flakedoves

little histories emerge from obscurity, if they emerge

2011-11-29T09:00:00.000-08:00

I am thinking about the obscurity of my life and the desire to make it emerge into an intelligible story, for my own sake, struggle, and satisfaction.

I wonder if the gathering phase of my life will ever end. Perhaps when my children are no longer small and I can luxuriate in greater quantities of REM sleep, the production phase will commence. But the shards--the ones I have-- they are trying. And the shards I do not yet have are finding their way to me. Like magnets, they pull each to each, turning this way and that, righting themselves into general orderliness.

Over Thanksgiving in North Carolina, I borrowed a self-published memoir from my mom's cousin Tommy. It was written by the wife of my grandmother's younger brother, if that makes sense. She wrote a history of her own family and then, generously wrote a history of her husband's side of the family as well. She had all of this bound and printed into a handsome red book for her children and extended family members. While her telling naturally focused mostly on her husband Harry and not on my grandmother Lucy, it still provided far more information than I have ever had about my grandmother's family in general, her past in particular, and shed some light on things that had never occurred to me. I cried.

This combined with being in the cabin my grandparents built in 1954 and where I went on vacation every single summer of my childhood made me cry even more. I was seeing ghosts, hearing voices. In some ways I was getting to know my grandmother, who died in 2008, for the first time. I was seeing her as a real person, and a person who, I realize now, had, at times and in a deep way, in spite of limitations and the haze of outward appearances, truly seen me.

Reading the self-published memoir by what would technically be my great-aunt, and who seems to me a grand lady in the most old fashioned sense of the word, inspired wonderment. Had she not decided to write it down, all of that particular history, at least as she chose to tell it, would be lost. Obscurity is certainly the norm in this life, no matter how accomplished its participants may be. This is always hard to accept.

Wonderment or no, I'm not sure whether I will be the great lady in the family who writes down a straightforward account of what happened (hers was actually entitled, The Way Things Went). In The Way Things Went, there are characters who shine like statues at the town center. They are business entrepreneurs and doctors, nurses who were valedictorians at Vanderbilt. There are interesting anecdotes about the Second World War and the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement.

But between the lines are the lost children in the family. They are not the ones who sallied forth directly to Vanderbilt but who were perhaps unsure about where to go to college, and who forever dwell in the shadows of the outwardly oriented. They are not the ones whose picture was ever taken for the newspaper, but who nevertheless see and hear and perceive more than anyone in the family ever guesses or cares to acknowledge. The lost children are the least likely members of the family to be memorialized or eulogized. No one can say why but for all the achievements of their parents and siblings, these lost children are inheritors of a sense of futility and a loss of affect. Long ago, the lost children lost who they were and what they might create and, once created, how it might look. They are all ears and eyes. They sometimes neglect to call home. They excel at sitting and thinking. It looks as if they are doing nothing when internally they are hard at work. Because they are lost and internally hard at work, they sometimes forget to keep their own children close, and instead lose them, thereby continuing the inheritance of lostness. They are not central figures in the straightforward accounts of The Way Things Went.

But somewhere in the shade of a mountain cabin, forgotten at the end of a gravel road, in the niche between two mountain ridges, where the Presbyterians built their stone buildings and have held their assemblies for 100 years, and cottagers come in the summer and leave in the fall, in an attic with one lit bulb, where few cars are ever heard but where the rustle of leaves and streams waft in, the lost child, after collecting enough pieces to assemble something intelligible, might one day bring a little history out of obscurity--one that might sound familiar to her readers but which they had not in any way realized was familiar-- in her own beguiling way.

our neighborhood of strange privilege

2011-11-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

What holds loves power?
Not words, but simple action
One cloak winds round two.

By Hillel Weintraub

* * *

Georgetown is like a small town, swathed in a blanket of seeming safety, a relatively quiet residential pocket within a big city. When I take my girls to the parks in Georgetown, even after only a few months living here, we see the same familiar faces, including children who are in my daughter's kindergarten class. She tugs at my shirt and points to them, feeling shy for a moment, and then she overcomes her shyness and runs to greet them by name. On Halloween, while walking down the lovely brick sidewalk to go to a pumpkin carving party, a girl from her class appeared in her doorway, also preparing for trick-or-treating, and yelled, "Hi Esme," from across the street. Later the streets were full of trick-or-treaters and parents, moving about in a festive mood beneath the street lamps.

All of this feels very cozy considering that we only showed up here two months ago. And we will only stay for another seven or so. Every experience we have here is qualified by the knowledge that we are only here temporarily. The way we did Halloween this year will not be repeatable next Halloween. And then our experiences are colored slightly by the knowledge that we are not a very stable addition to the general rule of stability in a neighborhood like this one, student families being, after all, temporary by nature. Sometimes I wonder if our time at Notre Dame was only long enough to trick us into a feeling of stability before the inevitable whisking away.

Georgetown is very comfortable, and very privileged. Although Esme is now enrolled at the public elementary school a few cute blocks from our apartment, to me it may as well be a private school, so high are its standards. The principle knows each child by name, and the parents are very involved. They volunteer; they support the teacher and communicate with one another by email. I never remember anything like this happening once in my twelve years of middle-of-the-road public schools.

I well know we might as well be foreigners here with a visa hurling toward expiration, but still I wind up succumbing to a sensation of strange privilege. In spite of myself I am gaining insight into just what wealth can buy you, even while approaching all of this extravagance with sense of stand-offish skepticism. I feel the ease of life here drawing me in against my core of (relatively) anti-extravagant values. It is strange to think that we--so long accustomed to the simple life of graduate student realities in a cold-north, mid-west, slim-pickings town in Indiana-- are now sharing and enjoying the same neighborhood perks as senators and ambassadors, but entirely without the high-pressure life demanded by such careers. The mothers of Esme's classmates include heads of human resource departments for government agencies and litigation lawyers working for downtown firms. I know, because they were standing in front of and behind me in line for popcorn on the school yard during movie night.

And I must remember to RSVP for Esme's school fund raiser, which happens to be a soiree at the French Embassy with a silent auction. If I go, it may be only for the motive of curiosity. That and being able to say I went to a soiree at the French Embassy. Certainly, I won't be placing any bids at any auction.

I ask myself what I am doing here. Surprisingly, I don't feel terribly out of place, chatting with other parents at the beginning of the year school picnic, and so forth. I just feel that my own life trajectory would never in a million years lead me into the heart of this particular neighborhood, so the fact of being here feels strange and curious, as if I'm a novelist researching an unfamiliar lifestyle enclave for a book, pretending to be an insider.

Mostly I reflect on the fact that I am here without having earned, as my two year-old would say, "a spot." To earn the right to be here, to afford the real estate and the other costs that come bundled together with an address in Georgetown, you would either have to be an inheritor of this way of life, with a trail of private schools and European cars and nannies behind you and your mom and dad, or someone who has striven to attain to this way of life and attained it only by wanting it badly enough. That would be the person who had a fire in his or her belly to work his or her booty off as early as seventh grade in order to enter a college where he or she would work his or her booty off so that he or she might be ushered straight into a lifestyle of working his or her booty off for a lifetime. Then, and only then, the entire showcase would be his or hers!

But what occurs to me is that even here among the materially privileged, are the under-mothered, under-cloaked. There is childish road rage. Even tonight my husband came home from the Chipotle on M Street, telling a story of a woman dressed to the nines, screaming and cursing at the poor employee making her burrito because he made an error.

To be heir to a large metaphorical woolen cloak, a human cloak of love and nurture, pre-woven and ready for you to enjoy and pass on to yours, is to be a truly privileged human being. As far as I can tell, DC is filled with the materially privileged but the humanly disenfranchised, the improperly raised, the rude, the pushy, the driven-to-be-more-than-human, the type A, the emotionally abandoned child, the emotionally neglected child, the adult who is really the adult-child, dressed up in a suit.

Sometimes someone has to stop and blaze a trail into the immaterial; to devote their lives to preparing a human inheritance.

I have no career to speak of. Here I am just walking, sometimes by myself and sometimes with one or both of my daughters, through the brick sidewalks. I walk and walk in a different direction depending on the day, noticing loose bricks that need repair or gingko trees or embassies from African countries with ornate stonework, sometimes using my ten fingers like the knots of a prayer rope while gripping the handles of a stroller. I am not a nanny or a luxury car or an ambassador, but I am supposed to be here and I have a career. I am here to mother myself so that I can properly mother my children, to overwrite under-mothering, break generational cycles and chains of various and sundry sorts. I am trying for the risky, hard-labor approach, so that one talent might someday spring as if by magic into two, five, or ten.

No one can see how much energy this secret weaving work is taking below the surface. I am not patching; I am increasing something without seams in order to get it bigger. By right it must not have seams; it must only increase from the stuff that it is, the stuff that was handed to me, in order to adequately cover me and my children. Then, when that is done, it must get bigger yet. At least, I hope to wrap it toward my own aging mother, and then backwards (outwards?) in time toward her mother, my grandmother, who is no longer living. We say the names of the departed in prayer because they missed out on nurturing too. Sometimes their names are hard to say, because they wreaked so much havoc. This is why I know I have quite a bit of work to do.

My life, like the white streaks left by airplanes in the DC sky, will pass quietly through this neighborhood of hurried professionals. I suspect I will remember this time as a season of un-hurry. In our nation's capital, I am The Person Who Is Not In a Hurry. My career is to take my time, to observe and receive my own peculiar education, my eyes squinting in the sun, the sleeves of my shirt rolled up, even on a crisp, fall day. On a very lucky day you might even see me on the sunny porch of the National Gallery, tiny beneath the hyperbolic stone pillars, one of the few people there at mid-morning not wearing a school uniform. I an walking through an autumn of remarkable perfection and duration, and as I do I am working in more ways than one. My heart and my blood both go faster and warmer.

i need more grace than i thought

2011-09-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

Pale sunlight,
pale the wall

Love moves away.
The light changes.

I need more grace
than I thought

A fragment from the poem Dissolver of Sugar, by Rumi

* * *

Attempt at a blog post, written 9-19-11, never finished:

We've moved!

And five years ago today, I gave birth to a baby girl. When you become a mother and hold a nursing infant in your arms, the thing that is clear is that you are the world to that infant. It seems strange to me that now, five years later, under the circumstances of having moved to a completely unfamiliar place, I have, in a sense, become the entire world to Esme again. Only now, this is not an agreeable situation for either of us. This morning, when I was trying to explain that, if she really wanted to go to the park, or do anything else outside of this apartment, she would need to put on some "real" clothes--or at least a pair of pants-- over her ballerina outfit, she shouted angrily: "I am thinking NOT what you're thinking!"

You and Yahweh both, Esme.

She has also taken to slamming doors.

Our furnished apartment, the one that comes part and parcel with Jeff's fellowship, is in a gorgeous neighborhood, for sure. It is the opposite of South Bend, Indiana; it is the opposite of the rust belt. Architectural beauty, colonial elegance guards the mossy brick sidewalks. A linear chain of luxury cars choke the clean, narrow streets. The playground just around the corner from our building, is almost a work of art. There is no plastic on this playground; the one slide is metal. There is a circle of graceful iron ponies that go around on a platform. The monkey bars arch just so, visually balancing the other play structures. Children with bows in their hair are with attentive nannies, or with their mothers chatting about the trials of redecorating their homes and working with contractors. The few dads seems to have just come from whatever very-white collar job allows them to live in such a place, with such cars, and such houses, and such a park.

So having an address in Georgetown, at least after one week, has so far transported me to a sort of Twilight Zone. I had so many visions of getting out for adventures all around the city, but so far the victorious adventures have been such things as: finding a Goodwill; finding a Target; finding the Trader Joe's; finding the other, regular grocery store (which is really not that regular, by Midwestern standards).

What I am feeling most right now is that my children's world-- the one where they moved with confidence and a sense of belonging and ease of owndership-- all disappeared in a big poof. In their minds, we are in a place where there really is little else besides their parents to define the world. For a two year old, suddenly being without her crib (we've transitioned her to twin bed with a rail since moving here) and no rocking chair (we were not able to bring any furniture) might feel like having landed on the moon. And being a family of four, stranded on the moon, I've found, is exhausting.

The picture above shows how very exhausting our moving week was, but it was exhausting in a different way. I was emotionally almost completely numb by the time we turned in the key to our apartment simply because I had been running on adrenaline and working so very hard. I think we were quite literally one entire day behind schedule, but somehow still did everything that needed to be done, including those horrible tasks like cleaning the oven (after, um, four Thanksgivings of not cleaning it) and leaving the apartment vacuumed and mopped and then making that final trip to the storage unit to drop off the said vacuum. Needless to say, our girls were not getting a whole lot of our attention in those final days leading up to our departure, but yet how they moved about in our little community with ease while Jeff and I were completely preoccupied and running on adrenaline. Trusted friends were watching over them. They were upheld by our little world, going from the house of one friend to another, and in Esme's case, just running outside into the tribe of children where she held a certain kind of office, sharing power, of course, with many others of the tribe. I think that moving week was fun for her because the normal structures of daily life were so slackened and she was given a week of freedom to play more and move about in a way more unmonitored than she has ever done in her nearly five years of life.

The move was exhausting work. But if I thought I was going to recover as soon as arrived here, I was wrong. Our first week here just put us on track for a different kind of exhaustion.

There has been a certain anger, sadness, and frustration hanging over us since moving in. Of course, it's partly due to things like discovering that we have no cell phone reception in our apartment, which adds to the feeling of isolation and adds another thing on the to-do list of getting settled in. But anger and sadness are just stages of that old time grief process, and this, I think, is what's really going on. And while Jeff and I can at least articulate these feelings to each other or to friends or to ourselves, in a journal, our girls can only feel these things inarticulately and lash out and act out and go from clingy, or affectionate, or defiant, or furious faster than the BMWs parked in front of our building. And whether I like it or not, they reign over my world in such a way as to almost completely level the entire city of our nation's capital so that, going through the mundane needs of each day with them and the logistics of getting anywhere with both of them, I might as well be stuck in a little farmhouse in the middle of a cornfield in Indiana. But at least there Esme could run out barefoot.

For the time being, until our world starts filling in with new people and the warmth of repetition and pattern, until the landscape starts filling in around us with known routes and worn paths, a family with little children seems to be a world unto itself. When we were going through the work of moving, I could not have anticipated how much harder it would be logistically with two little children, since I've never moved before with two little children. And now that we are here, I realize the degree to which I could never have imagined what it would be like to transition here with them.

Postscript, written 9-26-11

Things are getting better. I'll post again soon when Elsa's dankie (blanket) is out of the dryer and we are less in crisis, and I have been able to at last visit the National Gallery.

a good summer poem, now that summer is here

2011-06-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

The Humming-birds

by Amy Lowell

Up--up--water shooting,
Jet of water, white and silver,
Tinkling with the morning sun-bells.
Red as sun-blood, whizz of fire,
Shock of fire-spray and water.
it is the humming-birds flying against the stream of the
       fountain.
The trumpet-vine bursts into a scatter of humming-
       birds,
The scarlet-throated trumpet flowers explode with
       humming-birds.
The fountain waits to toss them diamonds.
I clasp my hands over my heart
Which will not let loose its humming-birds,
Which will not break to green and ruby,
Which will not let its wings touch air.
Pound and hammer me with irons,
Crack me so that flame can enter,
Pull me open, loose the thunder
Of wings within me.
Leave me wrecked and consoled
A maker of humming-birds
Who dare bathe in leaping water.

* * *

This week both of my girls had a virus of some sort. It was mild and the accompanying fever only lasted for about one day and one night. I think it came to Esme because she has been spending so much time outside in the kind of heat and sun that her body could in no way be accustomed to after the long, chilly spring we've had. So I kept her indoors all day and have been more conscious about just sending her outside to play all day with no limits.

Elsa's symptoms were less severe, but being smaller, she slept a lot during the day, whereas Esme stayed awake all day but went to bed earlier than usual. So it happened that early in the evening on Monday I had a sleeping Esme, and a dozing Jeff on the futon (because he was also fighting a cold), but at the same time a waking two year-old who had been asleep much of the day, had no fever, seemed refreshed, and would certainly not want to go to bed again for at least a few more hours. I wasn't sure what to do in our tiny apartment with a wakeful toddler and most of the other rooms with curtains drawn to keep out sun and heat, all dozey with convalescing family members. I did not feel like being inside such an apartment for one minute, wishing angrily that the day were on its normal schedule and that all child rearing duties were behind me, when it wasn't, and they weren't. So, I went outside and put Elsa in the baby bike seat, and we took off into the glowing summer evening, toward campus.

In the cooler part of the day, riding my bike to campus among all the wide open grassy spaces and tree-lined walkways, I felt like a lucky person--lucky to be in that very place at that particular moment, even lucky to be breaking from the routine of a normal day with children. Because how often is it that I get to sneak out of the house with just my youngest chickadee and go for an evening bike ride?

I rode across Notre Dame campus to the bookstore, and parked the bike. Elsa and I went inside and I stationed myself on a leather sofa near the poetry section. A lucky coincidence of the Notre Dame bookstore is that the poetry section is right next to the children's books, with a comfy sofa right in between. So Elsa was fairly happy too, organizing and stacking some board books at a child-sized table, while I picked up a book of Amy Lowell's poetry and read the introduction, which told about her life and her work. Elsa behaved so well and at one point even leaned against me and sucked her fingers, so that I was able to read all but the last page of the introduction, because at that point a staff member asked me if I knew that the bookstore closed at 9:00. So at two hours past Elsa's normal bedtime, we went out into the warm evening and a bookstore employee locked the door behind us. It was strange to read about her privileged, unconventional, artistic, and unhappy life in aristocratic Boston society in the 1920s, and then ride out into a lazy, Midwestern college campus in summer, at dusk, back to our little student apartment, where the rickety, singular AC unit was running and Jeff was still catatonic on the futon and everything was a mess with crumbs from dinner and kids' things spread around. But I think I pedaled a little more slowly toward home, because I wanted to feel grateful for all of it. And the ride accomplished it's purpose beautifully: Elsa went right back to bed.

I have also been reading Letters of a Woman Homesteader, a book of letters written by a woman in Wyoming in the early 1900s. It almost gives me literary whiplash to think of the tortured Amy Lowell in Boston, composing furtive poems nightly from midnight to dawn, and her good-humored unknown-to-her contemporary, Elinore Pruitt Stewart, out homesteading in Wyoming, waking at dawn to start her work, with colorful neighbors out in the woods named Zebulon, and "critters" and "beasties," and her highly sensible second marriage to an equally hardworking neighbor-man, and an overall upbeat attitude toward life-- whether while drinking coffee next to a campfire on a mountaintop, or getting caught in a snowdrift twenty miles from home.

So, I accept my life, not because it is objectively better or worse than any other, in all its hundreds of particulars, but because by training myself to accept-- not fight, not force-- I might quietly release a hummingbird here and there. I might contribute something to the splendor of difference that exists in the world.

a quality of loss

2011-05-18T06:42:00.000-07:00

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period--
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay--

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament

by Emily Dickinson

* * *

It has been a very parsimonious spring this year-- the most stingy I can remember in six years of life in Indiana. Today is dense and overcast, damp, with more rain predicted, and chilly. It is not May outside, but March all over again. I think nature produced a surplus of these days this year and is still trying to get rid of them--dole them out with a few nice days interspersed, hoping that no one will notice.

And this morning my children have been so fussy, fussy, fussy. I have decided that the sound of a fussing, whining child should be harnessed as a weapon, because I am confident that it could cripple a small country or at least debilitate a city. Citizens would forget what it was they were supposed to be doing, cover their ears, and then turn against one another and get into a street brawl. The sound of fussing feels like an electrical storm happening in my brain. I cannot organize my thoughts or make a rational move toward getting anything done.

This morning I finally, with some forceful resolve, stuck the two year-old back into her crib at about 9:15 and sent the four year-old outside onto the playground--although, of course, no other children are out there due to the damp chill. But she seems content, playing in the sandy puddles that sit at the base of the green plastic slides. I'll have to completely change her clothes when she comes in. Her pre-school will host an end-of-the-year picnic today at noon for all the families.

I'm not complaining, only indulging in a temporary loss of perspective. At some point, that impossible-to-pin-down light will appear again and shine on everything, transforming the way it looks and the way I see it-- both.

it was embittered

2011-04-27T08:50:00.000-07:00

This fragment from the Amy Clampitt poem On the Disadvantages of Central Heating keeps going through my head this spring over and over and over again like a scratched record:

...of nothing / quite drying out till next summer...of nothing / quite drying out till next summer...of nothing / quite drying out till next summer...of nothing / quite drying out till next summer [repeat]

Today I was supposed to be out working on our community strawberry patch-- weeding and helping to repair the fence with the others who are involved. But the rain is falling so heavily, as it has been on and off relentlessly for what seems like weeks, that this was not possible. Only coffee and supervising the indoor antics of two small girls was possible, not unlike the possibilities presented by a day in January. I cannot remember a spring of such relentless rain and wetness.

I will not post the Clampitt poem again because I already used it once for Poetry Wednesday last year. Also, I can choose to disregard the weather today in favor of a more confessional, unseen brightness, which the weather will just have to catch up with, and surely will. "It was embittered, it was embittered, it was embittered," is another fragment on audio loop in my head since hearing the Paschal homily of St. John Chrysostom early, early Easter morning. Why these phrases circulate in my head like overalls clanking in a dryer, I do not know. But certainly, I don't mind. I love the sounds-of-the-words knocking around between my two ears. It is Bright Week, and why?

Hades was embittered when it encountered Thee in the lower regions.
It was embittered, for it was abolished!
It was embittered, for it was mocked!
It was embittered, for it was purged!
It was embittered, for it was despoiled!
It was embittered, for it was bound in chains!
It took a body and came upon God!
It took earth and encountered Ηeaven!
It took what it saw, but crumbled before what it had not seen!

leaning back against the weight of lifting them

2011-04-20T10:12:00.000-07:00

Into Hell and Out Again

By Scott Cairns

In this Byzantine-inflected icon
of the Resurrection, the murdered Christ
is still in Hell, the chief issue being

that this Resurrection is of our aged
parents and all their poor relations. We
find Him as we might expect, radiant

in spotless white, standing straight, but leaning
back against the weight of lifting them. Long
tradition has Him standing upon two

crossed boards--the very gates of Hell--and He,
by standing thus, has undone Death by Death,
we say, and saying nearly apprehend.

This all--the lifting of the dead, the death
of Death, His stretching here between two realms--
looks like real work, necessary, not pleasant

but almost matter-of-factly undertaken.
We witness here a little sheepishness
which death has taught both Mom and Dad; they reach

Christ's proffered hands and everything about
their affect speaks centuries of drowning
in that abysmal crypt. Are they quite awake?

Odd--motionless as they must be in our
tableau outside of Time, we almost see
their hurry. And isn't that their shame

which falls away? They have yet to enter bliss,
but they rise up, eager and a little shocked
to find their bodies capable of this.

* * *

For a long time I've mistakenly believed that it was my job to bring that internal village of disparate people--the one that supposedly lives inside of everyone-- into harmony. Until I accomplish this, I thought, until I reunite them, make them come and cooperate and sit down for just one meal at the same long table within the rambling house of my thoughts, I would finally feel settled in my own identity. But no one cooperates. Some dress in a suit and arrive early while others forget and are found wandering the opposite way in rags. The meditation on my family is ever-broken. There are too many of them and they are too different--rough-hewn and delicate, serious and humorous, engaged and withdrawn. If I had more information and if someone, long ago, had only thought to put numbers on the pages, I could order them into an image of my own face.

If there is a reason why this project is discouraging, it may be because it is not possible. I can know the things I know. Sometimes I can know new things, if I ask new questions to someone who might be able to answer them. That has happened. Sometimes I can know old knowledge in a new way, all of the sudden. That has also happened. But I cannot take what I know about my family and use it like ingredients, as when cooking without a recipe, experimenting until I find the perfect blend that is the real me, based on some mixture of them, or some old message I heard from one of them or another.

A far more possible, reasonable, and even enjoyable task, even when it involves something like work, is to bring myself into harmony with myself--that one who has always been present to me and, however uncooperative, is far more cooperative than anyone else in the village.

