flakedoves

sometimes, a slant

2009-10-28T17:24:00.001-07:00

Today I accused myself of taking the same pictures over and over again, unintentionally. It does not help that my baby girl, at six months, looks very much like her older sister once looked at six months. Often these days I take a picture and then realize it is, in a sense, the same picture I took of Esme two and a half years ago. I search the archives and find that, indeed, they are so similar! Perhaps Elsa's cheeks are a little less chubby; her skin tone more pink.

Perhaps I am engineering a pattern because I do love patterns, connectivity. Maybe so, but not consciously.

There is a view from our second story bedroom window which I have felt compelled to frame with my camera several times, but in instances so spaced out that I am not conscious of having done it before. Seeing it in deep snow once two winters ago, at the last slanting light of the day, I stood atop our bed and took a photograph. Seeing it again a few days ago, I must have felt that same compulsion, but not being consciously mindful of the time before.

This window does not typically offer any radiant event but rather dull yellow sameness in mid-summer haze, or a gray sameness the rest of the year. I might glance out while standing at the foot of the bed, folding laundry. A moment of slanting light tenders a visual event and I can't help but take notice. Then the clicking sound of a camera becomes a way to add weight to the appearance of what must disappear, a way to say thank you.

This week I've been hemmed in by the confines of our apartment because it began with a cold on Sunday which kept me at home with my nursing baby while Jeff and Esme stayed out all day at church, followed by a church picnic and kickball game and then a hike with friends. Though her source of sustenance, I was certainly boring company for Elsa all day Sunday, stirring ascorbic acid (which is Vitamin C) into multiple glasses of water, heating chicken broth, sitting her down on the floor with a toy with the unspoken entreaty to please be content with the toy and the emptiness of the apartment and the inanimate mother. And waiting for her next short nap so that I too could drop into restorative, never-enough sleep.

I determinedly stamped out my cold with my stubborn application of home remedies, then proceeded to wake up to a feverish three year-old the next day. Esme had the flu-- that thing that has been around all my thirty-two years of life on Earth, but which this season is being billed as a harbinger of death. My home remedies seemed very feeble but I wielded them nonetheless, disguising olive leaf extract in some applesauce with honey, spiking her diluted juice with vitamin C powder, and of course feeding her chicken broth the one time she willingly ate. The Pedialyte freezer pops went over relatively well also. But perhaps the bodies of generally healthy children are resilient: she licked the flu in two days and two nights, waking up symptom-free today, Wednesday. But still not strong enough for pre-school, I mostly let her lie on the futon, watching Dora, Kipper, and Max & Ruby.

Elsa, for inscrutable reasons, except perhaps that breastmilk contains antibodies and perhaps because, unlike most other people, is privileged to sleep whenever her little body needs to, has shown no sign of any sickness during all this time. I'm thankful for that boon.

In any case, it has been a long week so far, and flu season, or sick season--or just plain winter--has only just begun. Family life with small children is so often just raggedy, around-the-clock work, which affords few phenomenal contours. Reading a book of sayings from modernday Greek elders from a reclining position on the sofa, Jeff read one aloud to me the other day, prefaced by a hey-listen-to-this. It is by a certain Elder Epiphanios:

"When someone is free, he has rights and responsibilities. When he marries, he has few rights and very many responsibilities. When, however, he has children, he doesn't have any rights at all, but only responsibilities."

Well, that's what I'm talkin' about, Elder Epiphanios.

But I am not complaining. Nor do I think that life has to be so hemmed in to be valid-- a denial of worldly possibilities and opportunities. I think what I am saying is that when life's responsibilities take us to that place of limitation, another capacity is heightened in direct proportion. Then, as compensation for giving yourself over to responsibility, as a gift, there develops a capacity. It's the capacity to latch onto the beautiful moments of family life within the nexus of struggle. It is why I take pictures of my girls' beautiful faces even on the days when they've driven me mad and back numerous times. Or it is the capacity to regard the spectacle of slanting light on a leaf-or-snow-carpeted patch of mundane, even when that same window view has at other times depressed me. I really think that the flicker of beauty isn't a foreign substance, a break from the mundane, but a flaring up of the same stuff.

wendy's drive-through as entrenched infrastructure and the inevitable disparagement of the ideal

2009-09-28T06:11:00.000-07:00

Last winter I went to hear a lecture by Joel Salatin, an advocate for sustainable agriculture. He is not exactly famous, but not exactly unknown either. (He was featured in the book The Omnivore's Dilemma, which by now seems to be one of those books that everyone and their brother has read.) I know this is a trendy topic now so I apologize in advance for bringing it up. I can't help it if I am profile-able.

The talk was in one of those old theaters of yesteryear that many small towns have in their downtown, which now tend only to be utilized for things decidedly not in vogue, like non-denominational church services. The fold down auditorium chairs at this theater were nicked from years of use and the carved ornamentation on the ceiling was lackluster. All of the wood--stage, ceiling, seats-- seemed as dry as a matchstick, petrified from the decades. This theater, in quaint downtown Goshen, Indiana, was packed with bearded and unadorned men and women, all farming families, all clearly Mennonite. I believe it was the Mennonite community in Goshen who had arranged for Joel Salatin to come at no small price. An unapologetic believer in capitalism, he is not an inexpensive speaker, per his website. There were also a few bemused, scruffy-looking college students in the balcony, probably there for the extra credit they would receive in one of their liberal arts classes. I went with a small group of other Notre Dame friends and also sat up in the balcony, above the sea of Mennonite uniformity below. The experience was rather cozy and surreal.

Joel Salatin, with his sweater vest, bow tie, Buddy Holly glasses, and slick talking manner, conjured up an image of an old timey, all-American snake oil salesman. On a surface level he contrasted somewhat sharply with the audience who had arranged his visit. Nevertheless, soft chuckling and murmurs of approval floated up into my ears from the first floor as his talk and his slide show progressed, illuminating the philosophy and methodology behind his sustainable farming practice of fifty some years. So mesmerizing and dynamic was he, I could almost see the phantom outline of a covered wagon behind him, from which he was going to pull out his wares when the talk was done. Either that or give a call for us all to come forward for prayer, healing, and eternal salvation. And people were going to kneel and pray, or plunk their money down, or just try to shake the man's hand afterward--that was certain.

I myself, never having been a skeptic by nature, plunked some money down for one of his books after the talk. My friends and I exited the theater onto a snowy sidewalk and crunched back to the car. None of us had eaten dinner beforehand and so, as if to mock us in our idealism, trap us in our hypocricy, reveal the entrenched nature of our food culture, or tickle our highly developed sense of irony, or all of the above, the Wendy's drive-through presented itself as the only viable choice under the circumstances. After this inspiring talk about taking the high-road of life on the margins of the industrial food industry, it appeared to be the only convenient place open in Goshen at that time of night. We were starving, had a forty-five minute drive home, and our respective spouses--potentially grouchy from solo parenting--were waiting for us. The collective pull of your home responsibilities tells you to be moving on; the stomach tells you it needs immediate filling.

On the drive home I contributed to our zesty conversation about the ideals presented in the talk we had just heard, whilst taking pulls of diet coke from the unwieldy, sloshing, large and ridiculous drink cup that came with my Wendy's value meal. I really love diet coke.

I'm not saying that it is wrong to get fast food. Don't be shocked but occasionally I go to Wal-Mart too. Or maybe I am saying it's wrong. Or maybe I would just like to say that in a deep down way I believe it's wrong but I'm not standing up here saying it's wrong. I'm just pointing out the irony of the entire situation-- an irony that for me stubbornly pervades all my thoughts and hopes about living according to an ideal. It pervades them before they are even born into the real world of action.

Nevertheless, us chickens have made a few significant lifestyle changes in the last few years, punctuated by many delightful lapses, like frozen pizzas and salad greens in the middle of winter, which show no signs of tapering off. The struggle proceeds too slowly to ever feel very good about any of it, but, I suppose, it at least proceeds. I'm not sure if I really believe that living perfectly in any area, according to any particular ideal, will actually change anything about the world and its workings. And for that matter, there is such a variety of ideals espoused by people of all stripes, some quite at odds, that they probably cancel each other out anyway. For example, I heartily disagree with people who think that veganism is The Way to go, but there are plenty of people who do.

I'm thinking: as long as a passion for the outskirts of the industrial food industry grid hangs within me with a pure, intensely personal brightness, I'll probably keep inching toward those outskirts for the rest of my life, fighting my own slovenly ways, and generally not giving up altogether. Sometimes, though, I do wonder if this passion, unasked for and unexplainable inside of me, was simply planted inside me as a tricky way to mimic and assist the real struggle of life, which is the struggle to pray and be completely convinced that prayer is the most important thing. It is difficult to be genuinely convinced of that, just like it's difficult to be genuinely convinced that I can't eat a bowl of coco puffs from time to time as a before-bed snack. Both struggles require resisting the overwhelming power of mainstream sensibilities, resisting the pull of what is considered sensible and normal for everyone, like the perfect normalcy of a grocery store. Resistance and progress in either area proceeds at about the same unimpressive pace, with lots of humanly understandable and justifiable lapses. The world is just that fallen.

(I took the photo above at the nearby farm where we and a handful of other student families here get meat and dairy. The farmer was showing us the fake grit given to chickens raised on industrial farms.)

there's a story i've been meaning to tell

2009-09-23T20:52:00.000-07:00

"And all that we have, and all that we see / I tie and I knot, and I lay at your feet / and I have not forgot / how the silence crept over me" Joanna Newsom

I took this photo at on July 10, 2004. I think it was among my first attempts at anything artistic with a camera in my adult life. It was taken at a consignment store-- a rack of vintage clothing in front of a framed picture for sale.

There is a story I've been meaning to tell about that time in my life. It has taken me so long to really know myself, and I knew myself even less at that time. I was working full time at the seminary where Jeff was a full-time graduate student. The cost of living was high-- it was "Westchester County," and I'll say no more. Also, at that time, we were just not very frugal and perhaps a little irresponsible with money. For example, all trips to Barnes and Noble, which were frequent, meant a new book, which I now believe to be absolute absurdity. And there were many other such absurdities and unnecessary bills. The point is that I felt at the time as if we needed more money than I was making, which I now know was a delusional belief. But I was very convinced of this at the time.

A friend--actually the mother of a friend, or both really--told me about this pyramid business she and her husband did from their home. I knew her and her husband to be incredibly nice people, and apparently prosperous, so I took an interest. To be fair, she told me that it was not technically a pyramid scheme, and I still believe her on this point, but since I'm not naming any names, I'm just going to call it a pyramid scheme here for brevity, because everyone knows what that is: it's a business that sells things but doesn't use advertising. Instead it uses person to person marketing and inspirational sales meetings and so on, and people who are new sign up underneath someone else and the person above gets some of their sales commission and the more people you sign up and sales everyone makes the higher you go, blah blah blah. To my limited understanding, that's what it was.

Now, I really have no idea what I was thinking when I decided that I was interested in doing this on top of my full-time job, which had a perfectly decent salary. It seems as absurd to me now as our spending habits were at the time. Nevertheless, I told myself that it would be a great way to bring in some extra money.

I don't think I really understood what it all entailed, because a large part of my attraction to this was the fact that I sincerely liked the person who introduced me to it. I think I always tend to be blinded by the relational aspect of everything. Anyway, she gave me a time and location of a meeting which I could attend where I could learn more about it. It was near enough to our apartment. It was at a hotel, in a conference room. I remember driving there and parking outside. I didn't want to turn off the car because I was in the middle of listening to Joanna Newsom's "Sadie," a very long, serpentine, wild, layered, complex, creative song. Sitting there with the car running I just started weeping, partly moved by the song, and partly by something I couldn't name. Finally I crept over the plush carpet of the hotel lobby and found the double doors where the meeting was taking place. A table set up outside the door was being manned by polished young business women. I wanted to sneak in and be a fly on the wall but they somehow wanted my name or something-- I don't remember the details, but only feeling embarrassed and out of place. The meeting was large--very large--and was not really even a meeting, in the strict sense. To my mind it was more like a big tent revival. There was an audience listening to an onstage speaker, who was clearly of the dynamic persuasion. I remember feeling circumspect and bewildered and never entering further than the outermost periphery of this large conference room, never taking a seat. I stayed for a discrete amount of time, then fled in anonymity. I went home and told Jeff this thing was not "me," but I could not even articulate why.

I can't remember the precise ending to this story. Stupidly, I did end up going one step further into this venture and signed up, substantial fee and all, talking myself into it, lord knows why. It fizzled out shortly thereafter. It was money down the drain. It was a loss of face too. I marvel at how shallow my sense of self was then-- that I could so miscalculate my ability to stomach certain things or enact a role so unlike myself.

I am not sure why I need to tell this story now, except that, although I do not generally have a very good memory, or a very visual one, I do vividly remember and even see myself sitting behind the steering wheel, listening to the words of that song and being so moved by it, and realizing that the spirit of that meeting clashed terribly with such a song, and that the two were at enmity, and that the energy which rolled in the heavens of each was of a different nature. In the hotel conference room, it was generated in words such as "marketing," and "branding," and "networking." I knew that I hated those words; I wanted to go away from those words. But I also feared that the hating of them might perhaps be a lesser happiness, an alienation, or a handicap of sorts.

I am still this way, but now more consciously and firmly so, more happily so. I will forever skirt around the periphery of that conference room, never giving my name.

I want to go where the walls of the words I write down are white.

frazzled

2009-09-22T09:46:00.000-07:00

I decided to quit my Ideal Job yesterday. The decision was spontaneous, provoked by a mounting agitation. It was not unlike a scenario in which a normally softspoken, deferential person is provoked to the point of screaming, uncharacteristically, in a noisy room in order to shock everyone into silence. Once the silence is established, however, the quiet person feels a little shocked at having screamed, and wonders what happened.

What happened is that I, unexpectedly to myself, entered my boss's office and told her that I probably could not do it anymore. The twelve hours a week--three afternoons-- which to the ear sounds like really very little, have been too much coming and going from home--enough to make me feel constantly frenzied. Leaving expressed milk for Elsa three afternoons a week has been a nagging problem daily, requiring equipment--clean equipment which is constantly being used and needing subsequent hot soapy baths. Intuitively it would seem that breastfeeding mothers should be exempt from entanglement with feeding apparatuses. In the checks and balance system of the universe, it would seem that being apparatus-free is one of the inherent rewards of breastfeeding, and that being saddled with both at the same time is a rather unjust yoke of sorts.

I know that many working women breastfeed successfully, and I now appreciate the sweat and tears it requires to not simply give in to formula, which would end the madness of pumping. But I who was truly determined was only able to do it just shy of four months. In the end (actually, it's not quite over yet because I still have the requisite two weeks), it was not a choice between breastfeeding and formula, but between breastfeeding and the job itself. Formula never really entered the equation for me. I am just wired that way. And I feel pretty determined to give Elsa the same thing I gave Esme-- it seems only right.

Anyway, this is not really a tale of breastfeeding, which can be an alienating, unpopular topic. That was just one layer. The other thick cellophane suffocating (and, oh, unpopular) layer was that Jeff is in his exam year. For those who do not know what "exam year" means (which would have included me until only recently), it is the year in an American PhD program in which the PhD candidate spends about six months studying detailed, nuanced "answers" to "questions." But the questions are more like research paper topics and the answers are more like research papers. And there are ten of them, and the student must know these ten "answers" by heart and in great detail. The student must take six two-hour written exams over the course of three days and then an oral exam before a committee the following week. These exams are in March and are either passed or failed. Everyone around here-- both students and spouses of students-- say it's the most stressful year of the PhD. Here we go.

Jeff was more than generous in the beginning to offer to stay home with Elsa, to save my job, and actually, I was surprised that he had even offered. It seemed that all the pieces were falling into place. Esme had finally gotten into the Notre Dame pre-school this fall, and Elsa could stay with her dad. The distance between the office where I worked and the pre-school is about a block and a half-- so convenient. My boss was totally flexible, never breathing down my neck about my arrival or departure time, and asking no questions if I needed to switch my schedule around. It was all a veritable advertisement for a mom-friendly workplace.

But after Jeff turned in his exam questions and began preparing in earnest, it became more and more clear that it was too much time away from reading-- that wonderful euphemism academics use for what they do. His stress level, if charted with a red marker, would certainly show itself spiking up into jagged mountain peaks. I don't think our small apartment has room for all those red lines ricocheting off the walls, ceiling, and stainless steel sink, where he stands clattering the dishes clean after dinner on a typical evening, emanating bodily tension.

