lake-studded land — when you fly into this region in the summer it resembles deep green fabric dotted with tiny mirrors embroidered to catch the light — each lake reflecting the sun and sky and winking between the green hills and valleys.

All of this is to say that when G and I began our relationship we knew it was ‘the one’ — and we did nothing to keep nature from taking its course.  Nature, for her part, did nothing.  I went to the GP through my healthcare provider at the college where I taught at the time and that provider gave me that spiel about a year of trying — and explained the idea of taking my temperature and handed me a mimeographed sheet from the 60s on which I was to record my temperature. That must have been 2004.

I can still remember how every piece of graph paper in our apartment was covered with these spiking hills and valleys — endlessly annotated.  G and I were also navigating the very beginning of what it would mean to be a blended family — and his son, four at the time, became our focal point.  There were many painful child-less years where I yearned to be the mother — and had to step aside for his ‘real’mother — a relationship that has warmed with time but a thorny one by definition.

In 2005 I found Fertility Friend and began charting there and it was through a conversation on those boards a few years later that I discovered the idea of the infertility blog — first I found Julie at Alittlepregnant — and then Mel.  I had a website of my own hosted on Geocities (that makes me laugh now) which just had a few pages — and some scraps of writing and was basically fueled by my homesickness for Montana.  I had begun toying with the idea of a blog — I was certain I could write something and then Get A Book Deal — because my mind was much on book deals in those days — and I was even more focused on my writing as a career — being closer at the time to my years spent in an MFA program.

Meanwhile, in 2005,  a good friend of mine had experienced secondary infertility and had a woman who she referred to as an “infertility specialist” — and she said I should go to see her.  This was the year before I married — and I went to see the woman I used to refer to as Dr. Volleyball Coach.  Now, what I’ll say about this I’ll say with the knowledge gleaned from the years that followed — many OB offices offer a kind of one-size-fits all approach to infertility — but they may not know the specifics of your diagnosis — and, like me, you may find yourself mildly overstimulated and extremely uncomfortable and facing a canceled cycle — I didn’t know about Reproductive Endocrinologists — Dr. Volleyball coach looked at my ovaries on a monitor — said she had no idea what was wrong — I had an HSG, bloodwork — she chalked it up to ‘undetermined’ — but the moment my RE saw my ovaries on a monitor she said “you’re polycystic” — she had no doubt.  I had spent years at that point without a clear diagnosis or appropriate treatment.  I would wait a year — until 2006, after our wedding, to start treatment with Dr. Volleyball coach — I would exhaust our three covered cycles of insemination — ending with the overstimulation.

It was  2007, the spring after we were married — I remember G getting off the phone in the living room — and I remember him telling me that his ex-wife –(who had recently become engaged to a man whose own first marriage had fallen apart after their struggle with infertility — he was infertile — we’d had lots of chats at W’s soccer games where she commiserated with our journey) was pregnant.  I lost my mind a little in that moment — the kind of keening sobbing wails that came from me were out of my control —  I am not one prone to such outbursts and I was so overcome — I was in a fetal position in our bed sobbing — Lucy, our dog, curled by my side.  She was always the mommy I remember thinking to myself.  It was an awful, terrible time.

I think it was G who said to me “if you had cancer you would go to an oncologist — of course it only makes sense if you’re infertile that you would go to a reproductive endocrinologist”   I tried infertility diets and homeopathy. In the winter of 2007 I went  to my RE and  I was ready — we were very lucky.  I had been doing infertility diets and working with a Chinese accupuncturist specifically for ovulation.  I had a strong retrieval and fertilization with ICSI. Of our first round of IVF and the two blastocysts that were transferred — one of those blasts was Z.

In retrospect I wish I had gone to an RE at the outset — someone who would have been clear with me that I was, indeed, statistically infertile — even my RE  acknowledged that yes, it would be possible for us to conceive without assistance —  though of course its also possible that we might be struck by lightning.

It is hard to shake the feeling that the first OB clinic that I went to benefitted financially from my time spent there — time that very likely would have amounted to nothing more than my maxing out the paltry three cycles of IUI covered by my insurance.  Though my RE clinic and their shared risk partners benefitted too — they made 26 thousand dollars from us — we don’t regret it — and of course, had we not succeeded on the first cycle we would have welcomed those three fresh and three frozen cycles worth of chances… but it was a wrenching decision to make at the time.