So I can let my relatives--living and departed--go. I can light a candle for them. I can bless them while I look at their photographs. I can look at the resurrection icon and put them there, in the place of Adam and Eve.

the summertime is coming

2011-04-13T10:00:00.001-07:00

Blooming Heather

Oh, the summertime is coming
and the trees are sweetly blooming
and the wild mountain thyme
grows around the blooming heather
Will ye go, lassie, go?

And we'll all go together
To pick wild mountain thyme
All around the blooming heather
Will ye go, lassie, go?

I will build my love a bower
Near yon pure crystal fountain
And on it I will pile
All the flowers of the mountain
Will ye go, lassie, go?

And we'll all go together
To pick wild mountain thyme
All around the bloomin' heather
Will ye go, lassie, go?

If my true love she won't come
I would surely find another
Where the wild mountain thyme
Grows around the blooming heather
Will ye go, lassie, go?

* * *
I am growing vegetables from seeds inside our apartment this spring. It took some time, but all my seeds eventually germinated. According to the "gardening by the moon" section of the Farmer's Almanac online, I planted them on a "dead day," a day best for burning or knocking down fences, or something or other--not a good day for planting one bit, apparently. "Seeds tend to rot in the ground," it said. I have no idea what it means to garden according to the moon, or whether there is the tiniest bit of validity to that idea, or if it's along the same lines as the daily horoscope, but I suppose my imagination finds it compelling, and so, try as I might to blow off this silly superstition, I was concerned for my tiny seeds. The week in which I poked them in the soil did seem unseasonably chilly, overcast, and bleak.

I planted broccoli, tomato, and eggplant for my first round of seedlings, per the advice of an Indiana based seed company. Germination took longer than what my gardening book said it should, but at long last, all the seeds sprouted. What I found interesting was that the broccoli seeds all germinated together, very promptly, within the same two-day period, and likewise the tomato a little later, all together, after I had given way to discouragement. Then after many more days, when I thought for sure they had "rotted in the ground," the eggplant seeds all poked through, each with two leaves that folded out from each other like a heart.

Lent is nearing the final stretch. Next week will be Holy Week. Holy Monday is Elsa's second birthday. I am unsure about how to celebrate on such a day. Any other time in Lent I'd happily break the fast for a child's birthday party, but Holy Monday feels like a different case. I think we are going to have some sort of special breakfast in the morning as a family, and let her open a few presents. It may be just the boost we need to begin a notoriously challenging week. Even if I don't make it to church with the girls at all, Jeff, a deacon, after all, will be in church most every evening, so it is going to be interesting. I don't know how wives of priests manage this or any other time of year, honestly. But on Bright Monday, we will have arrived, so to speak, and can think about the fact that Elsa is really two. We'll have a real butter and egg cake with candles, balloons, wine, and friends outside, where, hopefully, it will be literally bright and I can just pass out in the grass if I feel like it.

I am reading a book called The Education of the Child, by Rudolph Steiner. His philosophy inspired the Waldorf method of education. It's a collection of lectures he gave from the years 1906-1911. It is full of ideas and terms that, while not familiar to me, I can only categorize as metaphysical or New Age, like astral body, sentient body, and etheric body to describe the non-physical make-up of a human being. I am reading it with a sense of detachment, yes sir. Yet I am reading it eagerly and learning so much. Here's an example of one beautiful passage:

"At this time [ages 7-14] in childhood all perception must be spiritual. We should not be satisfied, for example, with presenting a plant, a seed, a flower to children, only as it is perceived with the senses. Everything should become a parable of the spiritual. In a grain of corn there is far more than meets the eye. There is a whole new plant invisible within it. Children must comprehend in a living way with their feeling and imagination that something like a seed has more within it than is sense-perceptible. They must divine through feeling the secrets of existence."

Again and again he points to the fact that there are hidden realities in the world, and that the job of the educator is to awaken a sense of this in children, in direct contrast to the very materialistic approach that is normal in mainstream education, which completely denies the hidden realities of life. I like and agree with so much of this.

The only thing about the book that causes me distress is, oddly, not the talk of a second and third spiritual birth, and so forth. That I can receive as merely a helpful analogy for child development, if I choose. What disturbs me is that he repeatedly warns that if children do not receive certain things during these critical time periods which he delineates, such children will never be able to make up for it in adulthood. He says this more than once, in more than one way, driving it home firmly. This is where I lose my supposed composure as a detached reader and start asking: In what ways am I permanently damaging my own children, even now, irreparably, by failing to give them this or that? And then: In what ways am I myself a permanently damaged adult?

I can experience these questions as horrifying. And I know from experience that fear is simply no good for me as a parent, or as a human being, for that matter. Someone just forwarded methis wonderful quote from Thomas Merton's, Seasons of Celebration: “One of the things we must cast out first of all is fear. Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.”

What quiets my fear in this case is to look at my icon corner and remember that--whatever Rudolf Steiner says or fails to say--as adults, we can nurture ourselves and be nurtured by others. Any given day we bring ourselves out of isolation and find something that we need. I am not saying that we will be what we might have been had we received something different at age ten. That is a precise story that will never be told. But we have the raw materials available to us in the present to become who we are, from this time forth, meant to become.

I have to believe that if I cannot find and replace every little tile that went missing or got busted out of the mosaic picture of my childhood, or that even if the mosaic never really came together according to a lovely vision, or worse, is the product of a botched vision, there is still abundant mercy available to me. And I can take the tiles I have, add to them, and rearrange them into another beautiful--if altogether different--kind of picture.

I have been listening to this old Scottish folk song above (but a really beautiful, recent version by Kate Rusby) over and over again recently, and singing it to my children before bed. This song can take on eschatological proportions for me and it occurred to me to connect it to the Bridegroom Services of Holy Week, in which we are being invited to attend a wedding feast for which we are unprepared and, for shame, cannot even imagine attending because we have no wedding garment. But in the end, the wedding garment is provided.

Poetry Wednesday

how to complicate even the life of a lily

2011-04-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

Lilies

by Mary Oliver

I have been thinking
about living
like the lilies
that blow in the fields.

They rise and fall
in the wedge of the wind,
and have no shelter
from the tongues of the cattle,

and have no closets or cupboards,
and have no legs.
Still I would like to be
as wonderful

as that old idea.
But if I were a lily
I think I would wait all day
for the green face

of the hummingbird
to touch me.
What I mean is,
could I forget myself

even in those feathery fields?
When van Gogh
preached to the poor
of course he wanted to save someone--

most of all himself.
He wasn't a lily,
and wandering through the bright fields
only gave him more ideas

it would take his life to solve.
I think I will always be lonely
in the world, where the cattle
graze like a black and white river,

where the ravishing lilies
melt, without protest, on their tongues--
where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss,
just rises and floats away.

* * *

All the time I think about moving toward a simpler life. Then, a simple task comes up like shopping for new and much-needed warm-weather pajamas for my girls, and before I know it I have complicated the task to a dizzying extent. First I will look at the rack of the consignment store. I can't bring myself to settle for something pilled or adorned with snowflakes out of season. So I take the time at Target to shift through whatever cheaply made Tinker Bell crap is hanging on the racks of the girls clothing section and still can't commit--partially on the grounds of aesthetics and partially on the grounds of principle. Oh yes, I have many ideas which are going to save others and myself and, conveniently, take me a lifetime to solve. Finally I will turn to the sale section on the Land's End or Sierra Trading Post websites, seeking something that isn't florescent, with peace symbols, or made from fabric that feels as if it will shrivel at first contact with a dryer, and remotely affordable on a student budget. Four or five online stores later, I decide that my very soul is flagging from time spent on an unsatisfactory quest for something that is not of ultimate importance in the long run.

Then, quicker than lightening, it occurs to me to check out retailmenot.com to see if there are any coupon codes for free shipping at the sites I've visited. Surely this will help me arrive at something. The chalky, swirly, pajama-shopping equation on the blackboard of my mind must elongate and take on a dragon-like life of its own before it finally spits out a solution. Then I enter in our billing and shipping information, feeling little satisfaction and wondering faintly if I will only grow to resent these cute pajamas on the first day that they get dragged out of the closet, along with a dozen other things, and left on the floor of the living room, by my girls, playing dress-up, as I think: "They have too much; we have too much. For all of my talk of a student's budget, our lives are beset with too many nice things, a thousand overly nice and unnecessary things, which I resent having to constantly gather and regather and wash and dry and fold and put away." It doesn't help that I just finished reading The Poisonwood Bible, in which, the five year-old girl in the American missionary family observes something like: "Everyone here [in the remote Congolese village] has just one clothes."

This is a dramatization. And yet it is one that embarrasses me because it is also, well, true. But I have to believe I am not entirely alone in my periodic stumbling into the miasma of choice in a choice-galore land. I don't even really care that much about which pajamas I ultimately grab from the drawer and dunk over the heads of my girls at bedtime, as long as they are clean and will keep them from the extremes of hot or cold during the night, but somehow the process begins with a perceived need, and then it goes from there, taking on exaggerated proportions. "For all her household is clothed with scarlet." I couldn't be more invested if I were shopping for my own tombstone. And maybe, if I'm being honest, I like getting sucked in for the numbing, time-killing benefits it provides. Maybe I should just put Jeff in charge of the girls clothes. He would never, ever waste so much time, and would probably buy the Tinker Bell on the spot. Then the girls would be happier, and I would be free.

I don't think this is what the Mary Oliver poem is about, exactly. It is about desire in general. I hardly think the warm-breasted hummingbird, desire of the lily, is an analogy for internet shopping. But I can relate in general to a somewhat cynical view that would say: sure, I could become a lily of the field, and still find a way to complicate my career as lily with some preoccupation or another--ranging from the most noble of yearnings to the most base. That's all I'm saying. Lord, have mercy.

the abandon of birds

2011-03-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

What We Need Is Here

By Wendell Berry

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for a new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

* * *

My stainless steel teapot is getting a lot of use these days. It sits next to me like a convex mirror that surprises me sometimes with an appealing picture of myself and the room around me. I and the room appear unfamiliar in the warped reflection; we are somehow more grand, colorful, and illuminated, as if the girl with black hair having tea with bookshelves behind her is a more interesting girl living in a more appealing apartment, and living a more interesting life, a life I might want to step into, or watch as a favorite TV series. But truthfully, I know that the teapot is only showing me myself and the place where I live, and maybe if I could see it differently, as from the eyes of an unrelated third party, I would know it to be just as appealing, interesting, and lucky, a place I might want to step into, if I were not already here.

Last Friday I attended a lecture on campus. It was on Eudora Welty's use of deaf characters in her short stories. It was very interesting and wove together several different disciplines, including one I had never heard of before-- disability studies. The speaker made me give some thought to the idea of what it would be to be deaf and all but exempt from the burden of the responsibility of silence, the sticky interactions that fetter the world of the hearing and the speaking, the choices that must be made around speaking.

I walked home from the talk in the brisk March weather feeling as high as a kite and full of ideas. But it wasn't long before my thoughts began to sabotage my good mood. "It was so nice to sit in on a lecture again, so nice to be with others who are thinking about literature and discussing it." And I couldn't just accept the one gift of having been to the one lecture. I wanted to imagine that I was somehow deprived because I never went on to be a graduate student in literature. And I imagined that I am now somehow deprived because I cannot click my heels and enter a graduate program this year, or next, or maybe even the next. My thoughts were spinning around this idea I revisit every so often: the Idea of Myself as Student. This famous idea puts me into a tailspin. I oscillate between resenting my life as it was and is and panicking over what it could become. Then I get into the grandiose, followed by the dejected. I get nowhere and unhappy.

This time I did not let it go very far. I threw no understated adult version of the child-tantrum, good only for making myself and those around me unhappy. I tried to get to that place of abandon that Wendell Berry describes-- the ancient faith, accessible to the tiny apparatus of the bird brain, yet elusive to my much larger, human brain. I had just gone to a literary lecture and been inspired by it, and it was a gift of unknown and yet-to-be-known value, and I would let it hang there just like that, in silence, let it slide into the pocket of the unknown. Right now there is no avenue for me to be a student again, and therefore I can arrest the thoughts that go backward around this non-issue, as well as the ones that go forward around this non-issue. I asked myself if I was interested in forcing anything to become a reality in my life, and decided that, no, I am not the least bit interested in forcing anything to become a reality in my life. Force is for the birds, I would say, except it actually is not for the birds. Force, juking and jiving, are for the godless race, setting their clocks an hour forward or an hour backward twice a year, living by the allure of the almost-true but slightly skewed reflection. No, abandon and the faithful flapping of wings is of and for the birds, and works well for them: they arrive at the place where they need to be at the time when they need to be there.

Poetry Wednesday

the week in which i lost track of time because of a book

2011-02-25T08:27:00.000-08:00

The Slow Man

by Allan Ahlberg

The phone rings
But never long enough
For the Slow Man.

By the time
The set's switched on
His favourite programme's over.

His tea grows cold
From cup to lip.
His soup evaporates.

He laughs, eventually
At jokes long since
Gone out of fashion.

Sell-by dates,
And limited special offers
Defeat him.

He comes home
With yesterday's paper
And reads it...tomorrow.

* * *

I missed Poetry Wednesday this week and I wonder if anyone will read my post two days later, on a Friday.

I had every intention of posting something on Wednesday, but I had a day of disorientation in which I lost track of which day it was. This happened because I was completely engrossed in a book. Ironically, the book that had me suspended in an abstract mode, pondering ideas around the topic of time--pacing, simplicity, and spareness--was the same book which was so absorbing that I temporarily lost touch with which day of the week it was, for several days. This translated into several incidents of tardiness this week, as in the case of this post.

Thankfully I finished the book and have rejoined the realm of real time. No one would guess that the book that blew me out of touch with my surroundings this week was a parenting book. I was scrolling through my last ten or so blog posts recently and was a little dismayed at how repetitious they were. Every post seems to contain something about the trials of being home with small children, without any insight or progress or hope of a way of to make things more peaceful, more productive, or smooth. Deep within me, a voice has been saying: I need to read something. I need to find a book. I need some kind of extraordinary advice. But I don't need just any book-- a book that will cause me to feel discouraged or annoyed by presenting me with a vision of family life that is somehow deeply admirable and yet untenable.

When Esme was two and I was desperate for some advice on discipline, I read a book like that. It was by a married couple who, though not Amish, raised a large family in the country near an Amish community, emulating Amish child-rearing practices. The final product sounded wonderful: children who would listen and obey even the smallest verbal cue from their parents; children who help in and around the house and share in all responsibilities; children who are courteous and aware of the adult world, with an innate sense of what is appropriate and not appropriate.

It sounded wonderful, and yet, somehow out of my reach. I felt as if I would have to go backward in time and marry an Amish and/or countrified Grizzly Adams species of man, and reconcile myself to highly specialized gender roles, etc., in order to grow a crop of children like this. I adopted some of its advice, but most of it fell away and left me with a residual feeling of lousiness. My heart has been a little wary of parenting books ever since, and yet silently crying out for something. I really believe that there is a promise attached to seeking and knocking. That is, if you seek and knock, you will find. I don't mean that I conducted exhaustive searches on Amazon. I mean that my heart was yearning for a solution. At last, it came to me. I found a book on accident through an only obliquely related google search. I actually did a search for something like "streamlining a child's wardrobe," because I have been a little overwhelmed with the girls' clothes lately and thought that it might help to see a list of some sort showing a basic guideline for making things simpler. The truth is that streamlining and prioritizing and decision-making amidst lots of choices is not my strength. Every now and then I break down and start hunting for some help. What came up was a link to Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids, by Kim John Payne. I clicked on the link and after just a few minutes looking at the description and reviews, ordered it. If books can come to you straight from God, this one came to me straight from God.

Oh, the book is so good. I want to quote it and quote it and quote it. Instead, I will just simply say that I have already made several changes in our home based on this book, and already seen major improvements all around. Right now I am able to sit down and write this post because Esme is engaged in deep, intense, imaginary play, staging a wedding between two stuffed dogs, with a care bear acting as priest. Right before that she was a pirate, using a cylindrical wooden block as a telescope. I'm not kidding. She has come up to me a few times for a little help with this or that, but other than that, she's been happy and independent. This is our third day without her using videos as a crutch to get through the day. For quite a while we have been going in a direction I did not like, but did not know how to stop. It is a terrible feeling when your parenting style is slipping away from the grip of your deepest values and instincts. And so, I was so relieved to find a book advocating on behalf of my deepest values and instincts, and also showing me how to flesh them out in real life, and not be barraged by all the forces that would carry me away in the opposite direction.

I went to work right away while reading this book. I simplified their toys. I simplified their books. I am now even avoiding verbal clutter-- simplifying the way I speak to them. The verbal simplification is perhaps the most difficult of all, but I am grateful that the book made me aware of this, just in time for Lent. My children are so clearly more responsive when I speak less. Who knew that they did not need me to explain everything to them six times, in six different ways? I am also slowing down and bringing Esme up into my world. This is hard for me to do. I have resisted it in the past. My psyche has never harbored dreams of a mama's little helper by my side. But I notice that when I let her drag a chair up to where I am doing dishes, or where I am putting clothes into the washing machine, or let her push the buttons on the phone when I need to dial a number, or whatever, the task takes longer, but the day goes more smoothly because she is more content and the two of us are sharing the same world. Out of this connection, discipline flows easily and becomes almost a non-issue. We are doing life together, and when you are doing life together, you are on the same team, and it does not behoove people on the same team to be at odds with each other for the sake of being at odds with each other. It appears that even a four year-old feels the truth of this. But to be on the same team as a child, adults have to slow down, and with the world of adulthood going faster and faster, this takes some conscious effort.

There is a lot to this book--a hundred facets I cannot enumerate. I have a feeling that some of the more minor points in the book may turn out to be the ones that have the most profound impact on me. It is rich and profound, a voice of sanity in an insane world. I am not going to review it or summarize it here. In the spirit of simplicity, I will only say that this book is a gift which seemed to come to me at exactly the right time, and I believe that this book will be a gift for many other people, and I am very grateful that it was written.

you are not meditating

2011-02-16T07:00:00.000-08:00

First Lesson

By James Tate

This is a meditation:
a snake with legs,
a one-legged snake,
a snake with wings,
a one-winged snake,
a rat with sparks,
a fiery rat,
a rat that sings,
a star rat,
a horse that explodes,
an atomic horse,
a horse that melts,
an ice horse,
a bee that flies through concrete,
a pneumatic bee,
a bee that lifts buildings,
the world's strongest bee,
a tree that eats the noses off children,
a bad tree,
a tree that grows inward until it is a dot,
a hill of dots that eats lots of children
(you are not meditating).

* * *

Lately I have been through some rough patches with my four year-old. I often feel like a very uptight person in her presence. She is forever chasing the butterflies of her mind while I am trying to get each of her five uncooperative fingers into the right slot of her gloves. She is running to the window to see what made some sound outside, while I am standing there, holding the pair of pants that she was about to step into. She is also going through a phase in which she continually asks me to look at something or choose something. "Which stuffed animal do you want?" To say, "Actually, I am wearing rubber gloves right now and they are dripping with soapy water, and I would prefer not to take either stuffed animal," is not an option. Even while watching a cartoon-- something that is supposed to provide me a slot of time to myself, she has started saying, "Mama, look that this!," every two minutes. She also cannot make it through a meal without feeling the impulse to jump up and show me a dance move from her creative movement class. Often it's as if, in her world, nothing really exists until one of her parents sees and acknowledges its existence. Until the moment I turn and give her my full attention and tell her that yes, I see, she will tug and tug and tug at me. All day long my own private stream of consciousness is interrupted, and all day long I exert one burst of energy after another in the effort to reign in her attention to the next practical task.

The truth is that she is a perfectly delightful girl-- bright-eyed and exuberant and everything that I would wish her to be. When we do connect over something, like drawing on a page together or playing a game of memory, it is always sweet and special. But her naturally childish inability to draw boundaries around herself and focus on the thing at hand makes me sometimes feel as if I share my life with a whirling dervish. When she is so tired that she is falling down on the floor sobbing, and needs to expediently get into her pajamas, brush her teeth, and go to bed, but still wants to us to read her three more books, then tell her "the story of her day," and then explore that noise she heard out in the stairwell, I see an extreme demonstration of a human being who does not know when to say when--ever. Sometimes I cross over the threshold of tolerance and I want to scream and throw something, much like a four year-old myself.

I'll come clean and state the obvious: part of my frustration is that my child presents me with a hyperbolic picture of myself when I do not draw boundaries between myself and my world, when I react to what is happening around me instead of act, and when I fail to manage my day well and live consciously.

The big news right now is that our family will move to Washington DC in the fall. My husband just received a fellowship to study at Dumbarton Oaks for the 2011-12 academic year. He traveled there a few weeks ago, in the wake of the Blizzard of 2011, to interview with five other candidates. We had no idea what his chances were, but of course, both of us were entertaining daydreams of moving to this wonderful place, while trying our hardest not to entertain daydreams of moving to this wonderful place. The difficulty is always to live in the present, give my best to today's choices, and surrender my entire life to--I believe--a God who loves me and whose love transcends my most immediate wants and desires, just as my love for my children so often runs contrary to their will. The other day we got Chinese take-out and Esme's fortune cookie said: "Cooperation will work better." I wanted to frame it and tell her that yes, we absolutely believe in fortunes. But this does take a conscious effort to pray and meditate and bring my mind back to a reality that exists over and above the busy things happening around me, and the ways that life would most certainly play me. It also requires drawing real, concrete boundaries between myself and the words and actions of others (silly old facebook being high on the list of Things to Block Out for the Most Part), and everything else that could be categorized as the external stimuli which is completely out of my control and very often none of my business.

Poetry Wednesday

life in a dying city

2011-02-09T06:00:00.000-08:00

Housekeeping in January

Evergreen, evergreen,

Your shaggy arm

So full of snow.

If you look in

You know

Sheets are clean

Once a week.

A law says laundry

Cannot be created,

Nor destroyed.

Despair and hope,

Share props,

Squalor and order,

The same matter.

Dry beans clatter

About the child

Near my feet.

Ceramic squeaks

And drowns

In the noise

Of scattering.

Winter sees me

Gathering, gathering

Armfuls of sheets.

* * *

I wrote the above poem and I think it may be the bulk of what I have to say today, so I am nonchalantly throwing it up here, as if publicly sharing my own poem is not a risky, gutsy thing to do. Honestly, it should feel that way, but for some reason it doesn't today. This poem is what I have right now, so I'm sharing it. I managed to wrangle some rogue words into an order that pleases me. Of course, any critical feedback is welcome, but not necessary.

I feel badly when I miss Poetry Wednesday, as I have now for two weeks in a row. Life is full and there is plenty I could write about, but sometimes it does not come together. The muse is not talking to me, and that is alright. If there is one thing I have learned from six years of life in the Midwest, it is that although it may seem that nothing is happening, something is still happening. Something is always happening.

South Bend was just listed among the nation's ten most dying cities. I was not surprised to see this. It helps to explain what I have always sensed: that when I came to live here, I was shot like an arrow straight into the heart of a paradox. Life in a dying city is paradoxical every day, especially in February, after a blizzard has left the streets of the city bordered with walls of dirty snow. Jeff and I have been watching this goofy TV series Psych, which is set in Santa Barbara, California. I think that half the attraction of the show is the setting, which can make me feel like I am being administered a little shot of transcendental orange juice in my dark igloo.

I was in my old neighborhood--College Park--in Orlando in January. I cannot believe how this area of town keeps blossoming in interesting ways every time I go back. On Edgewater Drive, where my dad's old, humble chiropractic storefront office used to be, there is now a really hip-looking bar and grill with outdoor seating. The facade of every building has been redone. There are boutiques and even the franchise drug store has a Spanish tile roof to make it conform aesthetically to the overall town-center feel.

Meanwhile, in South Bend, the only known independent coffee shop with local personality and a sort of 90s pedigree--Lula's--was forced out of business for unknown reasons by its landlord, and now sits vacant on a depressing little corner of town, where cars stop at a red light, then go at the green light, tires kicking up a wintry mix of dirt and melted sludge. This is where my two children were born, where I do my grocery shopping, and where I cling to friendships in place of the sun in February. And it is also where I have changed and grown and developed my best tools for feeling content and happy with life.