It's the "this and so much more" details of madness that cannot all be conveyed--like getting Esme buckled into her car seat (after the struggle with her tangled hair, potty, shoes, and getting her past the bike rack without a few rings of the bell on her tricycle), then realizing that I'd forgotten to bring the little breastmilk storage bags and freezer packs, then running back up to our third floor apartment to gather them together. Rewind further to the preceding night to a restless infant putting on a growth spurt, waking just a few more times than usual. All of this brought me to the metaphoric screaming point.

But its literal manifestation was more like a pathetic squeak. I felt very small sitting in the office of my boss, whose walls are choked with satirical clippings and cartoons. She is probably the most likable, charming, approachable, funny, no-nonsense boss I will ever have, and yet I had to chuck it all over the lifeboat of forced sacrafice.

She did not seem the least bit surprised, which should not have surprised me, since it is always true that others can see you better than you see yourself. She said that I'd seemed "very tired, and frazzled, especially lately." I had the impression that she had seen the writing on the wall long before I did. It was all very unflattering and awkward. It was a huge relief, even though being described as frazzled is to me most hateful and insulting, even when people don't mean it that way.

I am not sure how things will be this winter. I spent my usual Tuesday today at home with both girls and was reminded of how eternal and toilsome a day at home can feel with a small child. Now there are two. Esme will stay in pre-school three afternoons a week, thankfully, so perhaps I'll find those afternoons to be very luxurious with only Elsa, and Esme will do well to have the outlet for play and recreation during those long winter months. But I feel as if I've already burrowed back into the small kingdom of domestic struggle, forsaking the structured, sanitized, well-lit place of distraction and relief, otherwise known as a part-time job.

Nevertheless, this evening has been very balmy one after a rain, and fog settled in, and the sky was pink and purple. I went out with my camera and took some pictures, wanting to be creative in a way that I have not been for a long time. Now I'm writing here on my blog. I think something switched over inside me once I realized I could once again go back into a world more of my own making-- the world of home. I will get to keep Elsa closer to me and she will be happier for it and will think that this arrangement is much more to her liking (she never seemed totally happy with her daddy afternoons-- I think the preference for dads is a later development). I'll write more and take more photos of less literal things. I'll have tea with friends more often, and hunt for used things at thrift stores instead of new things at online stores. I'll reduce the potential number of occasions in which others can rightfully describe me as frazzled. It really will not be that bad.

the end of an ideal, and also a beginning

2009-05-10T17:00:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to write down the story of Elsa's birth now for several weeks (it was exactly three weeks yesterday), and keep getting interrupted. This makes sense considering that I rarely finish an entire cup of coffee in the morning, much less secure a lengthy block of time to sit at the computer, think, and write.

I'd like to believe that I'm already moving beyond all preoccupations about childbirth now and that the need to talk about it and tell my story is fading. But a few nights ago I had a dream that I was about to get a haircut at a really nice salon and the beautician gave me an epidural before she began cutting. So, I must still be stewing. Moreover, at the very moment I write this paragraph, I can hear Esme in the bathroom giving her My Little Ponies a sink bath and explaining to the baby pony that the mama has "gone to the hospital." Clearly the collective subconscious of our little family is still processing this major event.

I'm not sure what others might interpret in the above photo--maybe something in the range of poignant. For my own part, when I saw this photo just after Elsa's birth, something more like a comic strip popped into my mind involuntarily. It had the caption: "Thus ends my career as granola mom." Because there is something really funny about this picture of mom and baby both sleeping through the big birth event. This allowed me to laugh at what otherwise might have made me cry. And of course, I did cry many tears in the days, and finally the minutes leading up to Elsa's birth. I'm sure the tears were partially due to the pregnancy hormones at work as I approached, then passed, my due date. But they were also brought on by the swelling realization that my hopes, efforts, and will were not very powerful variables in the complex equation that was quickly filling up a chalkboard where doctors stood in professorial authority over my big belly.

And it's no secret that my will was to have a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean). Every mother on the playground of our apartment complex knew this, as did all of my close relatives and friends, and probably a few far-flung acquaintances who couldn't care less. I suppose I am what you'd call transparent, and fecklessly wore my heart for a VBAC on the sleeves of my maternity shirts. But as per indicated by the surgical cap on my head, I ultimately did not get it. Elsa was born by repeat cesarean, despite my nine months of white-knuckled steering away from that destination.

Also plainly evident in this picture: mom wasn't even conscious during daughter's entrance into the world, but, rather, passed out from a paradoxical but potent cocktail of exhaustion, disappointment, excitement, denial, resignation, happiness, sadness, and relief.

I was relieved, in the end, to receive the powerful spinal block that sent warmth down my legs and ended the pain of contractions. I was relieved to know that I didn't have to struggle a minute longer to bring my baby into the world-- she was going to be brought out immediately and safely by a team of capable people. Jeff was standing by, ready to greet her. My doula, standing near my head, was watching the surgery, taking pictures, and, in a sense, keeping vigil, as she had been all night during my labor. Frank Sinatra, oddly, was playing from a small stereo in the surgery room.

Under such circumstances, I had the luxury of letting go, caving into my now painless exhaustion, and drifting into oblivion. And while I wouldn't have consciously chosen to sleep through my baby's debut, it was apparently beyond my power to resist. I didn't even realize I had fallen asleep. When Jeff woke me up and presented me with a swaddled bundle, I was genuinely surprised that so much had transpired without my being aware. This was definitely the end of an ideal. The wrinkly red crying newborn was not brought naked up to my chest in her first moment of life to be warmed and to nurse. I didn't even hear her first cries or the announcement of her weight. And so it was that I became what all the natural childbirth advocates preach against: a passive participant in my own child's birth.

But not really. In the earliest weeks of my pregnancy I actively sought out a group of obstetricians in town who were willing to perform VBACs-- in fact, the only practice in my town. I had a consultation with one of the doctors to ask him questions, like what was the rate of VBAC success among their patients. It was a respectable 70% and I was determined to be among that 70%. I tried to have the healthiest pregnancy I could have. I did prenatal yoga like my life depended on it. When it looked, toward the end, like I might once again have a breech baby (automatic disqualification from a trial of labor), I did more yoga, and everything else I could think of to get the baby to turn, and she finally did. I was poised to go into labor, and clinging to this fact, I waited. I wanted this child to arrive in her own time, in her own way. For reasons I still can't necessarily explain, trying for a VBAC was deeply important to me. Simultaneously, I knew that there was a very good chance that it would not happen, and was ready to flip the switch and emotionally jump ship should the battle go ill.

The more exposure I had to the doctors in this particular practice through weekly appointments in my final months, the more I felt that it would be a miracle if I avoided a repeat cesarean. I apprehended a subtle attitude of defeatism that did not nourish my hopes. I sensed a certain nervousness and lack of trust in the birthing process in general, and my ability to give birth in particular, even though there was nothing about me to indicate that I would not succeed. There were assurances such as, "You know at any point if you're having a difficult labor that you can throw in the towel." There were attempts to assess the weight of my baby just in case she was "overly large," because I might "feel differently about trying to VBAC if I knew I was carrying a ten pound baby." (It turned out she was not even seven pounds at birth.) And there were casual, impersonal questions such as, "Have you scheduled your c-section yet?," even though it clearly stated in my file that I wanted to try for a VBAC. Was anyone paying attention?

Looking back, I see now that although my earliest conversation with the doctor from this practice was not negative or discouraging, neither was it positive or encouraging. His tone was professional, neutral, promising nothing. He spoke in terms of statistics, percentages of risk. He said that I was currently a "good candidate" for a VBAC. Should that change at any point as the pregnancy went along, we would then "have another conversation," about my options. Although I was hopeful in the beginning, I think I realized intuitively, even then, that within this model, within this system, I was going to have to have the perfect pregnancy and the perfect birth. Even though the risk itself (of uterine rupture) is miniscule, and even though I was a healthy person having a healthy pregnancy, I was going to be categorically treated as "high risk." And at any point, I could lose my status as a good candidate. Should anything not go according to the book, I would be disqualified, and no one would lose a wink of sleep over it but myself. I crossed my fingers, and just hoped that the pieces would fall into place. It should not have surprised me when, in my forty-first week of pregnancy, a doctor looked at me with irritation, spoke of hospital policy and said, "This is just the nuts and bolts of how it works."

I was treated according to the rules and regulations of the high risk category, which felt terribly impersonal and unfair. Moreover, metallic hardware metaphors are not what you want to hear from your caregiver in the last few hours leading up to what you know will among the most memorable and vulnerable events of your life. According to Ina May Gaskin, who is considered the authority on midwifery par excellence, and runs a famous birthing center in Tennessee called "The Farm," childbirth works according to what she calls "the sphincter law." She explains it herself in this short video. To put it succinctly and crudely: in the same way that people can't relax and go to the bathroom in a place if they do not feel safe or comfortable, a woman can't relax and give birth if she does not feel safe or comfortable. Likewise, if an animal such as a deer detects a nearby predator, her instincts are wired in such a way as to automatically shut labor down until she finds a safe place to have her baby. According to Ina May, some caregivers are so tense, they can have the same effect on a laboring woman's brain as a predator by merely walking into a room, and cause the birth to stop progressing. Clearly, there is a strong and intense psychological component to childbirth which must be handled with care and understanding.

But looking back to the first conversation I had with a doctor from this practice is telling. I asked him what he thought of VBAC home births. I knew what his answer would be, but wanted to hear it just out of curiosity. He said that anyone who practiced them was irresponsible. Such a midwife was basing her practice on the premise that things turn out alright most of the time. And, he conceded, most of the time they do. But when they don't, they go badly wrong.

I myself would not have been comfortable with a VBAC homebirth either, but in retrospect I wish I could have secured an experience for myself that would not have been so radically opposite from the personalized attention of a midwife who is able to invest a bit more heart and soul into the birth experience. I learned the hard way that the psychological (dare I say spiritual?) component to childbirth is simply ignored by the medical model of care, which thinks itself so advanced and air tight, a bastion of expertise.

In any case, I had a perfectly healthy, uneventful pregnancy, just as I did with Esme. But it seems to be my particular experience with pregnancy that it begins like a wide, safe, leisurely, tree-lined boulevard, with no traffic. And of course, I am grateful for this. It goes along like this for blocks and blocks and blocks. But then, in the final weeks, without warning, that boulevard quickly bottlenecks into a narrow, rude, traffic-filled street in a congested, overpopulated part of town. The intersection of the birth is just ahead. It turns out, unluckily, that road work is happening and the way I'd like to turn is blocked by a detour sign. To make matters worse, the traffic light is broken and blinking, and cars are backed up in all directions. In such a situation, no one gets special treatment. A grumpy, impatient policeman is directing traffic, in no mood to be reasoned with. I'm trapped behind the wheel, inching forward in a locked line of cars, and suddenly feel very naive for having trusted the generic and conventional advice of mapquest. I wish I had mapped out an alternative route on my own.

I can never entirely explain to myself how or why, at the approach of a due date, things go from emotionally ordinary to feeling nearly apocalyptic. Again, I realize that much of this is probably hormonal, and perhaps a common experience of all women as they approach childbirth, whether they can expect things to be routine or not. Maybe childbirth, though certainly common, is never just a routine, everyday affair. It quivers with too much potential for comedy, tragedy.

In seminary we discussed the meaning of the Old Testament laws about what made a person ceremonially "unclean." A person was considered unclean if they had come into contact with either birth or death, and was required to pass through a period of cleansing in order to re-enter ordinary life. We were told as students that this uncleanliness was not something bad or sinful, but rather holy and divine-- extraordinary. Birth and death are human affairs which touch the divine, and therefore they are fearful, sacred, holy, and stand apart from the ordinary. They must be treated as such.

As a baby's due date approaches, it becomes, at least in my experience, impossible to continue pretending that something merely ordinary is about to happen. My due date with Elsa was on Monday, April 13. Until it was actually upon me, I failed to really consider the implications of the fact that this was not just any Monday in 2009, but Holy Monday on the calendar of the Orthodox Church.

Holy Monday is the first day of Holy Week, which is arguably the most beautiful but also the most spiritually intense and demanding time of year. It is well-known that emotions and passions are like taut guitar strings during Holy Week. People at church can be grumpy and short. Communities and families may bicker over nothing. With forty days of fasting behind you and the anticipation of the Feast of Feasts ahead of you, and the most beautiful and serious poetry, Scripture, hymns and prayers surrounding you in church daily, it's no wonder. For me, even though I was too pregnant to fully participate in all the services, I did make it to many. And seemingly independent of my own participation, the aura of Holy Week seeped into our home on its own accord, as it does every year. There is a certain glow.

Time feels as if it is being compressed and events are set in motion. Christ is betrayed and will stand before Pontius Pilate. A pamphlet arrived in the mail from our seminary, a short reflection on Holy Thursday, by Alexander Schmemann. In it he talks about the mystery of this unique day in which "light and darkness, joy and sorrow are so strangely mixed." It seemed only natural to me to find a certain synchronicity in the full-term baby pressing me at all sides from within and the liturgical drama which was leading up to the Cross and finally Easter.

On Holy Thursday, I had a doctor's appointment that I knew would be pivotal, and which I was somewhat dreading. It was the first time I went to the doctor since passing my due date. Both Jeff, my doula, and Esme came along--quite a crowd. This was the appointment of the "nuts and bolts" comment. This particular doctor breezed into the office with my file and brusquely asked when my last ultrasound had been because "as far as she was seeing, the last ultrasound was showing that the baby was still breech." This was not correct. The baby was not breech and there had been a more recent ultrasound showing this. But the word "breech," with all its emotional baggage for me felt like a brick being hurled at my head. I sat there at the edge of the examination table dumbfounded and knew right away that I was not in the proper frame of mind to deal with the forceful personality of this woman. I also could tell that she was not really interested in listening to me either.

I can't explain what happened next, except that something snapped in Jeff and whatever rhetorical skills have carried him through far too many tedious years of graduate school were suddenly marshaled and employed on my behalf in the face of this doctor. In short, he was heroic.

Up to this point, he and I had been preparing for the birth as if in two different spheres. He had been working hard at the library, trying to get as much of his course work out of the way so that he could take some time off when the baby arrived. I had been working at home, trying organize our small space and figure out how things were going to fit and flow with two children instead of just one.

As for my feelings, hopes, and fears about the birth, I felt that they were in a chamber that I alone visited throughout my pregnancy. Jeff always sympathized and supported my desires to have a particular kind of birth, but was not personally invested in them himself. I have always been mystified by couples who promote the Bradley Method, or "husband coached" childbirth, because I could only snicker at the thought of my husband being a self-taught expert on cervical dilation, or telling me how to breathe during a contraction. And while he spends his days at school pouring over the most dry academic books, I suspect he'd be bored to tears before making it through one paragraph of Ina May's Guide to Childbirth. And honestly, this has never bothered me at all.

But this is why I was surprised when, at this appointment, he suddenly rose up and became my voice when I faltered before the pushy doctor. She seemed furious that I had somehow slipped beneath the radar and gone past my due date (merely four days) without anyone from their practice having intervened. (I suspect now that she was irritated with her colleagues and I was just caught in the crossfire.) She wanted me to go home immediately, pack my things, and head to the hospital for a c-section that afternoon. I won't go into all the tedious details of the conversation we had with her, except to say that she interrupted me at least three times. She accused Jeff of being sarcastic when he was actually asking a sincere question at one point. We told her that I'd been having pre-labor contractions for two days and suspected that I'd go into labor naturally very soon, and that it seemed reasonable at this point just to wait at least through the weekend to see if perhaps the c-section could still be avoided. There was nothing to show that my baby was in imminent peril if she stayed in the womb for a little while longer. She barked at me and said something about ignoring the advice of three doctors (she supposedly had quickly consulted two of her colleagues without our being present), implying by her tone and body language that I was being a stubborn moron. Finally Jeff, realizing that things had reached an impass, had the presence of mind to ask if we could speak to another doctor. She said yes and left the small room, letting the door bang shut behind her.