I guess what I hope the takeaway is here is to go to a specialist.  Go to a Reproductive Endocrinologist in your region — even if it means — as it means for many women in this region — going states away … they are specialists and will know exactly how to help you.  Oh, and blog.  I am still blogging because of the handful or friends I made at the time…and am blessed with new friends along the way.

***

I wrote this a week or so ago and then didn’t hit publish –it felt unfinished — and stilted somehow — because I can’t get to the core of the emotion of that time — it’s too painful, was too all-consuming –I remember the pain of it so clearly — the longing was deeper than anything I’d known before – -and I’d longed for a family, a father — so many things  – but this longing.

I took Z to school this morning — and as I was walking in and settling in with Z who was trying to convince me in her fashion to put my shoe back on and go home — one of the other mothers came in the door with a new baby in the car-seat — and she was only ten days old — a girl — and the mother was chatting with our teacher as the sunlight fell in patches on the wood floor — the long wooden benches — and  the mother was beaming, but in that sleepless daze — and she talked about how when her daughter was crowning they told her she could reach down and touch her — to pull her out herself…and this, now this of all things — I felt such a pang — for this moment in the sunlight, sharing this beautiful and natural birth story in this place that is so welcoming to such stories — I received all of this so differently than I would have three or four years ago — I was so filled with joy for her that tears came to my eyes — it wasn’t without a pang — but it was just so fundamentally different for me than it used to be.

And then, just today, as I was home making coffee I thought about how more than anything else it was my own worldview that made my journey as long as it was — I felt for the longest time that I was to pay attention to each thing that happened to me — that they were happening for a reason — and that it was setting me on a path — and I felt, when I couldn’t conceive naturally — that there was a reason for it — and I really struggled with the decision of IVF — strange because I don’t have any qualms or issues whatsoever with the process for other people — but when it came to me, in my life, I needed quite a long time to come to terms with the process of IVF.  I’m not sure I would go through it again — even though our remaining blastocysts are currently in storage — it’s an ongoing process of … are we done?  Is this it?

 

Hitting publish now…

 

A Sponorship For the cost of my Caramel Soy Macchiato Habit

I taught writing at a local community college for eight years.  It was a college that brought together disparate populations — African immigrants from war-torn countries — recent vets from Iraq and Afghanistan there on the GI Bill, working mothers, first-generation college students who had never traveled out of the state, evangelical christians, muslims wearing the hijab…. I always felt it was my job to get them thinking first — and to generate content after — and lastly to worry about the business of structure and punctuation … The semester before I left I taught a Creative Nonfiction course at night where I taught from a great Phillip Lopate Anthology — and we dealt mostly with the personal story — writing from your own experience, but towards the end of the course I did ask them to think how the same creative energy of storytelling is most often put to use in powerful journalism. Our college had recently upgraded to online projectors and so I uploaded Frontline’s The Ghosts of Rwanda — and we watched it together.

I’d forgotten that until this morning.  I’d forgotten what it was like to scroll down the timeline with them and see their faces try to register the fact that by day 100 there were 800, 000 Rwandans who had been massacred.  I forgot what it was like to listen to my student’s stories — about the time they narrowly escaped death at a checkpoint — or the time someone they knew didn’t…or the girl who wrote about cowering at a riverbank with an infant, not her own, as she unwound her headscarf and dipped it in the water for the baby to suck — hoping it would stifle its cries — because she needed it to be quiet — about the people they saw stoned to death, about the burning tires thrown around people…I had forgotten — so insulated have I been in my own little world — until I read Eden’s series of posts.

Yesterday she wrote about sitting with women and their interpreter — and how they seemed self-conscious and rubbed their feet against one another as a kind of comfort –and I couldn’t get that image out of my mind — I kept flashing on Z as she nursed to sleep at night – her feet paddling against me.

Then I read Eden’s post today.  And I clicked on a banner much like this one:

 

I looked for a girl — one roughly Z’s age and found Aline.

From Rwanda.

