Fat Tuesday, but only technically

 

I don't think I've ever in my life been ready for Lent, and I suppose in some sense that is not surprising. Who can keep up with God? But this year it did at least occur to me a day in advance. I woke up this morning knowing it was Fat Tuesday. I had actually already thought about feasting on fat things; however, I spent most of yesterday in narcotics withdrawal, and I didn't think eating crazy amounts of chocolate or even a meal with meat was a good idea on an uncertain stomach. I had a cookie or two that a friend had brought me. To splurge and celebrate my new-found ability to sit in the car for ten minutes, we ate out. I had a vegetable stir fry: broccoli, carrots, peppers and rice. Living large, I am. We thought about going out for dessert afterwards, but it was cold out and the only dessert places around served ice cream, so I came home and made brownies. Then I ate one. Yes, that is how I live it up around here, one week post-surgery.

More to the point, I have actually been thinking about Lent and how I should observe it before it begins. The trouble is, nothing traditional feels right. In past years, I've given up chocolate, and I suppose I could do that again. Last year I fasted between breakfast and dinner one day a week, which turned out to be a difficult discipline for me, and meaningful, but since I am deep in the throes of some heavy healing, that doesn't seem like a brilliant idea.

What feels right to me is if the last six weeks could happen in the next six weeks instead. During the seasons of Christmas and Epiphany, I was going through my own Lent. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was walking in circles in my house during one of my assigned ten-minute walks. Now that the narcotics are out of my system, and now that all of my concentration need not be focussed on surviving great pain from moment to moment, I was startled to think of life going on. I am not allowed to do anything, really, yet. I can walk 10 minutes every two hours. I can sit for up to 15 minutes. But it increasingly looks like some time in the next months I will return to some acceptable level of function, and the thought is completely bewildering to me. What will I do? Who will be my friends? What will I do? What will I DO? I feel as if I have spent the last seven weeks being stripped of everything that might have been used to define me. I not only stopped running, which I hadn't done for months anyway, but I stopped any form of exercise whatsoever. Moving myself from the couch to the bed at the end of the day wore me out. Standing long enough to eat a meal was more than I could handle. I stopped cleaning my house. By the end, I wasn't even able to cook. I quit my job. I quit the band. I quit the choir. I stopped going to church. I never left the house at all, in fact. I haven't seen anyone but medical staff, family and one friend since before Christmas. I need assistance to shower and to put on my own socks and shoes. If the purpose of Lent is to strip away all that comes between me and my God, the last seven weeks have done about as good a job as anything can.

One of the ways I got through endless days of shooting, burning pain was to bless it, to make it something holy from God. When things got beyond the point where narcotics could help, I would force myself to become very very still except for my breath, and I would imagine that my pain was sentient, something like an angel, not a friend, exactly--it was too fierce for friendship--but something that was intentionally purifying. I imagined God with me in my pain. The pain and God blended, and I felt a presence with me. Not an easy, happy presence, but not a dark or cruel one either. Something powerful and ultimately to be trusted with what little I had left. I do not believe that God sits in heaven thinking of ways to torture us children into obedience, but in a more abstract way, I believed myself and my companion pain to be held right in the middle of God's will. And I found peace there. I even, as strange as this sounds in this day and age, was grateful for my pain, for my prolonged stretch of being stripped down and without pride or purpose. I found a sort of comfort in the knowledge that at my most unpleasant, my most unattractive, my most useless, I was still something beloved and cared for. I was grateful, most of the time, to lie still and have my pain erase everything in the world that was not my most basic me and my most elemental God.