I felt manhandled and shaken by this encounter, in which I'd barely gotten a word in edgewise. In the end we did speak to another doctor who was much more flexible, amiable, and reasonable. He had no problem with letting us wait the weekend to see what might happen. By the time we left the office after this lengthy, stressful appointment, I felt like I was suffocating and could not wait to exit into the parking lot where there would be air and sunshine. My doula told us to go eat our favorite foods, do something outdoors, and spend the rest of the day emotionally recovering. I knew, with every fiber of my being, that I had done the right thing. It would not have been right to succumb to the established protocol and go in for a c-section that very day. I knew that my baby was fine and that I was not putting her in danger by giving her a little more time. But despite this, a poisonous seed of doubt and insecurity had been planted and my strength was sapped. It would be difficult to regain a totally untainted, positive attitude about this birth.

Jeff and I stopped and got Thai food, then went home, put Esme down for a nap, and debriefed. I am not categorically anti-medical. But I realize now that the real issue for me in Elsa's birth transcended any rivalry of VBAC versus c-section, medical versus natural. It became an issue of personal versus impersonal. I didn't want my birth--a sacred thing-- to bear the impersonal latex glove prints of science. I know science gives us many good things but I am wary of its one-size-fits-all, systematic approach, and I do not trust it implicitly. I thought that having a doula at my birth would be enough to counteract the hospital system in which, as Jeff put it in a moment of realization, "birth and death are treated like taxes." But truly, although having a doula was a wonderful comfort amidst the whole experience, it wasn't enough to change the ultimate outcome. In the days leading up to the birth, we realized, too late, just how powerful the system is, and how small we were within it.

As I had suspected, I did go into true labor on Friday night. I labored for a little while at home but after my contractions became close together, intense, and regular, we went to the hospital. And that's where the story simply gets onto the fast track of inevitability. I was hooked up to an IV and a fetal heart rate monitor which I could not unhook. What's more, it took the nurse three tries to find a vein in my arm, which I had to hold out obediently and keep still for a long time while having contraction after contraction.

All of this ensured my discomfort and kept me bound to the small area beside the hospital bed. The baby's head was descended fairly far and, we found out later, she was also posterior, or sunny side up, which makes for a longer, more painful labor. The position of her head made it too painful for me to sit down while contracting so I had no choice but to stand and hold onto the side of the bed. I would get chilly, then hot. I recall that was shivering quite a bit and my legs eventually started shaking from fatigue.

Somehow, though hours passed, I never settled into the hospital room and had the delirious impression that we had perpetually just arrived. And of course, nothing I had read about natural childbirth really prepared me for how hard it would be. I struggled to relax and breathe during each contraction, and "get on top of it," as my doula put it. The key is to try to relax and work with the force of each contraction, but everything about the hospital environment was working against my being able to truly relax. Standing there in a thin hospital gown with a needle poking me near my wrist and two itchy elastic bands around my abdomen, it was inevitable that, as the night wore on, I too wore down physically and emotionally, and felt incredibly discouraged. Knowing that my cervix was not progressing very fast, it became clear to me that I needed relief in some form if I was going to continue at that rate until the end. It would have been helpful to get into a warm bath or something like that, but with the monitor and IV connected, that was not an option. It would have also been helpful if the team of people caring for me were determined to do everything in their power to make me comfortable and make a natural birth possible. But obviously that was not going to happen either.

In the early hours of the morning I opted for a half dose of intravenous pain control, which seemed like the most benign choice. It didn't totally blot out the pain, but it allowed me to lie down on my right side and rest for a bit. But in retrospect, I don't think this was a very good choice. In such a position, feeling slightly dopey, my blood circulation was not optimal, and the baby, who was also tired from all the contractions, started showing heart rate dips on the monitor. After that it was just chaos, and I can barely say what happened. The doctor and several nurses came in, I was turned on my left side and given an oxygen mask. I was terribly uncomfortable on my left side. I had not dilated very far by this time-- only four inches. It was clear that if I was going to finish the labor naturally, it was going to take a long time. Every woman's labor is different, and I know plenty of women who have gone through long labors. One friend I know labored for three days with her first baby under the care of a midwife. It would have been possible, I believe, but only in a radically different environment, where I was allowed to move freely, find a comfortable position, and, most of all, get into water. In the context of the hospital room, where everything was working against my comfort and encouragement, it was simply not possible. And while I can't be sure why the baby's heart rate dropped, I do still believe that it was situational and a direct consequence of me lying down on my side, which was a direct consequence of taking the only form of relief I felt was an option, which was a consequence of having no other options for relief, which was a consequence of being bound to a small area by machines.

As soon as I stood back up, her heart rate bounced right back to normal. But how many more hours could I just stand there on the cold tile floor and continue in back labor? Why didn't I just get an epidural? I would have, as a last resort, but my doula said that because it causes the mother's blood pressure to drop, it would likely also cause the baby's heart rate to drop as well and would result in an automatic c-section. If I was going to have a c-section, I didn't want it to be an emergency due to another heart-rate drop.

As we tried to process what was happening, Jeff and I looked at each other and realized that it was scary and pointless to go on. As Jeff said, it all felt so complex and tangled at that point, there was no right choice. I could have tried to labor longer and see how it went, but truthfully, it seemed futile. Jeff said it was as if someone had told me to run a race and then put weights on my ankles. In the circumstances set up by the hospital, choosing to go ahead with the c-section sooner rather than delay the inevitable made the most sense. In radically different circumstances, perhaps at a birthing center, under the care of of midwife who trusted in the birthing process and was devoted to making me comfortable, in a place where I could truly relax and feel cared for, there is a good chance that things would have gone differently for me. Of course, there is no way to know such a thing for sure.

So this is my birth story. Elsa was born at 11:30 a.m. on Holy Saturday, the day before Orthodox Easter. We named her Elsa after Jeff's grandmother, but I wanted her middle name to reflect something of Holy Week, which was so closely bound up in my anticipation of her arrival, so I chose the name Joanna. Saint Joanna was among the women who went to the tomb of Christ to anoint his body with spices. They are called the myrrh-bearing women in the Orthodox Church.

I do not know why things turned out as they did. I am thankful for the c-section that brought Elsa out safely and surely, even while I can never be sure if, under different circumstances, it would not have been necessary. Now it doesn't really matter. In some ways, I wish I had never cared so much, because it would have simplified the whole matter. I am healing well and have had amazing support from dear friends and neighbors. I have two healthy daughters, and I am deeply thankful. I am also glad that I at least had the opportunity to go into labor this time and try for a VBAC, and that Elsa got to arrive in her own timing, on Holy Saturday.

In childbirth, as in all things that matter, there are ideals, and those ideals are certainly good. But I learned through Elsa's birth that human ideals, no matter how wholesome and legitimately desirable, are not the content of my belief. There are ways that one hopes life will unfold but in a fallen world they only happen sometimes, for some-- not all the time, for all-- and usually without explanation. We are only asked, like the myrrh-bearing women, to be faithful should we ever be asked to live through a very dark day, to forgive seven times seventy, to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn.

Addendum:

I wanted to add a slight correction to this birth story and am just now getting around to it (oh, a mere five and a half months later). I stated above that I was having back labor, but when I later spoke with my doula, she said that I wasn't having back labor, because in her experience, women with back labor really need someone to maintain pressure on the lower part of their back or else they experience excruciating pain. I on the other hand didn't want anyone to touch my back while I labored. However, during the c-section, the doctor performing it distinctly said that Elsa was in a posterior position, which is what causes a woman to have back labor. That was what made me conclude later that what I was experiencing was back labor. All I knew was that it hurt, and had no standard to measure what such a category is supposed to feel like. In any case, it all just confirms for me the nature of the whole thing in retrospect: a question mark. How is it that I wasn't having back labor if Elsa was indeed posterior? I don't know. Or maybe I was at the very end, the final stretch of walking to the operating room, which was admittedly the worst part of the entire labor. Still, I wanted to set the record straight since my telling of the story above was not entirely correct.

lo, the winter is past

2009-03-18T20:30:00.000-07:00

Last year our March, according to the average temperature, was actually the coldest month of winter. This year it has come back in an unrecognizable form, as if it decided to switch its allegiance to spring and be forward-thinking. We have had some beautiful days lately-- sparkling, unbelievable for March in South Bend. Yesterday, St. Patrick's Day, was the best so far. We went walking in short sleeves; we stayed outside for hours. We didn't have to put our sweaters and jackets back on until the sun began its final descent.

For me the day simply oozed with traditional connotations of St. Patrick's Day, which is to say, it felt charmed, lucky, merry, blessed, lighthearted, persisting in green upon green, then ending in hues of gold.

I've never experienced a St. Patrick's Days which so predictably conformed to leprechaun-friendly, four-leaf clover stereotypes. Instead, my experience of St. Patrick's Day is that of a late-winter pseudo-holiday which, like its lame February cousin Valentine's Day, takes a stab at an unpopular calendar month, trying to puncture the dreariness and thus provide some distraction during the long interval between the first-rate festivities of Christmas and Easter. School rooms, beauty shops, and dry cleaners pin up some dreary pre-cut paper decals of hearts and clovers in an effort splash a bit color at an unflinching facade of gray. Couples try really hard to enact romance; bar patrons try really hard to re-construct some iconic ideal of Irish pub merriment. The terrestrial remains terrestrial and accentuates human powerlessness against winter's longevity. All the candy hearts, thematic cupcakes, green beer, and green rivers of our towns and cities are not muscular enough to float the weight of a single human soul upward.

Well, I exaggerate. But my point is that my personal experience has conditioned me to temper expectations and distrust the approach of these holidays. I do not make plans for them, nor do I expect them to be remotely inspiring. Instead it has become habitual in me to ignore them and treat them as supra-ordinary. Jeff and I totally forgot about Valentine's Day this year until the day was almost over, at which point we barely so much as tipped our hat to it. That was my idea of a very successful Valentine's Day.

So, my doctor's appointment yesterday was naturally dominating my thoughts more than any official notation in my date book that it was St. Patrick's Day. As far as I was concerned, this appointment could not get here quickly enough. This is because, in the few days preceding, I really felt as if this baby had turned head down, and I was on edge hoping that an ultrasound would confirm that this was so. My morning was spent at home watching Esme and her best friend Lukas--both of them about twenty times more rambunctious than usual. Or it may have been that I felt twenty times less comfortable than usual, a large, unwieldy, short-tempered pregnant woman, uncomfortably full-bladdered, red-faced on the windy playground, unable to read even a paragraph of my novel due to snack and sippy cup requests. It took all my resources to herd the two of them out to the playground, then back in, up and down the stairs, later cleaning up Esme's potty training playground mishap (the worst kind), and finally wiping copious amounts of lunch off their hands and faces, nevermind the sploshes of yogurt on the floor. The moment when I would break away to go to this appointment lay just beyond the moment when Lukas would go home and Esme would go down for her nap. The promise of this moment did not make the morning seem shorter. Jeff would come home to take over and I would mercifully make my exit and drive away in a bubble of Personal Space.

When the appointment finally came, it happened almost too quickly after all the waiting. Without any ostensible delays, (although I almost was delayed by Esme deciding to resist her nap and throw a hysterical fit at my departure) I found out about the baby. It was head down. It suddenly was, so simply, true. The very fact of it sent me home in a cloud-car. All the anxiety, emotion, and fatalistic musings of last week came to weigh less than a cloud. This baby had turned, and would not likely turn back, and that was the simple truth. There were no other solutions required or decisions to be made about an external cephalic version. The pending notion of a scheduled c-section was promptly removed from the table by my busy doctor before he moved on to his next thing. I left the office with only the sparkling afternoon of an unexpectedly beautiful St. Patrick's Day before me. I was surprised to find myself subscribing to the feeling that, in fact, it was a holiday.

In the end, my friend and I decided to walk to Notre Dame, corral our husbands respectively, then eat outdoors at one of our favorite spots on campus. These were not very illustrious plans involving live Celtic music, imported beer, or corned beef, but I didn't care. The day was so beautiful. Esme's hair was a wild, tangled yellow mane, blowing in all directions like a royal flag as she ran around in squirrel patterns in the sunshine. I didn't care if all we were doing at one point was sitting outside the library on a stone wall amidst air that was remarkable for its freshness and civility toward the range of human temperature tolerance. I was in sandals, short sleeves, and carrying an almost full-term baby who was (and still is) properly situated for her birth-- all utterly remarkable and unanticipated realities whose very realities were sufficiently marvelous to hold me in a state of composed passion for this day and my existence within it. Undergrad students, exiting their classes and streaming by in clusters here and there, were invariably in bright kelly green, some with died green hair, green mardi gras beads, green top hats, tights, or clover-patterned bobby socks. St. Patrick's Day outlandishness probably may only happen in such a degree at a university whose mascot is the fighting Irishman, and part of me always rolls my eyes at this, but yesterday it only served to increase my sense that I was swimming in a particular kind of day, in which earthly hopes and pleasures were allowable, indulged, even freely granted.

I suppose I believe in the possibility of such a day (this feeling tends to come each year in some form at Pascha, for example), but I never actually expect it, and certainly not on St. Patrick's Day because it is St. Patrick's Day. I suppose I also believe that things can come to us that are shaped in the precise shape of our fears, and thus designed to displace them absolutely. But I never genuinely expect that either. I certainly would not expect all of the above on March 17, any given year.

Last week, in my situation, I knew I needed to pray. I thought about praying that the baby would turn downward, but that didn't seem right. Instead, one night in my sleepless worry, I did pray that God would simply be with us in the birth of this child, whatever "kind" of birth it turned out to be. I burrowed into my heart and found the capacity to be stubborn with God. I would stubbornly insist on believing that, even if the birth were the kind most seemingly managed, scheduled, and acted upon by human will and planning (a scheduled c-section), I would stubbornly believe that the date and time were chosen by God, and that his action would be at work in, with, and through this event of our little human family. I have always felt a certain disappointment and horror at the idea that my child's birthday could be pre-selected according to the convenience of a doctor's schedule. But I decided, in praying, that I would refuse to see things that way. It would be a stubborn, hard-headed, impossible interpretation of events, that others would find kooky, I think, but it appealed to me as correct, and, feeling my way in the dark, I think that it was the only possible prayer to pray. It was the only possible faith.

I remember my grandmother, who struggled for years with a chronic headache which would never fully lift, told me that one day, at my sister's birthday party at a pizza restaurant, her headache suddenly lifted without explanation, and she felt for the first time in years what it was like to not have a headache and simply enjoy a moment of life free of that burden. It came back eventually, but she interpreted the moment as a sign to herself of what it would be like to one day have all of our burdens lifted, so easily and completely after they have harassed us for years with their unbreakable yoke. She said is was a silly and humble moment for it to happen-- at a child's pizza party-- but from the way she talked about it I could tell that she regarded the moment as an instance of God's action in her life, and she held onto it as such.

I know at this point in my pregnancy that anything still could happen, and having the baby turn downward is no guarantee of anything. Pregnancy and childbirth are, in themselves, inherently fragile and crazy endeavors. But I do believe that God is acting among us, in us, behind us, and with us (something like what it says in the Shield of St. Patrick) and that this particular winter is pretty much over.

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away." Song of Solomon 2:11-13

alive to the mysterious nature of tummies

2009-03-12T10:07:00.000-07:00

I haven't really blogged much through this pregnancy, and now, as I enter into the narrow tunnel of its finality, in which All Things Childbirth comes into sharp focus, high relief, and dramatic potency, it is difficult to tidy my thoughts.

Because I'm not just thinking of myself and the birth of this mysterious new baby who likes to push so strongly against the walls of her in utero apartment. I am waxing philosophical about humanity at large. And humanity in particular. Some friends of ours who are our age and have two daughters-- a girl close to Esme's age, and an infant under the age of one-- have been in the hospital for several weeks now with their youngest girl. I learned that something was going on when I caught a cursory glance of one of their newly uploaded photos on flickr and saw the unmistakable pink and blue stripes of a standard hospital baby blanket-- the kind you always see on photos of newborns before they go home. I thought irrationally: why are they just now uploading birth photos? Then I looked closer and saw tubes and wires hooked up to their baby girl, clearly lying on a hospital bed, and my heart leaped. Next I investigated facebook and learned the news that something mysterious was going on with her intestines that required emergency surgery. That was a few weeks ago. Since then they haven't been able to leave the hospital as doctors are still trying to figure out what exactly is wrong. As of yesterday J, the father, updated his status to say he was "still worried-- [my daughter's] tummy is still a mystery."