I have been so isolated — so insular — so focused on my own story and my own anxieties frankly — that I needed posts like Eden’s to shake me … and to realize that for the amount of money I pay each month for 10 soy caramel macchiatos (3.65 ea.) I can make the tiniest bit of difference in her life.

Thank you Eden and World Vision.

Making My Way Through the Wood

I’ve been a wild rover for many a year and I spent all me money on whiskey and beer but now I’m returning with gold in great store/and I never will play the wild rover no more - Folk Song

I was born on the plains. I have the image of a thunderstorm gathering on the edge of the prairie and my mother and me watching it come, feeling the pressure drop and the air go suddenly cool and the sky darken — this could easily be the metaphor for our life together — both with my father and without — it also explains my love of The Wizard of Oz. I grew up with black and white television — people did have color of course — but we didn’t — but I remember watching that movie on my grandparents’ television in their brick tiled breezeway — sitting on their tufted leather couch — I must have been four or five — and the moment that Dorothy emerges into color — I felt that to be my life so powerfully then in a way I can’t even recount now — as I watched Dorothy and her trusted friends navigate that forest and my grandmother was bustling around her kitchen taking the waterford juice glasses out of the dishwasher in the warm circle of light — placing sugar wafer cookies before my grandfather and me — the sense of freshly laundered sheets folded meticulously in closets, my grandfather’s tools on his pegboard in the basement — Dorothy in the poppies — and these were the years before the worst of it — my father’s murder, my aunt’s descent into madness, my grandfather’s dropping dead of a heart attack on that same gloss of brick, my aunt’s brutal attack of my grandmother and the subsequent years of my aunt’s incarceration — first at a forensic center for the criminally insane — then later at a state run asylum — and the last years when my grandmother had lobbied successfully for her release and they lived together again.

I imagined myself like Dorothy — this little girl at the mercy of this force of nature swirling around her — and her beloved dog. I remember when we drove from the prairies of Illinois north — after my father’s death — so this would be the spring of 1978 — and as the prairie gave way to deciduous forest — the closing in — the river valley’s rising — how I felt it in my breath — how I could no longer see what was coming at me and I felt the trees to be harboring the unknown and so to me it was a kind of marker of isolation — still, at night — when we drive home from our cabin — when the boreal forests are broken only by the long jagged shelves of glacial till — and I feel this darkness coming from somewhere in my breath — I have to swallow past it and breath myself into the light again — will a house to appear with glowing warmth so I can imagine us there — otherwise it seems we’re hurtling through the dark.

I belonged to my mother. Perhaps this is the way of many children of divorce that’s never reconciled –but it was more than that — this picture shows my parents as they would have liked to be seen — my father was the older beat-generation professor — my mother the younger, blonde second wife just a few years too old to truly have been a hippie … a woman still governed by all of the expectations of pre-women’s liberation — a woman on the cusp of all of it and unsure of which way she would go. She was so young really — I can almost forgive her when I think of how young she was. I can almost forgive her when I remember that she never knew her birth father — that even though the man I knew as my grandfather adopted her she never felt a part of that family but forever felt other and removed … that she was always searching for something … and who can blame her for holding onto me so tightly — so tightly that when she began to unravel I had to hold us both up as best I could. Who can blame her.

I find it more and more difficult to blame her as I continue to fall more in love with Z. I gaze at her sometimes — and it is gazing — and imagine a day when she rejects me and I want to cry with the thought of it. I’ve been stumbling through blog land for a while here — not quite clear on why I’m writing or what to do with it — not even clear with where to read… in a week I managed to read consecutive posts about women (young mothers) and their relationships to their own mothers — pictures of three smiling generations and while usually I can click away without it bothering me much — it began to get to me.  I began to feel a resentment — which isn’t these poor women’s fault — how wonderful for them — and I mean it truly — how blessed to have a relationship and connection that is nurturing and fulfilling and strong — and I want that for my daughter… but I’ve just felt adrift somehow lately.