Life is an ongoing creative travail of making something out of nothing. Maybe the dying city only lends more clarity to the assignment. Everyone has to do this, no matter where they live. No one can expect a city--even the most apparently alive one-- to do this for them.

the first thread of my red dress

2011-01-19T15:41:00.001-08:00

On Foot I Had to Walk Through the Solar Systems

by Edith Södergran

On foot
I had to walk through the solar systems,
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already, I sense myself.
Somewhere in space hangs my heart,
sparks fly from it, shaking the air,
to other reckless hearts.

(tr. by Stina Katchadourian)
* * *
I had this poem tabbed in a book, along with some others, as a possibility for today's Poetry Wednesday. At some point today, I watched apathetically from across the room while twenty-month old Elsa pulled out most of the tabs and stuck them elsewhere around the room, project #50, perhaps, in a series of about 100 projects she accomplished around the house today. None of the projects really took Poetry Wednesday into account, but thankfully, I know better than to expect that they should.

It's evening now and I just got around to finding the right page again. Today, in lieu of thinking about what I might write about this poem, I did lots of other little things in order to keep my head afloat somewhere above the waters of my day. Most notably, I got myself and both the girls out onto the playground in all of our snow clothes for some outdoor winter play. I was really happy to discover that my twenty-month old has made the transition from not-being-able-to-play-in-the-snow-at-all phase of development, to the moderately-able-to-play-in-the-snow-with-a-lot-of-help phase of development. Mostly, she let me pull her around in a sled. Her expression was stoic and inscrutable, as, for example, it is when we take her swimming. But she did not protest, and when Elsa does not protest, the outing is a roaring success.

This led into the more extended phase of coming back inside, warming up, getting all the boots and snow clothes off again, changing a diaper, followed by snacks, (more) laundry, and requests for things, never-ending requests, you see, and the perpetual task of putting strewn things back where they go, and a crock pot dinner, which, I'm discovering, is the only kind of dinner I can seem to pull off more than three days in a row without succumbing to take-out.

What I can never really get over is that tomorrow, we will all need to eat again, several times. And we will probably need to do something for the cabin fever again as well. So, I guess this is why I like metaphors about finding the red dress of self--or what have you--so much. I am most definitely footing it through the universe over here with a reckless heart, and have been for ever so long. But not without many, many rewards.

the metaphor of the solitary bench to sit down on

2011-01-15T11:23:00.000-08:00

A common feeling of my childhood was to feel invisible, as if I were in a sort of haze or daze. My soul, my true self, was there, but in a state of disconnect. Now that I've read enough self-help books to sink a small sailing vessel, I have a pretty good grasp of why this was so. None of these reasons were deliberate or malicious on the part of my family. But to this day a call home can again make me into a little clown fish swimming straight into an inky cloud. The voices, the messages, obfuscate rather than orient or illuminate. On the other side of this interval of inky pigment, the little fish must blink a few times and re-establish the direction of the ocean floor.

All my lifelong, I have been swimming for clearer waters. A large portion of the strength that I was dealt--a finite ration at birth-- has gone into this enterprise. Origins can and must be muscled away from in order to fix a safe distance between the true self and the chimera of family dysfunction, in which the soul is always, always obscured.

This has nothing to do with the events of my life of the past three to four months (except that, perhaps, I'm forever contemplating these sorts of issues). But I think I am trying to talk about my relationship to writing, and perhaps explain to myself why sometimes I cannot seem to do it. The persistent feeling of invisibility and solitude in my childhood has made me seek the deepest kind of visibility as an adult-- the kind of visibility found in a certain kind of writing. There are other kinds of ways to become visible and I am blessed to have them. My marriage makes me feel visible. My friends make me visible. But writing of a certain kind seems to be the best, the highest, the most satisfying form of visibility for me. And it has nothing to do with ego or personal glory. I could happily write under a fake name or Anonymous (I practically do) and achieve the result I am seeking.

There are lots of other kinds of skilled and interesting writing that is not the kind I am talking about. I could write about the things that have gone on in my life recently, except that I cannot seem to write about the things that have gone on in my life recently. We moved to this beautiful life in DC and the days--containing adventure, blessing, beauty, and struggle-- have felt like card deck being shuffled over my head by a Las Vegas poker dealer. Our time here is flying. The owl lunch box we bought when Esme began kindergarten, once cute and new and kind of exciting in a certain start-of-school way, has been filled and emptied so many times now, and seemingly so relentlessly, that it has become a worn item, with an odor. I should wash it. And that thought reminds me of how load of laundry follows upon load of laundry, and how the dishwasher is also loaded and emptied time after time. The counters are wiped down, the floor is swept. The stroller is lugged down the front steps of our apartment building and off we go. Family has visited, friends have visited. We've done many rounds of site-seeing. We had Christmas, and New Year. We had our turns with stomach flu and colds. Esme dressed up as a snowflake for her winter program at school. Elsa has twice been caught squirting out a tube of very expensive make-up into the bathroom sink, and other typical two year-old antics, making me either totally furious or completely resigned. We've had more disposable income this year than we did in the past so I've bought some new clothes. New toys, books, towels, and kitchen tools have been acquired to fill in a lot of the stuff-vacancies that occurred when we put our stuff into storage and moved into this not-so-furnished apartment. I have been reading The Adventures of Mark Twain, and then Huckleberry Finn. I've been reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln after visiting the Lincoln Memorial. I read a book about Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I don't feel like writing about these things, or the thoughts I've had about these things.

How I'm solving my life's problems, or some political issue that fires me up, are among the things I care a lot about which I cannot seem to care about writing about. I spend a lot of time with these thoughts. I feel no need to relive them in writing, except maybe in my journal or in a three-sentence comment on facebook. And yet these are the kinds of writing that attract that thing called an audience. One time I had a job where I wrote stuff for an institution. I guess I could say that I was making money with my writing, although somehow the way that sounds doesn't seem to match the reality of what it was. One day I might get a job like that again, but mostly, I'd rather not, unless I have to.

I wasn't made for the busy life, but motherhood pulls me constantly into action. And yet, because of this, I am a more balanced person than I used to be or otherwise would have been. Because I have two kids five years old and two, I can't sleep in. Because I have two kids five years old and two, I can't spend a day loafing around, waiting for the muse to visit me. But secretly, every day, even while practically flying through the sidewalks on foot to Esme's school to be in the school yard when her class comes bounding out, I am seeking a metaphor that will wrap everything into a blanket, one that will enfold everything neatly so that I can send it up to heaven.

You'd think that I'd be seeking a solitary bench to sit down on, and that is sometimes true, of course. But more essentially I am craving the photograph of the solitary bench to sit down on or the metaphor of the solitary bench to sit down on. In that place within a place, I will sit down and hear myself think. That is where I can check to make sure that my soul is still there, its stripes vibrant, whether anyone sees them or not. When this eludes me, when it has been too long since the last time I was able to go to this place, I start to have that old feeling of invisibility; I've drifted into the shadowy part of the ocean.

to feel at home in my life

2011-01-12T08:26:00.000-08:00

On Waking

by John O'Donohue

I give thanks for arriving
Safely in a new dawn,
For the gift of eyes
To see the world,
The gift of mind
To feel at home
In my life.
The waves of possibility
Breaking on the shore of dawn,
The harvest of the past
That awaits my hunger,
And all the furtherings
This new day will bring.

* * *

I've been away from home for a while and since my mind seems to have no space for blogging and traveling at the same time, I stopped blogging while traveling. I shall now cross "travel writer" off my list of possible vocations, though I'm not sure it was ever on my list. Actually there is no list.

We were in Tennessee and Florida (with a short stop in Atlanta in between), as usual, over the holidays, and gone for a total of three weeks. It was a long time to be living out of a suitcase and journeying by car up and down the vertical length of this country with two little kids, and something I will probably not do again any time soon. I'm tired physically and mentally.

I love the lines: "The harvest of the past / that awaits my hunger." I am ever hungry to make sense of the past, and never more so than while visiting my childhood home in Florida. But it does take a lot out of me.

I have to say, I'm a huge fan of being an adult and coming back to the place where, as an adult, I now live, even if I cannot go outside to drink my morning coffee in the middle of January, and my kids cannot wake up and go straight to the sandbox while still in their pajamas, as they did in Florida, while I watched them, drinking my coffee.

Today I will probably write in my journal--not my blog--all the thoughts and insights harvested on this most recent visit. The project of making sense of life is not yet over. But I'm thankful to wake up and feel at home in my life--a gift that seems to come most easily when I am, in fact, at home.

Poetry Wednesday

the owl of love

2010-12-01T16:00:00.000-08:00

The Owl of Love

Clogs

I am the owl, the owl of love.
At night, I suck it in, I suck it in.
By the day, the startled morn,
I breathe it out again.
Alone on the branch, the owl of love,
with the stars and the moon
and the moon over cloud.
I take in the souls of the minds of the world
and sift out the weeds from the few.
Breathing it in, breathing it out,
over again and again and again.
I am speckled like the hare,
I may not breathe again.
Alone on a branch, holding it in,
I sift through the minds and the souls of the world.
I am shattered by the calm.
I may not breathe again.

* * *
These are song lyrics by the Clogs. I hesitate to post song lyrics in place of a poem, as if they are the same thing. I suspect that there is an inherent bias in encountering poetic words in the form of a beautiful song before you read them alone on a page, without music. In The Once and Future King, by T.H. White, Lancelot, on one of his many quests, performs a miracle by saving a maiden out of an enchanted pot of boiling water. Later, when he is introduced to the girl again more formally, it says, "Lancelot, perhaps slightly biased by having first met her with no clothes on, thought that Elaine was the most beautiful girl he had seen, except Guenevere." I imagine that song lyrics are a little like that. As far as I can tell, these lyrics stand alone as a poem, but I am biased since I encountered them first--clothed, actually--as a beautiful song. Here's a link to what it sounds like, in all its unearthly beauty.

I identify with the song and at first was not sure why. After recirculating in the gurgling waters of this album--and especially this song-- many times in the last month or so, I've grown to love the idea of this lone, breathing owl, and have gradually been fleshing out an image of this lovable owl of love in my mind's eye. In my picture, she represents the life of emotional integrity, of someone who lets emotions flow freely, in and out. The emotions come and go, like breath, never blocked, never stuffed or suppressed. But sometimes the tender creature is tempted to stop the flow and hold its breath, because it is hard to keep breathing emotions in and out, in and out. It is much easier to block and resist.

But at the break of day, the owl suddenly finds that she can breath again, and if she goes on breathing, then all will be expelled and will normalize once more. I love this idea.

This is all I have to say today. I actually started writing this post last week--before Thanksgiving-- which is why it sounds slightly more clear then anything I could possibly have written today, since I was trapped inside with my two girls all day with ceaseless snow blowing horizontally. As usual (I know this is getting old) I had more ideas that I was going to connect to this owl song, but today I forfeit. Progress, not perfection, right? Esme was hogging the computer most of the day watching Christmas videos because I ran out of ideas for how to spend the slowly passing time. Maybe one day I will be able to really develop an idea in writing--like really, really develop it--when I am not doing all this other stuff, like hosting seven adults and three children for Thanksgiving, and refereeing serial property disputes over "Littlest Pet Shop" figurines, randomly creating an illustrated copy of a chart on kinosis in water colors alongside my four year-old because she wants me to draw and paint with her, and abdicating use of the computer so that she can watch Christmas Classics, Volume I to wile away the long afternoon, knowing that she will not find a way to wile it away if I am using the computer for anything that takes concentration. But until then I can at least stick to the humble project of getting us all out of the house on bleary winter days once in a while, and posting half-warmed Thanksgiving leftovers to my blog.

Poetry Wednesday

flints, not flowers

2010-11-17T12:00:00.000-08:00

Flints, Not Flowers

by Marianne Moore

I sense your glory.
For things that I desire and have not got:
For things that I have that I wish I had not,
You compensate me,
Stones. The moth shan't eat you up, rust shall not waste
You. How far more cunningly than Keats has placed
His toy, that poor hack
Flung you up as he walked round. Praise god, stones.
Initially God made that horse, his bones
And lasting glory.

* * *
Marianne Moore's poetry is as dense as poetry can possibly be. I find her strangeness an occasional antidote to all that is scripted and nicety nice in the world. Sometimes I want scripted and even nice, but then I need a dose of meaningful strangeness. And Marianne Moore is so lady-like and prophetic in her prickly intellectual strangeness, and I approve of her very much.

Last night I got lost in her poetry. While doing so I also enjoyed reading the many humorous titles out loud, as I encountered them, to the husband in the room watching college football. I'll give one example: "To Be Liked By You Would Be a Calamity."

Is that not a great title?

So, the above poem is a puzzle that I cannot solve entirely, at least not today, because it is a poem written by Marianne Moore, and I am at home with children, and not at a library, and maybe just not intellectual enough, or maybe not even curious enough. And yes, I tried the internet, and it did not yield anything conclusive. And I only know so much about John Keats off the top of my head. Would she, could she, be calling him a hack poet? What toy is she referring to? Why the horse? I'll keep the results of my highly unofficial google searches for combinations such as "Keats + horse" to myself and let others draw their own conclusions, hoping that if anyone out there has any conclusions, they will kindly share them in the comments section.

I think I have some ideas about the stones though. The way she is using the image seems to me an allusion to the Gospel passage about the stones crying out on the one hand, and maybe even (I'd like to think) the passage about God being able to raise children of Abraham out of stones on the other hand. (See, I am even too lazy to look these passages up so as to provide a chapter and verse reference.)

But I like the way she is using the stones. I like that she talks to them and has decided to favor them over flowers and everything else that we tend to desire even though we might lose it or must lose it or might decide five years later that it wasn't really as great as we thought it was. And it seems that this would be an austere theme, but really it is comforting, because it involves accepting life on its own terms and deciding to be aware of the fact that there is a higher reality at work in the world that doesn't always give us flowers but maybe wants to give us something better, if we can lift our vision ever so slightly above the envisioned flowers. And it probably does not go around making children of Abraham out of stones either. But it could, if it wanted to.

Poetry Wednesday

you gave me in secret one thing to perceive

2010-11-10T10:39:00.000-08:00

THE ONLY ANIMAL

by Franz Wright

The only animal that commits suicide
went for a walk in the park,
basked on a hard bench
in the first star,
traveled to the edge of space
in an armchair
while company quietly
talked, and abruptly
returned,
the room empty.

The only animal that cries
that takes off its clothes
and reports to the mirror, the one
and only animal
that brushes its own teeth--

Somewhere

the only animal that smokes a cigarette,
that lies down and flies backward in time,
that rises and walks to a book
and looks up a word
heard the telephone ringing
in the darkness downstairs and decided
to answer no more.

And I understand,
too well: how many times
have I made the decision to dwell
from now on
in the hour of my death
(the space I took up here
scarlessly closing like water)
and said I'm never coming back,
and yet

this morning
I stood once again
in this world, the garden
ark and vacant
tomb of what
I can't imagine,
between twin eternities,
some sort of wings,
more or less equidistantly
exiled from both,
hovering in the dreaming called
being awake, where
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.

* * *
A friend sent me this poem recently, which was really kind, because it's a great poem. I have been slack on exploring new poetry lately and preoccupied, so it is certainly convenient to be sent a great poem and spared the work of finding one. Plus, I happened to have this great coordinating animal picture handy from the photos I took on Halloween.

The llama's expression is so shrewd and knowing. His one eyeball seems to be saying: "What kind of ridiculous creatures dress up their young on Halloween and then make them pose for a picture?" Well, Mr. Llama, only one kind of creature does this, as far as I know.

Last week I was knocked down by the flu for forty-eight hours. Whenever that happens, I tend to lie in bed and think about my own mortality and what it would mean to leave this world permanently. I cry over everyone and think about my mom and dad a lot. I feel the desire to ask forgiveness from anyone I've harmed or disappointed or failed to love properly. I think about my responsibility to my godsons and, this time, even thought about a letter I might write to them if I were indeed dying. I consider all of this a good thing, since according to the saints we are supposed to live in constant remembrance of death. But since I am not so spiritually advanced in my hours of wellness, illness is a good time for me to catch up on all of this contemplation of death. Then it is much easier to imagine "the space I took up here closing scarlessly like water."

Because my life is so small, and only a handful of people would actually remember and miss me if I died. But God "raised me from my bed of illness," which is another way of saying that I have more work to do in this life, at least as of today. I have more time as queen over my small realm. My daughters still have a mother to prevent their hair from turning into dreadlocks, see to their consumption of healthy fats and toss a couple of hopeful vegetables onto their plates, to make sure that they have a least one pair of mary janes to wear on Sunday, to deliver a steady pile of folded laundry to the roof of the doll house, and generally lend them my lap when they need a lap to fling themselves upon. And I have another day to change and learn and know myself, to air out and integrate all the inner rooms of the castle of my existence. Maybe it's not too late to get all those rooms functioning again and the air circulating well throughout. Beyond all of this there lies, let's see, everything else that is not my concern. I do better to ignore all the rumors and hearsay about the choices, behaviors and opinions of rulers of the gardens and tombs beyond my borders.

Poetry Wednesday

an upward spiral, generally speaking

2010-10-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

The love of God, unutterable and perfect,
flows into a pure soul the way that light
rushes into a transparent object.
The more love that it finds, the more it gives
itself; so that, as we grow clear and open,
the more complete the joy of heaven is.
And the more souls who resonate together,
the greater the intensity of their love,
and, mirror-like, each soul reflects the other.

Dante Alighieri
Translation by Stephen Mitchell

* * *

Today I am unusually and acutely aware of a muscle that runs from my shoulder to my neck, because, for the third day now, it is giving me pain. It feels like a strip of tough rubber inside of me and I cannot turn my now-stiff neck in any direction very comfortably. And like everyone else, I am having sinus trouble due to the wacky October weather, complete with tornado warnings and unbelievable wind all day yesterday.

I've been trying to minimize all of this, pull myself together, and go about my day as if I felt normal, because I can't just lie around drinking tea and reading a novel, like I would like to. But I have to admit that being physically uncomfortable is a distraction, and I have been doing some spacey things. Yesterday I took Esme to her preschool an hour earlier than she is supposed to arrive. I marched us in, realized my mistake as soon as I surveyed the room and saw that the kids were about to sit down for their lunch, and marched right back out, feeling sheepish. I drove right back home--so convenient, you know--and then an hour later put both kids right back into the car and headed back. Later that afternoon, my eighteen month-old made it abundantly clear that she was not on board with my plan to take it easy for the rest of the afternoon. She did this in a non-verbal fashion by standing at the front door, wedging her fingers in the cracks, and making a a pulling motion while screaming as if desperate to be released from an intolerable imprisonment. So, I decided that it might be a good time to go to the library and inquire about replacing the library card which I thought was lost after the said eighteen month-old had gotten into my purse and wallet and scattered its contents around before I noticed and was able to swiftly retreive them from the four corners of the apartment. But although all of the plastic miscellany--such as the "My Panera" card which I have not activated and intend never to activate--had been safely returned to my wallet, my library card, which I value only less than my debit card and drivers license, was nowhere to be found. So with an attitude of non-resistance, I just quickly assumed that my toddler had hidden it in a place that would probably not reveal itself until moving day, and I resigned myself to getting the card replaced without any fuss.

Well, I was at the help desk of the library serenely inquiring about replacing a lost library card when it presented itself unambiguously in the fold of my wallet. Where had it been the last ten times I looked? The woman at the desk kind of blinked at me, then explained in what I thought was an overly articulate manner how to go about paying my fines down at the computerized check-out station. She was kind enough to escort me there, even though it was only ten paces away, and point out the visually conspicuous piece of equipment where I could swipe my credit card.

Unflattering evidence of my distracted state continued this morning when I found an envelope in our house that I remember distinctly dropping in the mail slot of our community rector. It contained a check for the annual community fee we pay to live in student housing. Only, if the envelope is here in my house, then what, I ask, did I put into my rector's mailbox? Hopefully it wasn't anything too weird. I guess I'll find out when the very understanding secretary calls me back later today.

This morning I would like nothing more than to visit my chiropractor and cry. Trouble is, my chiropractor lives over 1,000 miles away. That would be my dad, the now retired chiropractor. I'm pretty sure that I cannot afford anyone else right now. And an unknown, local chiropractor might be made to feel awkward if I started crying on his or her adjustment table.

Hopefully my neck problem will just resolve itself without any intervention or treatment. Most likely it will. And in general, I am just a person who lives my life between my ears, so to speak, lost in thought, so I cannot blame all of my spacey incidents on physical discomfort, although it certainly doesn't facilitate wallet organization or timely bill paying.

And lately, I have entered into another struggle--one consciously welcomed on top of all the ordinary, unbidden ones. I have decided to struggle for a more childlike faith in God, or, as Dante puts it, a greater clarity and openness with God. I do this realizing that, in the last ten or maybe even fifteen years, because of a series of little hurts and stumbles and fears, I have been gradually lowering the volume on the child's voice inside of me that would proclaim that God is taking good care of me and can be trusted with whatever is happening to me and around me. I have been tinting the windows a little bit more each year and inching the door shut, thinking it was just a bit naive to really and truly trust that God was competent to manage my life. This was something that only a relatively sheltered, non-adult citizen of this world could really believe. By the time you reach thirty, even if life has gone decently for you, it is hard to keep believing that a banquet table is being set for you somewhere, in a grassy pasture, beside the still waters, with angels protecting you from stubbing your toe, and so forth. Now it is taking all of my adult resources to raise the volume on that belief again--really raise it until it is the clearest voice within. As it turns out, there is nothing wimpy or naive at all about struggling to trust and believe God in a post-Christian--often really shitty-- world. It is rather an ongoing struggle to surrender everything, from moment to moment.

Poetry Wednesday

when we are weak

2010-10-06T07:10:00.000-07:00

When we are weak, we are
strong. When our eyes close
on the world, then somewhere
within us the bush
burns. When we are poor
and aware of the inadequacy
of our table, it is to that
uninvited the guest comes.

By R.S. Thomas

* * *
This morning has been like many recently: disjointed. I have to remind myself that my children are too small to find any rhythm or phase that could be expected to last for very long. Things might feel settled for a time. Then they hit a different phase and are once again unsettled and the minutes of the day pass in a disjointed and clumsy fashion before everyone adjusts to a new pattern of relative predictability. I can only hope that a newer and smoother pattern will emerge again soon.

Because I can tell that right now I am in a season of anti-pattern with my children. The youngest is finally, at long last, dropping her morning nap. Only, the word "dropping" does not depict the situation adequately. She could be said to be dangling her morning nap on a string. She throws it out sometimes but other days seems to think better of it and pulls it back, keeping me in suspense about whether or not she is going to cross the line into a hysterically tired state at any point in the morning.

But that is only one example of the forces of chaos at work upon the average day. There are dozens of these kinds of things going on at the same time between the two of them--shifting and disparate needs. I might also mention that I feel like a human snack and drink dispenser, given the frequency that snacks and drinks are requested between the two of them.

I wonder if there is such a thing as hard lefts or hard rights with children, or, for that matter, anything that could be described as "efficient." The corners that they turn are long arcs that take a while to straighten back out again. Sometimes I feel as if I am sitting in a car, being pulled sideways and just waiting for the pull of the vehicle to abate so that I can resume a normal posture in the back seat. Then I might be able to take up a hobby or something.

Another aspect of imbalance lately is that my four year-old is always just a little too happy and my one and a half year old never seems quite happy enough. I cannot seem to take five steps in any direction in our apartment without hearing a cry of discontent from Elsa for some reason or another. Meanwhile, the effervescence of my four year-old is bubbling up to the ceiling and pushing me against the wall until I am squeezed to the point that I might implode.

All summer I have had the luxury of a pressure relief valve. By that I mean the front door. When either one of them becomes too much, I can open it and send the human cyclones outside to our fenced in playground, which seems to fix everything. My four year-old's energy can bubble to its farthest end and never reach the domed ceiling of the blue sky overhead. My one and a half year-old is always instantly distracted from whatever is ailing her as soon as there are no walls within sight.

But I know that very soon the same playground will be as hard as ice, the domed sky will be the color of zinc, and our apartment will feel like the sealed quarters of a submarine. I am not certain what I am going to do when October is over. I am venturing into the realms of new questions, like whether or not being home with children is actually the right thing--the best thing-- for me, or for them. I am finding it good for me right now to start thinking in different directions and different possibilities, and realize that this-- my current situation as it stands-- is by no means a closed case. I am beginning to poke around at other possibilities. In any case, just for today, I am here. This is my job, however inadequate it makes me feel at any given moment. I like this poem by R.S. Thomas. It makes me think that there could be a burning bush somewhere in all of this, or a special guest coming to my table. I need that.