It all sounds like one of the ancient mystic saints, doesn't it? I don't mean to come off as someone born again into a life of unshakable faith. I'm sure I'm not. And I'm almost as certain that I'm not crazy. But I do feel as if, for the first time in my life, I really really experienced Lent this year. I don't think I have the self-discipline, or the faith, for that matter, to wear a hair shirt and self-flagellate and fast to the point of suffering. But I see why people of great faith might do so. I am amazed to have found myself, several times, at the point of true surrender, and to have found something greater than anything I could produce by my own actions or will still holding me together, still calling me by name, still willing me to live. I can attest that it's worth a great deal of pain and disability to feel oneself nakedly in the presence of the holy. It is awe-ful. The word has been misspelled.

Which brings me back to tomorrow, Ash Wednesday, the observed beginning of Lent. Where do I go from where I have been? Lent is approximately six weeks long; my expected recovery time, the time it will take me to get back to where I can even begin to get back to "normal," is six weeks. It will be months and months before I can be athletic and before I can truly put this injury behind me, if it is to be my fate that I do ever recover fully. That six weeks feels like it has some significance though.

In an attempt to come up with a plan, I poked around on a few websites to see what exactly the significance of Lent is supposed to be. Wikipedia, the source of profound truths, says Lent is meant to prepare the believer. It didn't, however, say what the believer is to be prepared for. Alas. A Catholic website claimed that Lent is about conversion. It's not about giving up some indulgence for six weeks but of learning to let go of an old life and embrace new life. That wording works for me this year. I once had a certain life--not all good, not all bad, very very human--and circumstances beyond my control gave me a chance to see myself without any of the trappings of that old life. I was allowed to let go of everything for a little while. It seems to be my fate and fortune, however, that I should, now, reenter life. It isn't true to say that I get a fresh start. I will, gradually, resume most of the same responsibilities I once managed. I will reenter many of the same communities of which I was once part. To the rest of the world, I had a spine injury and surgery and recovery period. I will pick up where I left off some time ago. For me, though, coming out of my own wilderness of pain and mandatory idleness, it feels like starting over, like learning how to live again. If Lent is the period between the old life and the new, then my Lent has already happened.

And so for me this year, it feels right to find a discipline that will teach me to enter new life with the assurances I found in the midst of the in-between place. How can I re-enter the chores, the little competitions, the insecurities, and the politics of a busy modern life and remember what was so clear when I was naked of all of anything that might claim to lend me worth? I must learn to live with the idea that nothing I do can make me more worthy of the love of the Divine. The temptation of the new life will be to forget how to be humble enough to find holiness.

What's happening

Yesterday I saw the second of two neurosurgeons. I had been advised that in such matters as neurosurgery, it's best to seek out at least two opinions. I suppose the good news is that both surgeons said pretty much the same thing: I need surgery, and the sooner the better. I have a severely herniated disk at L5-S1. According to yesterday's doctor, it's about as bad as a herniation gets. It's filling up about half of my spinal column. We joked a bit yesterday with the doctor that I've always been something of an over-achiever and so I wanted to have the very best herniation he'd ever seen. Good for me. Seriously, though, it is, for some reason, helpful to have my pain validated. Yes, this is as bad as this type of pain gets. It really is. So I truly am doing well to not be a wailing pile of mess, and I've been bearing up remarkably well for having been in this condition for several weeks.

Both surgeons are able to get me into surgery on Tuesday. It's not a herniation to mess around with. If they operate soon, there is still a good chance that I could regain full use of that nerve and therefore full use of my right leg which, of course, is important to me. The surgery involves a fairly small (not much larger than an inch) incision in my back. The doctor will then peel the muscles off of the spinal column and keep them retracted and out of the way. Here is where my athletic physique will cost me a bit. If those muscles were weak and atrophied, it would hurt less. Mine, however, are robust and meaty and will HURT. Even so, better to have them hurt than be cut. The doctor will have to drill a little hole in the lamina of my vertebrae in order to get to the nerves, which will be pushed aside, and the disk, the extruded part of which will be cut into pieces and removed. The doctor will then look around with his tools and microscope and make sure he isn't leaving any fragments, and then put in layer upon layer of dissolving stitches and close me up. Done.