I thought of the talk W and I had the other day.  He’s been sort of getting into knucklehead trouble — the sort of things twelve year old boys have always done and when you have two paths in front of you — you hope your child takes the better of the path — but one thing I’ve always known about W from the time he was small — he wanted power — and he wasn’t a leader — he cared what people thought of him…from a very young age — and that has all come home to roost this last year.  Anyway, we were talking about why it is that his parental units (all four of us) are so on him… monitoring his texts, punishing him etc… and I asked if it was possible his friend’s parents weren’t actually paying attention?  And then he asked about when I was his age — and I gave him a thumbnail sketch — how I nearly flunked out of the seventh grade — and how, at that point my mother, who was too focused on keep her head above water emotionally and financially (and probably too focused on her boyfriend as well) had to notice — and I’d wanted, anyway, to go to a private school for years — and we had enough money from my father’s insurance policy to do it — and how I’d transfered to this school where the kids were nice — and their parents seemed to care what they were doing — we did innocuous and innocent things rather than huffing white-out out of plastic bags in the big empty houses of the idle rich like I’d done the year before — and how, I told W, it seemed attractive to have parents who didn’t care what you did — but when it came down to it — it wasn’t so great having a parent who gave you all the freedom in the world.

He looked at me and the said “nice speech” — which is how kids talk these days I guess — and I stammered that it wasn’t a speech so much as a sharing of what I was thinking and feeling — and then we left it at that.

My anxiety has been hovering in the last month and a half or so — I have always had a kind of PTSD — that seems to come to life most often when I’m driving — it kept me from driving, in fact, for seven years after I was legal to do so — I couldn’t get behind the wheel without reels of horror playing in my head — and I never really even knew I did it — I’m not sure what was finally the piece that allowed me to realize it — but once I did — I worked at training my mind to not do it … and this is something that I need to work back into my life — the life-saving practice of meditation and mindfulness — because my monkey mind on its own can get into devious trouble.  I’ve been reading Carol Flinders At The Root of This Longing — which talks about her own journey in meditation with her ashram community — and her own awakening of feminism  – and how the two came together — and how one reconciles a feminist thirst and a spiritual hunger.

When I was a child — the second neighborhood where I lived was along one of the city’s lakes — in an old apartment building from the twenties.  I used to spend hours walking around that lake — along the macadam paths — the cracks and hills and rough spots — for years I could’ve told you each tree around the three mile path — and directly across from where I lived there was a house — a large-ish stucco house set back among the hydrangea — though I didn’t know what they were called then and thought of them as the white puff-ball flowers — the  kind of flowers every old lady had along the foundation of her stucco house here — and there was a sign that said Minnesota Zen Center — and I thought that sounded interesting —  but I was a child and had no way of knowing what that meant — the whole city seemed a city filled with hippies then — and as the years passed the people in and out of that house didn’t seem to — they had a kind of quiet intensity and energy that I liked and admired.  Later, when I was in college I’d discover that Natalie Goldberg had been a student there — and had taught poetry and writing to kids in this city — just as I would do later in Montana — and she headed to New Mexico — I to Colorado and somehow I feel that if I’d had more of a direction, more of a foundation — I might have more clearly heard the interior voice that was driving me forward — but I was so clouded for so long — it seems clear to me that some kind of community of meditators is exactly what my heart has been searching for for a long time — but still haven’t quite found my way there…

I’ve been wondering if what I’m feeling is a bit of a mid-life crisis — it’s as if I feel there’s something big for me out there — writing-wise or spirituality-wise — but I keep throwing roadblocks in my way — as I have my entire life — so much easier to focus on the last fifteen pounds — or whatever…  I have this desire to run the tap until the water comes clear — but I’m not quite sure how to do it — things seem awfully muddy right now.

I subscribed to a few self-publishing blogs — wondering if there was something there for me to think about — the eternal question of whether to spruce up this place and drop the anonymity and just move out into the open — have you been following Eden’s journey?  My friend Eden was recently sent to Niger by World Vision to document the food crisis there — as a blogger.  Can you believe that?  Amazing.  And a reminder of how this platform can be used for social good — that’s the phrase that Eden kept touching on — social media for social good — which is so attractive to me — because there’s so much superficiality out there — so much clutter.

