It has been another week of challenges in a winter fraught with them. My mother is back in the hospital, and while she is mentally and spiritually sturdy, but her body is giving out. There are options for her treatment, and we are pursuing them, but there are many threads to keep track of and, frankly, I am having a hard time weaving them all together right now.
It always seems that we get one area of life, one relationship, one crisis resolved, and right on the heels of that satisfaction comes a flood of problems. Partly it is an extension of the fact that Tom and I come from large families and have jobs that require us to interact with many individuals on a daily basis: with so many players, the dramas are in constant rotation. But I can’t help but wonder how much we bring upon ourselves: if you are known as a problem-solver, guess what? People come to you for solutions. The path to our door is clear and well-marked, and well, we keep the light on.
We usually keep each other going, and fill each other up. But now, we are both so depleted, we’re unable to do that very well. It takes all we’ve got to stay up for our kids and our jobs, when in the back of our minds, all sorts of scenarios are running. At the end of the day, we collapse into bed wordlessly and hope things will get better.
And experience has proven that it will. Maybe not tomorrow or next week, but soon. All that pain and anxiety breaks down, dissolves and repairs itself eventually.
And when that happens, we will breathe, find something stupid to laugh about and ready ourselves for what else lies ahead.
Archive for March, 2008
Keeping the Light On
Friday, March 28th, 2008The 30 Day Challenge, Part 2
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008“Huh?”
“Why do you always look in the mirror like that?”
“Like what?”
“You always frown, then turn sideways and look at your middle and sigh.”
I felt my face flush with heat. “I do?”
“Yup.”
She got up close to the mirror and did a pantomine of me. I was not amused. Then she grinned affectionately at her reflection and said, “Be like me. I like looking at myself.”
She was right. And it made me wonder, Did I ever like looking at myself? I couldn’t remember, and that made me terribly sad.
So I gave myself a challenge: could I go 30 straight days smiling at myself in the mirror. Could I silence the critic?
Reader, I failed miserably. Lasted 3 days.
But I am determined to try it again - and again, if need be — for Neve’s sake. If she can go into her teenage years seeing me smiling at myself, then it will be worth the effort. Who knows, maybe I’ll even come to love that upper-arm dingle-dangle in the process.
(If any of you are game to give this 30 day experiment a try, let me know what happens. Successes, failures, I’d love to hear it all –maybe I’ll even quote you!– Andi)
The 30 Day Challenge, Part 1
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008So now that it is ostensibly spring, the bathing suit catalogs have started arriving. Perfect reading matter while I curl up on the couch to finish off the pound or so of candy left from the Easter egg hunt.
I’ve never found a bathing suit that actually fits me–not in my youthful prime, and certainly not now. My mother and I both suffer from what we call f.p.i.c. (for fleshy protuberances improperly contained), gap-osis (for huge arm and leg holes) and the self-explantory upper-arm dingle-dangle. As I flipped through the pages of one catalog, saying to myself in-between M&M’s, nope, no way, that’ll never fit, it brought to mind last year’s experiment.
Last spring, several of my female students had profound eating disorders, and wrote movingly about their struggles, so I was thinking about female body image almost daily. I was not very far down the post-partum path at that point, and was giving my body time to recover–or so I thought. One day, Neve came into the bathroom as I was dressing for work and she said, “Why do you always look at yourself like that?”
Just Another Family Dinner
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
When Dex got in the car this afternoon, I knew something was off. Normally a talkative kid, he shoved himself into the corner of his seat and stared out the window. I figured something had happened at school, a problem of the friend variety.
Only hours later, after dinner, did he reveal what was troubling him. Apparently, one of his teachers, a truly inspired instructor in my opinion, has been working with a residence for cancer patients. Christopher’s Haven offers children and families from out of town a home and a little fun when they come to Boston for treatment. Dex and his class studied the website for Christopher’s Haven, and they discovered a music video by the man who founded the home, who happens to be a singer. They watched the video, and Dex began to tell us about the song, about Christopher, but he was so choked up, he couldn’t finish. The whole family fell silent as we watched him struggle to express his emotions. All he could manage was, “Why did that little kid have to die?” As he lifted his gaze expectantly towards me, I could feel Neve staring, too: there was a lot at stake here.