I have decided to go with the second doctor, although it was a hard decision because both seemed very good. The second doctor was more thorough in how he spoke to us, although both seemed knowledgable and confident. He also put more emphasis on the non-surgical aspects, like physical therapy, and he already has a connection with the physical therapist I've been seeing and whose professional knowledge I trust. He also was very adamant about the need for an overnight stay in the hospital after the surgery, whereas the other doctor was going to send me home same day. For spine surgery, that seems ambitious. And it's a lot of responsibility to put on Doug. Lastly, he is closer and uses the hospital that is only two miles from our house.

So that's the plan: surgery on Tuesday, home on Wednesday, beginning a gradual walking plan in the first week (walks measured in minutes at first) and physical therapy after the second week. I have a few more days of this kind of pain, a few days of surgical pain, and then I should start to see the pain go down. I almost cannot imagine life without pain. I'm willing to try it.

Reasons to be thankful

In the last few days I've talked to two different friends who are down. I've been down before. This fall I was in therapy for major depression, until a few weeks ago when I became unable to sit for even a few minutes, much less an hour. I thought at the time that most of my depression could be traced back to my chronic injuries and my inability to run. However, since then, I have lost not only the ability to run but also the ability to bike, to swim, to walk further than from one room to another in my own house, to sit down to dinner, to ride in the car (and since I cannot walk either, basically I've lost the ability to leave my house,) to go to church, to be in the band, to participate in choir, to teach, to sit at a computer, to put on my own socks, to tie my own shoes, to get my hair cut, etc. Basically, I've lost the ability to do anything not involving lying on the couch. Or in bed. And sometimes it hurts too much sleep, so that's out too.

This should all be very depressing. Yes, it hurts enough sometimes that I cry and moan. Sometimes I am quite grumpy with my family due to the pain. But I don't believe that I am depressed at the moment. Odd.

I should probably provide a disclaimer before I go any further. I am scheduled to have surgery on Tuesday. It's spine surgery. It requires general anesthesia and a neurosurgeon and some expensive and high-tech equipment. And yes, I am a bit nervous about that. But the surgeon seems quite confident that this surgery will fix my pain. Perhaps some of my depression cynicism reemerges for a moment when I think of that, but I quash it pretty quickly. On the whole, I tend to believe that after Tuesday, or maybe after Wednesday or Thursday, I will start to feel better and that my life will return more or less to normal in a couple of months. Therefore, what I am about to say I believe I can only say because I believe that this pain is nearing an end.

That said, if I somehow had the secret power to go back in time and magically cure my back before it ever got to this point, I'm not sure that I would. I feel oddly grateful (now that I know an end is near) for this interlude from normal life. Yes, it's incredibly painful and debilitating. Yes, it's scary. But it's also been a very interesting experience. Just as I do not for a second regret having done natural childbirth, I wouldn't sacrifice this experience just to get rid of the memory of the pain. The memory will fade, after all.

I confessed to a friend that I feel grateful for this time, and she asked why. I've been trying to figure out just what it is. The pain itself is very purifying, I think. There is something about horrible pain that makes one blind to trivialities. When the goal for the day--or the hour, if a whole day is too much to contemplate--is just to survive it, suddenly things like bad hair and gained weight, lack of productivity and a clutter-filled house just aren't that important. I don't feel anxious that I haven't exercised because, quite frankly, I can think of nothing I want to do less. I want to lie on the couch, find a position that hurts only a bearable amount, and not move from it until I can get up for another dose of narcotics. When the pain is intense, I want to be alone with it in a quiet place and breathe into it and live it and honor it and bless it and make it holy. It is, for me at least, a spiritual experience. Plus, I also had the chance during the last couple of weeks to read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World, both of which have helped me live my pain fully and with as much grace as possible.