Poetry Wednesday

Postscript:
We ended up having a nice day today, mainly because we all went outside and enjoyed the beautiful fall weather (what can I say?). But later, after dinner, Esme and I made this drawing together (see above photo), with me imitating her on the opposite page, per her careful instructions. The drawing is of "disguises," with "stripes and stingers" on them and eyes, but no mouths because they do not have mouths. I have no idea what inspired such a drawing, but it was good to get down on the floor with markers and paper and to give her an excuse to boss me around for a little while.

psalm at high tide

2010-09-22T18:00:00.000-07:00

Psalm at High Tide

by Martha Serpas

Rain on the river's vinyl surface:
water that glitters,
water that hardly moves,
its branches witness to trees,
to fronds, leaves, crab floats, pilings,
shopping carts, appliances--
the divine earth takes everything
in its wounded side and gives back
wholeness.
It bears the huddled profane
and endures the soaking
venerated in its wild swirls--
this river fixed with wooden weirs,
radiant in misshapen glory.

* * *

Today has been another Wednesday in which I never really got a chance to sit down and write all that I would have liked to write. My children are demanding, my days a series of little, relentless demands, and I am tired. I look forward to a time when they will sleep past 6:00 a.m regularly, but that day has not yet arrived, and the cumulative affect on my body and mind is not really fun, especially since I am a die hard night owl who can go to bed early only rarely. Meanwhile, I love my girls and will probably mourn the passing of their littleness one day, especially the cuteness of seventeen month-old Elsa standing by the dryer today, crying and pulling on the dryer door because, despite my total sneakiness, she somehow deduced that her blankie was in there.

As I sit down to write they are both asleep. It's 8:15 p.m. but my body feels as if it could easily be 11 p.m. (Don't pay attention to the incredibly unhelpful "time stamp" that blogger puts on this and on every post, which is always fabulously incorrect--just another one of those little things in life that are not-quite-right but which I deal with summarily by letting them sliiiiiide by.)

This past week we watched a really great documentary about Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy, a sculptor, who uses only natural, found materials to build his sculptures outdoors. The sculptures are impermanent, sometimes constructed of leaves arranged into a streak of color on the ground, or maybe stones carefully stacked and balanced into a three dimensional shape. They are strikingly beautiful and exquisite, and yet, once built, the forces of water and weather pull them apart at their own pace.

I was very inspired by this beautiful documentary, entitled Rivers and Tides. Only a few days before we watched it, I had built the gingerbread castle pictured above for my daughter's fourth birthday party. She had asked for a castle cake several months in advance, and I had agreed to make one for her birthday. Thoughts about how I was going to pull this off started percolating in my head a few weeks before the date. I had no idea what I was going to do, and I actually do not know much about cake decorating. Finally, a week before, I started looking around online and batting around a few different possibilities in my mind. At the last minute, I decided that it might be less risky to build a castle from gingerbread rather than cake, and to make cupcakes on the side to fulfill the cake requirement of the birthday party.

At some point, I realized that I was getting into the territory of obsession with this princess castle project, and felt slightly foolish, especially when I was standing in the bulk candy section at the grocery store and oscillating for much longer than I would like anyone to know over which candy would be most suitable for the outside walls. This was no longer totally about making my soon-to-be four year-old happy. She would have been happy with the most generic, store bought thing I had put in front of her, as long as it was pink/purple/sparkly. What was really going on was that I was getting excited about doing something over-the-top creative, for a change. It was engaging a passionate part of me that loves embarking on a creative project and taking it to the max, whatever the max might be. Once I decide that something is going to be awesome, I cannot bring myself to do less, and would have to be in bed with the flu before I would settle on something store bought.

I finally decided on Neccos. They are at least somewhat old fashioned because my mom claims to have loved them as a kid, and they would provide the muted pastel color scheme I was looking for. But it wasn't until I got the Neccos home that the idea of breaking them up into little shards and cementing them into a mosaic occurred to me. And yet, it almost felt as if it was meant to be. It was as if my subconscious mind already knew it was going to do the mosaic before my conscious mind was alerted to this fact. So that still small voice led me through the maze of choices at the grocery store, telling me no, no, no, and finally yes. And I came home with the Neccos, not knowing exactly why, or what path I was going to take to completion.

Oh, this is all so silly, I know. But while I was working on it, in the silent space during Esme's afternoon at preschool and Elsa's afternoon nap, I felt as if I was doing something very therapeutic for myself with all that icing mortar, and was myself amazed by the process of it coming together, almost of its own accord. And I did not care at all that the castle would, in a few days, be half-eaten, or, more likely, thrown into the trash because it would be disgustingly sweet. No matter. I might as well have been designing a castle to house ten generations of a royal family.

So when I watched this documentary, I understood what Andy Goldsworthy is all about. He did not seem at all crazy to me for spending an entire day on a freezing beach, stacking up rocks, knowing that the tide would soon come in and carry them all away. It is said that some of the great Russian writers wrote "for the drawer," never really thinking that their work would be published.

There are far more conclusions to potentially draw from the art of Andy Goldsworthy than comparing it to my humble castle-building experience, and many more angles to explore, but I am at my insight limit tonight. I was actually also going to write about another aspect of this birthday party, which was that, although I invested a lot of work into it, I was able to, in the end, step out of its way and lovingly detach from its outcome. In the past, when planning events, I have been driven crazy in the attempt to control their outcome, which is, quite simply, insane. Events can be prepared for, but not controlled, as they involve too many people and variables, and have a life of their own. They must be released into the realm of unpredictability and possibility and chopped free of the hostess's ego. Yes, I was proud of myself for getting my incredibly large ego out of the way of this party, and felt that it was somehow a turning point for me. And I will only add that the party was really fun for both kids and adults, and to me had a light, blessed ambiance that seemed to exceed the sum of its parts, the sum of my efforts. For now, I would encourage everyone to go watch this documentary and be edified. And if you live in the States and have Netflix, you can watch it instantly online, which is a great bonus for people like me, since I have never really mastered the whole physical DVD mail exchange thing satisfactorily enough to have something good to watch on the weekend.

Poetry Wednesday

the feast i call today

2010-09-08T10:16:00.000-07:00

The Holy Surprise of Right Now

by Samuel Hazo

If you can see your path laid out ahead of you
step by step, then you know it's not your path.
--Joseph Campbell

Inside Brooks Brothers' windows
    it's July.
                  Sportshirts on sleek
    dummies speak in turquoise,
    polo, Bermuda, and golf.
Outside, it's very much the first
    of March.
                  The sportshirts say
    today's tomorrow and the present
    tense be damned.
                  They tell me
    to forget that here's the only place
    we have.
                  They claim what matters
    most is never now but next.
I've heard this argument before.
It leaves me sentenced to the future,
    and that's much worse than being
    sentenced to the past.
                  The past
    at least was real just once . . .
                        What's
    called religion offers me the same.
Life's never what I have
    but what's to come.
                  But where
    did Christ give heaven its address
    except within each one of us?
So, anyone who claims it's not
    within but still ahead is contradicting God.
                  But why go on?
I'm sick of learning to anticipate.
I never want to live a second
    or a season or a heaven in advance
    of when I am and where.
I need the salt and spices
    of uncertainty to know I'm still
    alive.
                  It makes me hunger
    for the feast I call today.
It lets desire keep what
    satisfaction ends.
                  Lovers
    remember that the way that smoke
    remembers fire.
                  Between anticipation
    and the aggravation of suspense, I choose
    suspense.
                I choose desire.

* * *

I am glad I found this poem today. Note: I did not get the typesetting of the poem exactly right, because I do not have the necessary time to sit around and fiddle with html.

Today, and for many recent days, my mind has been clamoring to comprehend things-- the past, the present. I stay up late reading, I go to bed thinking, and I wake up still spinning within my desire to comprehend all the complexity of my life, and the stories that I like to tell myself about myself. And because I cannot seem to reach the end of the realizations I am having, I feel myself to be in a hamster wheel of existential exhaustion that I would like to speed through and come to the end of, where I will achieve comprehension and, hopefully, some elusive state of maturity (heaven?). Meanwhile my heart is yearning for this made-up future in which I am somehow a more advanced person, perfectly loved and loving.

Well, this is probably all fine, I suppose. To hunger and thirst, to knock and and to seek and to ask, and maybe even to nag God like the persistent widow--these cannot be all bad states. But it does turn awful when I allow myself to be "sentenced to the future," and I try to eschew the salt and spice of the irresolvable present. Today, I am trying to settle into the comforting confines of the day and realize that on the inside of this day nothing is too unbearable to be borne and I am actually doing just fine, even though I have been trying to make it to the YMCA since 9:30 this morning and should probably give up and change out of my workout clothes since it is now already 3:00 p.m.

Poetry Wednesday

i am back and forth

2010-09-01T08:55:00.000-07:00

This morning I woke up in a bed and breakfast. I am sitting at a little antique secretary in the corner of a gigantic room overlooking an ordinary tree-lined street in Big Rapids, Michigan, a town I knew nothing about until this morning, when we had a long conversation with Jane, the very friendly woman who owns and runs this bed and breakfast, and made us coffee and stuffed french toast.

Yesterday was our seventh anniversary and, because my mother-in-law was sweet enough to come stay with our girls, we were able to leave them for two nights, something I have not done even once since my oldest was born four years ago.

There is not a lot to see in Big Rapids. Last night we ate at one of the restaurants in walking distance downtown, a bar called Schubert's. Tonight we will eat at the other, fancier restaurant within walking distance. This morning I went to the single antique store and poked my head into the gift shop, which reminded me, unfortunately, of a hospital gift shop, but sold those plastic shape bracelets that all kids seem to be wearing these days, so I bought Esme a pack. Later, I might go to the women's boutique a little further down. After that, I'm not sure, but I brought a lot of books, including a new novel that I am now really into. Jeff brought his classical guitar and is now out on the expansive wrap-around porch, practicing sheet music. We brought one movie, which I turned off last night after ten minutes because I thought it was crappy, and preferred to read.

Yesterday we floated down the Muskegan River in inner tubes-- the other thing to do here. Despite the town being so named, I saw neither hide nor hair of a big rapid. Rather, there were some brief and almost-swift, yet still-gentle episodes of rocky shoals punctuating the much more prominent serene sections of deeper, smoother water. The river carried us along, for sure, but at what I might call a gerontological pace. It took two hours to complete the tubing experience, at which point it was beginning to be evening. We exited and rolled our inner tubes up a staircase along the embankment. We waited in the warm late-summer air for the tubing company van to pick us up. We sat near a sign which was partly informational, with awful, anatomically incorrect graphics of people in dangerous scenarios connected to the river, and partly a memorial for two local girls who recently drowned there. It said something like: "Enjoy the river. Respect its power." Somehow this seemed a profound commentary about such a docile-seeming river, and it did cause me to consider the river in a different, more respectful way.

While floating down the river, existential metaphors kept coming to me involuntarily. If you sat in the inner tube and just let the river take you, all kinds of variations happened of their own accord. Sometimes the river would take Jeff ahead of me for no discernible reason; other times I would get way ahead of him for no discernible reason. Sometimes it would push me off to the side no matter how much I tried to paddle myself back to the center. Sometimes it would turn me facing backwards for a long stretch, then turn me forwards again. Sometimes the sun would be glittering and glaring in my eyes, and other times I got a little chilly if the river bent altogether out of the sun into deep green shadows. Then I thought about how these kinds of existential thoughts were precisely what made me feel awkward in public school, and out of place yet again among the kind of college kids who could be found at fraternity and sorority parties at big state schools. There was a cluster of guys and girls ahead of us in the river who were having a great time together. They were loud and had a floating cooler of beer with them. They shouted "hey" at us in a friendly, ostentatious manner when we floated past. After passing them I was amused to see a rogue purple flip flop floating near me. I forgot about it for a long stretch, and then was surprised to see it again not four feet from me much further down. I thought that because I had forgotten it that the river would have forgotten it as well. But it did not cease to exist; the river was bearing it right along with me, at the same pace.

Before having children, I would have been dissatisfied by this vacation and all that it lacks in the way of time fillers. I would have wanted the river to be more rapid, the downtown to have more places and people. I would have preferred to not be the lone couple staying in this cavernous, historical house-turned-bed-and-breakfast. But now, as soon as we left home in a car with no children and had the expanse of time in front of us, I felt a weight lifted off me and was thrilled with the novelty of quiet and no one to take care of but myself. Their car seats had been transferred into Mimi's car so the back seat was empty. My face muscles, my shoulders, my lungs, all felt more oxygenated; I adjusted the passenger seat of the car into the fully reclined position, knowing that no one's little knees would be in the way. I stretched my entire body up and back.

Before even leaving South Bend, we stopped at the downtown public library to get books and CDs to take with us. Even this-- something I would have not placed much value in before-- was surprisingly fun. I love looking and browsing in a lost-in-thought manner, carried along by an unbroken stream of consciousness so that I can hunt down not just the first or second thing that occurs to me, but even the tenth thing that occurs to me, and needs the preceding nine things in order to come into being in my head--a thing I have been meaning to pursue but never sees the light of a to-do list. I gained a little more insight into why my grandparents took so many excursions that seemed so vacuous to me as a child, like driving all the way from Orlando to St. Augustine and back just to eat at Barnicle Bill's seafood restaurant. After life gets filled up with so much around-the-clock responsibility, a little bit of void feels wonderful. Because really, it is not void at all, but probably only seems that way to the children sitting in the back seat.

This morning, after the stuffed french toast, Jane more or less sat down with us and talked shop about the restoration of this house and her unlikely vocation as a keeper of a bed and breakfast. I got almost palpably tired just listening to her description of stripping and re-staining the elaborate oak fireplace mantles in each and every room. It occurred to me that a person would have to be specifically cut out for such a task in life-- the complete restoration of gigantic old house. She grew up just down the street and was once chased off the property by a maid named Harriet, who shook a broom at her. She told us about how this house was owned by an old woman for a while who took in boarders. Then it was sold in the 1960s to a national fraternity. Frat boys of decades past still pop in periodically to see the house in its restored state and share stories of their wild times here, including a slip n' slide party that took place on the wooden flooring of the downstairs rooms (somehow I got the impression of the slip n' slide being awash with beer instead of water), which of course could not be salvaged in the restoration. My thoughts drifted back to the burly guy at the tubing company who handed us our inner tubes, and who, upon hearing where we were staying, said, "Yeah, I rushed that fraternity," with a subdued smile on his face.

She told us about a psychic who visits the bed and breakfast regularly and does readings. She told us that Desmund Tutu's daughter Naomi came to speak at the local university, and has been her most famous visitor, and was a very kind, down-to-earth woman. She told us that specific ghosts were seen here in the recent past, and there has been a consistent account of a woman with long auburn hair walking around upstairs. And the cries of babies have been heard coming from the attic--because babies surely must have been birthed and died here in the 1800s. She said that three times she walked throughout the entire house speaking to the ghosts, telling them to go over to the other side, and so now the house is clear of ghosts. This has been confirmed by the regularly visiting psychic.

Despite its paranormal subject matter, the conversation felt oddly sane, friendly, and cheerful, and was a pleasant start to what was bound to be a very quiet, lazy day for us here. And the house, even at night, does not feel even slightly haunted to me, and this is coming from someone who is fairly susceptible to sensing strange vibes in connection to strange places. No, I have a good feeling about this house. And anyway, I am much more spooked by the thought of the three decades of fraternity boys, who are, to my mind, far scarier than 19th century ghosts.

Poetry Wednesday

* * *

The Inside of Things

by Linda Hogan

Such lovely voices, the angels
singing at night in the showers,
sitting among the plants
talking about their pasts on earth.

They don't care
about the inside of daily things
the bones in an open palm
or feet that start tapping
to inner songs.

Angels have better things to think about
than houses sitting on the shabby planet
with night lights in dark halls,
or attics, filled
with records of war and birth.

Angels have no time
for horses in the barn
or the three white geese.
They are busy preening their own wings
or pecking at one another.

But the demons
come knocking right on the door
telling how angels have failed
to look at the inside of lies and history,
at ticks on horses in the barn,
at broken beams of houses.
They point out the cat's thin ribs
and sore teeth.

I am back and forth,
held in soft wings
then falling, then saved,
dancing through air
to earth made of bones,

to new green rising up,
descending,
like the bountiful rain
taken in by earth,
taken in by sky.

a poem on solitude

2010-08-18T08:24:00.000-07:00

I've learned to live simply, wisely,
To look at the sky and pray to God,
And to take long walks before evening
To wear out this useless anxiety.

When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
And the yellow-red clusters of rowan nod,
I compose happy verses
About mortal life, mortal and beautiful life.

I return. The fluffy cat
Licks my palm and sweetly purrs.
And on the turret of the sawmill by the lake
A bright flame flares.

The quiet is cut, occasionally,
By the cry of a stork landing on the roof.
And if you were to knock at my door,
It seems to me I wouldn't even hear.

by Anna Akhmatova

* * *
This morning, between my sixteen month-old and three year-old, I was struggling to stay calm and be simply present in the moment. Today I woke up feeling automatically overwhelmed by the prospect of the day for two main reasons. First, I stayed up too late last night reading a book that would upset me and present me with some information that was difficult to process. (I did not know this when I began reading the book.) And second, the first sound I heard at 6 a.m. was very angry wailing coming from the crib where my sixteen month-old was clearly desperate to be removed from, and all I could think was: I hope Jeff gets up. So then I proceeded to wonder if, already, my child is suffering from gaps in her psyche that will lead to problems later in her adult life as she attempts to fill the voids left by a mother who, on some mornings, could not seem to get out of bed.

Well, this was all very clouded thinking, and thankfully, Jeff did go in to get her. And, moreover, he had gone in when she had woken up earlier at 5:30 a.m. to check her diaper and give her a cup of water, and he said that what I was hearing when I woke up was just her being angry that he had put her back down to try to get her to sleep some more. That made more sense. When she wakes up that early, she basically fusses non-stop, walking around the house making her all-purpose "I want" sound repeatedly, which is something like, "Aa?! Aa?! Aa?!"

Which is exactly how the morning proceeded, until she went down for a nap at 8:00 a.m. And then she did not wake up in a good mood, but kept up with the "Aa"s and sometimes just plopped down on her bottom and cried alligator tears for no apparent reason. And meanwhile, my three year-old was jumping about in an almost too-good mood. And the cool morning air coming in through the window kept getting imperceptibly hotter without my realizing it until I was feeling positively hot and grungy, with a baby attached to me and the attempts to appease her-- bread and peanut butter, and a sippy cup now rolled under the table-- scattered around me and around the toys that my three year-old had dragged out.

So, Anna Akhmatova, I understand what you are made of. I am also made that way. If left to myself, I could be a very chaotic, alone person. I would sleep when I wanted to sleep and wake up when I wanted to wake up. I would eat when I wanted to, and work when I wanted to, composing something or other, for sure. I would go on walks, and the sound of my own thoughts would get so loud, I might not hear someone knocking at my door, and would certainly have no concept of time.

Instead, I have to accept solitude in doses, and I am very grateful for this situation. "The quiet is cut, occasionally." That's true. The noise is cut occasionally, too.

I finally realized this morning, after feeling totally exasperated that I could not seem to appease her with anything, that my sixteen month-old needed to go right back to her crib again, even after a substantial nap this morning. Her nose is runny; she must not be feeling well. And truly, she was so relieved when I made the counter-intuitive decision to put her down and immediately curled up with her blanket and became calm. So, unexpectedly, I get another break to regroup and do something I would like to do or need to do. And my almost-four-year-old is on the playground now, happy in the sunshine and playing with another little girl. I've been periodically checking on her from the window in the hallway of our building, which faces the back. But I managed a speedy shower, put on some nice clothes not encrusted with snot and granola bar crumbs, and turned on the air conditioner, and swept the floor all clean and picked up some toys so that I could sit in a room that feels sane and orderly for a little while. I made some earl gray tea and managed to write this blog post. Temporary solitude is refreshing, and lately I feel proud that I have developed the skill of being able to partially find it, partially create it, and partially receive it as if it is simply being given to me. Now I'll go find something else productive to do before the quiet ends just as abruptly as it began. And if someone were to knock on my door, I feel as if I would hear it.

Poetry Wednesday

can you see it?

2010-08-11T08:23:00.000-07:00

[Exposed on the cliffs of the heart]

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there,
look: the last village of words and, higher,
(but how tiny) still one last
farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground
under your hands. Even here, though,
something can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge
an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.
But the one who knows? Ah, he began to know
and is quiet now, exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
While, with their full awareness,
many sure-footed mountain animals pass
or linger. And the great sheltered bird flies, slowly
circling, around the peak's pure denial.---But
without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart. . . .

* * *
Today, I am looking for a chink in which to sit down and write. I think I may have found one. Child two is napping; child one is successfully engaged in a quiet time, which means that after an episode of protest tears trumped by my insistance, she resigned herself to getting lost in her imagination in the other room, and now I hear a conversation happening between a/some matryoshka doll/s, a Mr. Potato Head, and a Strawberry Shortcake figure, and so on.

But there is no way this little chink of available writing time is going to last, so I'll try to think fast.

I like this poem for many reasons. For one, I like thinking of the heart as a place with a vast landscape, where things can be explored and discovered, including cliffs. I also like it because it reminds me of the lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem that says, "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed...."

We went on a twelve day road trip including visits with two sides of our extended family, and a friend's wedding in between, all taking place in three different states. We returned last Wednesday to a stuffy, shut-up apartment and a fruit fly epidemic because I so carelessly and unbelievably left a bunch of bananas in our kitchen. I was looking forward to returning, but it was so unappealing to walk in the front door that first night and find myself so squarely in my own life. It has taken me almost a week since returning to synchronize with reality and fully re-assume my post. But the worst of the fruit fly epidemic is over, thank goodness.

I had lots of insights into family life on our trip-- the kind that, if they are going to be expressed, will require some other vehicle than a blog-- something which offers a greater distance. We spent a day in Ashville, North Carolina, where we tried but failed to visit the house of Thomas Wolfe, because it is closed on Mondays. Thomas Wolfe needed to get his biography out of his system and did so by writing fiction, changing all the names of places and people, but in such a thinly veiled way as to cause an uproar in his home town, because everyone knew exactly what and whom he wrote about. I have tried to read Look Homeward, Angel before, but it bored me so much I could not go on. I plan on trying again now, even if I have to take it in little boring sections little by little for a year. It just seems like the right time. I want to read that darn book for the sake of having it read. It is just one of those books that has been on my list for years. I have to know.

So, the heart has cliffs, and little unknowing plants growing on them, gasping for air, and I do believe that the erosion that precedes the formation of such cliffs happens mostly in one's family of origin. I came to the conclusion that if I ever want to express all that I long to express about cliff formation in the heart, I really have no choice but to take up fiction writing. Right now that idea is still a little bit laughable to me, but then a little sobering too. It's both laughable and sobering if it happens and laughable and sobering if it never happens. We'll see.

shy word

2010-07-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

Shy Word

by Tarjei Vesaas

Say, say, say--
It sits in the eye.
It tugs at the mouth.
Say it, say it.
It's a vital word
that wants out,
but doesn't dare.

Wants, wants, wants,
but cannot.
Will never be said.
Covered in white foam.
It dies on the lips.
The paralyzed word.

Many miles away
perhaps the word
is scratched into a stone
by frightened hands.
There, through the ages,
it will be washed away.

A word that wanted
to open doors.
That wanted to make life different.
That wanted, that wanted--
That cannot.

* * *
This poem is by a Norwegian poet Tarjei Vesaas, and I hope very much that it is easier on the ears in its original Norwegian. The English version seems to me choppy and halting, but the meaning is good enough to carry it in spite of this, I think.