So many thoughts ran through my head. As hard as it was to see him upset, I was touched that he could feel so much empathy for a complete stranger. So many of the students I get have already assumed a stance of modulated indifference as a sort of protection device, it was a relief that Dex hadn’t gone numb from the informational assault about war and violence and shootings. And then, of course, there was the backstory of Dex having lost a sibling, which could not be ignored. A lifetime of my own questions rolled through my head, too, as I recalled asking those very things of the adults around me and never being quite satisfied with the answers. He was looking for comfort, he was looking for perspective, and as tempting as it was to just give him something temporary to make him feel better, I also felt as if this was one of those significant moments in parenting. And just as I opened my mouth to ask him more questions, and get to the heart of all of this, Tom and my mother bombarded him with responses.
I sighed and sat back and let them go. They needed to give him answers. Me, I’m happy to sit around in the dark with anyone contemplating the mystery. And I think Dex might, too.
At one point during their presentation, Dex looked at me for what – reassurance? Agreement? All I could think was, Hang on, kid, we’ll have our day.
The Third Leg
Friday, March 14th, 2008Readers: a peer asked to me to address the issue of a child’s death, which is the topic of this blog. Pretty serious stuff. Just thought you should know beforehand so you could opt out.Over the years, I have often found myself unwillingly in conversation with people about having lost a child. It is something I don’t often volunteer anymore, not like I used to—not because I still don’t think about her, but because I think about her in a very different way.I once told my friend Michele that losing a child is like growing a third leg. You have to completely adapt everything you do to this new appendage: your balance, your movement, how you are perceived by others. And it is so physical for me: I cannot look at my body in the mirror, the body that bears so much evidence of childbirth, and not think of my children. But the choice to go public is always there, every time someone asks me how many children I have. Do I mention the thing everyone has questions about, or do I just pretend everything is normal? I have, now, many years later, learned how to walk with my third leg; one might even say I have learned how to run again. It was slow going, to alter my identity from someone who has lost a child into it being an element of everything that I am, but it happened naturally. It becomes second nature, that third leg, always there, always in your awareness, but not something you have to keep pointing out to people.After a while, I sensed there was this odd, voyeuristic quality about discussing my daughter with people—strangers, especially. It altered the dynamic instantly, either calling all attention to me, or filling the air with such tension, if I didn’t make a little joke, no one could figure out how to break it. Instead of comforting me to talk about her, it started to feel like I was dragging her out a lovely sleep to show her off. She didn’t deserve that. Even writing this, I feel like I am pulling her onstage again, but it is in service of a greater point, one of which I hope she would approve: Now that I am carting around a baby again, many more people ask me how many children I have. When they do, I smile, mentally pat my third leg and then tell them I have three.Three legs, three kids, somehow the math works for me.
The Purple Ghost
Monday, March 10th, 2008
I am grading papers tonight, and Neve drifted in a little while ago completely draped in a purple blanket.
“A purple ghost, I muttered, trying not to break concentration. “There’s something you don’t see every day.”
She slowly moved beside my chair. “This purple ghost needs a hug,” she whispered. I knew she’d had something emotional brewing all day, something she couldn’t quite grasp, but she knew enough to ask for a hug.
That’s the great thing about Neve for me. At nine, she has already proven to be a significant force in my life for lots of reasons. She’s goofy and adventurous and sharply observant, but what really impresses me about her is that she always figure out a way to get what she needs.
Sometimes it seems as if everything I wanted to be, everything that was repressed or edited out of my psyche as a child, came bawling out in the form of Neve. I was a kid with a wild imagination and crazy impulses who quickly picked up that those ideas were not well-received, and so I went underground. I felt most myself sitting alone in trees or closets letting those stories surface.