There are successful television dramas built around the tantalizing potential of a difficult diagnosis-- when the human body doesn't do what it's supposed to do and an entire staff of brilliant, over-achieving doctors must solve the puzzle. These cases get tidied up in one hour on TV. But how agonizing to be a parent, sitting by your child's side for weeks in the hospital, while her continued well-being may or may not skitter just beyond the fingertips of the best human effort, intelligence, care, and control. How frustrating and confounding when a seemingly automatic component of nature, whose functionality should not require even the slightest effort of conscious human will-- the bowels-- suddenly decides to malfunction in one small, new person, for no apparent reason. A tummy that doesn't work is indeed a mystery, when tummies almost always, in all cases, work just fine without our ever telling them to do so.

A few weeks ago I was trying to leave the house for a routine pre-natal appointment in the afternoon. I had been busy at home all day with Esme, doing housework, keeping her entertained and her two-year-old energy reigned in. In my bustle and distraction I had forgotten to eat properly, and then, on a whim, made myself a really strong cup of hot chocolate. A neighbor had agreed to watch Esme while I was at my appointment, so after the hot chocolate I started rushing to get her in her coat, shoes, gather her sippy cup and other items into a bag. Then I started feeling strange and my eyesight seemed spotted. But I didn't think anything was really wrong until I started to write a note for Jeff and the words came out scrambled and dyslexic. I couldn't believe the nonsensical words and random letters that were coming from the tip of my pen. I knew what message I wanted to communicate, but it would not transfer from my brain to the paper. I crumpled up four different notes before giving up and thinking: whatever is wrong, it is probably a good thing that I'm headed to see the doctor at this very moment.

My mind seemed to clear by the time they called me from the waiting room, but of course I wasted no time in describing to my doctor what was clearly an alarming incident. I was disappointed in his lackadaisical reaction. I wanted to shake him and say: Can't you understand??? My verbal ability just abandoned me!!! Ironically, it was this appointment at which I was to learn the result of my gestational diabetes test, which came back clear. I thought for sure I would be told that I had tested positive for gestational diabetes, with my blood sugar levels performing such crazy tricks. Instead I was told that everything looked fine. The doctor said I had probably had a hypoglycemic episode, and I just needed to be sure to eat protein snacks regularly and not let my blood sugar drop. It appears that an hour or two of total mental murkiness is, according to all standardized modern medical care, within the range of normal. Interesting.

Bizarre as this incident seemed to me, I decided to let it go. Then, a few weeks later, it happened again, this time a little more dramatically, on Forgiveness Sunday, which is the day before Lent in the Orthodox Church and thus the last chance to eat dairy. Ice cream being (need I even state this?) the pinnacle of all possible dairy foods, we went out with a group of friends for ice cream at Bonnie Doon, our local retro ice cream parlor. Pregnant women do not fast for Lent, but I was still happy to indulge in the spirit of the excursion. I won't go into the tedious details of what I'd had to eat that day, but it had been a strange eating day for various reasons that were somewhat out of my control, and I could tell that, once again, something was amiss, when I started seeing blackish spots in front of people's faces. I knew better than to order anything sweet so instead I opted for the cheesy, deep-fried genre of 1950s diner indulgence. After about a half-hour of sitting there, chatting with friends, I noticed that my words were not coming out correctly. In fact, I was speaking gibberish. Again, like before, I knew what I wanted to say, but the words were morphing and distorting themselves upon exiting. Alarmed, I managed to say to Jeff pointedly: I need to go home.

We did, and I was fine within a few hours, but still really alarmed and confused about what had happened. I later spoke with a diabetic friend who said that it was clearly a case of low blood sugar-- hypoglycemia. Another woman I told said that something similar happened to her after the birth of one of her children. She was speaking nonsense and the hospital staff thought she had had a stroke. It turned out to be a migraine headache that was putting pressure on the speech center or her brain. Well, I had had a headache too while this was happening, so perhaps somewhere between blood sugar and headache something somewhere was "putting pressure" on the speech center of my brain. I like that term: speech center. It is good to know that my brain has a speech center, and that most of the time it works just fine, but that it is not always guaranteed to do so, as I would have naively presumed. Twice now, in fact, it has roundly betrayed me, in a way that I was helpless to control. This experience-- though harmless in the long run-- has now become a part of my own history. It has left me with a distinct impression-- an impression of human beings, starting with myself, as strangely plastic, changeable, mysterious things.

If there is anything that pregnancy twice over has also taught me, it's this mystery. Obviously, it is very mysterious to have an autonomous being, separate and distinct from myself, grow from seemingly nothing and then poke its elbows at you from the inside. Of course. But there is also the mystery of an unwritten drama as I approach the birth of this baby. I guess I should mention that at my 35 week appointment I found out, as I had suspected, that this baby is breech. The vast majority of babies turn head down just before birth, but some do not, for various reasons. Esme never did, and my doctor didn't catch it until 39 weeks, which made it far too late to do anything about it, so they scheduled a c-section, and I was knocked off my feet by the disappointment of having a "normal" birth taken away from me.

I thought that perhaps if I wanted a VBAC badly enough in my second pregnancy (which I do), and also sought out better, more attentive pre-natal care (which I did), that I just might achieve it. Now it is not looking very sure. Now it is looking like I may very well be headed for another surgical birth and the long recovery that follows. If the baby cannot flip on its own, and/or will not be flipped by the doctor's hand, this is what will happen. I will not know what it is like to wait for the exciting surprise of spontaneous labor. I won't know what it's like to have a single contraction. I will not experience the gratification of pushing a baby out. I won't have a story about the full moon breaking my bag of waters, and so on and so forth.

Please don't tell me. I know too well: in the spectrum of human griefs, losses, and disappointments, this is really quite banal and insignificant, and reifying this into something next-door to tragedy is not entirely valid. In fact, it is arguable that my disappointment in not being able to have a natural birth is quite irrational, given how difficult and painful natural birth can be. I cannot think of very many solid arguments for why it should necessarily be important (although, in the circles I move in, it certainly seems to be, without question).

I think of friends who have trouble conceiving, and who pine and pine for pregnancy. I think of friends who have been pregnant, and miscarried. All is mystery, mystery, mystery. Nothing bears comparison or questioning. Some tummies digest food while others do not. Some tummies grow babies while others refuse. Some tummies specialize in breech babies. One tummy, if it is not irreverent to call it that, was the expansive dwelling place of God. Tummies are mysterious indeed.

At my last doctor's visit, after a quick ultrasound confirmed that the head was up, the doctor actually said, "Crap, there's the head." (This wasn't my regular doctor, by the way.) Then he proceeded to explain that sometimes the shape of a woman's pelvis can prevent the baby from getting comfortable with its head down, and showed me with his hands what a "normal white woman's" pelvis is shaped like, and other--narrower--possible shapes. My own pelvis is now a mystery to me. Perhaps it is not "normal." But I can't see it to confirm this, so perhaps it is. Perhaps I'll have another c-section. Perhaps things will still right themselves, and I'll have the birth of my heart's desire. Right now, I have to live within that ambiguity and accept it.

But is it not totally absurd that I could go away from that appointment envying the pelvises of other women (of all things), even while some women, unknown to me, might be envying my pregnant abdomen, even while these friends of mine in the hospital might be envying their own lives before they were suddenly turned upside down by the problem of a mysterious little tummy?

I have a mounted reproduction of the above icon on the wall in our bedroom. It is the Theotokos of the Sign. The night after finding out about the baby's breech position, I took it off the wall and put it near me, so I could face it and think about it. The baby had an unusually active night of churning, kicking, stretching, pushing. I was on high alert for whether or not turning might be included in all of this activity. I did not really think my baby would turn downward, but the very hope kept me wakeful. It would be natural. It would be supernatural. I wonder how often hopes of various kinds like this keep people awake at night, fully alert and alive within the reality of the ambiguity we all appear to inhabit.

sing-steering and chinese holidays

2009-02-07T22:00:00.000-08:00

I am trying to break away from my tired blog themes and remember how to describe things more immediate. Today would be a good place to begin because it was a Saturday of heightened feeling and sensible detail due to a surprise influx of warm air-- air warm enough to thaw the very thick layer of snow that has been over our town for weeks. There is nothing like a day of fluke weather to make my senses pay better attention.

That things were going to thaw, that it was really true that a day of relief was upon us, could be sensed as soon as I got out of bed, and I opened all windows wide for the first time this winter. I even went into the stairwell of our apartment building and took the liberty of opening some windows there-- the stuffy stairwell where cooking smells from multiple families--vapors of onions, fish oil and pancakes--have no choice but to turn back on one another, clash and linger, until, I imagine, they are displaced by new odors, and fall to the floor in the form of dust, mingling with the mud and rock salt from snow boots on the black rubberized stairs.

Esme does not particularly like to bound up said stairs, and getting her up them, back into our third floor apartment takes some measure of effort on my part each and every time. In the past if she resisted, planting her feet, dawdling, or blatantly bolting the opposite way, I would not bother with verbal persuasion but would whisk her bodily (and slightly angrily) up, up, up. When my front door is close, I want to go through it and unload, not linger in a dirty, stuffy, cinder block stairwell, bantering words with a two year-old. But as I grow larger in this pregnancy I have found myself staggering under our combined weight by the time I reached the last few steps, so I've had to be more creative about getting her to use her own little feet. Holding her hand I coax her, stair by stair, by singing, "This is the way we climb the stairs, climb the stairs, climb the stairs," to the tune of "Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush," and so forth, until we arrive at the top. I didn't know if it would work the first time I tried it, but it did. She shifted into a cooperative mode, looked down at her toddler snow boots and began moving them in sync with mine. So far, it has continued working, and is gradually becoming our stair-climbing ritual.

I suppose it's o.k. to digress and point out that Esme now seems to love singing songs, learning songs, repeating songs. I've sung to her since she was a baby but it's only been recently, since she turned two really, that she has wanted to participate. Whereas breast milk was my secret fix-all in her infancy and early toddlerhood, now songs have become my handiest tool. I sing-steer her to the car and into her car seat. I sing-steer her to the community center so we can get our mail. I sing-steer her away from her friend Lukas'house, where she's been playing and doesn't want to leave. On the way home I sing-steer away from puddles and patches of ice. I sing-steer her into her crib for naps and bedtime.

Thanks to a Mother Goose CD which has seventy-one tracks and which we never drive anywhere anymore without listening to (sigh), I now know all seven verses to "Mary Had a Little Lamb," a song I previously believed had only one verse, if I gave any thought to it at all. My repertoire is now brimming with all of these songs, plus all the songs my mom and dad sang to me as a child, and all the Julie Andrews movie standards. There are songs from camp fires sat at, folk music listened to, and hippy-kid guitar sing-alongs participated in. There is John Denver, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Simon and Garfunkel, to name a few kid-friendly, yet not annoying, possibilities I've pulled out the wazoo. Then we have this book called Rise Up Singing, which is an amazing collection of well-known folk songs. Sometimes instead of a storybook I sit and rock Esme with this book in hand, just paging through and singing every song I happen to recognize. Esme likes this book and likes to flip around in it, pointing to the illustrations, asking questions, and giving me orders. The pen and ink illustrations clustered haphazardly in the margins are wrought in an unmistakably 1970s aesthetic and remind me of the doodles that might decorate the notebook of a bored but artistically inclined high school student. They are of bearded men and flowing-haired women, flowers and babies. Esme points and says:"Sing that! What's that? Who's that?" Unlike me, Esme is good with names, and has a mind for who's who. But this book, filled with generic illustrations, makes it impossible to satisfy her identity queries. I usually just say: "That's a man," or "That's a woman; she doesn't have a name, these are just pictures of people, in general." This never stops her from asking on the next page. But there is one exception: an illustration of a woman next to the "Ballad of Barbara Allen" who is obviously meant to be Barbara Allen, and so, when we go to that song, I'm able to tell her who the woman is supposed to be. This is why, the other day, when I asked her who she was "talking to" on the phone, she told me it was Barbara Allen.

Now I've really digressed. But honestly, the only reason I wanted to write tonight was to write something-- anything-- slightly different from the tired themes I keep going back to. I wanted to be concrete and possibly write about the things my child does and says, like other mother-bloggers. I was going to describe today and I wound up talking about my daughter's propensity to remember names and sing songs. It's all related really, whether I am tying it together thematically or not.

I suppose I mentioned the sing-steering thing because I was going to point out that today was a day in which no sing-steering was really necessary, because the day didn't feel that difficult nor toddler boots so heavy. It was a Saturday, which happened to be a spring-like day, which happened to be a significant Chinese holiday. Being outside was not something to brace the body against. By late afternoon, the playground out back had shed its thick white uni-crust armor and was allowing visitors. Jeff and I took Esme out and watched her explore the familiar but long-estranged equipment from where we sat side-by-side on the bench swing--an activity which, in itself reminds me of our daily life here in the summer. The playground bench spoke of summer but the weather spoke, of course, of spring, and the feelings felt therein. Esme's hair got really curly and wispy all over her head from the breezy air and the overall dampness of the melting world. Her wild soft hair looked to me like an emblem of everything the day was turning out to be.

As it was getting dark we went to the community center where all the Chinese graduate student families had prepared a lantern celebration for Chinese New Year today. I filled my plate with home made Chinese dumplings and other dishes apparently too authentic to readily identify by name to fellow Americans. I found a spot near friends among the chaos of all the families and kids running around, Chinese character painting lessons going on in the next room, shouted warnings about not letting your kids choke on pennies hidden in dumplings. Older kids, kids of riddle-solving age, gathered around a wall where slips of papers containing riddles were taped up. Esme ran off to play and then returned to my side for bites of noodles from my fork--another sketchily procured dinner among the many of her short life so far. Finally all the kids went outside under the moon where sparklers were being duly distributed. Although little feet kept slipping here and there on still-intact patches of sidewalk ice, the air was still amazingly mild there under the moon. No one could stop remarking about the weather. We walked back toward our building with our friends the Thames and the Heymans. My friend Manuela and I held Esme's hand on either side, counted to three, and swung her over dark puddles.

i did what i could

2009-02-06T09:00:00.000-08:00

This is the first winter I have spent in northern Indiana in which I have not yet experienced a seasonal shift in mood. I am pleasantly surprised with myself for making it into February without downshifting. Despite the inevitably cumbersome nature of being in my third trimester, I am moving through the days with some measure of buoyancy and an adequate ebb and flow of energy to accomplish routine tasks. Even at my best I am no Stable Mable or Fannie Farmer. I am no domestic goddess and tend to be disorganized and dreamy. But I have not been dreaming my way through this winter, or languishing on the couch.

The term "winter blues," sounds harmless and almost spunky, like a Joni Mitchell song or a Crayola crayon, but the reality of it, in my experience, is that it is serious, like the hand of a giant pinning me down for a stretch of several months, or a spreading bruised color that bleeds and blocks out the light from my mind's space. January, February, March: months in which my self has, in the past, gone to a place of particle stillness, inertia. My self-in-other-seasons almost can not recognize this winter self, and the sad thoughts it floats to the surface. That's how I feel when I read some of my blog posts from last winter.

A few months ago a speaker came to the community center here at the Notre Dame married student housing complex, a psychologist from the Notre Dame counseling center. Her talk was entitled, "Beating the Winter Blues." Again, it all sounds so harmless and upbeat; her power point presentation sported a stock image of a big yellow, smiling sun. I was glad I went though; I finally had some concrete, clinical, official-or-what-have-you information to explain my winter self to my self. I learned that Seasonal Affective Disorder has a high incidence in this area-- even higher than in Alaska. I was also comforted by the other women who showed up, all wives of students and mothers like me, and shared bits of what happens to them in the winter. It did me good to hear a few practical, industrious moms, with large families, extroverted personalities, can-do attitudes, and healthy bodies, saying that they lose all sense of motivation and succumb to the gloom of February in South Bend.

This winter a few dark clouds have passed over my head, lingering maybe, but not hovering. They move on and winter sunshine reappears, bouncing off the snow blanket two stories below our apartment, then coming in through our windows. It forms occasional afternoon glow-patches on the living room rug, where I endeavor to do my prenatal yoga.

That said, it has not been a mild winter so far. The temperatures and snowfall have constituted what is called, objectively, a "hard" winter. But this refers to logistics: the thorough bundling of self and toddler required before every front door exit; the vigilant re-application of balms and lotions to chapped hands and lips that immediately negate the moisture; long days spent entirely in three small, artificially heated rooms, otherwise known as cabin fever; the sense that one is torturing a machine by turning on a car; the physical separation from the people who live right next door, simply because no one is out and about, sitting on benches or utilizing swing sets. All of this is wearing, but of course, it's all doable too. People live here; people settled and founded towns and built livelihoods in these unfriendly climates long ago, and even climates more unfriendly, though I shudder to think of it. It's doable as long as one has an internal mechanism in place to produce the necessary energy for the endless succession of little, ordinary, immediate, everyday winter chores. And winter is, in all its moments, in my opinion, chore-like if you live in South Bend, Indiana, with its uniquely gloomy geographical vulnerability to "lake effect" everything. I have a major bone to pick with Lake Michigan, for being close enough to ruin the weather here but too far away to enjoy in any immediate, lake-side sense.