I am reading the novel Kristin Lavransdatter by the Norwegian author Sigrid Undset, and I am halfway through this cinder block of a three-volume book. It has me enthralled, but sometimes I put it down in order to read about its author instead. There are a few of her letters in print, ones she wrote to a close friend during her twenties. I can tell in her letters that she is young and obviously immature in some areas of life, but so shrewd and insightful in other ways that I cannot believe her insights come from someone so young. The sharp way she talks about art, people, and society remind me a lot of Flannery O'Connor in The Habit of Being. And the characters she draws could not be more true or real, despite their living in 1300s Norway. They go through phases so true to human behavior, phases that psychology has now named and labeled, but whose categories Sigrid Undset would not have had the luxury of knowing. She would not have had access to the collective cheat sheet that we now have about the universal patterns of human behavior, and yet she always gets it so right. For example, when Kristin Lavransdatter's little sister is injured by a rolling log and her family is waiting to see if she will recover, and to what extent she will recover, Kristin, in her anticipatory grief, begins struggling with God in her mind. She has a fantasy of herself entering a monastery and thus trading her love of the world so that, in return, God will make her sister better. If I'm not mistaken, this grieving behavior known as "bargaining with God," was categorized by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross when she wrote about the stages of grief in the 1960s. But Sigrid Undset knew at the turn of the century.

For my part, human behavior typically eludes me. I need rudimentary psychology lessons, and without them, and sometimes even with them, people and their actions may remain fuzzy until further notice. So, I am simply in awe of Sigrid Undset's ability to bring people's responses to life as it happens to them into perfect focus, drawing only from her own observation and intuition.

I am glad to have found a new author to admire and to assimilate into my overall picture of what is possible in art--what is possible to write and create, beyond the same old literary standards that everyone takes for granted. I love the person who comes through in her letters and in Kristin Lavransdatter, her masterpiece. And as a side effect, I am suddenly curious about the understated country of Norway and its understated literature. I snatched the book of Tarjei Vesaas' poetry off the shelf at the university library from where it sat in proximity to Undset. It is not terribly gripping poetry overall, but I like it.

I will soon be approaching seven years of marriage in August. A friend told me that every seven years you become a new person. This made me remember something my dad always said, that in a span of seven years all of the cells in your body have regenerated and replaced old cells to the extent that you are basically a different physical entity. I am not sure why this was one of my dad's quirky pet ideas that he thought significant enough to repeat periodically, and I do not even know if it is (cough cough) true. But I always found it a fascinating idea nonetheless, if not exactly applicable to my most pressing concerns at ages seven, fourteen, or twenty-one. Now however, I appreciate the implications a little better. I can look back and say for sure that seven years is long enough for two married people to build a fairly substantial structure around themselves-- a world that is completely shared, solid, and certainly not going to get up and walk away anywhere any time soon. Plenty can happen in seven years, an accumulation of many pieces of light straw woven together by repeated patterns (whether healthy or unhealthy, I would add). After seven years you have something surprisingly dense and heavy, and with a shape not easily altered, like a bird's nest.

Likewise, seven years is long enough for another process to work something elaborate: the development of a person into a new entity. So there is the husband, who is not exactly the same person as he was seven years ago, and there is the nest, which has settled into a certain shape around the patterns, and there is the self, which is also not the same self that it was seven years ago. And all three continue to evolve.

So if anyone were to ask me, I would say yes, marriage turns out to be very much a mystery. And it is no more permanent or disposable for being a mystery. Mysteries can only exist from moment to moment in the present; they are ongoing and semi-malleable. The nest is not exactly sacred either. It is always an option to abandon it or burn it down and fly away. And I have seen firsthand that sometimes entire structures must be torn down in order for their inhabitants to emerge from them intact.

I cannot say that I have seen a single episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show since the mid 90s, so this may be an unfair statement, but I have this mental image of the current Oprah Winfrey and her studio audience applauding the woman who reinvents herself in one fell swoop and unshackles herself completely from the ties that bind. She will be decorated with words like self-actualized.

I believe in self-actualization, if it means what I think it does, but I am wary about its guest appearance before a studio audience anywhere in 2010. I have a feeling that the real thing might be scarcely noticed, or granted clemency, before the throne of Oprah. I think it means constant, quiet growth and change-- the kind that requires taking responsibility for oneself to greater and greater degrees, and letting go control over the things out of one's control in greater and greater degrees. This takes terrible courage, and leads into vacuous air pockets of life that feel unfamiliar and frightening. But maybe from the outside it never looks all that extreme. It is a constant inward disentangling and detaching, with lots of steps backward happening in between the forward ones. Then, finally, Saint Anthony the Great achieved dispassion and emerged from his solitary cave glowing with the uncreated light.

I, on the other hand, can only seem to obtain courage in tiny, infrequent, impermanent installments. God help me, this is slow work, and I am a slow worker. In one letter Sigrid Undset wrote to her friend, she says very poignantly: "I wonder if the two of us will ever have the strength to say to life: 'Don't happen the way I want, but the way you want.'"

Dear life, I wonder that too.

It must be that I need the subtle model: someone, or several someones, to demonstrate to me how this thing, this self-actualization, can be achieved in a nest, with a husband, with baby birds who are still very far from being able to fly away, a self needing lots of care and attention, a society, an extended family, a faith, and the rest. The drastic barn-burning, fleeing-the-country, or retreating-to-a-cave model does not make much sense for my delicately entangled life. Yes, I need something a bit more nuanced than, say, a cute movie called Eat, Pray, Love, starring Julia Roberts, if that makes sense. All I really want is to set up a little shelter on a small mountain perch called Honesty With the World from where, for instance, I can sit down to write the words I want to write without shyness or fear that someone in some branch of my life will find out that I wrote them. For all I know, that place may look and feel as unfamiliar to me as Norway.

Poetry Wednesday

pines to assuage the darkness

2010-07-10T01:00:00.000-07:00

Photo by Amber Schley Iragui

Around Us

by Marvin Bell

We need some pines to assuage the darkness
when it blankets the mind,
we need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly
as a plane's wing, and a worn bed of
needles to pad the rumble that fills the mind,
and a blur or two of a wild thing
that sees and is not seen. We need these things
between appointments, after work,
and, if we keep them, then someone someday,
lying down after a walk
and supper, with the fire hole wet down,
the whole night sky set at a particular
time, without numbers or hours, will cause
a little sound of thanks--a zipper or a snap--
to close round the moment and the thought
of whatever good we did.

* * *
I missed Poetry Wednesday this week. Now it is already Saturday, so this will simply be a poem posted on a Saturday.

It seemed a good one for summer, because, after a few readings, I realized it must refer to the experience of camping. I have not been camping yet this year and wonder if it would be worth a try with a highly mobile fifteen month-old. But I have set up tents on beds of pine needles before and heard the sound of zippers in the dark, coming from sleeping bags just after everyone has said good night, so I easily resonate with the mood of the poem.

On Monday of this week I joined a gathering of women who were meeting to talk about natural and home birth. I have not really given much thought to the topic of childbirth for well over a year. I have not had any reason to, and given my past experience, I don't really want to think about birth unless I have to. But a friend of mine was hosting this gathering with her midwife who is visiting from Boston, and I thought it would be a nice time. I was also curious to meet her midwife, in any case, because I had spoken on the phone with her once before Elsa's birth and she had been very helpful to me, and even made me cry with her words because they were so respectful and comforting, and contrasted so sharply with what I was experiencing from my obstetricians at that time.

Birth stories swirled around the room, and I was surprised by how many of the women there who had set out to have a natural birth in some form or another had actually wound up with a c-section. I wondered to myself which was easier for me to hear-- the stories of triumphant natural birth, or the stories of disappointment and surrender to medical intervention. I left feeling slightly detached from and bemused at all of the emotionally charged data that was shared that evening.

Nevertheless, I liked so much of what the midwife, who was so clearly an incredibly bright person, said when she was questioned. She said that a mother should remember that she is a spiritual being giving birth to a spiritual being, and it is her role to create a space around her baby's birth that fully acknowledges the spiritual reality of what is happening. It is not simply a mechanical process to be treated as merely mechanical. She said that whatever your faith or spiritual practice is, whatever your religion, you should treat birth as an event within your own spiritual development.

I couldn't help looking back and evaluating the birth of both of my girls in light of her words. Many external forces broached the space surrounding both of my girls' births, and I wonder to what extent I could have protected that space more vigilantly, praying more, and surrendering to God rather than fretting and trying to control things so much. Perhaps a wiser me would have simply realized that it was more beneficial to preserve a peaceful mood surrounding the births than to struggle with the details of the mechanics, or, rather, to struggle with unsupportive doctors who wanted to control the mechanics in ways that I did not want, and who, in their attitudes and words were unwittingly contributing to the spiritual nature of the experience nonetheless.

Because ironically, the birth of my first baby was as mechanical as could possibly be-- a scheduled cesarean--and yet I look back on it as being far less emotionally complicated. It was as much a spiritual, mysterious event as anything I have ever experienced. And that serenity no doubt came from the fact that I was in harmony with the people who were going to travel with me into that birth space: doctors. Doctors are very pleased to be able to provide a controlled outcome to the birth event, which is otherwise so uncertain, and for them a surgical birth is perhaps that biggest guarantor of a controlled outcome, so perhaps (consciously or unconsciously) they love this method of birth more than any other. When the events leading up to the birth of both of my babies started pointing to the operating room, I could see obvious relief in the countenance of my doctors, a twinkle in their eye even as they expressed their sympathies to me, and a spring in their step. It was undeniable. And on some level I do not really blame them, because if birth is indeed a mystery, as wise midwives who have attended hundreds and hundreds of births claim, then everything within the hospital environment works against that mystery, and I imagine that this is difficult for doctors, who are simply trying to keep everyone safe, and do not really have the necessary resources to enter into everyone's personal mystery with them and do whatever it takes to protect that mystery, which can vary greatly from woman to woman, and convince that psychologically motivated sphincter muscle to open up and let the baby out.

I would be dishonest if I did not confess that it feels terrible to be in conflict with doctors, and it feels very good to be in their good graces. The seamless harmony that one can achieve as a patient by complying with doctors ensures a feeling of serenity around a birth, and this is precisely what a birthing mother wants to feel when her time comes, even if, for some women, this might mean forfeiting all or some amount of confidence in her own body.

When I left my friend's home on Monday evening, her midwife was sitting with her on the sofa, massaging her swollen feet. I knew that they were very comfortable in each others' presence and that they would simply hang out at her home, eat meals, and go through the day, or many days, in all the ordinary ways until her contractions began. If she were in the hands of doctors right now, I do not doubt she would be facing pressure to be induced, because she is well past her due date. And even if she simply refused to comply, on some level something would already be lost, because she would be in conflict with the very people responsible for her care. Instead, she was sitting at home, no one pressuring or badgering her. She would simply go from an ordinary day or an ordinary night amidst familiar surroundings, her icons, her furniture, her sons' things, into labor. She would experience that seamless feeling of harmony during the event of her birth, but without having to forfeit all confidence in her own body.

As the group dispersed that night, I left my friend's home feeling ever more mystified by the mystery of childbirth. I also left feeling happy for her. Someone was getting to experience the world a bit more closely to the way it should be.

like a life-giving sun

2010-06-30T05:01:00.000-07:00

You could become a great horseman

And help to free yourself and this world

Though only if you and prayer become sweet
Lovers.

It is a naive man who thinks we are not
Engaged in a fierce battle,

For I see and hear brave foot soldiers
All around me going mad,

Falling on the ground in excruciating pain.

You could become a victorious horseman

And carry your heart through this world
Like a life-giving sun

though only if you and God become sweet
Lovers!

* * *
I liked this Hafiz poem for this week. Today I feel pretty limited in what I can write though. We take turns with other families driving out to a nearby farm for dairy and meat, and today was my turn. It takes half a day to do this. I just got back, and I'm tired. It was nice to let Esme--who happened to be wearing a fairy costume made with tulle and sequins over her regular clothes--run around the farm and check out the baby chicks, some nimble-footed week-old goat babies (kids?), nursing calves, and a sand box. And later, indoors, she was not shy about brushing the hair of a doll in an upstairs bedroom. It was much better than letting her stay home and watch "Dora's Super Silly Fiesta," which was what she wanted to do when the prospect of driving to the farm was presented to her this morning.

I didn't really feel like doing this job today, but on the drive, I was very thankful that at least it is summer because I've done this drive a number of times in the winter, and it is not fun. The landscape is flat, featureless, bleak, frozen, and incredibly cold because there is nothing to block the wind out there on county roads, away from people and buildings. In that situation, especially when I have a child or two in their car seats in the back, I always think about how easy it would be to die of exposure to the elements if not for a flimsy thing called a car, with a flimsy apparatus called a heater.

But today the clouds were puffy, the sun was yellow, the cornstalks looked as if they had been treated with a special varnish to lock in an optimal shade of glistening green. The matriarch of the farm took time to chat with me and show me all the new animal babies, the sight of which somehow evoked the same maternal feelings that my own human babies evoke in me. Somehow watching those baby goats run around on their little legs with clickety hoofs that look like little dress shoes reminded me of how delightful and entertaining it can be to watch my own fifteen month-old totter around our home on her little legs. I said this out loud to the farmer's wife and she confirmed the phenomenon. She said that the baby animals always remind her of her own babies (she has six) and that she has been known to accidentally call a baby animal by the name of one of her own children.

So that's it. No grand metaphors today, really, because it is summer, and in so many ways, life is just easier. Alright, I changed my mind. I just cannot resist. I was actually thinking during my drive about how one and the same landscape can seem so dangerous and bleak in one kind of weather, at one time of year, and another time of year, in another kind of weather, seem so benign and idyllic--the familiar all-American agrarian ideal, you know, involving freckled, barefoot children and a heaping helping of surface-level naivete about people being wholesome enough if they appear wholesome enough. Yes, I was comparing that to life, and how it may appear at times so benign and simply not a very big deal. And yet all the saints speak of life being a battle to the end and prayer being a matter of life or death, like a heated car carrying a mother and her babies through a subzero day.

Poetry Wednesday

statures that touch the skies

2010-06-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

We never know how high we are
Till we are asked to rise
And then if we are true to plan
Our statures touch the skies--

The heroism we recite
Would be a normal thing
Did not ourselves the Cubits warp
For fear to be a king--

by Emily Dickinson

* * *
Jeff got his hair cut yesterday from The Barber on campus, whose name is Frank. He told an interesting story of how he came to cut hair for a living. His father had been a barber, so in his youth he had worked in his father's barber shop, but went on to become a chemical engineer. His father told him to never let his barber's license expire because he might need to fall back on it someday. Then, after years of working as a chemical engineer, the company he worked for started suffering financial setbacks and he was laid off. He thought about looking for a job cutting hair but knew he had let his barber's license lapse. When he looked into renewing it he discovered that his father had been renewing it for him every year already. Then, as he lay in bed one night he heard a voice say: "Frank, get your ass up to Notre Dame. You're going to cut hair." So, he went up to Notre Dame, where he was told that they already had a barber, but would introduce him. Frank and the barber hit it off, and the barber shared a secret with him that no one else yet knew: he would be retiring in one month. And so, that was how Frank became the barber at Notre Dame, and has been cutting hair for the last twenty years. "Talk about a still small voice," said Frank.

I thought that was a great story. And then there was this NPR story that really delighted me this week about a fresco in the Sistine Chapel. Neurosurgery researchers at Johns Hopkins are saying that Michelangelo drew an anatomically correct brain in God's neck. It is subtle, but there, hidden, but clearly visible.

I adore the fact that Michelangelo hid a brain in God's neck and I adore the fact that it took until 2010 for his audience to find it. I want to go back in time and tell Michelangelo about this. I think it would tickle him, even though I feel sure that he put the brain there to please himself, not a present or future audience. It was not socially or theologically acceptable in his lifetime to be passionately interested in human anatomy, but he was, and he found a way to incorporate it into his art for his own pleasure, without waiting for a green light from others which he knew he would never receive. I think that, in art, this is called sublimation. I wonder if all artistic courage involves something of this: sniffing out the latent space between the sphere of total isolation and the sphere of what is socially acceptable and then expressing something into that space, creating something suitable for it. And the only thing suitable for that space is brilliant subtlety. Emily Dickinson was a master at this.

My third anecdote for today involves dust jackets. Apparently children's book publishers think that it is a great idea to include a dust jacket with nice hardback children's books. It seems obvious enough to me without any explanation that an easily removable piece of paper, intended to be kept smooth and intact, is not a good idea for anything which will be used and handled by children. For some time now I've fantasized about throwing away these dust jackets into the recycling bin because of their uselessness and the fact that they take up space and make the shelf in my child's room look cluttered. When I worked in an antiquarian bookstore in college, I learned that dust jackets are worth 30% of the total value of a book. This fact in my head, and the thought that one day these books might pass into other hands, and then they will need their dust jackets back, has kept me holding on.

But what really prevents me from making certain decisions, from big to little, is a fundamental fear of responsibility. It's as if I am waiting for the voice of God--or Random House, or a friend-- to give me permission to act before I can act, even when I already know what it is I want to do. But sometimes I am so in the habit of taking my cues from external sources that I do not know what I want to do. In certain areas I am so out of touch with what I want I cannot even access it when I try. I have obscured it to myself because the responsibility for acting on it is potentially terrifying.

I think that this is what Emily Dickinson is writing about here. I warp the cubits of my own potential when I choose not to be self-determining, when I forfeit myself to external forces, both real and imagined, and then resent them for yanking me around. It is time for me to begin changing this pattern of behavior.

I believe in the veracity of Frank's story. God may speak to us with a literal voice if a situation calls for it. I just have to wonder if God only speaks this way when the person in question is already self-determining enough to receive it responsibly. More often, I imagine, there is a still small voice within each person, a bundle of functioning parts made in God's image. It is both beautiful and terrifying to be like God, to have a brain, and to completely own our own decisions, knowing that decisions will also involve mistakes, because we actually are not gods. But it is also perfectly fine to make mistakes. Finally I see that all of this uncramping of human stature is far more beautiful than it is terrifying.

Poetry Wednesday

swarming reassurances

2010-06-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

Grasses

by Amy Clampitt

Undulant across the slopes
a gloss of purple
day by day arrives to dim
the green, as grasses

I never learned the names of--
numberless, prophetic,
transient--put on a flowering
so multiform, one

scarcely notices: the oats grow tall,
their pendent helmetfuls
of mica-drift, examined stem
by stem, disclose

alloys so various, enamelings
of a vermeil so
craftless, I all but despair of
ever reining in a

metaphor for: even the plebeian
dooryard plantain's
every homely cone-tip earns a
halo, a seraphic

hatband of guarantee that
dying, for
the unstudied, multitudinously,
truly lowly,

has no meaning, is nothing
if not flowering's
swarming reassurances of one
more resurrection.

* * *
In the last few days I have noticed that the predictable clump of flowers in my child's hand was no longer uni-yellow but multi-colored, evidencing the arrival of varieties of wayside flowers other than dandelions. Amy Clampitt was originally from the Midwest, so I imagine she knew something about this. There is a lot of outdoor space here, and the space is often covered with grasses, and some of the grasses are not grasses at all. They bloom.

An old friend of mine is here visiting me now, and she is without a doubt a plant person. When we go outside, anywhere, she notices plants and knows their names. To me, unless they are something really obvious like "tulips," they are just plants, flowers, or, if they are weedy looking, weeds. On the park-like campus of the university, however, there are no weeds. I may have mentioned before that we go walking there a lot. We suspect that the university imports its flowers from outer space. By this we mean that the landscaping is quite possibly overly perfect, overly cultivated, giving the illusion that grounds workers (aliens?) swap things out over night, lest an important donor arrive first thing in the morning and spot a singular wilted petal. Sometimes entire flower beds change from white to pink in a matter of a day. Even I, who am not particularly a plant-noticing person, never cease to find this a jolting experience.

Walking on campus recently with my friend, I received from her a miniature field guide tutorial, and realized the degree to which I normally lump all plant detail into a bushy green generalization, like the scalloped all-purpose shrubs on every page of a Hello Kitty coloring book.

On the grounds around our student apartment buildings, set off to the north of campus, no university landscaping crew sets foot, only a few burly guys on lawn mowers who come each week. Their lawn mowers are hugely imprecise and leave lots of tall stuff growing unchecked near fence edges. If a bicycle or wading pool is left sitting in the middle of the grass, they don't move it, but just mow around it. This week, ironically, I noticed that there was an abandoned toy lawn mower framed within a perfectly circular patch of untrimmed grass in front of our building.

Anyway, my friend went snooping around our weedy peripheries and found some interesting things. I was thrilled to witness the particular emerge from what I thought was general, the detailed from what I thought was vague, and things of value from what I had dismissed. Embedded in the weedy panorama there turned out to be: wild mint, some kind of soft looking fern which turned out to be parsley of all things, some kind of other herb that has pretty little white flowers, and some kind of stem with bright red inedible berries. She arranged them speedily into a bouquet, a centerpiece for the small table where we eat. They are hardy and still look beautiful after several days. Today she discovered that oregano grows wild here all over the place.

Last night, relaxing in my comfy chair and staring across the room, chatting with my friend, full of my own words, I noticed that the herbal bouquet she had made was sitting before an icon of St. Elizabeth the New Martyr of Russia, which I had propped there temporarily. It was incidental, but once I saw them both together, they seemed rightfully connected. Elegant greenery appropriate to her had come to her.

If you have never heard of St. Elizabeth, the Grand Duchess of Russia, you should read her story. I became interested in her several years ago and tried to find out everything I could about her. I became so interested, in fact, that I even wound up reading about Queen Victoria of England, who was her grandmother, even though normally there are many kinds of boredoms I would choose over the boredom of reading about British royalty. But I was so eager to round out my picture of St. Elizabeth, to fill in as many details as possible.

She grew up in Germany (her English mother had married into the German aristocracy) but went to Russia as a young woman betrothed to the Grand Duke Sergei. She would convert to Orthodoxy and there would be an Orthodox wedding. Her heart was completely open to embracing Orthodoxy and Russia. Maybe that is why the Russian people were ready to adore her when she first arrived. Traveling by train, she was received in Moscow by crowds tossing flowers in her path to welcome her. The details of her life after all of this fanfare, after the settling in, are more scant than my curiosity would like, but reading between the lines, I would say she went on to suffer in many hidden ways. Her husband was assassinated, so there is that. But there is also some mention by historians that her husband may have been a homosexual, or was thought by some to be. Who knows? Whatever the case, whatever the particulars, she was martyred in the end, and the historical turbulence that happened in her lifetime would have by itself been extremely difficult.

By the end of her life, when revolution was happening in Russia and the aristocracy was being overturned, she was carried away from Moscow by Bolshevik soldiers. By then she had been widowed and had also founded a monastery, of which she was the abbess. Now she would be forced to take a train out of Moscow. She and several others were eventually thrown down into a mine shaft and left to die. Local peasants reported that the singing of hymns could be heard for a long time from below the ground.

When I read her story I was struck by the image of these two trains conveying Elizabeth to and from Moscow at the beginning of her adulthood, and then at the end. I coupled them together and thought they were an unlikely, and yet likely pair, a literary paradox, a real-life paradox, a Palm Sunday, a Holy Friday. I thought about Elizabeth, and what she must be thinking and feeling on these two trips. One train, a vessel of adulation, entered Moscow, bearing a young bride; another, a vessel of murderous hate, departed from Moscow, bearing a mature widow, a wizened abbess. And yet the trajectory of trains matters ultimately little. The adoring peasants, the violent soldiers fade away. Only the trajectory of Elizabeth herself, the dignified trajectory of a person, continue to matter.

I decided not to take a plot in the student community garden this year. I know it was the right decision because every time I walk past the garden fence on my way to get our mail from the mail room, I feel no regret when I see my neighbors working in their plots, but genuine relief that I am exempt. But despite this, I am an expert at finding ways to second guess myself, to feel inappropriately guilty, to be haunted by a limitless variety of self-imposed shoulds, to imagine that there is some standard I am not living up to. So at some point I did indulge in a few moments of false regret and dejection, telling myself that I must be unfit to care for plants, and that having two children under three is not a valid excuse for not being able to swing a vegetable garden, when plenty of people around here manage to do this, and so forth and so on. These and other desultory thoughts were coming to my mind and I cannot even remember if I exerted any effort to send them packing.

Some time after that I was sitting next to a neighbor outside while our children played in a wading pool. I barely know her, but she turned to me and said: How would you feel about plant-sitting while we are gone for six weeks? I said that I would feel fine about plant-sitting. The next day, another neighbor, whom I also barely know, popped in and asked if I might watch a plant while they are out of town all summer. I said of course and he brought up a gorgeous thing planted in a white basket. It was uncanny--unbidden plants coming under my care. I have never been asked to plant-sit, much less twice in the same week. And now our bedroom is like a conservatory. They adorn the room; they are what the room lacked before. I gaze at them when I wake up and when I go to sleep.