It’s hard not to feel small sometimes — to feel small and a failure in the eyes of the world — I said something like that to G the other day and he took me by the shoulders and dragged me to the doorway where I could see Z snacking happily in her high chair — and don’t get me started on all of the ways I feel I get that wrong some days … I’m the mother pulling up to the Wa.ldorf school with her daughter watching Caillou on her iphone.  I’m that mother.

I’m not sure where this post is going.  I was thinking about how when I reconnected with a childhood friend on FB — a girl I knew that horrible seventh grade year — when she asked what I was doing I said I was mothering.. but I was trying to write  – I’d gone to school to be a novelist etc. and she said “I always knew you were going to do great things” and the funny part was that I was so certain for so long that my life had shaped me for a reason –but I feel sometimes like I’ve lost my thread…lost my way — or perhaps — not lost my way — but just am on a long path– that my constitution allows me to do exactly what I’m doing right now and no more.

So what I try to do is think of the small ways I can tend my own garden — and quite literally this year we’re trying to extend our garden to include a veggie garden — I’d like to do a sunflower garden for Z — and believe it our not we’re talking about getting a chicken coop — much to G’s disgruntlement — and since he’s not wrong that most living things in this household owe their thriving to him — it probably is more work on his plate — as I’ve mentioned before I’m not as detail oriented as I’d like — I can plant all the elaborate gardens — but then I’m confronted with weeding….

Z continues to be slow to warm in her school situations — but increasingly gregarious on the playground or with spontaneous situations with children — but in school — especially after breaks due to holiday or illness — she retreats back into herself — and it’s as if she glazes over when the light of attention is drawn to her — just this morning I saw it in her music class — she wouldn’t participate, wouldn’t leave my lap — keep pointing to the door — would only do the slightest of motions… and if the teacher looked at her straight on she would freeze like a rabbit.  Though even in class if I asked her if she enjoyed it she would say she did — and later at home enthusiastically recount the parachute play or whatever — but while we’re there…it is a challenge.  I begin to despair that she will never be able to separate from me.

My brother invited me to visit him in Florida in a few weeks — the mothers of his children are renting a beautiful beach house with one of their sets of parents and there’s much room to rattle around in — and our mother summarily dismissed her invitation — she is still removing herself from that relationship in a way that makes my blood run cold.  I try then to make up for our mother by joining him — using a free voucher for tickets for both Z and I — though the very idea of travel with her alone nearly paralyzes me with anxiety…

Can you tell I’m anxious?

I figured I better write here sooner rather than later — even if its disjointed.  The perfectionist in me would keep it unwritten in my head forever.

I began this post with that photo — intending to write about images — the images we hold of who we are — what we hope others see of us — how we envision ourselves — and how that photo captured a particular idea of my parents — but how when you looked beneath the surface the reality was so different — and how I often wonder what it will be like for Z — my own identity was built from so much of my mother’s experience — and so little of my father’s — simply the stories I’d heard or the images I’d seen — or whatever family myth had built around him…I think of our daughter and wonder what we will bequeath to her.

April

Here I am sitting in the northern tier of the country — not far from the laurentian divide– streams here flow north to the Arctic Ocean. The ice has retreated early this year, the lake a scrim of translucent slate– the water’s band thirty feet at the shore. This morning a neighbor told us as he leaned out of his truck, the seats so high that G, standing next to him seemed to have to shift his gaze slowly up. The neighbor said trumpeter swans were nesting on a nearby island and as we walked back along the road they flew low above our heads.

I’ve had dozens of posts in my head: thinking about revisiting what I learned from my IF journey and why it is I don’t write of it much; reflecting continually on the strangeness of identity in the tech age and how when it could connect us it most often serves as a tool to hold ourselves further from our own true selves because we are so busy constructing it — and so aware of its construction— but we’re not unfolding ourselves so much as folding ourselves into elaborate origami…; thinking about the book I am reading about a spiritual hunger and what happens when it meets a feminist thirst ; trying to slow down and reclaim a life I would have recognized and valued 15 years ago; trying to make peace with my body image for Z’s sake; reflecting on the death of G’s brother and what it’s meant witnessing my friend’s navigation of terminal illness.

It can only mean one thing: in April I’ll come back and try to find my voice again.