It appears that this winter I seem to have what it takes to function in a pioneering, livelihood mode, even though every day I wonder if this will be the day my internal combustion tank breaks down and abandons me. This unprecedented buoyancy might be due to pregnancy, in which, as it is well-known, all normal rules of body chemistry can and must be thrown overboard. My asthmatic sensitivity to cats, for example, has unexpectedly gone haywire during this pregnancy, and who could say why? In Andrew Solomon's book on depression, The Noonday Demon, a book I really enjoyed reading a few years ago, he tells an anecdote about a friend of his whose life-long battle with severe depression lifted during her pregnancy, only to return afterward. I am not talking about severe depression, thankfully, but I do hope that the lightness I feel this winter is not some temporary glitch due to the chemical irregularity of carrying around an internal baby factory.

Or it might be owing to the fact that I've been faithfully taking my daily spoon of cod liver oil and chewing my lemon-flavored vitamin D gummy each morning. Omega 3 supposedly does wonders, and I'm pretty sure that I wasn't getting enough of it in my diet previously. I've made other dietary changes. I've been eating grass-raised meat and more homemade chicken broth, pure farm butter, raw milk. My body seems to respond well to these things. I also now have something I didn't have last winter: an outlet to the outside world in the form of a part-time job three days a week. This makes an inestimable difference in my mood.

But bodies, and their chemistry, remain a mystery, and pregnant bodies even more so. I can only approach it by trial and error and hope that whatever I am doing right this winter, if I persist, will keep yielding the same results in the future. I can only hope that the proverbial rug does not shift beneath my feet, then order me to lie down underneath its heavy woolen weight.

I recall from last February a most unmotivated, diminished version of myself sitting in a shadowy living room during Esme's nap times, listening to some newly discovered music, an album by Sibylle Baier, whose melancholic words resonated strongly with me at the time: "Remember the day / When I left home just to buy some food / Myself in that painful February mood / I did what I could." Yes, I do remember that even just mustering the energy to bundle up and get myself and Esme to the grocery store being painfully burdensome, rather than just "a pain" in the ordinary sense of the expression, like it is this winter. I remember feeling, in a despairing way, that I could only do what I could do. That's still the case. We can always only do what we can, but this winter, I am grateful to find myself able to do a lot more.

expectant mother parking

2008-12-11T19:00:00.000-08:00

All I can say about my mind lately is that it resembles my sock drawer, which is jammed full but yields precious few wearable pairs when I am in a pinch to get out the door. This is why I haven't written much for a while. The ideas I collect and toss into the drawer have certain potential, quality and color, but remain strays and refuse to self-organize into a thematic event. I suppose that writing, at its best, is a thematic event for me-- a special event. It's the culmination and choreography of thoughts that I toss into the drawers, boxes, and bins of my mind, according to category. If a category starts to overflow and beg for attention, I must throw myself upon it, which is to say, write about it until it is tidy and purged of disorder.

But lately this is not happening for me. There have been no event-worthy thought groupings, no overflowing bin. My relationship with thoughts and words has lately mirrored my ill-fated relationship with home economics and domesticity, which makes me feel as if I'm spinning my wheels or chasing my tail. My thoughts lately have been bound into the arena of our tiny apartment, where food goes bad and gets thrown out for lack of planning, and toys, books, and puzzle pieces find their way under furniture and remain there for lack of organization, or the simple willpower to pick them up and put them away for the thousandth time. I get so frustrated with myself, and this perpetual feeling of incompetence. Perhaps this is why I write: my words will stay put, and in an order which pleases me. And, for that matter, the process of ordering words gives me pleasure. Not so with housework. It takes me no small effort to torture my home into an order which pleases. Once achieved, I do enjoy the feeling of an ordered living space. But I lack the talent to forge a sustainable system, and so the satisfaction is always fleeting-- hardly worth the investment. This is where I find myself.

I snapped this picture recently as I was going for groceries on a snowy day. It is the line in a parking lot designating a place for "expectant mothers." The sign is equipped with an image of a stork carrying a baby, and is next door neighbor to the handicap spots. I used to feel ridiculous about actually utilizing such a luxury, especially when I tend to feel so well during the second half of pregnancy, and quite capable of walking the length of a parking lot. But this time around, my second pregnancy, I have no problem sailing into it with a sense of impunity. I am a mother and an expectant mother rolled into one, which sounds like a paradox, and probably is. I know what to expect-- oh how much more do I now know. But in some ways I still do not know what to expect. If I had to stick to one story I'd say that I still do not know what to expect while I'm expecting, except that, shortly after I brought home my complimentary copy of the book by that same title from the doctor's office, there appeared copious bright red crayon scribbles inside. I now know to expect that sort of thing.

I think I'm coming to terms with the struggle that ensues when I, combined with a small child and a small apartment, try to achieve a sense of domestic order. I eek out small victories, which yield modest satisfactions. Then all comes unraveled, and must be done again, world without end. I think there are women who achieve order in the world-their-home with ease and great satisfaction, because they possess talent. Where there is talent, there is energy--the work itself is energizing. I have to accept that I'm not such a woman, and that I will continue to struggle with this. I will struggle because I sincerely believe that domestic order is important for family life, and because I want my family to have some measure of that order. I cannot dismiss it as unimportant, just because I don't excel at it; I cannot utterly succumb to disoder. But I am also gaining insight into the fact that, as evidenced by the sweet symbol of the stork, the essence of motherhood is not domesticity. The essence is in many other, sweeter things. I wonder, for example, at the prospect of a new and different personality in our family, and how the delicate balance will be tipped and re-situated by this new life. I also like to imagine how, years from now, Esme and this girl, her sister, might have the kind of friendship and memories that I share with my sisters. There is this and so much more that transcends petty frustrations with the self as it is subjected to inadequacy.

I think that this is all I can write for now, even though it strikes me as a mismatching pair of socks. My mind is partially stuck at the moment in some kind of slushy, oily, rainbow-y parking space.

all creation rejoices

2008-11-07T07:44:00.001-08:00

wings
Originally uploaded by ambery

I stayed up late on election night in the television's glow, like everyone else in America. Jeff controlled the remote and alternated between the major networks, avoiding commercials and trying to find the best commentary and least obnoxious presentation. We always favor PBS, with its spare branding and sane spokespeople over, say, Fox or even CNN, with their splashy and over-produced backdrops and cinematic soundtracks. For a time we even watched Comedy Central, where Steven Colbert and John Stewart were going at it together. But approaching midnight all of the major networks began to glow with essentially the same thing: an array of human faces, both in Chicago and in Times Square, tilted up and open, soaking in the vision of their new president like a field of wildflowers in a long-awaited rain shower. The camera, as it does at a major sporting event, would alight on one face, then another. But these faces were definitely expressing far more profundity of human feeling than any sports fan.

I'm really not good at writing about politics. I might even have no business writing about them, any more than I could be a sports commentator, because, by nature, I tend to be so a-political and clueless about what's going on. It's like baseball for me: I only watch the World Series. I didn't even really and truly pay much attention to the career happenings of either candidate until their campaigns culminated into the live and very hard-to-miss presidential debates. Only then, tuning in from the place of pajamas and ice cream, did I start feeling some election vibe and developing something like a stance.

My opinion was born too late and didn't have time to reach maturity. Like everyone else who adores him, for reasons that-- at least to me-- are exceedingly obvious, I too started to get excited about Obama. But then the night before the election day, however, I started getting last-minute voter panic over my own dearth of real knowledge. I had not really read much or followed much; I had been overly content to receive the generalities; I had not done my own research. I started finding things online, naturally, and stumbled on a transcript of Obama's speech to Planned Parenthood, where he talked about his daughters' freedom to pursue "their own version" of happiness. I am not ready to be a spokesperson within the deadlock of the abortion controversy, and am always so impressed by Orthodox writers like Frederica Matthewes-Green or Jim Forest, who do it so confidently, and well. But I will say that while I desire happiness for my own daughter, it isn't the happiness that Obama was preaching that day-- a happiness qualified by the unhinging of persons, one from another, so that one is free to fly away, like a kite with no string. I believe in a happiness bound, tangled, and burdened in the very strings and sinews of human parts. The brilliant, rousing oration on behalf of our nation's daughters, who are each to pursue their own version of happiness in Futureland, made my heart burrow down and hide itself from American dreams, whose intoxication, I remembered sadly, I can never truly, deeply share.

The next day the polls were open. I fiddled around the house in the morning in a state of procrastination and denial, doing chores, and feeling burdened and sad, wondering if I could bring myself to go to the voting booth only two blocks north of my apartment, as I'd been planning to do for weeks. In the end, I did go, after concluding that I would feel worse-- really lame-- for not voting at all.

But despite my sadness and self-distancing from my own ballot, I am still not impervious to what those people in Chicago were feeling last night, and are probably still feeling in the afterglow. I especially feel a strong poignancy and wonder for the deep-seated emotions that minorities and immigrants in this country must be feeling right now at the mere symbolic power of what has happened. Maybe it's because I only live two hours from Chicago, but when I walked out of our building the next morning, it seemed as if perhaps all of that big emotion emanating from the Windy City had rolled over our land overnight, transforming nature in its wake. The air crackled. The autumn season, which has been with us for weeks, growing tired, felt newly minted. Little brown papery leaves were twirling down and somersaulting across the pavement in swirly, anti-gravitational bunches around my car as I drove Esme to the friend who babysits her while I'm at work. When I arrived on the campus of Notre Dame, a campus known for its park-like landscape, these same trees throwing their confetti were also filled with singing birds. It was a cross between autumn loveliness and spring riot--the embodiment of "all creation rejoices."

Jeff and I are very lucky that I have a part-time job in the same place where he is a student, because sometimes we can meet for lunch, and it's like being on a miniature date without Esme, which otherwise is a rare thing. We sat on a bench outside where a bumble bee and airborne leaves wouldn't leave my food alone, and talked about the various reactions to the election which we were seeing and hearing in the people around us, and online, of course, on facebook. Just walking from one side of campus to the next allowed us to overhear cell phone conversations such as, "I can only hope that the next four years are just so horrible that a Republican will get elected back in," to, well, you know, the exact opposite. I saw one young black student bounding up the stairs to the student center holler to a friend biking by: "I know, man, right?"

One professor, an Obama supporter, had to dismiss a herd of undergraduates and cancel a Wednesday morning class shortly after it began because she was still crying from joy and couldn't go on with her lecture. Meanwhile, we had also heard news of some of the reactions from the Bible Belt, where Jeff's home town is squarely located, and where a certain church pastor there was praying a certain Psalm verse "over" Obama. Jeff was curious, and looked up the verse. He found the disturbing words: "May his days be numbered."

I am a little worried about America right now, and all of these extreme emotions. I am cautious, and yet if I am being truly honest with myself, I have to admit that I too find the election of Obama exciting, and am waiting with everyone else for some of this election dust to settle (if it ever does) so that we can see how exactly the next four years are going to look. And while I do hope to see a lot of the changes he has promised, like paid maternity leave and more sick days for parents, and equal pay for women doing jobs identical to men (e.g., the Lilly Ledbetter Act), I know that, as everyone is so quick to point out, not all of this is going to happen promise per promise. I understand from number crunchers that the proposed healthcare reforms of Obama, and McCain, for that matter, are not even remotely possible or realistic.

More than anything, I think it comes down to this beautiful weather where I live, in Indiana, a swing state, and what one chooses to read in it. I do not really think that creation is rejoicing in the election of Barack Obama. Instead, I think this:

All creation rejoices in you, O Theotokos, for through your miraculous childbearing, all creation has been set free. Surely the angels marveled at the love and compassion of God when He lowered himself to be born as a man in a virgin's womb. The angelic host rejoices, seeing the fullness and the depths of God's love, and all humanity rejoices with them, for the human nature is set free of bondage. All of creation rejoices, as Apostle Paul says, "for creation is set free of its bondage into the glorious freedom of God's children."

By the way, special-special thanks go to Amber for leaving open and overly generous permission to blog her amazing flickr photos.

making paradise

2008-11-01T21:00:00.000-07:00

I am changing, and I don't know precisely what to blame. Motherhood would be the most obvious; that and time--plain old aging. I used to stay up late and almost never--couldn't--nap. These days, I can fall into a deep and long one any afternoon that allows for it.

I am getting over my general surprise over how demanding family life has turned out to be, although sometimes my imagination does venture down routes of escape. A priest recently told me that no one's ego wants to be bound by responsibility. Children are really hard work. All spouses have annoying habits, he said. But genuine love, Christ himself, is precisely in the ordinary and tedious things we do for them daily.

I'm still reflecting on the first trimester of pregnancy, which turned out to be a trial. I don't know how well I did. I hated being weak and incapable of managing quotidian demands. I disliked the fact that all my body wanted was a spot in the shadowy bedroom, under a rumpled quilt, with no two year old romping, climbing my head, and wanting constant and positive interaction. It all turned out to be illusory, of course, as I wasn't, in fact, dying. But even though I knew that and could reasonably expect a reprieve in a matter of weeks, I indulged in despairing thoughts, succumbed to the irrational sensation that I had been permanently banned from the frozen pond of life where everyone else was briskly rounding corners in their iceskates, going from one task to the next. I dramatically imagined myself having fallen through a thin patch of ice in an out of the way slough, where the healthy skaters couldn't see and didn't care.

Well, as said, it all turned out to be illusory and a trial, as most sicknesses are. But while I am sick I think about health as a thin--not thick--slab of ice, whereas those who are up there skating around don't think much about the thickness or thinness of what's beneath their blades. So maybe sickness and weakness are just practice for something more serious, which we will all face. Each bout of weakness dips us and soaks us further in the liquid of reality.

The first time I understood that pregnancy was not going to be business-as-usual was during my first trimester of pregnancy with Esme, the winter of 2006. I went to the Notre Dame gym, thinking I was going to do the usual stuff I do at gyms (which--ha-I now haven't actually done for several years). As soon as I got on the elliptical machine my legs felt weak, I couldn't muster up even a measly heart rate, and had to get off. Notably, there was an undergrad student on the machine in front of me wearing a Dr. Seuss shirt that said: "Oh, the places you'll go," and in that moment I looked at that t-shirt with a certain wisdom and loathing. These optimistic undergrads swarming the campus of Notre Dame, going places, in excellent health, with shiny hair and toned bodies, really had no clue about the places they'd be going, just as I didn't when I was in college, years away from true adulthood, and, moreover, childbearing.

But it feels like a precious gift to be functioning again, to make meals, walk in the strange and frustrating land of potty training, get persons and stuff up three flights of apartment stairs, and all the other endless stream of hassles that make up family life with a young child-- hassles that feel as if they are building muscle when they are not depleting muscle. But the motherhood muscle isn't a literal thing, but a figurative toughness and perseverance, which, I admit, I did not have upon first becoming a mother and have had to acquire gradually, only as the general shock subsided.

We had a magical, wonderful Halloween. The graduate student housing, which is always trying to bring the community together for seasonal events, finally went beyond the mundane and did something really great by bringing in a petting zoo, a horse drawn wagon, bails of hay, lots and lots of pizza, and a bonfire--all in one evening, on which, coincidentally, the weather cooperated beautifully. For Esme, this Halloween was the first holiday she has been able to understand and participate in somewhat. I think I now know what it means to experience life vicariously through a child. And this vacariism is so much fun, it must form at least one of the major, possible human motivations behind having children, which, as stated, is really, really hard work.

Something I keep hearing and/or reading from Orthodox people and books is that while we live here on earth, we are called to make life a paradise for those around us. It's a really beautiful thought, and I've been turning it over a lot in the past weeks.

Esme's birthday is in September, and it landed this year right on the cusp of when I began feeling sort of bad, but not yet terrible. I was grouchy that day, but tried to hold it at bay, and did manage to carry out my plans to make her a sunflower cake, put up a few decorations, and stay positive. Six days later it was Jeff's birthday. By then my pregnant misery was all happening in earnest, and I think we ended up getting take-out and no homemade anything, which I felt badly about. Once again, Jeff, the spouse, had to bear the worst of me, the spouse. He did a pretty good job during my worst weeks, and although I would not describe the final weeks of my first trimester as any sort of paradise, it is true that without his willingness to pick up all of my slack at home, things would have quickly become hell for us all. He kept hell at bay.