And, not at all surprisingly, they are still alive. I am perfectly up to the simple task of keeping plants alive. It is totally irrational to think otherwise. Why, then, is there often an irrational voice in my head always telling me the otherwise side of things?

Perhaps this general waffling and inexplicable collapses in confidence explain why, when I first became interested in St. Elizabeth, I found her simultaneously fascinating and alienating. Hagiographies in general can themselves be elusive and saccharine. Saints never seem to waffle or doubt themselves. Hagiographies present them as immutable and heaven-sent from start to finish, as if ultimate holiness was an in-born trait or a foregone conclusion. It is difficult to get a sense of a real person struggling with inconclusiveness along the way. I've gotten used to this though and it hardly bothers me. I find hagiographies edifying, no matter what.

But some versions of Elizabeth's story are like this. Maybe because she is a more recent saint it feels as if she should be more accessible. But in fact she was born into a world I cannot imagine, into a level of privilege I cannot imagine. She was moreover bred for greatness even in her childhood, and in adulthood universally admired for her striking beauty and charitable works. It goes without saying that there is little to nothing here that I can identify myself with, holiness aside. And yet, something motivated me originally to seek her out.

We bought her icon since she is Elsa's patron saint but I have not otherwise given Elizabeth a lot of thought in years. Only lately, and unexpectedly, the other night, I felt a slight inkling of connection to her-- more than I ever did when I was in the process of reading about her. I felt as if I caught a glimmer of something, a glimmer of a spiritual maturity that was, in fact, hard-won, by struggle and suffering not completely dissimilar to my own struggles.

I am glad that I don't have the burden of a vegetable garden this summer. I have absolutely no interest in taking two incredibly curious children ages three and one to a patch of dirt and trying to keep them out of trouble while I weed and water. The last time I checked you could still buy vegetables at the grocery store. And God sent me some very nice plants to look at without even getting out of my pajamas. Internally, I feel as if a lot of particular little plants are presenting themselves to me from what had been just a solid panorama of undervalued green, which I am in the habit of dismissing. I am talking about the panorama of my own life, my own soul. There is an inner life to work on. I thought it was all just a blob of color but it turns out that there is a self which deserves to be developed and arranged into a design, not dismissed. There is plenty to hold my interest.

This is for Poetry Wednesday.

an economy of ridiculous regeneration

2010-06-09T06:32:00.000-07:00

The Dandelion

By Vachel Lindsay

O dandelion, rich and haughty,
King of village flowers!
Each day is coronation time
You have no humble hours.
I like to see you bring a troop
To beat the blue-grass spears,
To scorn the lawn mower that would be
Like fate's triumphant shears.
Your yellow heads are cut away
It seems your reign is o'er.
By noon you raise a sea of stars
More golden than before.

* * *
I post this poem for my three year-old, who is dandelion-oriented. I have resigned myself to her preoccupation with dandelions. I know that any going out of doors with her will involve at least some portion of time spent dandelion hunting, and things go more smoothly if I just give her the leeway to do this. It used to feel tedious, but more recently, I've come to appreciate dandelions and their ridiculous ability to regenerate. Perhaps God put them here for children, who also seem to operate according to a different economy-- an economy of hyper-regeneration. Dandelions: I give you my daughter. My daughter: I give you the dandelions. I'll just stand here and lean on the stroller and zone out behind my sunglasses, if that's o.k.

Or maybe I am writing nonsense today because I have been thrown into the crucible of single parenting for the last five days. And both of my girls have colds that will not seem to go away. And it has been raining a lot. And I have been reading really intense self-help books that are making me see a lot of terrible things about myself. And every time I look at the NPR website, there is either something about the oil in the Gulf, or how a new study has shown that caffeine is bad for you, and sleep is really good for you. Um, besides duh, I'd like to write a letter that says: Dear scientists, please stop torturing yourselves and humanity with these studies.

Anyway, this is about all I can muster today. Thanks for listening.

Poetry Wednesday

a blessing for one who is exhausted

2010-06-02T07:00:00.000-07:00

A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted

by John O'Donohue

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,

The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.

The ride you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken for the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

* * *

I am not exhausted to this extent right now, but I felt drawn to this poem when I came across it this week. I had an accident a few weeks ago, on a Friday morning. I was standing in front of a chest of drawers, about to get out the clothes I was going to wear, when I felt a prick and a snap, and, within a matter of seconds, realized I had stepped on a sewing needle and part of the needle remained in my foot. A few more seconds passed and I realized that I was not going to be able to remove it at home, and would need to go to a walk-in clinic, possibly the emergency room. It sounds agonizing, but truthfully the pain itself was more like a small splinter. I sustained plenty of splinters in my feet as a child and remember my parents removing them with tweezers. That's what this felt like, except that the solution so far exceeded the power of tweezers as to astound me. It turned into a very big deal. From the emergency room, where x-rays showed that the needle was lodged very far from the surface of my foot, I was referred to a podiatrist. But because it was Friday, I had to wait the duration of the weekend with the needle in my foot for that appointment. It really was not as bad as it sounds. I did most things normally, being careful not to put pressure on the area of my foot near my pinky toe.

On Monday I found out I would have to have surgery to remove the needle, including light sedation. It all ended with three stitches and a very hyperbolic, loony toon-esque bandage covering my entire foot, which I was instructed to keep dry for ten days. In the end, it was not really the pain, which was just a dull soreness, but the inconvenience and the disruption of normal life that was the hardest to endure, and the most unbelievable aspect of the experience-- how a split-second mishap can spin out into such an elaborate consequence. This, by the way, is at least partly why I have not been keeping up with this blog.

All is well with my foot now. I do not think that John O'Donohue's poem is about physical exhaustion, even though, with two little children ages three and one, I am always dealing with physical exhaustion in one degree or another. But the poem is about mental and emotional exhaustion, which is more private than a foot injury. Life does go along sometimes in an insular way, but I am beginning to realize that there is a constant potential surrounding it that can press in at any moment. This is because, quite simply, my life is not like a Norman Rockwell painting, no matter how family photos appear. And neither is the life of anyone else. And although I can publicly tell the story about injuring my foot, there are always at least five other less tangible trials pressing inward that are not o.k. to broadcast. And there is always the potential for life to get out of sync, to get ahead of your soul and travel too fast over false ground. And so it is always possible for the proverbial rug to be pulled beneath your feet, or a literal needle to be hiding in the literal rug, which is why we have to depend so completely on God, which we sometimes forget until something happens, like a foot injury.

Poetry Wednesday

the anti-psalm

2010-05-12T11:12:00.000-07:00

Leap Before You Look

by W.H. Auden

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

* * *
A few days after the oil leak began in the Gulf of Mexico, as I was going to bed, I closed my eyes and had an involuntary vision of oil, spurting with terrible force, in a deep, faraway underwater place, and the thought: "This is happening in the present tense." And my brain, which had been sleepy, felt suddenly alert, my body tense. Everyone else in our household was already asleep, our home all dark, and I of course needed to go to sleep. A scary environmental disaster bordering my native state, and all its import, beckoning me to enter into a mild anxiety attack, would be no good. It would be no good for me or anyone. So I successfully pushed the entire Gulf of Mexico--sand and water, fish and fowl, inky oil--away from me and slept in the end.

It just so happened that, around this time, I had also picked up a book at the library about the unchecked chemicals that are surrounding us in ways we do not suspect, with affects we cannot entirely control or predict. Its (albeit sensational) title is Slow Death By Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things. Did you know that canaries cannot tolerate the fumes produced by heated Teflon? If you cook with Teflon around a small bird, its lungs will fail and it will die from the fumes that are--supposedly--harmless. He also describes the baffling stubbornness of human beings toward mercury, one of the oldest known toxins, which continues to be used again and again in careless ways, without regulation, even though the amount of mercury in a tiny thermometer is enough to poison the fish of an entire lake. This and other alarming facts I learned from this book were on my mind the day the President used the word "unprecedented" to describe the environmental disaster happening in the Gulf.

Auden is probably right to burst the bubble of the dream, on the one hand. Babies are born into the dream of safety. I've seen how they are born putting the entire world into their mouths. Maybe it takes a lifetime to unlearn the childish dream that the world is truly safe. On the other hand, I disagree with Auden that solitude sustains the bed on which we lie, or anything else. We function in an unsafe world only together. Our beds are sustained by one another, and by a great cloud of witnesses who have weathered all of the disasters there ever were on earth. We cannot live either in a false denial of death, or simply in the raw reality of all the evil that is immediately in our line of vision. We need to put aside anxiety so that we can sleep, and we need to sleep so that we can function in this world, taking care of ourselves and each other. And nothing is unprecedented. And there are the Psalms, so unlike Auden's poem, which does not go far enough. And there is in fact a certain kind of dream-of-safety not of this world.

More poems for Poetry Wednesday here.

some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle

2010-04-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

A Miracle For Breakfast

by Elizabeth Bishop

At six o'clock we were waiting for coffee,
waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony,
--like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun
steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.

The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.
It was so cold we hoped that the coffee
would be very hot, seeing that the sun
was not going to warm us; and that the crumb
would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.
At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.

He stood for a minute alone on the balcony
looking over our heads toward the river.
A servant handed him the makings of a miracle,
consisting of one lone cup of coffee
and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,
his head, so to speak, in the clouds--along with the sun.

Was the man crazy? What under the sun
was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!
Each man received one rather hard crumb,
which some flicked scornfully into the river,
and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.
Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.

I can tell you what I saw next; it was not a miracle.
A beautiful villa stood in the sun
and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.
In front, a baroque white plaster balcony
added by birds, who nest along the river,
--I saw it with one eye close to the crumb--

and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb
my mansion, made for me by a miracle,
through ages, by insects, birds, and the river
working the stone. Every day, in the sun,
at breakfast time I sit on my balcony
with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.

We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.
A window across the river caught the sun
as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.

* * *
The poem is a sestina, so the last word of each line continues to repeat in a different order in each stanza, making the poem feel as if it is swirling in circles back upon itself. It feels like life to me: waiting for something to happen, preoccupied with the processes of mundane things like coffee and food. And yet also preoccupied with the expectation of something beyond the mundane. I want my bread to be buttered by a miracle. How is it possible to be so caught up in everyday life, and yet, in my heart of hearts, always living the in expectation of some miracle.

Jeff and I went to see Babette's Feast at the movie theater on Saturday night. Someone left two tickets in the theology lounge on campus for anyone to claim and Jeff decided to take them. That was what determined our plans for a rare night out--the finding of free tickets.

On our way to the theater, I was still uncertain if I had or had not seen Babette's Feast before, a long time ago. I knew I had read the short story by Isak Dinesen some time back, and that the movie is a favorite in familiar circles, so I've heard it referenced a lot. Perhaps I conflated all of this second-hand familiarity into a quasi-movie in my head, something faded and grayscale, in a remote tract of Europe, like the classic version of Heidi. These are the kinds of muddled things that my poor head is capable of. I say muddled because as soon as the movie began, I was certain I had never seen it, and wondered at how I could have invented the notion that I had. In my defense, the Isak Dinesen story is written in a cinematic, straightforward, purely descriptive style that would lend itself to a moving mental image.

But the actual movie is not pale or forgettable. It is vivid and pregnant with meaning. It is perfect and will stay with me securely forever. The story is simple. It begins with despair and limitation and ends with hope and possibility. Between the two bookends of Loewenhielm's visit from the outside world to a pair of isolated, chaste sisters is sandwiched the time it takes for human beings to live a lifespan not punctuated by anything very remarkable. But the remarkable-- the completely unlikely and unbelievable, the divine act, the miracle, awaits these completely unsuspecting people. It happens to them.

I bring it up not really to go into any sort of analysis of Babette's Feast, but to mention it as a backdrop to the following morning, which was a Sunday morning, enveloped in rain, fog, and, for my part, very little momentum. We drove an hour to the church Jeff is assigned to every other Sunday, which is also across a time zone for us. The time difference is not a big deal, but only means that the start-time feels a little later for us than it is intended to feel. The morning has worn a little longer for us than it has for everyone else. It means, above all, that the breakfast in the tummy of our three year-old has likely been digested upon arrival, making the stretch toward post-liturgical calories at coffee hour a little long for her. This would not be the case if I would remember to bring her a snack for the car, but sometimes that particular detail falls through the rafters in the aforementioned brain that invents memories of movies it has not seen.

On this morning, Esme was very cheerful on the drive, making up songs and singing, pointing to the highway-side cows and sheep from her backseat window. But as soon as we entered the interior of the little St. Elizabeth Church, candlelit and dark as evening under the canopy of an April morning shower, the first thing she did on our way up to the center icon of St. Elizabeth the New Martyr was to spot a bag of cough drops near the choir conductor's stand and decide that she needed one urgently. When I told her no, she began a high pitched series of whines, culminating in a tantrum. She said she had a cough. She said her daddy told her she could. Neither was a true statement. This was all happening as my husband was heading up to the altar to vest for the service, amidst the quiet scuffle of preparations that happen right before the liturgy begins. I escorted her to a sofa in a back room and we sat down until the tantrum abated. But only the outermost fumes of irritation evaporated off of the two of us. There was no time or privacy to resolve the problem on a deeper level. Tension had pooled and was bound to splatter up again at some point during the liturgy.

She, at least, was distracted and cheered when the other children close to her age began to arrive. I used to deliberately position us at a distance from the other children in church, fearing that she would be a burden on other parents by engaging their children in a rollicking good time. At our parent-teacher conference with Esme's preschool teacher, we learned that she invents games of imagination at school and assigns role-playing parts to the other kids. She invented one game in which she pretends to be a baby and the other kids have to take care of her. Apparently it is a big hit and they all participate, rallying around her as she crawls around the classroom. Her teacher said that on days when she is not there the kids sometimes are at a loss for what to play. I am not sure how this child came from two parents who have never enjoyed astronomical levels of confidence in big groups.

In any case, this would explain my hesitation to let her engage with other children during church. And of course I also want to make the distinction, for her sake, that church is distinct from all the other ordinary situations of our life. But the separation was incomprehensible to her. My social, exuberant three year-old sees her friends in clusters together and wants to join them. What other impulse could she possibly have upon seeing the children with whom she exclusively relates to through play in every other situation? The restriction was making us both tense and unhappy. I do not want the experience of church to be miserable for her. So I finally gave her the green light to mingle among them, as long as things remained low key. This solved the problem of one kind of tension between us, but introduced a new set of tensions which--no matter how well things go along for a time--inevitably erupt at some point, usually right before communion. When I try to intervene, as I must, things typically do not go smoothly between us. In fact, it seems to me that she never defies so much as she does in this particular situation. And maybe some parents are spurned to be better parents when other adults are looking on, but being around other people has the opposite affect on my parenting. It makes me a worse parent. The fear of how I am being perceived adds to the tension I already feel about her defiance. On top of that, I feel angry at myself for caring one way or another how I'm being perceived. Why can't I be one of those people who does not care? But I never have been one of those people, and now I am burdening my child with my vanity. It is all like one big recipe for a homemade volcano which, of course, does not have the luxury of erupting in such a setting, accompanied as it is by the the Cherubic Hymn.

So there I was, feeling like an ugly specter among the faithful, hauling my two cherubs up to the chalice for that meal of meals, communion, tied up in knots, void of patience, kindness, longsuffering, and basically the entire catalog of fruits which are cited as evidence of the life of the Holy Spirit inside a human being.

This sends me back to the poem, the movie. I know, I am trying to tie too many things together in this blog post--movies, poems, personal anecdotes. But in my heart, they really are all connected. Life swirls around me in morning coffee, or morning coffee postponed for communion. Then communion, when it arrives, feels like a miracle working on the wrong balcony. Some mornings coffee feels like the real miracle, but then all I get is one drop before I am beckoned away by a dirty diaper and it turns cold. And yet, all this time, maybe a mansion is being forged--not by anything supernatural--but by time, insects, birds and the currents of everyday life. Maybe the stage is being set for something like a feast. "For tonight I have learned, dear sister," said General Loewenhielm, "that in this world anything is possible."

More poems, as always, here.

dear elsa

2010-04-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

Dear Elsa,

Maybe you would like to know some background information. When your older sister was born, I planted shrubs--tidy, boxy green hedges in a perfect square around us, and tended to them scrupulously for a year. Inside the hedges was a quiet space for a mother and a child. Our neighbors in that barren apartment complex were neither interesting nor friendly; conditions seemed to favor this improbable landscaping. As for the town, I had given up on it altogether. It was so quiet during the day, turned inward like that. The ceiling of our living room was white and vaulted. Never having been time or routine oriented by nature, I changed and began to develop a daily kinship with the silent clock face. The day's routine became almost like a game to me. It felt like a tidy wonder, getting a baby to nap in sync with the clock. It was easy, being a mother, and yet so draining, it took everything out of me, and I knew that my real youth was somehow over.

But I carefully supervised the process of becoming a mother, eager not to falter. I had so much time to watch myself, to oversee the entire operation. Brackets had been set up around my psyche: I was unfettered by any other goal than to simply be a good mother. Between all the naps and the intervals of time that pre-mobile, pre-verbal babies spend lollygagging around on blankets and bouncers, I luxuriated in parenting books on superfluous topics like infant massage. I exchanged e-mails with a dear old college friend whose baby was born nine days before mine. We compared notes about what was happening to us--this huge change--our words flowing between us like the flux of postpartum hormones, keeping us both afloat. Every advertisement in the sidebar of my gmail account at that time had to do with breastfeeding, it seemed. Nothing was there to hinder me from implementing any and every parenting suggestion that I deemed reasonable. I was hyper-focused upon advent of each next phase: the first tooth, the whats and whys of first foods, rolling from tummy to back and back to tummy, pulling up on knees, crawling, pulling up to standing, dropping the morning nap, and on and on. And because each change was preceded by anticipation, its little line on the developmental measuring tape appeared disproportionately prodigious. It was all very extravagant; the pupils of my figurative eyes were no doubt continuously, falsely dilated watching this first baby-- who had seemingly arrived perfectly whole and out of nowhere--grow into a one year-old.

Elsa, when you were born, there were no fancy, implausible hedges anymore. They had long been worn down into stubs by foot traffic, weather, and semi-conscious neglect. They served a purpose, but they were unsustainable in the long run. They had much less to do with motherhood than I thought.

You were born into all kinds of realities--both wonderful and difficult. You were born on Holy Saturday-- the very brink of the resurrection. You will know that this is why your middle name is Joanna--not because I especially adored the name-- but after the myrrhbearing saint who remained faithful to Jesus even in the darkest hour. I figure that if dark history ever happens on your doorstep, your middle name may come in handy. And it so happens that your first birthday fell two weeks after Pascha this year, on the Sunday of the myrrhbearing women--something that your liturgically oblivious mother could not have plotted even if she had tried.

What can I tell you about yourself? You are petite, tender-hearted, and tough as nails. You think your big sister is hilarious. You are very attached to your daddy and sometimes cry when he leaves in the morning. You love food, especially bread. You hate taking baths, probably because your bathtime experience has been so haphazard and, well, not very relaxing thus far. You have intense, intelligent eyes. You love the baby doll you received for your birthday yesterday, and you already seem to understand that it is yours and yours alone, apart from all the other toys and stuffed animals that were already here before you arrived. Don't worry, we will not let your big sister claim it. Your big sister loves you and always says you are cute; she wants you to play with her. I can tell by the way she says your name that she regards you as an equal.

Elsa, your first year of life was not an unbroken series of mother-and-child-figurine moments, and yet you are no less my sweetest baby on Earth, the sweetest baby in the world--sweet and strong and wonderful. I love you so much. When I gather you to my chest in a little bundle and squeeze you, I can feel the love flowing back and forth between us tangibly. Happy birthday.

Your mama

first words

2010-04-14T07:06:00.000-07:00

First Words

by John O'Donohue

Parents know not what they do
When they coax those first words
Out of you, start a trickle
Of saying that will not cease.
Long after they no longer hear
Your talk, the words they started
Continue to call out for someone
To come near enough to hear
The cadence of what has happened
Deep in the inevitable growing
Heavy and weary of heart
Under the layer of days
Where memory works cold fusions,
As if your voice could carry you,
Out of the stillness to warmth
Of someone who would linger with you
To search the frozen parts for tears
Until a forgotten line fires
Down through the word-hoard
To where your first silence was
Broken, and your rhythm born.

Our front window looks out onto the entryway of our student housing complex. When we first moved in, we would joke about how our front window gave us the sensation of spying. Every fire truck that blares through in response to every charred dinner can be seen from this window, as well as every family who goes to campus for a stroll. Every car making a run to CVS for children's ibuprofen at 12:00 am may be noted, and every parent jogging behind a fancy double jogging stroller, and every tired-looking, satchel-laden student coming home after a day of studies.

Esme likes to look out this window. In the past, when she was small and her knuckles could barely make an audible noise against the glass, we would encourage her to get the attention of her friends from this window and wave and say hello. Only recently, as she has become so much more loquacious and socially exuberant, I wonder if I may need to temper this activity. I wonder if her shouting from the window is starting to cross over into the realm of bad manners or lack of social restraint. In particular, I am thinking of the two little boys who live in the building next to ours and who always seem to be out there-- in their rain boots throwing mud near the dumpster, riding their bicycles, or just running around with sticks. Esme gets excited when she sees them and shouts loudly, calling them by name. But she doesn't stop at hello. She tries to engage them in a conversation at full volume. I have seen the puzzled looks on their faces as they stop what they're doing for a second and look up at her. Unsure what to make of this curly headed girl, they always go on with what they were doing. Their mom usually offers a bright hello before also moving on. But Esme will often keep trying to get their attention. I never know whether to cue her by saying: "Esme, that's enough, they can't hear you anymore." On the one hand, I want to cultivate a sense of propriety and restraint. At some point, one needs to learn that shouting at people from third story windows is probably not the most courteous form of communication and may even be interpreted as rude. On the other hand, I don't want to squelch her innocent and exuberant friendliness toward other children, her self-assurance that all this love will be reciprocated.

Just this afternoon this scenario with Jonas and Isaac, the neighbors, happened again. They did not seem to hear her repeated attempts to get their attention. They rode away on their bikes. After a few silent seconds, Esme said in a plaintive voice, "God, please let them come back." I wonder if this window is going to break her heart.

More poems here, as usual.

the charm of 5:30

2010-04-07T06:56:00.000-07:00

For Poetry Wednesday, here's a poem by David Berman. I have to confess, I think of him as a sort of dude who writes poetry more than a poet. But that is perfect for this week. There shall be no fasting during Bright Week. Neither shall there be any serious poetry. There shall be no peeking at the price of the cheese when deciding which one to put in your grocery cart.

When I told Jeff I was thinking about posting this poem on my blog, he said it was a good idea, except that there was that one sort of creepy line about the girl with lotion. Then I remembered how that line does make me feel as if the poem is veering off in an uncomfortable direction. Nevertheless, weighed in the balance, this poem still expresses something of the essence of Bright Week for me this year: a sublime relief that life may be getting back to an easier version of itself, for a while at least.

After six weeks of a cupboard which, though technically stocked, managed to feel simultaneously as bare as Old Mother Hubbard's during the Great Depression, it is nice to have chocolate, cheese, and salami just sitting around. My husband took it upon himself to make one of those absurd Paula Deen casseroles for dinner last night. It bordered on the symbolic. The belt encircling our girth of existence seems to have been let out by several notches, as evidenced by the fact that we are free--nay blessed--to use dairy fats as the perfect tool that they are for melding all manner of ingredients together at 350 degrees.

The photo is of Pascha day with good friends. There were no serious conversations that I can recall.

The Charm of 5:30

It's too nice a day to read a novel set in England.

We're within inches of the perfect distance from the sun,
the sky is blueberries and cream,
and the wind is as warm as air from a tire.
Even the headstones in the graveyard
seem to stand up and say "Hello! My name is..."

It's enough to be sitting here on my porch,
thinking about Kermit Roosevelt,
following the course of an ant,
or walking out into the yard with a cordless phone
to find out she is going to be there tonight.

On a day like today, what looks like bad news in the distance
turns out to be something on my contact, carports and white
courtesy phones are spontaneously reappreciated
and random "okay"s ring through the backyards.