The Coming Spring

It was a day in the sun while the snowmelt puddled at our feet and it was also a day that I managed to drink the green tea I’d brewed and I looked in the mirror and declared it was okay.  It was okay to like my hair though my best friend is losing hers.  It was okay to believe in spring while death hovered and roosted.  I watched Z as she stood at the ledge, the thick plate glass separating her from the polar bear as it dove and surfaced, legs grasping at a giant white plastic barrel — its mouth opened to  grasp an edge, its paws the size of turkey platters pawing at the barrel, and losing its purchase, it rolled again into the water.  We could watch him above and below and I thought of how it was something I loved as a child — always loved, somehow — the dioramas that showed the things happening at the surface — and what was working beneath.  I watched the bear and wondered if, by the time Z was my age, there would be any left on the wild earth — if this would be the only polar bear she’d ever know.

I thought about how I would likely not grow up to be a wildlife biologist — seeing as how I’d already grown up — and most likely would never sleep in a bedouin tent or see all of the places I dreamed of as a young person.  I might summit something, but not as I imagined — I thought again about turning down that rare job in that small and mildly famous mountain town for the life on the plains that I always felt trapped and hemmed in by — and yet I had this gift of great love and my blended family and my given one — which presented me with as many days to practice lovingkindness as I could wish — I was in my body with nothing but the most routine of aches and pains of a nearly forty year old woman who gained and lost more than 80lbs through my infertility/pregnancy journey — and my hip and knees complain about it every so often — but I am trying to be more grateful. I may never see Bhutan or India — but I’ve known a sense of purpose in my working life and though I’m at loose ends currently I feel the pull — or is it the drift of something in my life — it feels spiritual and creative all at the same time — at such a dark time.

I had a day last week where I felt so clear — about my own purpose — about life — and then the next day I was seized with a furious terror — that I could lose G or Z or W at any moment because that is what life does or can do — and I, of anyone, should know that.  The evening that G’s brother’s work called his mother G. was heading to a hockey game with her.  His brother, a recluse of sorts — a contract writer who spent as much time as he could in SE Asia — was known to lead a relatively solitary life and it wasn’t unusual for his phone to go unanswered — his emails unreturned.  G assumed it was nothing and he’d head over there after the game, to his apartment, to make certain there wasn’t anything weird going on.  He called me and said his car hadn’t moved since the snow three days  prior.  Z was sleeping — W was at his mother’s — G came home briefly in the hours he had to wait until 10:30 that night when the caretaker would arrive home before he would be let into the apartment. “Do you think he’s dead” he asked me  – and we were talking in a relatively light tone — and I said that all of the signs were there — the unusually punctual work demeanor he had — and he’d not shown in three days — the police knock at the door unanswered –the snow around his old subaru pristine.  I said I thought he might be.  I said I wished he would have someone else go — but who, he said, would protect him — what if he’d hit his head — what if he had something strange in his apartment and he let the cops go in there — and he was fine — no, he’d said, it was his job to go.  His alone.

 

He’d lived in the same apartment for over twenty years — with the pieces he’d imported from Borneo, the blow guns and the handmade baskets, the carved wooden frogs and the encyclopedic collection of Nat Geos — we sifted through his marathon photos and the cards he’d kept from the only American woman he seemed to have ever loved — a gap-toothed woman with an 80′s flip in a photo gone pink with age.  G. kept his resignation letter to a well known food company – it was witty and wry and non-establishment — as he was.  There were journal after journal, notebook after notebook of his writing — and a draft of his novel — an idea that had been with him for thirty years.

 

This is what it comes to, I thought.  All the yearning — the reading, the thoughts of who you might become and where it might take you.  It comes to someone else sifting through your thoughts and your photos.

 

I thought of Susan’s words about how we should take care with the things we write — the things we create — the way we love, how we treat one another– because that, that and only that, is what’s left when we are gone.