Right after I started feeling better, he got sick, and I tried to keep hell at bay for him too.

These are amazing words to me. It's an amazing human potential--to prevent hell from enclosing around another human being. It takes energy-poured-forth, attitude, and will. But I do think that anyone can do it for anyone else, and I think that it's even possible to do from a state of weakness, although that achievement is so far beyond me. I wonder if, in the future, I'll learn to create paradise for others even when sick, but that is really the glory of saints, like Mother Maria Skobtsova, who was a light to the people around her in a German concentration camp, even as her body was giving out.

In any case, I am learning to recognize this at its most basic, to feel it when others are doing it for me. I am beginning to understand that when I am exerting myself on behalf of someone else and tempted to resent the effort or pity myself, that I am diminishing the importance of what is happening. I want to train myself to recognize my own work for what it is--something important-- not trivial: the making of paradise for another. I am starting to suspect that this is the only work of true importance in the world.

time to flakedove again

2008-10-08T11:39:00.001-07:00

uncultivated lovliness approaching fall
Originally uploaded by Julia Wickes

After a public shutting-down of flakedoves, I think it may be time to start flakedoving again. Some people take a break from blogging without a dramatic announcement, or a removal of their blog from the public domain. I hauled off and made a big announcement and shut the whole thing down. Now, after not even much time, I'd like to retract that, if no one will think me too fickle. And while I toyed with the idea of starting an entirely new blog at some point, I think I'm just too attached to flakedoves, and I'm afraid my small, former audience wouldn't be able to find me again.

I felt I had nothing to share or say for most of the summer. I got a new part-time job at the end of spring, and it accelerated the pace of my daily life and took my mind away from the kind of thinking and writing that I tend to do when most of my time is spent at home, ruminating. Through June, July, and August, Esme kept morphing further and faster into a two year-old, until finally, as of late September, she was a two year-old. Parenting a two year-old is so different from parenting a baby. There are far more words involved--an expenditure of words that must, I imagine, demand a subtraction of other words from other categories in the life of my brain, namely the categories involved in thoughtful blogging--the only kind of blogging that seems worthwhile to me. The sun and the powerful draw of being outdoors in a place where for six months of the year the outdoors are uninhabitable also kept me from writing, or caring about whether I did or didn't.

Now, as the turn of the planet starts pushing me and everyone else inward, I feel the want of writing again. There is still a lot of green on all of the trees here in northern Indiana, and walks are still possible, and sitting on the swing while Esme plays in the gravel, sand, slides, and sea-saw behind our apartment building is also still possible--in hooded jackets. But the air is getting cold, and in the mornings I've been cooking a pot of oatmeal in a noticeably dark--very dark--apartment.

I've also been pregnant, and sick, in that order, and somehow the suffering, albeit temporal and nothing terminal or extraordinary in nature, has thrown me down into that particular view of life for a few days-- the one where normalcy, the ability to function, looks like a circle of unobtainable light from where you sit at the bottom of a dark well. This generates precisely the kind of thoughts that desire release through precisely written words, the kind of thoughts I haven't had for some time.

As far as pregnancy symptoms, my first trimester hasn't been bad, despite the usual tiredness and weird food aversions and cravings. I felt relatively fine until week ten, when I started to feel more repulsed by food and more tired. Then, in week twelve, I got a cold, which was bad enough, but then turned into an ear infection, which, in the past five days, has turned my entire existence into misery. Esme has been wondering, in some two year-old capacity, I'm sure, what happened to her mother, who has been lying down or sitting down with a sour, scrunched-up face, unable to engage her from moment to moment. Jeff has valiantly, as if with one available hand, upheld the pillars of our tiny household and kept them from crumbling on top of his immobilized wife and energetic toddler. But this still leaves me, as the antibiotics start to take effect and allow me to return to normal life (as of today, in fact), a lot of laundry, crumbs, dust, and junk mail to catch up with. I have to say though, I'm so happy to get up, grasp a spray bottle, tear up any stupid flyer from Blockbuster printed on extravagant and wasteful cardstock, sort out white socks from jeans, and remove food scraps from the aged linoleum around Esme's high chair several times per day.

life in a post-flakedoves world

2008-05-05T20:20:00.000-07:00

I decide things by instinct, and, instinctively, have always felt a certain tension when I think on old flakey-doves. There are concerns, back-and-forths, and ways of arguing for and against its continued existence, but finally I decided that I want to know what life is like, at least for a time, in a post-flakedoves world. This is not going to make so much as the tiniest ripple in the universe, but I still wanted to say goodbye to any who read regularly, whether openly or anonymously.

So, coming full circle, with Froggy as my muse, I am going to take a hiatus. Froggy and I might find that we like the anonymity; we may explore new hobbies such as gardening.

That said, I just joined facebook, so if you're one of the small handful of friends that keep up with me via this blog, I'm not ducking out of the internet altogether. Just know that in a week or so when you come to this URL it will be blocked in one way or another and it is not intended as a snub. It's just me taking myself really seriously, in a flakedoves sort of way.

bright week, interrupted

2008-05-01T14:35:00.000-07:00

On Easter day I should not have sat down at my computer, because it was the feast of feasts, and I should have known better. But I am still learning; I am still unwise and inexperienced. So, late in the day, satiate with cheese, chocolate, and salami, as if on auto pilot, I sat down in front of my computer, half-consciously knowing that there was nothing worth seeing or checking or doing.

I keep the news on my homepage in order to counteract ignorance of current events. But on Easter day, after having been in church all week to the point of a true connection to the experience of the disciples, the myrrh-bearing women, and the angels, I should have remained within that liturgically wrought brightness, and not ventured back so soon into the jarring fluorescent light of evil tidings. Hell was embittered and the Church was doing all it could to release me into an authentic celebration zone of joy, separate from the relentless pressing of darkness, evil, struggle, sadness, and death, which were all surprised to find themselves trampled down upon Christ's arrival in Hades.

The week following Easter is called Bright Week, the only week in the Orthodox year in which fasting is forbidden. I find it poetically gratifying to see the word Bright coupled with Week in capital letters, a proper noun on a calendar. I also smile at the coupling of fasting and forbidden.

But on Easter day what met me in the news, unasked for, was not the usual photograph of this or that third world political embroilment, which can certainly be a downer, but easily bypassed and clicked away from. Instead, on Easter day, a new kind of headline with a new kind of photograph met me--that of a psychopath whose eyes looked like windows into everything about humanity that I do not want to know. It was the face of the Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for twenty-four years, fathering seven children by her. I'm sure that by now this story has circulated everywhere. One newspaper said that the Austrian people could not find words to describe this horror, and I'm sure that I cannot either, but wordless, it spread over my heart, lungs, and brow as inky, leaden shadow. I was not prepared; I would never have believed that the grand inquisitor could be permitted to tempt me on Easter day with such a new and raw rendering of the old problem of evil.

During Lent I kept, insofar as I could, steering myself into the path of human holiness. That is, I myself am not holy, or mature, but my strategy was to put myself in the way of those who are, in the hopes of receiving a good influence. I visited a monastery, listened to the podcasts of Orthodox teachers and pastors online, read literature such as The Arena, and The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Jeff and I did not exactly plan this, but it just so happened that the only movie we watched during Lent was a DVD that has been circulating among our South Bend friends called The Island. It is a Russian film, the story of Anatoly, a convict who lives out his days in intense repentance and prayer, until he transforms into a saint. I believe in the good potential of art, but beyond the artistic loveliness of this film, I was so surprised at what it accomplished. I was surprised to be presented with such a true picture of human goodness. It fanned any faint desire I have ever had to be holy and I thought about Anatoly for days, and still do.

So this Lent I did get an inkling of a landscape-- a high one, and yet human enough to feel possible, to feel somehow connected to mine through simply sharing humanity with the other humans who have gone there.

But because I am not that mature, I still find it uncomfortable at times to face a maturity far above my own. While at the Orthodox monastery in Michigan, I sensed the limits of what I could imagine holiness to be like, because the community appeared featureless to me in many ways, and, dare I say it, even boring. Orthodox monastics live a life of total renunciation and I have a difficult time imagining what might occupy a person who has given up all the occupations of this world, with its opinions, aspirations, and activities. Yet, I could feel the tension on the monastery grounds and that something dynamic was in fact taking place there, invisible to worldly eyes. I suspect that the life of prayer is dynamic and has more at stake than what is most urgent and important in this world. I've read about this in The Arena, and elsewhere. But I still cannot quite imagine it.

This is due to the fact that my Big Struggle often involves ridiculous things such as an afternoon spent on the playground with other mothers and the interpersonal complications that arise. I think I must live in the Midwest in more ways than one. I live in the most middle, most ordinary, decent-looking strata of humanity, struggling with the petty things that happen among such supposedly decent people, struggling with my own pettiest thoughts, words, and deeds. And even here, I can attest that the struggle is not easy, and there are insidious forces both seen and unseen.

But this being the case, it makes sense that I also have difficulty imagining the psychopath, his very existence flaunting the depths of human perversion across the BBC home page. I do not want to share my humanity with such a person, yet there he is.

In seminary, I was a student of Fr. Thomas Hopko, who has a gift for tackling the problem of human behavior at its most atypical, along with suffering, victimization, and pain. Put in different words, he was known by his students, for better or for worse, for always harping on what might be called the weird and the strange. These frequent classroom forays into all that is malformed in humanity could be unpleasant, it's true, but I instinctively knew that these monsters needed tending to, or one might come upon me unexpectedly and scorch me with fire from its nostrils, knocking me and my little backpack of theology into a canyon of despair.

Somehow, even while trying to be an ordinary Christian in the Midwest, where life falls somewhere mid-spectrum between saints and monsters, I have to admit that both are connected to my humanity. I have to hold onto one without neglecting the reality of the other. This is hard to do, but I think that Bright Week is a good time to learn this lesson, because God did become human, and did enter into hell, but hell could not hold him captive.

no such thing as bandits

2008-04-21T22:15:00.000-07:00

I don't know how to write about Orthodox Holy Week, except to say that it is like a muscular yet gentle hand that grasps me by the wrist. Despite my paltry Lenten investment, the designed intent of Holy Week overflows with light and color into my lap, and also, I imagine, the lap of everyone who stands through these services.

Lately, and by surprise, my view into the Church looks like everything I will ever want or need to live. Maybe through someone's prayers, or through the culmination of life at its most basic and usual progression, line upon line, and so on, the ordering action of my life, which usually goes forward at an imperceptibly slow pace, feels as if it has just been granted a gratuitous boost.

So vivified, I have also been working hard to get our apartment in better order before Easter, dipping into the dark spots which I have knowingly eschewed for so long. Yesterday I rearranged the furniture in our bedroom, vacuuming and dusting as I went along, tossing out old cough drops embedded in dust bunnies near the floor boards, symbols of the now-forgotten illnesses of February. I pulled out all the boxes of stored things from under the bed and wiped them down. The windows were open and spring air dispersed through our 500 square-foot apartment. When I was done, the room had more space, light, air, and health than it did before.

While working, a Midlake song fragment played on loop inside of my head:

Did you ever want to be overcome by bandits;
to hand over all of your things and start over new?

Yes, yes, precisely.

But "bandits" sounds like a word from the Wild Old West, and I know that there are no such thing as bandits who will do me the courtesy of removing my clutter all at once. I will have to carry on and put things into order myself. I will have to simplify and change until my last breath. I will have wrap my hands around the dusty, the firmly lodged, the difficult to reach, and the sometimes difficult to see. I normally try to get away with residing in a separate room from these compartments of disorder. I languish at the thought of them, and live a lesser existence in the spaces they leave me. But this week is a holy week, in which I am allowed to glimpse what life might look like if those spaces were to be restored to me. This week, especially after the easy lightness of confession, I understand and feel that the Church is capable of restoring those rooms to me, and not by magic, or thievery, but by giving me the joy and desire to engage the process myself. The Church stands with me. It bears me along.

short reflection on an aged greenhouse in winter weather

2008-03-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

Monday some friends and I visited our local Botanical Garden for the second time, a multi-room greenhouse in disrepair. We parked in back. The gardener spotted us from a distance and hollered something about street-side parking in front having been available for eighty years, especially for moms with little kids. He seemed exasperated and a bit put out, as if by parking in back we had implied that the Botanical Garden was inhospitable to women and children. It is true that it was inconvenient; we had to push the strollers through a bumpy cluster of potholes in a blustery alley to get around to the front entrance.

The vines, flowers, trees, and herbs inside are all fully grown, deeply rooted, spreading, reaching, and budding with long-established trust in their precarious climate. But the glass and metal structure which gives them such consistency bears signs of wear, tear, and martyrdom. Its cavernous walls and ceilings nourish an impossible pocket of air radically distinct from the atmosphere at large, a job that must be arduous indeed. The greenhouse appears worn out by its long career as tropical ambassador to Indiana. Warmth and moisture make their demands upon the thin glass from one side while icy winds and winter precipitation shake their fist from the other. Environmental debris fly at the roof, while humidity and condensation push against the self-same glass ceiling. This explains the signs of corrosion-- streaks of rust and opaque mineral formations.

Chalky and dingy as it is, this glass house--so far from the sparkling ideal of glass--still manages to convert a chill winter light into a summer-like blaze, something effectual enough to require the shedding of a coat, followed by the shedding of a sweater. Standing in short sleeves amidst sunshine and plant-life is far too great a treat to admit any criticisms, or dwell upon the urge to spray and wipe down every surface with a giant industrial-strength spray bottle of glass cleaner. And I also did not permit myself to dwell on any negative feelings about the stale quality of the trapped, unchanging air, reminiscent of a YMCA locker room.

It is an admittedly odd, neglected place, hanging by a thread in many respects. I hesitated to let Esme out of her stroller for fear of her becoming overly interested in a dubious puddle of standing water, a peeling chip of paint, a handful of fiberglass coming unstuffed in the "Arizona Room," or a stack of old folding tables inexplicably propped up behind some thick foliage. For all of these reasons, it is not like a place normally open to the public, or even safe for the public. There is a certain naivety and low-fi, small-town informality to it, with all its booby traps and potential lawsuits. It is obviously not popular or well-funded enough to receive the restoration and care it needs, so perhaps it has been forgotten by the city, county, or whichever municipality it falls under. It seems more or less in the hands of Bob, the markedly casual man who oversees it. He sits in the main office, dressed in jeans, sweatshirt, and baseball cap. He chats amiably with visitors, talks about his family, and picks a hibiscus flower for every little girl that comes through. He walks around with a hose and replenishes the goldfish pond.

I did eventually let Esme out of her stroller, and was relieved to see that she was too absorbed in the plants and winding paths to get overly curious about fiberglass and paint chips. Once, a long time ago, I visited the Botanical Gardens in Montreal and the two do not bear comparison, and yet, plant for plant, they may not be very different in their offerings to patrons coming out from a cold day. I certainly would not assert one as more valuable than the other, in the sense that both are unquestionably worthy things, worthy of protection and continued existence, worthy of patronage.

I find myself comparing the old greenhouse with the ideal of old age, in which the body is more and more broken but adequately transparent, host to inner sunshine, warmth, and a riot of plant life despite the prevailing climate. I've known older people like this, holy people, although I believe they are rare. I wonder how anyone achieves this, and I suspect it has a lot to do with knowing oneself and persisting in a quiet willingness to be tropical in the face of winter, or something like that, without apology, but also with quietness and respect.

a straight path through the world of myself

2008-03-18T14:29:00.000-07:00

I like to think that I can stand before my child and the world with a flaming sword and gleaming breastplate to shield her little nerves from every source of shock, but there is always some seemingly innocuous thing that, though small enough to slip past my vigilance, turns monstrous in the hyperbolic lens of a child, and my protection proves inadequate.