This morning I discovered the red tints in cola
when I held a glass of it up to the light
and found an expensive flashlight in the pocket of a winter coat
I was packing away for summer.

It all reminds me of that moment when you take off your sunglasses
after a long drive and realize it's earlier
and lighter out than you had accounted for.

You know what I'm talking about,

and that's the kind of fellowship that's taking place in town, out in
the public spaces. You won't overhear anyone using the words
"dramaturgy" or "state inspection" today. We're too busy getting along.

It occurs to me that the laws are in the regions and the regions are
in the laws, and it feels good to say this, something that I'm almost
sure is true, outside under the sun.

Then to say it again, around friends, in the resonant voice of a
nineteenth-century senator, just for a lark.

There's a shy looking fellow on the courthouse steps, holding up a
placard that says "But, I kinda liked Reagan." His head turns slowly
as a beautiful girl walks by, holding a refrigerated bottle up against
her flushed cheek.

She smiles at me and I allow myself to imagine her walking into
town to buy lotion at a brick pharmacy.
When she gets home she'll apply it with great lingering care before
moving into her parlor to play 78 records and drink gin-and-tonics
beside her homemade altar to James Madison.

In a town of this size, it's certainly possible that I'll be invited over
one night.

In fact I'll bet you something.

Somewhere in the future I am remembering today. I'll bet you
I'm remembering how I walked into the park at five thirty,
my favorite time of day, and how I found two cold pitchers
of just poured beer, sitting there on the bench.

I am remembering how my friend Chip showed up
with a catcher's mask hanging from his belt and how I said

great to see you, sit down, have a beer, how are you,
and how he turned to me with the sunset reflecting off his contacts
and said, wonderful, how are you.

prayers lean upward on the dark

2010-03-31T10:00:00.000-07:00

Since last September my husband, in the third year of a five-year PhD program, has been diligently preparing to take his written and oral comprehensive exams. Finally, in the middle of this March, they came and went. Thankfully, he was prepared, he passed, and relief and joy followed in the wake of the stress and adrenaline surrounding this trial (just in time for Holy Week, I might add). I was proud of him because I could tell that he had prepared so well. But still there was a certain helplessness involved in this experience, and now, in retrospect, I realize that these exams are not the kind of "test" that "good students" do not need to fear because they are such good students. They are intentionally agonizing so as to function as an initiation rite into a more serious phase of the PhD program. At least, that is my best interpretation.

Worthy or not, ready or not, the tunnel that he had to enter was still a dark and scary one. I witnessed him enter and come out on the other side. Watching him withdraw into that narrow place was an ordeal of sorts for me too, although, of course, a much lesser one. He was not as mentally available for conversation as usual, and our family routine has not been normal for some time--something we both really hate. He was quiet and distracted and sometimes just spaced out during the three days of the written portion. Perhaps even our girls experienced their own uncomprehending versions of daddy's exam days. There was an instance when he told Esme he would pour her some milk. I watched as he fixed her a sippy cup of water instead and set it down distractedly in front of her. A few hours later I found the milk sitting out on the counter. He was obviously preoccupied, thinking of Ephraim the Syrian, or--I couldn't say what. It wasn't my particular dark tunnel.

But only a year ago, at the end of March, I went through that harrowing tunnel of childbirth, while Jeff stood by. I won't revisit that, since it is all covered in the archives of this blog. And anyway, it is so distant from me now. Spring is here; that baby will soon turn one. She is interested in the contents of drawers and cabinets. She cheerfully pulls my dish towels onto the kitchen floor; she feeds herself blueberries in her high chair and claps a lot just for the sake of clapping.

Between these two Easters, two Aprils, I could cite other notable dark dips, followed by bright hilltops in the life of our family. It's true: life is a series of small deaths and resurrections.

Lent is almost over now. Church is going to wear us out between now and Easter, I imagine. Over and under all the formal and corporate prayers, though, there is, for me at least, that private prayer that sometimes brings me out to my rocking chair in the middle of the night, wrapped in a blanket, wakeful, thoughtful, and aware of a sense of yearning inside myself that is old and not really placated by marriage, motherhood, or friendship. I always imagine that this particular yearning is the force behind the entire Psalter. "We have escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken and we have escaped." That line stood out to me from the Presanctified Liturgy on Holy Tuesday. It has the ring of absolute disbelief from the perspective of the bird.

I learned once that patients who undergo operations are much more likely to come out of their anesthesia and recover if they have someone waiting for them to wake up after the surgery. Patients who have no one waiting for them are less likely to make it. "Our help is in the name of the Lord, who has made heaven and earth," the Psalm continues.

I hope I will meet the beloved on the other side of all of these horrible tunnels. Even so, when I come out into daylight, I may still feel the need, like the bird, to blink in disbelief.

This week, for Poetry Wednesday: a poem from Wendell Berry's A Timbered Choir. And if I do not post anything again until after Pascha (I doubt I will) then: Christ is risen!

A man is lying on a bed
in a small room in the dark.
Weary and afraid, he prays
for courage to sleep, to wake
and work again; he doubts
that waking when he wakes
will recompense his sleep.
His prayers lean upward
on the dark and fall
like flares from a catastrophe.
He is a man breathing the fear
of hopeless prayer, prayed
in hope. He breathes the prayer
of his fear that gives a light
by which he sees only himself lying
in the dark, a low mound asking
almost nothing at all.
And then, long yet before dawn,
comes what he had not thought:
love that causes him to stir
like the dead in the grave, being
remembered--his own love or
Heaven's, he does not know.
But now it is all around him;
it comes down upon him
like a summer rain falling
slowly, quietly in the dark.

forgive the dream

2010-03-24T06:44:00.000-07:00

I have given up asking too many questions about Scripture. Instead, I try to do the daily readings on the Orthodox calendar (most days), and fancy them sinking into my mind like water receding into a thick rug. This week I was certainly tempted to ask: Why was it acceptable for Rebekah and Jacob to conspire against Isaac to steal the blessing away from Esau? Poor Esau, really. But I happily decided not to go there. I am getting too old for this. I love the Bible as much as ever, but it may be enough just to read it and let it sink down into me, become a quiet part of me which may, at some crucial juncture, resurface and make itself available, rather than ask these questions, which only get more impossible with time.

I am beginning to understand something about myself: my theological curiosity has grown old before its time. At age thirty-two, I have come prematurely to the end of my life's quota of youthful vigor necessary to wrestle with angels. Theology, at moments, makes me wince. While working for a short time at an academic press, my boss, the press director, who had a wonderful sense of humor, had a little scrap of paper taped to her door with a quote that said something like: "I have but a tiny light to guide me through the dark forest of life. A theologian comes and snuffs it out." She also, for the record, had a rubber ink stamp with the word, "BULLSHIT." I really liked that boss.

I think my theological exhaustion may be rooted firstly in the fact that I have had so many theological teachers--more than anyone should rightfully have in the course of one lifetime. And their voices are still very present in my mind, as if a disparate group of people are simultaneously talking to me.

It began with family members, like my grandmother, whose favorite topic was soteriology (although she never would have called it that), and was very keen on preempting any doubt in her grandchildren that we might not be eternally saved. I think this was because she had herself wrestled quite a bit in her life with this precise doubt and had finally settled firmly on the doctrine of "once saved always saved." She always talked about a time in her twenties when she had been running herself ragged trying to volunteer, and basically be a perfect Christian, until one day she collapsed onto her bed and told God that she couldn't do it anymore. I cannot remember enough to recount exactly what happened next, but vaguely remember that from that point on she understood that God did not expect perfection and had wrought salvation on her behalf. Based on the number of times she retold this story, I can only imagine that it was a kind of mystical experience that shaped the rest of her life and her identity as a Christian.

She prayed faithfully for a list of people every day, and knew in a very definitive way who on the list had ever prayed the prayer of salvation, and who had not. She knew for a fact that so-and-so had once gone forward at a Billy Graham rally and prayed the Sinners' Prayer. One of my older cousins was on the list of people whom she had seen with her own eyes go forward at a Billy Graham rally, and I know that she clung to that fact when, during his teens, he abandoned going to church.

She could quote a large number of scriptures supporting this position and, whenever my sisters and cousins were a captive audience in her living room or gathered around a table, having lunch at the Orlando Country Club, she gave us this presentation in various permutations. I have no doubt that she was motivated by sincere love for us, and by a deep belief in God, and I remember listening to her earnestly and taking her words to heart, even though I often craved a less formal relationship with a jolly grandmother who simply gave me bear hugs, and dug around outside in a garden.

The photo above is a page of her father's five-year journal from the 1930s. He was a Presbyterian minister who founded Park Lake Presbyterian Church near downtown Orlando in the 1920s. I love old fashioned things like this that promise to illuminate the past, and was thrilled when my grandmother gave it to me a few years ago, before she died. But if I expected anything terribly gripping in these little entries, I was disappointed. I knew that his children-- all six of them--both idolized and feared him. I knew that my grandmother routinely ran and hid under a desk when he returned home, because he was so strict. I knew that his legacy was responsible, in a large part, for many of the fears and anxieties that shaped my grandmother's life, and, in turn, my mother's.

But the journal really sheds no light on any of this. Instead, the entries are strictly quotidian, records of who he "visited" that day (it seems that his ministerial career was comprised primarily of visiting, visiting, and more visiting), the names of gentlemen elected as deacons in the church, the topic of his last sermon, and whether attendance that Sunday was good or poor. The thing I like most about the journal though, is simply his penmanship, and the creative variations he uses throughout when writing the day of the week with a fancy first letter.

My own mom did not feel bound to the traditional Protestant Christianity of her upbringing and was more inclined to shop around. My dad, mistrustful of most people and churches in general, and not terribly invested in where we attended church (because he basically ignored whatever happened in the worship service and sat in the pew reading his heavily highlighted Bible) always let my mom pick which church we attended. We went to a Baptist church until I was about eleven. Then came a day when my mom ran into our Baptist pastor's wife at the grocery store, and had a chat. Somehow the topic of healing came up and the pastor's wife said: "Oh, we don't believe that those sorts of things happen nowadays." My mother was somehow deeply dismayed by this statement, and became restless at the Baptist church. It was on the basis of this ill-fated grocery store encounter that she decided to shift our family to an Assemblies of God church, where they believed that those sorts of things could happen nowadays.

This was how, in my teens, I got swept into a really gigantic, 300-person youth group with a rock band and a youth pastor who, in a desperate effort to identify with high school students, wore really dorky ripped up, stone washed jeans and t-shirts, and preached bombastically and ceaselessly about resisting the temptation to have premarital sex.

From the time we began attending the Assemblies of God church, was, as best as I can trace it, when the tiny fissure in my religious psyche began. I remember how sad I felt that my oldest sister Kathryn, probably a junior in high school at the time, refused to switch churches with the rest of us. She played (or, according to my dad, pretended to play) clarinet in the Baptist church orchestra, and had too many friends there. She was incredibly social. Plus, she said, she was not going to attend any church with a parking lot as big as Disney World's. Although I could not articulate why, and probably never admitted it to myself, I sensed that she was being the sane one. It depressed me also to suspect, somewhat remotely, that it might behoove me to be a more rebellious child than I was capable of being.

The other day my mom, on the phone, said something out of the blue that surprised me. She told me that she and my dad are "proud of the church we are in," (meaning the Orthodox Church), and that she was sorry that I was subjected to that terrible youth group in my teens, and that, at the time, she really hadn't known how crazy it was or what was going on. Thinking back to my mom during the course of most of my childhood, she did seem perpetually distracted, and I, spiritually unsupervised.

There is certainly a lot more to the story. I ended up attending a Christian liberal arts college in Tennessee sight unseen, and things got even messier for me there. Chapel attendance was required, and students whose attendance lapsed went on "chapel probation." To keep track of attendance, the college had a team of student volunteers, whom my friends and I called "chapel police" who scanned your student i.d. card at the door. I survived college by banding together with anyone else who had a sense of irony, and others, who, like me, may have been hard pressed to explain exactly how they wound up at a college like this. One especially brilliant friend showed up at chapel one day with his i.d. taped to his forehead, parodying the mark of the Beast in Revelation-- an allusion which would not have been missed by anyone in that crowd. He was always doing things like that, making the dissenters happy.

But without turning this into a full-length spiritual biography, it may explain in part why, when, as a junior in college, I first stepped into an Orthodox Church and saw a large fresco of the Annunciation--an angel with swift feet greeting a peacefully receptive Theotokos--I felt a profound sense of awe and relief. Of course, I still had a lot more fight in me, and hauled myself off to an Orthodox seminary, which was quite happy to help me finish the wrestling match. I really will never forget how the dean said during orientation: "You're here to have your edges sanded off, to be broken so that you can be rebuilt," and so forth. Broken indeed.

These days, I can sense that such ordeals are not in the cards for me. My life feels so much safer, thank God. Even a two-minute "hard" sermon is enough to really tire me these days. Whatever zealous fire of faith burned brightly in my great grandfather and motivated a lifetime of preaching, visiting, leading, organizing, founding, and building--doesn't seem to burn in me, at least in that particular way.

I'm sorry, but I would like to relax now. It seems that, for me, this may be the only way to let God into my life--to relax and feebly invite him, or rather, feebly RSVP to his invitation to the wedding, even though I really have nothing to wear. This might have to be enough for nowadays.

This week I have been intrigued reading a thirteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky. And no, I am not dabbling in other religions. Even if I wanted to, I lack the energy. For Poetry Wednesday:

FORGIVE THE DREAM

All your images of winter
I see against your sky.

I understand the wounds
That have not healed in you.

They exist
Because God and love
Have yet to become real enough

To allow you to forgive
The dream.

You still listen to an old alley song
That brings your body pain;

Now chain your ears
To His pacing drum and flute.

Fix your eyes upon
The magnificent arch of His brow

That supports
And allows this universe to expand.

Your hands, feet, and heart are wise
And want to know the warmth
Of a Perfect One's circle.

A true saint
Is an earth in eternal spring.

Inside the veins of a petal
On a blooming redbud tree

Are hidden worlds
Where Hafiz sometimes
Resides.

I will spread
A Persian carpet there
Woven with light.

We can drink wine
From a gourd I hollowed
And dried on the roof of my house.

I will bring bread I have kneaded
That contains my own
Divine genes

And cheese from a calf I raised.

My love for your Master is such
You can just lean back
And I will feed you
This truth:

Your wounds of love can only heal
When you can forgive
This dream.

when we are worn out searching for something quite different

2010-03-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

Introductions

Some of what we love
we stumble upon -
a purse of gold thrown on the road,
a poem, a friend, a great song.

And more
discloses itself to us -
a well among green hazels,
a nut thicket -
when we are worn out searching
for something quite different.

And more
comes to us, carried
as carefully
as a bright cup of water,
as new bread.

This poem, for Poetry Wednesday, is by Moya Cannon, an Irish poet. It does not seem necessary to say very much about this poem, except that it describes my experience of life accurately. The best things have come to me almost too easily, with no correspondence to my own striving. It is also accurate to say that often I am not always sure what it is I love, until I encounter it. And, finally, that life continues to open outward, bringing me nourishment in all kinds of ways that I never expect.

overturned

2010-03-03T07:00:00.000-08:00

For today's Poetry Wednesday I'd like to post a link to something written by someone we actually know and like. Mike Schorsch is a friend who we met in our first two years at Notre Dame. Jeff happened to be on the phone with him yesterday and asked me to see if I could find any of his poems online. I found one last night, and we remembered that he actually read this to us in his living room a few years ago, right before he left for Iowa to do an MFA.

He does Greek and Latin translations of ancient poetry but also does creative, original things with those texts. In this poem, for example, he has juxtaposed an ancient, sixth-century Latin hymn composed by Venantius Fortunatus with text taken from an advertisement for an aromatherapy candle.

I have to be honest here and say that if I did not know Mike personally, and just stumbled across this poem online, I would very likely have scanned it and, in approximately one second, decided that it was too inaccessible, or quirky to devote the time it would obviously require to read and digest. I would need to have some kind of advance guarantee in order to read a poem like this. Without that, the text sorter machine of my mind would have quickly sorted it into the "no" bin.

But that is the reality that this poem--I think--addresses: there are so many words to filter through, coming from unknown sources, that our filtering mechanism is conditioned to be aggressive. Sometimes this means narrowing messages down based on their medium: only attending to the words when they come from a known, trusted source. I confess that, not being the most artistically adventurous person, that is more or less my criteria for what I pay attention to. But then the words I supposedly attend to lose their luster because they are still so abundant, repeated, and always--always--expected.

Well, Mike is a trusted source in my book and I am glad that his work was thus permitted to ride the conveyor belt of my ruthless internal filtering plant, into the "to be processed" bin of my mind. I think that what he has done here is profound, because he has taken two radically different kinds of texts--neither one very vibrant in my opinion. Both are candidates for dismissal--one because it is an advertisement for a candle, the other because it is by someone called Venantius Fortunatus, and sounds every bit like it. But by putting them together he has forced something vibrant, like pouring two colorless, odorless chemicals into a beaker and watching them turn red and fizzy.

I am sure that there is much more to this poem than just this rather obvious observation, but for now I am satisfied with this: realizing that often I only half-hear, half-dismiss the words I encounter. If it's a magazine, I know what kind of language to expect. If it's a prayer in church, I know what kind of language to expect. Either way, even the words I believe and cherish are about as shiny as tarnished brass. They slough off like dead skin. I need for these old meanings and tarnished messages to be born again in me. I need for words to shine. It may take something drastic. Poetry will do this.

my heart, my home, my beastiary

2010-03-02T12:04:00.000-08:00

I think I have grown grumpy lately for a combination of reasons. One is that winter has long outworn its welcome. I think there are at least twenty posts in this blog's archives devoted to South Bend winters. They [the posts] are boring. I think I just need a t-shirt that says: "South Bend winters: where fun goes to die."

There is also the fact that my husband's comprehensive exams are only two weeks away, making life feel as if our family has strapped on ankle and wrist weights, just to give our household's daily workout the benefit of increased resistence. And maybe I am feeling some social isolation since the start of Lent.

This brings me to the topic of Lent. I think I made a classic, even cliche error this time around: increased fasting without increased prayer. I stood in the front yard of my heart and yelled over the fence: "See you later, world." But then when I peeked inside the front door of my heart I found a sink full of dishes, a pile of old mail. Somewhere in the dark, drafty rafters I could just make out the outline of a surly dragon. This left me somewhat trapped in the cold yard area, between the world and my heart, growing resentful of both, and finally inclined to throw rotten tomatoes, first at the world, then at the door of my own uninhabitable, ramshackle heart. I cannot recommend this predicament. I am going to have to learn to pray and repent, or else forfeit one or the other, or both.

My three year-old and I made Valentine's Day cards for a party at her preschool. The one above was the very first one she drew, simply filling in all the white space on the card with red and pink. In the process of filling the card with color at random, a jagged, ragged heart shape was accidentally laid down on the paper. So I saved this remarkable, accidental valentine. And I think there is something realistic about a lopsided heart, lacking clean lines.

a hidden life

2010-02-25T08:00:00.000-08:00

I missed poetry Wednesday, but since I did start writing something yesterday, I thought I'd finish it up today anyway. A poem came to my mind which is actually just an old anthologized thing by William Wordsworth. I remember reading it in a high school English class. It's a pretty enough poem but the reason it came to my mind now is because since Lent began I have been giving a lot of thought to this old fear of mine. This poem frightened me a little bit when I read it as a teenager and now I am asking myself why.

She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove.
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love;

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eve!
Fair as a star, when only one
is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

* * *

I do love the name Lucy because it is the name of both my sister and my now departed grandmother. But that aside, I remember that the poem captured my imagination in a sad and somewhat horrifying way. I think it was the very idea of a "fair maid" living and dying in total anonymity, with no one to remember her, that made me sad. It is a part of a cluster of poems by Wordsworth called "the Lucy poems," and historians can not really identify who Lucy actually was. Well, naturally, given that she was a half-hidden violet obscured behind a mossy stone. I remember picturing that image vividly-- a beautiful flower hidden behind a stone, and thinking, "What a horrible shame."

A few nights ago my husband and I watched a documentary archived on the PBS Frontline website. It was called "The Merchants of Cool," and it was about how major corporations fall all over themselves trying to stay ahead of the cool curve in youth culture so that they can then market and sell cool back to teenagers, who can basically be counted on as a major source of revenue because of their uniquely large disposable income. Companies hire experts in cool to shamelessly scout out the most current yet ever-elusive definition of cool so that ads and products can be produced accordingly. This creates an oddly cyclical pattern in which it is not clear whether youth culture is spawning the marketing campaigns or marketing campaigns are spawning and defining youth culture. It was incredibly strange and sad to be presented with all of this and made me fantasize about relocating our family to the mountains in Romania, beneath the shadow of an Orthodox monastery, in order to opt out for the sake of my two little girls.

There was a segment about typical young girls, whom the industry types as "midriffs," and who are apparently desperate to flaunt themselves, desperate to be noticeable and noticed. Now in my thirties and living far away from all of this in my own enclave (no doubt another distinctly American problem), I admit that I never really think about teenagers, particularly the ones dubbed typical, and what they do or care about. But I did attend big public schools in Orlando, Florida from K to 12, and although I graduated in 1995 when all was still grunge and pre-Brittany Spears, I have to say, I got enough youth culture in high school to last me a life time. The cool scouts from MTV would have found my high school fertile ground indeed for further programming ideas. Every morning before first period a song would play over the PA system-- usually Stone Temple Pilots' "Black Hole Sun" or something highly uplifting like that.

But thankfully it's been a while since I've had to really think or care about quote-unquote youth culture. How embarrassing and ridiculous it is that I ever convinced my parents that I needed to own a certain pair of shoes (several certain pairs of shoes) or that, upon buying a new pair of jeans, immediately felt compelled to take scissors and cut off the bottoms, then wash them to make a raw edge. It's inevitable, I guess, but still very annoying when you think of all of these corporate CEOs--freaks of nature with no moral conscience--carefully harnessing and steering these notions of cool in order to get very, very rich.

I would recommend this documentary, even though I think that it did not present an entirely balanced picture. It simply is not true that every teenager is the sort that would participate in the debauchery of a Daytona Beach spring break, is it?

But what I have been thinking about since Lent began is just this basic fear of being unknown, which I think is partly a universal human fear but maybe a distinctly American fear, because sometimes it seems that everyone is in a great, desperate competition to be known and noticed. I am not really a showy person. I have certainly never deliberately exposed my midriff in public. But somehow this worldview had already burrowed a place inside of me in some form by age sixteen: that to be unseen, unheard of, and unknown was to almost not exist, and carried with it a certain horror.

I thought of this while watching the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, because it was so showy and forceful, and seemed contrary to what I think of as the Canadian disposition. The message about Canada being great was put forth rather aggressively. I personally do think Canada is plenty great. But part of what I always liked about it was its seeming quietness and introversion in contrast to America's bombastic personality as a country. I just wonder if perhaps the showy and voyeuristic nature of American culture, which produces every kind of disgraceful reality show and cannot keep anything secret for very long and most especially feels compelled to drag out a talent or remarkable quality into the public eye just as soon as it is evident, is rubbing off on all of our neighbors.

Last fall I read a book called Exploring the Inner Universe, which is more or less an interview with Archimandrite Roman Braga, an elderly Romanian priest who now lives at the Orthodox women's monastery in Rives Junction, Michigan. He suffered years in prison under the communist regime in Romania and speaks about his experience. One of the things that he said that stood out to me was how intolerant the communists were of Orthodox monks because they would not openly talk about their inner life. They would just go about their business, their prayer, their routine, in silence and obedience. They had an inner peace which they guarded and would lose if they spoke about it, so they simply kept quiet. Father Roman emphasized that what the monks had was actually very simple-- silence and obedience-- but because they wouldn't talk about it freely and yield their inner life into the open they drove the communists crazy and filled them with hate.

It was strange for me to realize that to some degree I also possess that same impatience with with silence and mystery and perhaps have exercised the same aggression toward others. I want to talk and I want others to talk to me; I want to be known and to know. I am a total sucker for facebook. Obviously there is nothing unnatural in wanting to know and be known, except maybe when it is forced instead of just allowing disclosure between yourself and others to come in its own time and way, as a gift from God, rather than in this aggressive, voyeuristic way that we are so accustomed to we hardly even know it.