 

In these weeks I sat in a hospital room flooded with sun as my best friend had high doses of chemotherapy flooded through her veins in the hopes that she might be granted more time.  We looked at funny you tube clips and she played a slideshow of her boys in the leaves for me to watch as she showered having been unhooked for a rare bit of time — this was the song that was playing — I said “Is that Bob Dylan?” and she said “yeah, but its from Natural Born Killers”

 

As her boys played in the leaves, covered one another, made squint eyed faces that 5 and 7 year olds do — as the pictures played that they took of her — from that perspective — low, looking up, her gaze of love at them — these are the words that played:

See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sunrise from a tropic isle
Just remember, darling all the while
You belong to me

See the marketplace in old Algiers
Send me photographs and souvenirs
Just remember when a dream appears
You belong to me

I’ll be so alone without you
Maybe you’ll be lonesome too
And blue

Fly the ocean in a silver plane
See the jungle when it’s wet with rain
Just remember ’til you’re home again
You belong to me

I’ll be so alone without you
Maybe you’ll be lonesome too
And blue

Fly the ocean in a silver plane
See the jungle when it’s wet with rain
Just remember ’til you’re home again
You belong to me

Juliette Lewis: “I just want to tell you I love you, and I miss you. Don’t
forget about me. You won’t forget about me?
Woody Harrelson:I won’t forget about you. It’s cool. No matter where he takes
you, Timbouktou, it don’t matter, because it’s fate. Know? Nobody can
stop fate. Nobody can.

Reading it now it takes my breath away from me. In that moment, that day — leaving the hospital — we’d had such a good day — spent more hours in one another’s company than we had in years — alone — sitting in the window seat — the sun spilling around us and it could have been just as it was when we were twelve. “You’re like my sister” she said.

***

I’ve never felt the spring sun as I did today when Z’s little feet stomped in the puddles.

Another from John O’Donohue alternatively titled Not A Way to Build Blog Readership

I just came across another piece of O’Donohue’s writing and was going to just post it here without any reflection — and then I laughed at myself because it’s not exactly in the blogging playbook to write post after post about this stuff — but it’s on my mind — and in what little ways I can share my mind with you right now — I wanted to — so as not to lose a connection here — but this is so much how I am thinking right now  – and he says it so much more eloquently than I could right now.

 

“For Death.”

From the moment you were born,
Your death has walked beside you.
Though it seldom shows its face,
You still feel its empty touch
When fear invades your life,
Or what you love is lost
Or inner damage is incurred…

That the silent presence of your death
Would call your life to attention,
Wake you up to how scarce your time is
And to the urgency to become free
And equal to the call of your destiny.

That you would gather yourself
And decide carefully
How you now can live
The life you would love
To look back on
From your deathbed.

A Fold in the Universe

I want to write but I’m not ready, not yet.  The strangest thing about the confluence of grief — immediate and pending — around here — is how it has opened a space in me rather than closed one — which is how it’s always gone before in my life and I don’t know quite what to make of this clarity and intensity.

 

I heard this amazing podcast today on Krista Tippet’s On Being — a program that is broadcast here from our National Public Radio – it is an amazing show that deals with ethics and spirituality — and I find it incredibly nourishing.  I heard this today in combing through the archives — a talk she had with the philosopher and writer John O’Donohue.  I chose it because he’s Irish – as am I, and there’s so much that runs to my very being in the celtic tradition — but then as I heard the preamble I got chills — because, like G’s brother, John O’Donohue died in his sleep at 52 (or was it 53 — ) just as G’s brother did just over a week ago.  It was one of those folds in the universe when I just knew, just understood that I was meant to hear this right now — and maybe I was meant to stumble across it in order to send you there — please carve out a silent space for yourself sometime soon and listen to this.

 

At the end he read this poem.  I knew immediately I was meant to know it.  To remember it.

 

And here in closing, is one of his well-known poems of blessing, which he wrote for his mother at the time of his father’s death. He read it aloud to me when we sat together.

Mr. O’Donohue: This is a poem I wrote several years ago, and it’s called, Beannacht, which is the Gaelic word for blessing.

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

 

 

Redirect

For a break from regularly scheduled programming — since I am still processing all of this — I thought I’d link to my other blog which is dusty and unused — to post a video G sent me – we were captured on video for a local restaurant – and it just made me smile.  I didn’t want to post it here — not sure why except that I wanted this space to sit a little and for the next post to be one that reflects on what this last week has been like…thank you all for your visits and words.  Really. Thank you.