I remember being at a hardware store with my father when I was about four years old. As we were standing at the glass counter, making a purchase, an alarm sounded. I still do not know what this alarm was meant to indicate, but it threw my four year-old nervous system into a state of panic. I looked around and wondered if I had done something wrong or pushed a forbidden button. I searched the faces of the adults up above me for clues about what was happening and was further confused by the fact that none seemed perturbed. The rest of the memory is muddled, and obviously my intense internalization of the situation was irrational, but I have never forgotten my pounding heart. Perhaps because I remember so many instances in my childhood in which I floundered in my lack of perspective and hypersensitivity I am now especially aware of a child's limited ability to contextualize. I constantly try to help Esme grasp her experiences in order to spare her from this horrible feeling insofar as I can, until, bit by bit, her scope of experience expands to include a wider variety of happenstance. But already I perceive the limit of my powers as arbiter.

If my parental fears have any practical application at all, it would be as a window onto my own fears, a means of knowing myself better.

Because Esme is typically happy. She seems as well-adjusted a toddler as I could hope, open to unfamiliar people, brave, wandering far from me on the playground, taking tumbles without dismay. But of course there are moments which defy her resources. More than once when I have left the vacuum cleaner out she has wandered up to explore it, switched it on unwittingly, and then dashed away, flapping her hands in horror when it roars into life. I cringe when I witness her face register the shock waves of the seemingly terrible. During a recent bathtime, I was sitting on the edge of the tub while she stubbornly kept trying to stand up in the water, and I tried to dissuade her. Sure enough, she slipped and hit her nose. To her horror, and to mine at first, it bled, and she climbed in my lap, drenching me in bath water, tears, and spotting my now wet jeans with bright red blood. Jeff came in and we tried to soothe her, dry her off, stop the bleeding, and demonstrate by our reaction that what had happened, like the sound of a vacuum, was not as bad as it seemed. I had so many bloody noses as a child, from softballs deflecting off my glove and clocking me in the face or poorly executed bottle rockets off of slippery diving boards, that I eventually became brazenly smug toward all variety of nosebleeds.

I wish I could say that after thirty years of life I am similarly toughened to moments of debilitating self-doubt like the one in the hardware store. But self-doubt returns to me again and again. Again and again I irrationally internalize false alarms for which I am not truly responsible. It only recently dawned on me that this emotion, in its varying forms, is the precise phantom--my pet phantom--that I want to rescue Esme from ever encountering. I want to spare her from ever feeling like confidence turns its face from her, that life is painfully confounding, and uncomfortably weird. But even as an adult with much thicker skin I cannot save myself from feeling this way from time to time. A misfiring alarm in a hardware store would not phase me, but other design flaws, just as ordinary, albeit more humanly complex, can throw me into system overload. I try to achieve that elusive thing called perspective, but the horizon recedes. Some days this makes me feel merely self-pitying, but on other unfortunate occasions I feel like I have just pressed a red button that is going to bring the roof down over mine and everyone's head.

And what do I do to cope with this but analyze? I burden myself by looking for insights which will supposedly banish uncomfortable uncertainties. I plaster the cracks in my personality with home remedies. I think if I flap my wings hard enough I will find a perch from which to look down upon this uneven land with a dispassionate eye.

I am in the habit of thinking that confidence is what I lack, the one thing I need. So naturally, I am fascinated and intrigued by confident people, the way they appear unfettered by the nexus of concerns that so bog me down. I am at home, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a pencil, filling in details in my notebook about the world and its inhabitants, second guessing my conclusions. Meanwhile, the confident person sits at a desk, commanding and streamlining within a tidy sphere of influence, never doubting, always professional, upbeat.

I envy that person at the desk but in my heart I do not really want to trade places. I do not really believe that confidence for its own sake is a virtue, any more than I believe that self-doubt is virtuous. And in any case, why would I want to trade in one hubris for another when I am already so well-acquainted with the pitfalls of being me?

Recently my friend Kristy hosted a gathering of women at her house. All were mothers, and there were at least five pregnant women there as well. The topic of fear came up-- fear for one's children--which is probably the universal experience of motherhood, though I am sure that the content of a mother's worry is broad in kind. Kristy gave us each a slip of paper with a prayer from St. Gregory the Theologian which begins: "Without you, not one footstep can we place, Lord Christ, for mortals source of every good; you are yourself our straight path through the world." I love this prayer for presenting me with the image of Christ as a path, with the world on either side-- the world of my thoughts, fears, anxieties, misconceptions, false perceptions, and inborn faults.

This Lent, I want to escape the absurd homework assignments I am always giving myself, the essays and algorithms. I want to develop the habit of sitting down, being patient, and holding the person of Christ before me as much as I can, until anxiety falls away on either side.

the rainbow sign

2008-03-11T21:46:00.000-07:00

While putting Esme down for her nap today I sang Kermit the Frog's rainbow song. Actually, I don't know the title, only that it begins by asking the question: Why are there so many songs about rainbows?

If there are a lot of songs about rainbows, I've never heard them. I only know the one Judy Garland made famous, and that as a child it made me imagine a little box of Lemonheads (the candy) sitting on top of a hot chimney, melting into a sticky mass. Perhaps there are some long-forgotten rainbow songs from Vacation Bible School having to do with Noah. I can't recall.

We spent Jeff's spring break in Tennessee with his parents. My friend Lisa usually drives the short way from her home in Atlanta to come see me while I'm there, and she came again last week, bringing me her old juicer, and a canvas bag with magazines about raw food living, a spiral bound calendar with a story of an Orthodox saint's life for each day, and some boxes of steel-cut oatmeal that her mom left at her house. Esme and I ate some of the oatmeal for breakfast this morning, with currents and almonds thrown in. I had to puree Esme's portion in the food processor so she could have the almonds.

Today is the second day of Lent, and already something has changed cosmically, as it always does, and I mean that without exaggeration. For me, Lent always introduces the notion of a coming blossom, hidden and not-yet, present through anticipation. Interestingly though, I cannot access this cosmic blossomy feeling until Lent is actually here, and until it arrives, I doubt, and wonder if this year it will falter; I downright refuse to expect it. In February, the hidden quality of resurrection felt absolute to me. Its hidden quality seemed equal to nonexistence-- not the same as hidden-but-eminent. I could not sense the end of the flu season, overcast skies, ice-crusted windshield wipers, and the fallen nature of everything, near and far. I knew that spring would have to eventually come, but could not seem to access the hope of its intervention. But a change came rapidly on the very first day of Lent and I could sense the sureness of the alteration.

I am not sure why, after nine years of Lent, its real efficacy, as well as its being bound up with spring irrespective of the movable date of Easter, continues to surprise me.

The trees I see continue to appear as nondescript sticks, but I have managed to renew my faith in their inner-leaves. Meteorologists are saying that the Aurora Borealis can now be seen: an official sign of spring. I cite this to prove that this alteration appears to be cosmic and not merely one of my own fantasy. If a sign of spring can be seen in the arctic circle, then it can be seen anywhere.

Indiana is still cold but the day I spent with Lisa in Tennessee was warm enough for us to lay beach towels on the spongy grass and lay there looking directly up at the sky. It was a remarkable thing to be doing, but our conversation was actually quite somber. The blue dome above us looked higher than I have seen it in ages. An airplane I spotted was the smallest silver splinter, sneaking past the entire region soundlessly. The clouds were the kind that move and change quickly, as if someone was dragging a large rake over them, so they were interesting to watch. Then, we saw an inexplicable rainbow fragment posted in that same hidden region, like a stain, fading out then coming back in with relative permanency, though the whole sky around it was bright blue with white going hither and tither. There had been no rain or even humidity, so it wasn't a rainbow sort of day, according to my prior experience with rainbows.

And we were most likely the only ones in town who saw it-- because you would almost have had to be lying on grass in the middle of an ordinary work day, gazing at a ninety degree angle into obscure altitudes.

On our drive back to Indiana, I saw another unlikely rainbow created behind a semi as it kicked up the puddles of melted snow over the highways of Kentucky. It followed gloriously behind a mud flap, again with a seeming mid-air permanency and stillness, despite the transient action of mud and salt all around. In the midst of all this taking note of rainbows, I perked up when I heard a Pete Seeger song on the radio whose lyrics said,

God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water but fire next time.

I started at that line. I guess rainbows are not all about sentimental promises and three cheers for humanity. Lent is similar, because I spend half of it feeling like a jar of homegrown sprouts waiting to spring in a sunny windowsill and the other half thinking about what it will be like on the withering Day of Judgment. Somehow the Lenten season in the Orthodox Church holds all of this together perfectly, and for that I love it. It comes as a perfect relief, an intervention, a sign, a shift, bigger than me yet graciously containing me and including me in its cosmic proportions.

a mild case of fatigue

2008-02-27T14:09:00.000-08:00

There are several points of discouragement and mystery occupying my thoughts right now. One is that I have had a mild sore throat now for over two weeks, and just about everyone I know has been sick at least once this February, and it is getting to the point where I'm almost afraid of going to the grocery store, lest a flu virus on the cart handle jump up into my nostrils, or stick to Esme's little fingers and travel home with us. Every morning I wake up thinking that this will be the day that my sore throat will be gone; I swallow and find it still there.

I have also been thinking a great deal about fatigue. I was at a gathering of women last week-- all mothers. My friend Kristy arranged the get-together, and there was a lot of talk and sharing stories of birth, children, and childcare. Listening, I started to realize that motherhood, although universally demanding, does not necessarily leave a woman feeling as if a huge alteration in her health and well-being has taken place since before the birth. I don't hear this coming from the stories of other women, many of whom are happily pregnant with their second child. I read some things last night about a thing called adrenal fatigue, which can hit a person after a major life event--whether good or bad. Death, the loss of a job, and, of course, the birth of a child were among the things that could trigger such chronic fatigue and adrenal maladjustment. It made sense to me, because it isn't really the tasks of motherhood that I find exhausting, such as diaper changes, putting down for naps, picking up toys, or mashing up sweet potatoes. It isn't about Esme, or motherhood itself, which I love. It's physical. Childbirth itself, breastfeeding perhaps, and the new patterns of sleep have somehow changed me--my internal chemistry, hormones, or what have you. I don't feel horrible every day, but I never feel more than just o.k., and never wonderful, and it is only now hitting me that this is not quite right, and I should look into what I can do to get back to normal. Perhaps a mild case of fatigue is almost more insidious than a severe one, because it passes under the radar, and after a while its sufferer forgets what it was like to live without it.

A pre-bedtime routine to help me get into bed earlier, remembering to take my daily vitamin consistently, a probiotic perhaps (one friend just tipped me off to that), more raw foods, more fresh air, more sun (oh...wait...no sun to be had), less caffeine, zinc, vitamin D, and a host of other potentially health-giving supplements I cannot really afford to buy from our dear local health food store "The Garden Patch." Healing begins to feel like pulling myself up by the bootstraps, or toiling up a steep mountain trail, with a backpack full of colloidal silver and magnesium.

But I am trying to remain undaunted; I am trying to take it all seriously, even though, deep inside, I am beginning to hold a more fatalistic view of life and death. I hope it is alright to discuss this, as it is so fresh and terrible. News of the death of a woman who I knew as an acquaintance when I lived in Boston stunned and grieved me a few days ago. The evening after I heard the news, I could not sleep for thinking of her in disbelief and sadness. She was about my age, with a husband and four-month old baby boy, and among the most vibrant people I have ever encountered, and yet she collapsed and died quite suddenly, due to a hidden heart defect. This in contrast to my ninety-two year old grandmother, who suffered three strokes, did not feel quite well for years and years, and yet lingered on and on for so long before she died, just has me bewildered.

I remember a few years ago when the mother of one of my friend's in Orlando died, also suddenly, in her early fifties. I loved her mother, but after her death my mind kept seeing her kitchen, where there were always bottles of vitamins, herbal supplements, and health foods on the counter and in the cabinets. Somehow this made her pre-mature departure that much more poignant and troubling to me--the thought of her kitchen.

The air outside the window I am facing right now is absolutely dense with a wall of snow blowing sideways. Esme naps in her crib beyond and I should be trying to take a nap too. So many obligations to my body, and yet intangible, invisible, incorporeal thoughts are far more demanding, and on most occasions I am obliged to exorcise them into written words before I can succumb to sleep, which is why I stay up later than I should, staring into the glow of a computer, over-stimulating my retinas, no doubt. I always think I want to be a writer, but the more I read books, the more I suspect that writers are not exactly the healthiest people, probably subsisting on coffee and cigarettes, and preferring nervous, psychic energy to the energy that comes from whole grain bread.

Why won't my sore throat go away? Is my immune system in such bad shape? Why can't I care for my body the way I care for Esme's, protecting her sleep routine with vigor, and fretting over her vegetables, breastfeeding her long past the pediatric recommendation? I have passively accepted my low-grade fatigue for so long now-- about a year and a half-- carrying on with the basics of housekeeping and childcare, but feeling exhausted at the mere thought of things I used to enjoy, like thirty minutes on an elliptical machine. I hope that I can learn to care for myself better, although sometimes the litany of self-care responsibilities presents itself as a burden whose very weight may just cancel out its benefits and leave more tired than ever.

neither inspiration, nor perspiration

2008-02-23T21:57:00.000-08:00

I'm not a jogger, but if I were, I would jog boldly into the frosty landscape and generate heat and energy within my cells to counter this terrible February indifference. I would shuck off the oppression of the overcast perma-dome above South Bend and feel closer to the remembrance of sun-warmth. But I'm not a jogger, and I also have a baby under my wing all day. I would take her on walks with the stroller, but although I can bundle and protect her core and appendages in warmth, this baby refuses to keep any sort of coverage on her little hands. On another foolish attempt at a winter walk yesterday, she looked down at her red little hands at one point with distress and said, "Cold?" She understands cold but somehow resists the concept of mittens, and chucks them over the side of the stroller each time they are re-applied. The last stressful stretch of the return journey were inevitably spent in tears, screams, arching back, and numb fingers. There will be no more stroller walks until spring, and I am so tired of being inside.

The stagnency of February always frightens me into thinking that I will never feel vibrant or artisticly inspired again. I took the above picture out of Esme's window yesterday but it was only by a rote effort to capture an image. This tree is one that I see every day. At the beginning of the winter, when it first emerged leafless, I thought it looked charming, dotted as it is with little round, botanical spheres. But now anything I could possibly see out of any of our windows looks banal. My camera felt like led in my hands and the visual world has never seemed less interesting. I don't like this, so I was aiming to get back some inspiration through perspiration. But even perspiration seems far from me right now, since I can't find a creative way to exercise with a toddler, and, as aforementioned, I'm not a jogger. So I sit tight through this February. I hope the wheel that turns us into Lent will bring renewed interest.

remembrance of things past

2008-02-20T21:10:00.000-08:00

During my entire time in Florida, I struggled with a sore throat, eye cold, cough, and earache, in that order. These ailments layered down upon me and went through stages of benignity, but never lifted altogether. So although the weather was what I had dreamt about escaping to, I plainly lacked the energy to maximize my time there in the ways I had imagined, and cared little for excursions. On principle, I tried to get outdoors with Esme at least once each day, taking her out in the stroller or just letting her roam, supervised, in the backyard, its spongy jungle grass bouyant under the soles of her small shoes. But mostly I stayed indoors, took it easy, and made runs to Walgreens for kleenex and things that come in dropper bottles. I came home with my suitcase a veritable medicine cabinet.

One night after taking some nighttime cold medication, I got in bed intent on that one needful sleep thing, but could hear the voices of my family in the living room, close, noisy, and impossible to block out, even through my congested head. It is my weakness to never lie in hiding when a good rankle is taking place; the devil in me wants to join in the fray. There wasn't any rankle or fray going on, to be exact, but I still wanted to join in, so I gave up on sleep even as the drowsy ingredient in the medication began to take effect, dragged my quilt out to the living room, and found my place within the conversational circle my two older sisters and parents had formed without the aid of electricity, sitting in Floridian moonlight. I had forgotten about Floridian moonlight, and also my mother's quirky habit of turning off lamps prematurely in the evening. But I discovered that when three sisters gather in their parents' old home, the very place where they grew up, without any husbands-- new blood-- to alter the dynamic, the old household is reborn, reconfigured. Being at home this time was like going back in time. I half thought that I would have go to school in the morning, or get chewed out for sneaking into my sister's room and stealing a squirt of her perfume. Lying in bed, I half expected to hear my sister's footsteps pounding up the front walk just before her curfew, and my dozing dad rousing from his arm chair like a grizzly bear in spring to unbolt the front door for her.