Being visibly in pain and more confined and for a longer stretch than most people have to be with an illness or injury has also brought to me the blessing of compassion. I may not be on anyone's fun list, but I certainly have been well taken care of. My husband has been carrying the load not only of paying the bills but also picking up a good deal of the child care. And the wife care. He helps me put on my pajamas, drives me to physical therapy, and has been unfailingly patient. My sister Katy came over one week and took down and put away all of my Christmas decorations. She vacuumed up the fallen needles and my stairs while the vacuum was out. She dragged the tree out to the street--ordinarily Doug's job, but she did it herself. The next week she came and scrubbed my kitchen floor, something that made me breathe easier and really needed to be done, as my back has been hurt since last spring. My mom has driven my daughter to ballet and cleaned her room. She had me spend the weekend a few weeks ago and waited on me hand and foot, literally, as one of the favors I asked was for her to pull on my foot to take pressure off my spine. When she hosted my birthday dinner, she arranged it so that people stood at the counter with me so that I didn't have to eat my birthday dinner alone. My friend Jen came over and taught me to knit and brought me some DVDs of her favorite TV series and some chocolate. Another friend volunteered to take Adam to baseball practice every week, and a neighbor is going to take Gretchen to preschool while I am with a neurosurgeon. Even though I am not currently much fun, not a good runner, not a good musician, not a good housekeeper or mom, really not a good anything, I feel as beloved as I ever have. I have nothing to offer to others, but I still feel valued. What a remarkable gift.

Talking to my friend tonight on the phone I began to wonder if perhaps I am also feeling oddly mentally OK because this has been, if nothing else, a time off. Not a time away. I didn't get to run the relay in Florida I had intended to do, and I keep missing out on shows and outings, but it has been a break from, well, everything. An enforced break, but apparently I, like most women, need it to be enforced if it's to happen. This has been a time set apart. Apart for pain, yes, but still apart, for me and about me. Although I have not yet begun to heal physically, I think that time by itself has helped my soul heal from the wounds of daily living. If all goes well, I hope to come out of this with a renewed sense of perspective, a revised outlook on life, a fresh start.

All I Can Do Is Walk Him to the Bus Stop

My son is eight. He is, for the most part, a calm and responsible boy. He can get carried away with silliness. He sometimes cries about ridiculous things, like the need to wear jeans to school when it is 20 degrees outside. But I trust him as much as I would trust any eight year old. Even so, I have taken to walking him to the bus stop most mornings. I do this partly for him because he is the only one at the bus stop in the mornings. But if I examine my motives carefully, I realize I don't think that being alone at a bus stop is such a terrible thing. The ability to be alone is quite valuable, in fact, and alone for two minutes while waiting for a bus filled with peers is probably not entirely a bad thing. So I have come to realize that, mostly, I am walking Adam to the bus for myself.

I walk my son to the bus because if I don't, I stand at the front door and watch him cross the street and then walk away, out of sight. He walks confidently but without deliberation, as though this is what he does on a normal day, as though there never was any question of him walking down the sidewalk to the bus stop, getting on a bus driven by a stranger (granted, it's the same stranger every day,) and then spending the bulk of his day somewhere other than home with me. As he walks, I see double: I see my dependable and intelligent "big boy" going off to be dependable and intelligent where all the other kids his age are; but I also see my baby, my toddler, my preschooler, and he is walking away, going off without me, leaving me. Both sights are irrefutably true. I must let my child go out into the world because I want him to learn to be independent and to learn about the magic of words and numbers and the stories of our history and the marvels we think we know through science. But I must also accept that my baby is just walking away. My toddler is leaving. He is going off into a life that will be his and not mine, that he will control and I will, decreasingly, only influence. He doesn't need my hands to hold him up any more, and he isn't afraid to stand on a corner by himself and then get on a bus and not look back at his mother, standing alone and watching.