But Neve can’t even conceive of folding her most essential self away. She does not conform, she lives out loud. Her opinions are powerful and plentiful, and she is compelled to express them. I’ll never forget her saying loudly at a church service once, “Everyone here looks miserable. Why come if it makes you unhappy?” I tried to shush her, but true to form, she only asked because the question was burning within her, and she needed answers, now. All I could do was shrug and say, “I don’t know. I really don’t.” I have never admitted as much ignorance as I do with Neve, and it is a real blow to my teacher-ego at times.
Bearing Witness
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008When I had Colin, I knew that having children so far apart in age would challenge me physically, but over time, other, more perplexing issues have surfaced. Freedom is a word that keeps popping into my head of late — not my freedom, that’s another post altogether — but the kids’. Just at the point that Dex is testing his wings, Colin is utterly dependent upon me for survival. There’s something cognitively awry for me in negotiating with Dex about his desire to walk around town with a friend while I hover over an unsteady baby.In their own ways, they are both trying to gain some freedom from me, but that’s the only similarity. Colin is still very much tethered to me, and even though he ventures to the end of the driveway on his own, he still comes tearing back to me to get most of his needs met. Dex, on the other hand, is looking for reassurance that he doesn’t need me to witness and evaluate all of his experiences anymore. And there’s Neve, teetering somewhere in between both of these poles on any given day. She can be dismissive, pushing me out of her business, and then an hour later climb into my lap with a burning needing to share and relate her ideas. (more…)
Loneliness of the Long Winter Mama
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
I spent the weekend alone with Colin, and it was a rough one. He’s clingy and fussy right now, and it brought back memories of the extraordinary loneliness I felt when Dex and Neve were small. And it made me recall the best piece of parenting advice I ever received.
It was a dark, bleary day at the end of a winter much like this one—it seemed the snow and slush would never go away. I had relied on our daily walks to the park to keep us all sane and balanced, but it was cold to go outside. How the hours loom in front of you when you realize you’ve another day stuck inside with toddlers. I was out of energy and ideas, I was worn out and worried – about my kids, about ever pursuing my career again, about all the ideas ricocheting around my head would never make it onto paper. I was there, but not present; I was a conscientious mom, but I didn’t know what to do with my grandiose longings.
I had wanted to be somebody. I wanted to do something big. Lord, don’t we all?
But it is difficult to remember your unique talents when you are in the toddler trenches. How easily your world shrinks, until the kids’ bodily functions, weird obsessions and demands are the focus of your day. There are parents who handle all of that with grace and ease, but I’m not one of them. My psyche had become a leaky toilet — functional, but moving towards a really unpleasant mess.
At some point, my mother called that day, and I found myself complaining to her about feeling so drained. I generally avoided moaning to her about my mothering issues since she’d coped with a lot more kids and a lot less help than I did. But on this day, she heard me out, then said, “Well, no one’s going to rescue you.”
My self-pity shut right off. “Huh?”
“The only one that can make your day better is you, dear,” she sighed. “You need to plan one thing every single day that you look forward to, or you will drown.” I could hear her taking a sip of her tea. “It’s how I survived twelve years of toddlers.”
“Wait a minute, you were stressed?” I was scrambling to re-assess this information with what I knew of her. Even though she’d been a professional before having a slew of kids, she’d seemed to adapt beautifully to being a mom. You know, the born-to-the-task type. “But you made it look so easy.”
“Oh, by the time you came around, I had it all figured out.” It was true, she had something going on almost every night when I was little. “All that volunteer work was my socializing. It was great fun, we had a lot of laughs. And,” she added, “it kept me from feeling like a dolt.”
I laughed. “That’s exactly it. I feel like a dolt.”
“Okay, dolt,” she replied. “So what are you going to do today?”
Every day, her challenge still rings in the back of my head.