The five of us have not been all together in that house for fifteen years, and I didn't know when this special configuration, like a rare astronomical event, would happen again. I knew that we were long overdue for such a reunion. Of course, we have all seen each other separately along the way and gone home at different times. And of course, we all keep in touch and no one doubts anyone's love for the other. The rarity of this reunion was mainly due to geography, the care of small children, and limited funds. Both of my sisters married what my family calls "northern men," who caused them to settle in far flung locations. I married a so-called southern man but still landed rather unluckily in Northern Indiana--at least for the time being. But I knew as my grandmother's death approached, that finally something was happening that would have the power to draw us all back at the same time-- to cut through our busy schedules and limited budgets so that, at whatever price, we all had to buy a plane ticket for the same dates.

So the familiar voices of my family were bouncing around the living room one night and I felt compelled to join in. How do I describe such a conversation when it contains a world unto itself of contextual information? As I listened I tried to weigh my writing abilities and gauge whether or not I might one day be able to convert all of this family data into a novel, or even a short story. I'm not sure. It would be a huge project like nothing I've attempted. Families are so complicated, and mine is no exception. My mother kept a very basic family diary during the early years of our childhood. She wrote down the funny things that we said, major headlines in the news, when we were sick, and what we did. She brought these red hardback diaries out to the living room in a big stack and begged us to divide them up and take them home with us. I didn't have room in my suitcase, so my sisters took them and promised to pass them to me at some point in the future. We sat around reading some of the entries and laughing. Once when I was three I told my parents, "No one is making me happy."

I think my obsession with wanting to understand my family comes from being the youngest. Being born last is like walking into the middle of a movie and trying to figure out what is going on. You can't interrupt the flow to ask irritating questions (the youngest always gets labled as a pest), so you quiet down and become hyper-aware of clues in the dialogue as it progresses. This is what makes me want to write--hyper-awareness, and the feeling that I will never wrap my mind around the whole thing. But it is in my nature to stubbornly, ceaselessly try, because I will never believe myself to be caught up.

It seems fitting to me that I come from a city where everything constantly changes and develops-- Orlando. My old neighborhood, College Park, looks different every time I return. At my grandmother's funeral, I met my grandfather's old business partner, whose name I have heard many times but who I had never met before. He talked about how his family came to Orlando in the 1920s, and I told him he must have lived a very interesting life, witnessing such dramatic change in one place over so many years. He said it had been interesting "and wonderful, really." He seemed like a very sweet man, with watery blue eyes, and not a drop of cynicism. I would not have been able to span that many decades in Orlando, watching the touristy takeover, watching the urban sprawl, without calcifying into one large block of salty cynicism. So, this man rather mystified me, and confirmed my suspicion that my understanding of human nature is still insufficient for authoring fiction.

The photo above is of the grocery store that we always shopped at growing up-- Publix. It was not a stylish grocery store in my childhood, but has become so now. The owners remodled it but kept the retro neon sign. In my mind this Publix is somewhat iconic of my childhood. I don't think of myself as being old enough or interesting enough to have anything worthwhile to remember, but during this particular time with my family, I did feel like the content of my life was starting to feel, for the first time, expansive. The more change I witness, the more stories I watch circle to semi-completeness, the more things begin to make sense, and the more I long to tell them, write them. On a quick run to Publix one night, my sister and I bumped into a familiar face. She was the mother of our old babysitter Carol. Out of nowhere she said: I remember (speaking to me) the day you were born. I was shopping and ran into your two sister's being babysat by your dad's secretary. That was a long time ago." I responded that it was thirty years ago, to be exact. I can't explain why but it was nice to run into someone who remembered the day I was born.

the end of struggle

2008-02-05T21:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, my grandmother finally passed away. I say finally because our family was given countless false predictions over the course of the last few weeks that she would not live another hour, another night, and so on. But her organs, apparently engaged in a ninety-two year old habit of functioning, were more reluctant to shut down than even the most experienced hospice nurse could account for.

All week I was imagining them at work, laboring on the subconscious level of organs, yet attuned as ever in their long-established relationship of servitude to a steely will. She willed more time, and her organs gave it. They kept vigil, unlocked their dark room for her and cleared out a workspace. There, in the internal place behind eye-lids, I cannot help but imagine that, with or without the aid of lucid thoughts, she engaged in an intensive struggle on the foyer of death.

My parents would call and announce that hospice informed them she would not last through the night; this would be followed by a call the next day that she was breathing better than ever. Even while externally my life proceeded as usual last week, I was preoccupied with that internal room where I imagined my grandmother, her will, her organs, the angels, and also the demons, engaged in a final colloquium. It troubled me, and one night I got in bed with the chills, followed by two days of the common cold. Jeff had to go to school and I struggled during the worst part of my cold to care for Esme. At one point I resorted to an afternoon of lying on the couch watching Anne of Green Gables while Esme played on the floor. I wept inexplicably the entire way through, not just when Matthew Cuthbert dies. I knew I was really crying for my grandmother, and was relieved that I finally found my tears for her. I e-mailed my priest's wife and asked her to pray. I tried to pray too, but felt feeble. Her battle with the demons seemed close and immediate to me, and yet distant and barred from me all at once.

It seems inappropriate to use a birth analogy, but I felt as if my grandmother was almost laboring in her death-- in a particularly long and difficult labor. The remarkable length of time she took to die, past all medical norms, made it take on spiritual proportions, with spiritual complications. It began to feel like something quite tangled, as life is known to be, was demanding to be un-knotted through the honesty-with-self that is so painful. My grandmother had ninety-two years of entanglement with this life. I would think that some backlogging is inevitable in ninety-two years.

I know I have an active imagination, and perhaps a weird metaphysical bent. I am admittedly lugubrious at times. All of this reflection on my grandmother's death, this worry, this getting sick, this mind's eye picture of a demonic struggle worthy of a fourth century desert saint's deathbed, could be, in short, all in my head. It could be a deluded spiritualization of a natural process at best, or a projection of my own fears about life and death onto the death of my grandmother at worst. But it has made me wonder about what we are involved in through being born and possessing a body. It made me thankful for a spirituality that affirms constant honesty with oneself and disclosure of one's darkest self to another. I know for a fact that such a way was not provided or encouraged for my grandmother, either in our out of church, in all her faithful churchgoing life. In fact, I am certain that the opposite was endorsed at every turn-- keeping up with appearances. I suppose this was at the heart of my worry all last week.

Yesterday, my father called to tell me that he had re-assembled an old crib for Esme to sleep in and it looked great, and that Gogo had finally passed away at 2 p.m., in that order. I did and still do feel a shift into lightness; I do sense the end of struggle and the hope of overwhelming, canceling mercy. Saturday I will take a plane into gold sun and green fronds and seventy-seven degree days; Saturday I will take a plane to her funeral.

I took the above photo two winters ago in Florida.

always choose the tightrope, is what i say

2008-01-25T00:55:00.000-08:00

Whenever I read the humorous writings of my fellow bloggers (i.e. Ser, the Miles), I feel embarrassed of the serious nature of this blog. I seem to write strictly about struggles, punctuated by the occasional funeral. The truth is, I do dwell, mentally and emotionally, in sensitivity to human suffering. I've always leaned toward the melancholic, but my theological education then sealed the deal by immersing me for two years in the pastoral and theological and cosmic problem of suffering. Plus, it is just a tendency of Orthodox spirituality to keep the old dial of mirth turned to the lowest possible volume. Save the annual burst of unbridled joy at Pascha, rolling on the floor with laughter, drinking yourself silly, and otherwise ducking out of constant mindfulness of one's own sin and the horrible effects of sin in the world is not, as it were, recommended.

However, I am genetically inclined toward laughing-- hard. I come from a family of people who tend to laugh until they cry, and it took me a good many years and hard lessons in reality before I realized that there are people walking the surface of this earth who simply do not go in for that kind of laughter.

A once-heard scrap of hopefully scientific information which I have no reference for tells me that laughter and crying are physiologically similar. It makes me wonder if the melancholia and hilarity I can experience are, in fact, not that wide of an emotional range. One time, in church, while singing in choir, in fact, a friend and I started laughing so hard that she had to stand in a corner and I had to go sit down somewhere else until we gained control. A friend, a man who had once spent a lot of time living in St. Catherine's monastery on Mt. Sinai told us later that this often happens to monks in church. Perhaps it is a release of the nervous tension and seriousness born out of trying to live life correctly, trying to have a spiritual life, failing most of the time, of course, but relentlessly trying.

I'm not saying anything about my paltry spiritual life here. But the truth is, I do feel a sense of spiritual obligation to be attuned to all the ills of the world. Therefore when I listen to NPR and absorb the news about how polar bears are soon to be added to the endangered species list, the Netherlands are going to be underwater due to rising sea level, and the Midwest is running out of water and looking for ways to pump it in from the sea, I ponder, ponder, ponder. When I hear about the mother of a two-week old who was arrested because police determined that she caused the death of her baby, I take it pretty hard.

It's no wonder that I sometimes want to plunge into the world of little youtube boxes containing the comedic archives of Mystery Science Theater, the farting preacher, or A Bit of Fry and Laurie. I want to laugh, even if it may be not spiritaully recommended. Maybe what I really want is to cry. I can't be sure.

Oh NPR, how I both love and hate you. You spare my winter day from feeling as cooped as it could be, but you take my mind in a thousand directions that it is not smart enough to synthasize in a twenty-four hour period, REM sleep included. My toddler likes to dance to the snazzy scraps of music you play in between your programs. I keep listening dutifully to all the updates about the campaign trail(s)-- trails that swerve and crisscross, like the three-prong footed tracks of hyperactive sandpipers on the Florida beaches of my childhood. This is what I compare the pool of candidates too-- spastic sandpipers negotiating the frothy tide. And the more I follow their antics, imagining that the information will bring me closer to conclusion, the more the whole thing feels like an opaque concoction of rhetorical soup with too many cooks in the kitchen, NPR journalists included, however lovable their voices. Who can claim to see through all of that broth and decide who to vote for? And even if we vote "rightly," who's to say that another bullet fired in Dallas won't send the whole mess spiraling into a "political situation" none could forsee.

Well, this is why I like literature and hate politics. I think that politicians are crazy for thinking that they can weild one iota of control in the cosmos. They should be ashamed of themselves for the way they talk. And this is why my emotional duty is to sympathize anonymously and privately with the suffering things in the world, and also, probably, why I need to laugh really hard once in a while, even though I have no talent for writing comedy myself. Garrison Keeler, on the Writer's Almanac, quoted something from Edith Wharton the other day. She said that life is either a feather bed or a tightrope, and she preferred the tightrope. I think I do too, and yet, I am really looking forward to the spending spree that the government plans to dish out this spring to stimulate the economy. I guess we are all full of inconsistencies.

The picture above is one I took after being trapped indoors all day due to freezing temperatures. It doesn't relate to this post in any way, but I had already uploaded it and decided to leave it.

a small lake to swim across

2008-01-20T13:59:00.000-08:00

My sister called today to relay news about my grandmother. The hospice workers have said that she will probably not live past Tuesday. I did not feel emotional at this news for the usual reason-- because she is ninety-two and has not been doing well since her second stroke four years ago. She has languished a long time, giving me ample opportunity to adjust to the idea of her most real self already belonging to the past. Perhaps because she has not really been herself for so long I have already done some of the work necessary for securing her in the place of memory.

I held the phone while sitting on the arm rest of our futon, facing the open door of the bathroom. As my sister talked to me about flights and funeral arrangements and who would sleep in which room at my parents' house, my gaze fell trance-like onto the toothbrush holder, with its two adult and one baby toothbrush. It looked so very static, but oddly, like a symbol of my own binding entanglement with energy and all earthly cares. I learned that my grandmother has stopped drinking water and tried to imagine what state one would have to be in to no longer desperately desire water.

Even though this end has been long in coming, I still cannot process the dissolution of a ninety-two year old life, and all of its indescribable essence. Being too-much engaged in the thick of my own life, I am not sure I can properly ponder the ending of hers. I can only think about my own acquaintance with her essence--the sound of her voice, her gestures, or the tasteful way she decorated her home, which to me seemed like a grand extension of herself. Part of this was lost when she and my grandfather moved into a retirement village, and divided up a lot of their belongings among the family. Part was lost through strokes. I think about the loss of this and also of the stories she told over and over again, and how I'll never remember the details exactly right, and how, even though they reside as partial things in my brain, one day I will die and they will reside no where. That, most of all, is hard to think about.

Her father was a minister and founded Park Lake Presbyterian Church in Orlando, when Orlando was a small town, with pristine lakes. After church services, she and her sister would sometimes swim across the small lake between the church and their home instead of walking. She had a favorite story about involvement in a community play in which the entire cast started giggling uncontrollably and couldn't go on with their lines. I always pictured this in my head as a black and white movie. She had one sister and four brothers, and according to her account they all had big personalities and loads of talent. One of her brothers was nick-named "Curly," and apparently never tired of playing the piano and entertaining people for hours with his songs. Another brother was named Harry and became a surgeon in Nashville. Her sister was Elizabeth but went by "Ibby," and was my mom's favorite aunt, because she was an entertaining story teller and practical joker. I knew Aunt Ibby too and saw her right before she died, still crackling with personality. She collected early American antiques, ate out every single meal, and really was "a riot," as all the older members of my family dubbed it. But my grandmother, named Lucy, outlived all her siblings.

My grandmother went by Gogo to us. She was constantly quoting scripture, holding forth on table manners, and beckoning us to bring her a pair of scissors and stand close so she could remove a stray string hanging from the hem of our clothes. She rode a camel in Egypt and traveled all over the world with my grandfather as a tourist, even to India and Ecuador, at a time when the world was much bigger than it is now, but never carried her own luggage or voluntarily perspired. She always had certs, kleenex, and moist towelettes in her purse, and always wore very large, stylish, tortoise shell sunglasses. I actually remember the kind of face cream she used and that she had several unopened jars of it in a closet. She never cut and permed her hair like other women her age, but wore it up in a big gray bun, held in place with combs. When she would take her long hair down in the evening and brush it with a soft bristle brush in front of the grandchildren, we could not believe how much it made her look like a wicked witch, and actually told her that, but she did not take offense.

Her legacy is potent, with extreme weaknesses and also extremely lovable qualities flowing through it. She led a privileged life, with a maid, countless country club luncheons, vacations, a nice home, nice clothes, and a doting husband. Even now my grandfather has hired the very best hospice care he could for her at the end, and I picture him with one of those over-size checkbooks, freely writing out checks for her care throughout the course of their long marriage. But anyone close to her would perceive that she also suffered inside from unrealistically high standards and a binding, life-long perfectionism that would make anyone miserable. She also struggled with chronic headaches, nervousness, and depression. She was always taking different kinds of medicine.

Maybe it is not proper to write all of this down. It may only the perspective of a child, since that is the only perspective anyone can have of a grandparent. And if I wanted to go much further into detail, about anyone and everyone in my family, and the complex legacy they have handed me, I, like most people, would have to write a novel in which all of the characters "are entirely fictional have no relation to actual people whatsoever." In a literature class I took in graduate school we talked about how everyone has a village of people living inside of them. My grandmother is without a doubt a primary inhabitant in my own internal village. I hear her voice, her advice, her politics, her religion, her criticisms, and her goodness, her heart, and her suffering and best virtues and charms, all jangling around inside of me quite often. They also formed my mother, binding and repelling her by turns, and pass down to me in yet another, modified yet potent version.

For a long time I have lived far away from where Gogo lives and felt distant from her, despite the fact that I know she loves me and I love her. As of this moment, I feel peculiarly detatched from the reality of her death. But I hope to fly down to Orlando for her funeral, which will be at the church where her father was a minister, with stucco walls, a beautiful Spanish tile roof, and oak trees hung with Spanish moss--now a historic building on a busy street near downtown. The lake is still there too, though no one would want to swim in it. It will be difficult to go down with Esme, lugging her portable crib and all the rest, especially because she is in the process of weaning now, and I'm afraid she will regress when taken out of her familiar environment. This is not a time in my life when I want to travel. But it will be warm and green and I will see my sisters, all of my cousins, aunts, and uncles, who mostly all still live in Florida or the South, and who I rarely see anymore. I'm not sure how this trip will go, but I know that I am still young, and, despite all my talk of feeling tired and depleted most days, I still very much crave hydration, and life, my daily tooth-brushing, and in a pinch can always scrap together the necessary energy to make a trip. I hope I can be closer to my grandmother in death than I have been in life, especially in my adult life. I hope her funeral, where I will gather together with everyone who cares about her and holds her in their village too, will carve out that space I need to meditate upon and genuinely honor her ninety-two years.

(This is a photo of my grandparents at my wedding in August 2003.)