Today a broken and bent man went into a school full of children like my son, children whose parents scolded themselves for being silly enough to almost weep every morning when their brave dependable children walked out into the world, and did the worst thing I can imagine a human doing. There, but for the grace of God, go I. And one can't help but know that even with the grace of God, people are there already. I can't imagine there is a parent in America today who isn't wearing the clothes of the parents in Connecticut, who isn't completely undone by empathic pain, who doesn't look at the school pictures of their children hanging in the hall or at the top of the stairs and HURT to the point of near-paralysis, and who isn't thinking of how a person could, before she even knew what was happening, lose everything. How can any of us ever be brave enough to let our children go out into the world? I really don't know.

And yet, I also know that I must. If I love my children--and I do--I will eventually have to let them cross the street by themselves, even if there are reckless drivers in the world, because I want their world to be larger than my modest suburban house and yard. I will have to let them get on the school bus and spend a day at school because I want them to be able to understand the marvelous world they live in and the mostly marvelous people who share it with them. The horrible horrible truth is that I can walk my son to his bus stop every morning, but unless I am willing to force him to grow up in fear, unless I am willing to sacrifice all of the brilliant things he might become and the fantastic journeys he might take during the life ahead of him, I have to let him get on the bus by himself.

Those of us who are in the season of advent have an uncomfortable mingling of Good Friday and Christmas today. Our streets are lined with lights and wreaths, preparing a path, lighting the way, and yet we watch our brothers and sisters as they hang on their crosses and ask how God can allow such pain. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? And yet, since I became a mother, since I felt my son's presence in my womb, for me, Christmas and Easter have become inseparable. Yes, I await that moment of pure joy Christmas Eve when "Silent Night" becomes "Joy to the World," that moment when I transcend hope and actually believe that God is with us, that the kingdom is near, that swords will be beat into plowshares, that "they shall never harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain." But I also think of Mary giving birth alone, save for a man she had only recently married. I think of Mary loving her baby and then watching him grow up and then.... And I think of God, who knew humanity pretty well by then and still let his whole heart be born flesh--the kind of flesh that is first a helpless and dependent baby, the kind of flesh that must be never out of reach of Mama and then eventually learns to walk on his own, the kind of flesh that eventually must go out into the world if He is to experience life in its abundance, if He is to make a difference on this unreliable planet among broken, bent, and hurting humans.

If you've ever watched a beloved child walk down the street to a bus stop, Christmas is equal parts wonder and terror. He will get hurt. He will be grieved, perhaps even unto death.

Lord, have mercy on us.

Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed--and a sword will pierce your own soul too." --Luke 2:34-35

Team Chickpea Piccata: Some Thoughts on Deliberately Falling Short

“The true object of all human life is play.  Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.” –G. K. Chesterton

“If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.”  --Jean Piaget

“Imagination rules the world.”  --Napoleon Bonaparte

Comparisons are the death of joy.  I know this.  I know quite well that I ought to go about living my own life the best I can and not worry myself with what anyone else has or does.  Competition, however, is contagious, and it’s a difficult disease to shake.  You would think that abandoning my career and for the better part of a decade earning $0, and that having my running career taken down by a chronically broken foot, and generally doing and having nothing lauded or glamorized or even compensated by our current culture would go a long ways towards breaking me of measuring myself against others, but such a thought underestimates the depravity of human nature.  There are endless ways to keep falling short, even if you protest that you are not really running the race.

The issue I am currently wrestling with is how much is enough.   Likely, the level of enough is different for every family and within each family, every kid.  Still, I think every kid probably has a level that is too much.   Every year it feels like more and more kids are doing everything available, and in an affluent suburb, that’s a lot.  Kids are in soccer—and not just regular soccer, travel soccer with foot skills classes and special audition-only tournaments—and baseball and swim team and Spanish class and piano lessons and scouts.  I feel like Adam is in plenty.  He’s in “recreational” soccer and cub scouts and takes piano lessons.  But all of his friends are in those things and baseball and some sort of tutoring as well.  Maybe football too.  Most are now on “travel” soccer teams.  Today I overheard one mom moaning/bragging that her eight-year-old is on two travel teams and a baseball team.  If you talk to the parents of these over-scheduled children, they will claim that they are doing it for one or both of two main reasons: (1) the child’s friends are all on those teams, and (2) if the child does not play every sport every season, and if he/she is not on the best teams now, he/she will not make the high school team(s). 