I remember a discussion in a class at seminary about why, at Orthodox funerals, we pray, over and over again, that a person's memory be eternal. "Memory eternal, memory eternal, memory eternal," goes the hymn. The professor of liturgy said: "It's because if God forgets you, you cease to exist. You could walk out of here today and get hit by a car; your time on this earth is up. But if you cease to exist in the mind of God, you do not exist at all." So like the thief we pray: "Remember me O Lord, in thy kingdom."

I just finished this really good book by Roberta Bondi called Memories of God. I cannot say I agree with all of what she is saying theologically in this book, but I really enjoyed it and learned so much from it as a memoir of how her own belief in God developed from childhood. The surprise came at the end when she writes about the death of a beloved aunt who was not really talented or remarkable in any way, and who passed out of this life without really much of a splash. Then as a reader you realize that the title is not meant to indicate her own memories of God, but the memories which belong to God-- God's memories of us--and how we are held in existence by them. Our worth is not measured by any worldly hierarchy or criteria. We slip beneath the world's hierarchy and find peace there.

So, thankfully, I am not of the same mind now as I was at sixteen in my cowardly panic at the thought of the unknown maid that lived and died in anonymity. I am thinking this Lent about the monk or nun who has the courage to be silent and hidden.

are you grieving?

2010-02-10T11:35:00.000-08:00

Here is a usual suspect for this Poetry Wednesday: the familiar, the comforting, the beautiful, the pure Gerard Manley Hopkins. One day I may post something offbeat and avant garde. The poet might not be dead but alive and inhabiting a neighborhood in Brooklyn or Atlanta, neither pure, nor exactly beautiful. The poem might include profanity for shock value, but then again probably will not, if it can be helped. The poem might be vacuous, very American, or very blunt, or some combination of things like that. Someday I might toy with that idea further, then return to Gerard Manley Hopkins again, and again, and again.

This is a poem I chose this week because it helps me articulate something that is finally rising to the surface-- an insight into my experience of being a mother so far. I never seem to have much success when I try to write about my experience of motherhood, and keep asking myself why that might be. I think it must simply be that the action of mothering interferes with the contemplation of motherhood. Contemplation happens in slow currents, like those that drift from continent to continent in the deepest part of the ocean, where whales live. The action of caring for small children is more like the shoals of a rocky river, where small fish dart about and algae cannot grow.

My thoughts cannot find a rock to cling to within the everyday relentlessness of meeting the ever-shifting needs of growing babies, but nevertheless, there is still the place inside me where the whales live and currents proceed imperceptibly, of their own volition. In this slow metabolic process lugubrious insights occasionally emerge. And still, because they are not being generated in the swift-moving part of my mind and life, where the words swirl, they are hard to explain. That is why I picked this poem today. There was this thing I realized-- a very simple thing, but eluding my powers of explanation. It began after I returned from the hospital with a new baby. I could sense the instability in my older child when I returned home. The notion that her mother could unexpectedly leave home for several days was weighing on her, and it clearly took a long time of me staying put for her to leave off fearing that this might happen again at some point. She was furious with me, really. But then I was not the same mother to her as before. I needed for her to need me less-- much less than she had before. I needed to recover from a surgical birth; I needed to care for a completely dependent newborn. She was two and a half when her baby sister arrived, but before that there had been no terrible twos. The terrible aspect of two only began in earnest after the arrival of her baby sister, including all sorts of wretched behavior and disobedience and potty training defiance. There was a major shift in her sleep needs too: suddenly she didn't need a daytime nap, and if she got it, she would stay up late into the night, driving her parents absolutely mad. Truthfully, our family life was crazy for at least six months after the addition of a second baby. We were in upheaval, adjusting, flying by the seat of our pantaloons. I could have written thousands of words about these things, all coming under topics such as behavior problems, nap schedules, potty training, and so forth and so on. But for some reason I could never really wrap my mind around it all or get to the heart of it or attach any words to it that I felt anyone could possibly want to read. It was tedious.

One evening at a vespers service at church, while struggling with my wild child (ah, church, where my relationship with her is always at its absolute worst), a woman sitting behind me said to me: "She [Elsa, my baby] looks happy. She [Esme] does not." I wanted to snap back sarcastically: "Thank you for your helpful commentary." And my inner thoughts, now on the defense, rattled on: "Don't tell me that my child is unhappy-- this child that I've nurtured so well and given so much of myself too-- the best of myself. She is de facto a happy child; it cannot be otherwise." But I knew that what I was humanly able to give her had suddenly been drastically cut, and there was no way that she would not feel it sorely. I was asking her to be happy with much less. It was the first real demand ever placed upon her tiny life.

Gradually I had to admit that, quite simply, she was sad. She was grieving the change in our relationship. And it was not a sadness that comes and goes in a child a dozen times in one day, like crying over a toy. It was a sadness that permeated her life for many months, displacing her former notions of what it meant to be alive, or maybe just expanding them to include grief. Then, thankfully, our family did begin to settle down and adjust. Adjust: a word that I never knew could include so much toil and strain and endurance. Then one day in late fall or early winter (I cannot remember) we had our coats on and were about to go for a walk. She was singing and cheerful--the way I tend to think of as her natural state. Then she burst through the front door into the stairwell, threw her arms out and announced: "I'm happy!" And she seemed genuinely surprised to find herself feeling that way. It seemed that she was finally getting to the other side of her grief and able to offer her true self to us again-- her cheerfulness, her joy. The true Esme was going to be more available to us again, instead of bitter, withholding and stubborn. We were so relieved; the torturous time of upheaval was coming to an end. And it goes without saying that behavior is an ongoing issue, but sometimes you can just sense that what is motivating misbehavior is simply the developmental fact of being three, rather than some deep unhappiness that you are powerless over. And that is much easier to deal with.

I have heard that loss and grieving is a part of the maturation process. It begins when we are small and is difficult but necessary, and continues until we die. And there is only so much you can do as a mother to protect your children from losses and grief, and even if you could, it would not be desirable to do so. It would stunt their growth. Today, with Lent approaching, I am wondering what things I might be grieving for right now, including selfish notions of ways that I wish I were more fulfilled, things I wish that others were giving me or had given me in the past. Maybe Lent is a good time for grieving and traveling to the other side of grief. On the other side, the world is in springtime, the world is well-adjusted, and the world--the small part in which I live-- will be relieved to find my true self more available.

SPRING AND FALL:

to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

frail, illegal fire balloons

2010-02-02T11:00:00.000-08:00

For Poetry Wednesday

Elizabeth Bishop spent time in Brazil and wrote poems based on her experiences there. For some reason, I find her very interesting, but have never sought to learn about her life in any real depth. I know she was friends with Marianne Moore, another poet whom I also find interesting. I love her poem "Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore." She dedicated this one to Robert Lowell. I've tried, but so far I cannot get into the poetry of Robert Lowell, who is considered a very important American poet. I just saw a gigantic book containing the complete letter correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop, whose poetry I really love, and Robert Lowell, whose poetry I cannot get interested in, at a bookstore. I quailed at its size and weight. I showed it to my husband and said: "This is why I could never be an academic. I could never be that interested." He said: "You would just have to see it as what you do everyday. You go to work every day and do that (indicating the book) instead of something else, like house work, and the nice thing is that it is actually marginally more interesting than house work." He meant it seriously and I could tell that, because, in fact, this is exactly what he does every day. He leaves on his bike and rides to a small, borrowed office on campus, where his books are.

On Monday he left his keys at home, because they were still in the pocket of my coat from Sunday, when I took our tired girls home from a long after-church luncheon and program--a talent show in honor of St. Sava, with lots of speeches, recitations of Serbian poetry, songs, and even a girl who did a jump rope routine. Our three year-old did not understand why she could not participate in the entertainment on stage with the other children, and a meltdown was in progress when I swept my husband's car keys, our stuff, and our girls into the car while he stayed behind. Since he is serving as a deacon now, and also helping with the Church School program, he really had to stay until the end. Because of this irregular situation, his keys were still in my coat pocket on Monday morning, and he had to ride all the way back home to get them so that he could open the door to the borrowed office where he works. This is how his workday always looks from my perspective-- just that mundane, involving keys and a schedule, and a range of feelings about what he is working on-- feelings that sometimes include ambivalence--even though poetry actually does factor prominently in what he works on, albeit ancient, and eastern.

In any case, when he pointed this out to me, something overturned in my mind-- an infantile and unworkable definition about what it means to love and study literature, the love of literature as an unsustainable, fragile infatuation which must sooner or later be abandoned. Thinking of it merely as daily, unhurried work sounded so soothing and imminently sustainable to me. Only in this way could I survive the complete correspondence between two modern American poets. Otherwise it would surely kill me and kill any regard I ever had for them. But how satisfying it would be to survive it, and as a result, to know it.

But I am not going to enroll in school again. It is only an interesting exercise to think about it in a different way--dispassionately. This poem seems like this to me: an account of, a dispassionate attention to, something whose content is actually quite fantastic. Its like the impulse to simply tell another person about what you dreamed, even if the dream means nothing you can discern, and there is no interpretation, and nothing else to say, only the fact of the dream.

THE ARMADILLO

For Robert Lowell

This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear,
Climbing the mountain height,

Rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it's hard
to tell them from the stars--
planets, that is--the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,

or the pale green one. With a wind,
they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it's still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.

Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.

The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!--a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

the perishing residue of pure sensation

2010-01-27T08:58:00.001-08:00

Some weeks ago my sweet friend Molly told me about a circle of women bloggers who post a poem every Wednesday. She encouraged me to join in, thinking that I am probably a person who likes poetry and would enjoy such a thing. She was right. In fact I picked out a poem, then proceeded to think about posting it for about five (four? six? I can't be sure) Poetry Wednesdays in succession.

I am also given to understand that Wednesdays are Anti-procrastination Day. This comes from the Fly Lady, who's advice, mentoring, and coaching I receive daily via e-mail since I signed up in early November. She has helped dreamy, emotion and idea-oriented me in innumerable ways to be more in control of all things practical. One of her strategies for getting things done is to set a timer and tell yourself that you are only going to work on something for fifteen minutes (or ten, or five). The timer begins, and you go. This helps me tremendously. It is as if two firm, black brackets, like bodyguards, have been planted in the air around my soul. My emotions and squirrely thoughts, no matter how bratty, insolent, or pushy, must take a time-out on the outsides of the brackets. On the inside: just action. Since carrying around a timer (gosh, it sounds kind of pathetic) I've realized just how often my thoughts and feelings bind me to inactivity. But today it occurs to me that maybe the same qualities in me that draw me to poetry are the same qualities that cause me to eschew action in favor of thought. I don't really want to change that in any fundamental way; I like poetry. But in honor of Anti-procrastination Wednesday and Poetry Wednesday I am taking action to get my blog unstuck from inactivity. "I can think of three things that I have procrastinated doing that I am going to do today," says the Fly Lady. "What are your three things? Set your timer, and go."

After I finish copying out this poem by Amy Clampitt that I picked out a now blurry but substantial number of weeks ago, and which I like even just for the title alone, even though I realize that it is kind of pretentious (why say "nibble" instead of "eat"?) I am going to pay my student loan online and organize our disheveled storage closet, lest a bike helmet or some other object dislodge from the top shelf and knock me out cold the next time I go to open its door. The last line of each stanza is supposed to be centered, and I cannot figure out how to do that in html. But I am posting this anyway. There is a crying baby next to me that needs attention.

ON THE DISADVANTAGES OF CENTRAL HEATING

cold nights on the farm, a sock-shod
stove-warmed flatiron slid under
the covers, mornings a damascene-
sealed bizarrerie of fernwork
decades ago now

waking in northwest London, tea
brought up steaming, a Peak Frean
biscuit alongside to be nibbled
as blue gas leaps up singing
decades ago now

damp sheets in Dorset, fog-hung
habitat of bronchitis, of long
hot soaks in the bathtub, of nothing
quite drying out till next summer:
delicious to think of

hassocks pulled in close, toasting-
forks held to coal-glow, strong-minded
small boys and big eager sheepdogs
muscling in on bookish profundities
now quite forgotten

the farmhouse long sold, old friends
dead or lost track of, what's salvaged
is this vivid diminuendo, unfogged
by mere affect, the perishing residue
of pure sensation

blessed mourning

2009-11-12T06:33:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended a funeral for a baby who died at twenty weeks gestation in the womb. The young parents and much of the extended family are Orthodox, so the service was the Orthodox funeral service for the death of infants. The tiniest coffin imaginable, simple, modest, hand made of smooth, blonde, unfinished wood, sat in the center of the church; the priest censed it again and again with clouds of sweet incense.

In the Orthodox Church icons and people are censed alike, without prejudice. To me a censor pointing in my direction feels like a surprising love note saying: you've just walked in from outside, tracking in toxins, rancid oils, and the decays of the pavements of the world on the soles of your shoes. You've also tracked in a head full of petty thoughts and lies. All in all, you are confused about who you are, partly because of your own weakness, and partly because you are swimming in a treacherous gulf of defective humanity. For a brief moment, stand still, look in this direction, and let me remind you that you were created to be a royal steward of creation. Your dignity remains intact, however far it has been pushed down into the muck.

The departed child, whose name is Adrian, and who, in the words of the funeral service, "did not reach his full stature," was censed again and again. Stamped in the image of the divine, the muck of the world could not even come near him, and never will.

The night before the funeral I cried reading his mother's blog post about the experience of delivering his tiny body. I think I cried even more just looking at the picture of his parents gazing at him. It's not possible to add anything to this. The only thing I can really say is that I felt privileged to be allowed to share a tiny bit of the mourning. I live within a certain demographic: married graduate students who are mostly family-oriented and all in the childbearing stage of life. In a community of eighty families, there always seem to be at least five pregnant women at any given time, babies ever arriving. Most of the time their healthy births are joyously trumpeted in the University Village newsletter. But of course, for every few births openly announced, there are losses which are only whispered about from person to person. In fact, a neighbor here in her fifth month of pregnancy just lost her baby a few weeks ago. I heard the news as I was on my way to--what else--a baby shower. The mother was traveling to her home country in South America. She stepped off the plane, three hours away from any hospital, and began bleeding. When she returns, she will return to an apartment building quite literally full of pregnant women-- three to be exact. Already the question on everyone's lips is: What will we say to her? How will we approach her loss?

I am coming more and more to believe that the loss of an infant, whether in the womb or after birth, is not something that can be borne in isolation, but that it is difficult for others to share the grief unless they are somehow invited. Standing in the Orthodox service for the death of an infant, I couldn't help but feel that the words were like the action of poison being sucked from the bite of a venomous snake--a drastic intervention performed just moments after a crisis. But it was not just a personal crisis; it was a crisis in the entire community. I have never suffered this loss as a mother, so I feel timid to speak about this with any authority, but I can only imagine that running away, withdrawing from others, shutting others out and not inviting them into your mourning, could only enable the poison and cause the wound to fester, and even spread, infecting not just an individual, but relationships as well. As someone standing on the outside of such a grief, and speaking for others who do, I can only say: people want to be let in, people need to be let in. Maybe this comes as a surprise to the ones suffering, but it is true.

My dear friend from seminary Jenny Schroedel wrote an entire, much lauded book devoted to this topic, called Naming the Child. I have little to say in comparison, but I know that the impetus behind the book was to help change the culture of silence and isolation surrounding infant loss, and I hope it succeeds. I know that what I witnessed yesterday at the funeral, graveside service, and warm reception with family, friends, swarms of children, and food afterward--the very opposite of silence and isolation--was right. The mother's own brother placed her baby into the ground; her nephew, in his little golden altar server's robe, assisted the priest by holding the holy water at the grave. Maybe those parents who take the difficult step of inviting people into their mourning will not mourn less, but after the witness of yesterday's funeral, I feel sure that their mourning will be blessed.

an unpacking

2009-11-05T07:38:00.000-08:00

For the time being, I'm not even making any pretense at having a presentable home. As an indication of the degree to which I've fallen behind in house work, there is a gigantic blue suitcase in our bedroom which we took for our stay overnight in Chicago exactly a week ago and which still sits, unpacked, on top of a full laundry basket, whose inventory, dating back even further, is unknown to me. Similarly, our living room has a few repositories of unsorted collectanea which I am also rubber stamping with the figurative TO BE DEALT WITH LATER ink stamp of my mind.

Seeing the suitcase there this morning before church, I thought that perhaps this afternoon, at last, I might finally empty its inner chamber, a medley of items including but not limited to a stuffed plaid hippo which has been peeking out at me all week. Then I could get the hefty, toe stubbing, feng shui nightmare out of our room and back to the storage closet at last.

Jeff took Esme to St. Patrick's Park and Elsa napped, and I have felt physically better today than I have in two weeks. What better opportunity to whip the apartment back to a state of good repute. I thought about this and the other projects I need to dispense with, but I still can't seem to shake off the domestic apathy I consciously adopted in the preceding weeks as a coping mechanism. Only apathy and anti-perfectionism could protect me from letting the state of the apartment this week make me crazy. Tonight I vacuumed the living room just to achieve a bare minimum of ick removal; and I feel bad that Elsa is crawling around getting flotsam and jetsam stuck in her fingers, which she regularly sucks.

Ultimately I made the decision to extend my stay in semi-apathy land today. I'm sure that the pilot light of commitment to domestic order still burns somewhere within. Soon, probably tomorrow, I'll fire up the burners. For today, though, I am letting my desire to unpack a story-- the story of the somewhat harrowing past two weeks--take precedence. This afternoon, all of the sudden, I remembered the wonderful song from School House Rock about unpacking your adjectives, especially the lyrically brilliant: "I unpacked 'frustrating' first / Reached in and found the word 'worst'." So I'm going to follow the pedagogy of this child's song, and use this time to unpack my adjectives.

When (per my last blog post) I told about the week beginning with sickness, I didn't mention the broader context that was preoccupying my mind during those days of sickness. I didn't mention how important it was that our family be well by the week's end. An event, monumental for our family (not exactly identical in scale to a wedding, but, for descriptive purposes, close), would be taking place on Saturday, October 31, at the OCA Cathedral in Chicago. Jeff would be ordained a deacon in the Orthodox Church. His parents would be flying in the Friday before, meeting us at a Chicago hotel, and then fly out the following day after the ordination. It would be inconceivable for Jeff to cancel on account of sickness, and likewise inconceivable for me to have to miss it.

So, when the week began with me having a cold, then Esme succumbing to fever and vomiting, which in turn kept me up all hours of the night and left me with a lingering fatigue and a few unshakable cold symptoms, I was apprehensive. Jeff did get hit by something too, and had to stay in bed for a day in the middle of the week, but he seemed to get over it quickly. The real problem was me. If the mother cannot keep up her end of things, a family with tiny children falters. I really did not sleep well any night of that week, partly due to caring for a sick child, partly to lingering cold symptoms which wouldn't go away because there was little to no opportunity to make a true recovery through rest. But above all of this I could feel a mounting anxiety over the ordination. The anxiety was almost more physical than anything. Mentally I was not worried. I was happy that Jeff was being ordained, and marveled at his sense of calm as the date approached. Having had ongoing conversations and prayer with him for a year and a half about his sense of being called to this, I was not suffering from irresolution. But still there was a certain stress mounting in me in a very literal way as this reality approached, immovable. I could feel the cyclical effects of cortisol in my blood stream, preventing me from sleeping well, then mounting higher yet again due to lack of sleep.

By Thursday, despite all of this, it looked like-- just barely-- we were all going to be able to drag our frayed bodies to our destination. Knowing that Jeff's parents were praying for us earnestly all week, I almost wonder if those prayers, and those of a few others scattered abroad, were what bore us along on the toll road west to Chicago.

Once our car entered Chicago, we promptly took a wrong turn at a fork in the highway. By the time we corrected our mistake and inched through rush hour traffic, we were two hours late meeting Jeff's parents at the hotel near Midway airport, who were of course eager to soak up every precious minute with their grandchildren on this all-too-short short visit. I felt badly.

Jeff had just enough time to eat a quick meal and get back in the car to drive to the cathedral, where he would be tonsured a reader (a necessary step preceding the diaconate) during the vigil service. His dad accompanied him into the night, while my mother-in-law and I took the girls to the a TGI Friday's, the closest restaurant to the hotel, to eat. I was ready to pass out and embrace a decent night's sleep when we got back to the hotel, and gratefully turned Esme over to her Mimi, who was eager to read her stories and give undivided attention to her non-stop chatter. We had adjoining rooms, so baby Elsa and I retreated into the dark on one side while Esme and Mimi had their pajama party on the other.

But despite my exhaustion, and the slumbering babe next to me, the white fluffy pillows in the dark hotel room, and the potential for a great sense of coziness in being at a hotel, with family, I could not sleep. I think stress--very similar to caffeine in its efffects-- was still holding me in its grip. I've experienced this before with big events: they don't release me until the event is, quite simply, over. Until then it's like the radio dial of my body is tuned into static.

Elsa woke up to nurse at her usual time at about 10:30, and holding her in my arms, I realized that something was different: she was burning up with a fever. The reality that the struggles of the past week were not over, but resurfacing just when I most needed reprieve sunk in and I braced myself for another night of poor-to-none sleep. I knew that even if whatever she had was mild, I would still fret and worry until I knew for sure. Although she ate and fell back asleep, I was now on hyper-alert for her well-being. When she began throwing up copiously after midnight, soaking the bed with the entire contents of a full feeding, I knew we had to do something. At this point everyone (except little Esme who thankfully snoozed through it all) was awake. Jeff and his dad were sent off to find a 24 hour Walgreens in a strange neighborhood of Chicago to bring back baby Tylenol. Thankfully they were driving a rental car with a GPS device. It was 3:30 a.m. when they came back. Tom and I switched rooms so that Marybeth and I could take turns watching Elsa for the rest of the night and Jeff and his dad could get whatever sleep was still available. After the Tylenol took effect and Elsa held down a small feeding, I finally fell into a tattered sleep-- enough to survive the next day, I suppose. I do remember Marybeth taking Elsa quite a bit in the wee hours of the morning so that I could sleep more than I would have otherwise been able to. Honestly, overall, it was very clear that, had Jeff's parents not been there with us, things really may have been called off. In the morning, Jeff and his dad left early so that Jeff could arrive on time, and took the energetic Esme with them, so that Marybeth and I had a bit more slack to get ourselves and poor little Elsa, who really had no business being dragged out in her feverish state, to the Cathedral. We were a half-hour late to a very long, hierarchical service, and for that I do not feel too bad. I had showed up.

This past week following the ordination has also been hard. After the initial relief, I think my body finally went into a sort of post-ordeal demand for rest. On Tuesday night I was chilled and could hardly get warm, and yet I did not have the flu. Wednesday I was achy from head to toe. I think it was my body's way of finally demanding what it had needed ten days prior: just to stay in bed, not just for a little while until I could get up and go again, but all day and into the night-- a seamless twenty-four hours of rest. And finally, Jeff was able to stay home and give me this. It was really only after this day in bed that I felt myself really getting back to normal. Before all of this began, I had been feeling physically quite well and my immune system was strong. It says to me how quickly, under certain circumstances, a person can slip down into a state of real fatigue and vulnerability.

* * *

I feel as if lately all I've done on my blog is write about struggles, as if that is all life is made up of, when in fact it is made up of so much else, like the hilarious things that Esme says and does (i.e., asking today where her "chipstack" was, meaning chapstick).

But for now, the story, and the need to tell it, which overrides the need to tell other stories of my life, stands. It was what it was, and I will certainly never forget our passage into being "clergy family." I can unpack the adjectives to tell the story at this point, but I think the deeper interpretation of the story has yet to unfold in retrospect. At a basic level, I believe that we were being emptied of ourselves. Maybe, like suitcases, we were being unpacked. In order to arrive at the steps of the Cathedral that day, we had to be somewhat powerless and let go of numerous details. We had to rely on family utterly. I in particular was being asked to put away vanity. I did not have time to prepare in such a way that I could stand next to my husband like a politician's wife. I felt rumpled and in a fog. Jeff said later that it all felt very Real. When it was time to go stand before the archbishop and receive his words for our family, addressing me as Matushka and Jeff as Father, I had the impulse to look behind me to locate who in the church he was addressing before I realized: me, us. Finally, I smiled at the camera in faith.

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.