Now for my confession: sometimes, I believe these parents.  Sometimes I worry that my son is getting behind by not playing fall ball when the rest of his baseball-playing classmates are.  Sometimes the competitive part of me wonders if I am, when he is only eight years old, causing my son not to “make” the high school soccer team by keeping him in “recreational” soccer while all of the other kids who ought be his teammates and competition are now in travel soccer.  (Side rant: the travel soccer thing annoys me for other reasons too.  If we all just stayed here, the competition would be of the same level.  Instead, people are giving up their weekends to play teams whose members live in our town but on a field 90 minutes away.  And they’re paying a thousand dollars to do so.  Why? Because all of the good teammates and competition have gone to travel teams.  If we all just stayed here, we all could just stay here.  Seriously, folks, get over yourselves.)

Of course, there are all sorts of other ways I fall short of perfect.  Recently, I was at a meeting in a house that was probably close to twice the size of mine and decorated like a model home.  No, much more nicely than a model home.  I was in constant awe.  There were pictures in the bathroom, and they were hung in painted rectangles (perfect perfect rectangles) that matched the matting of the pictures.  The soap and hand towels matched the paint and the matting as well.  And that was just the bathroom.  Moreover, the house was immaculate.  Not a stray anything.  Every surface—and there were a lot of surfaces—was polished and shiny.  No dust on the framed mirrors.  No sock fuzz on the carpets. No toys.  Not even any toy boxes.  No papers.  Of course I didn’t go exploring around the house, so it’s possible the upstairs was grimy and chaotic, but I really doubt that was case.  Gretchen, who did go upstairs to play, told me that she hopes she can go back there someday because the house was even more like a castle inside than it was outside.  I wonder: how is such a life possible? 

How do other people live these lives?  And, because it’s really all about me after all, why do my children and I seem unable to pull it off?  Why are there piles of papers that I don’t have any idea what to do with but am afraid to throw away?  When should I be scrubbing the kitchen floor and tile walls (not that   I have these) and polishing the bathroom counters?  Do my kids have more toys than other kids, since the toys in my house seem not to all have a place to go other than the floor?  Frankly, I suspect that even if my son was on three travel teams, he still wouldn’t be the best soccer player in the third grade.  He’s small and neither particularly fast nor aggressive.  Nothing I do is likely to change that.

I know there is no point in making these comparisons.  In the end, when I’m, say, eighty, I don’t think it’s going to matter to me that my floor was dirty or my mantel was dusty or that my mirrors were splattered with soap and toothpaste.  And, let’s be honest, some of our kids are not going to be on the high school soccer and baseball teams, and that’s OK.  Really.  Some of them (gasp) might not want to be on the high school soccer, basketball, and baseball teams.  Furthermore, when I pull out my rational self for a few minutes and think through this thing, I suspect that it’s too early to either predict or prepare for those years-away try-outs.  If I’m being completely logical, do I think that playing fall ball in third grade is going make that much difference in Adam’s baseball playing two years from now, much less six or seven years from now?  No.  I don’t think it will.  What I actually believe is that there is far more to be lost than there is to be gained.

For example, the other night while I was making dinner—and I’ll return to that activity in a moment—my children got to (read: had to) play by themselves.  Adam had already had a piano lesson; Gretchen had already taken a nap.  We had already had some time together for snacks and a trip to meet Adam’s new teacher and discuss his allergies.  And so my children had something they would not have if they were on multiple sports teams: down time. 

Segway to a snapshot of our home: our dining room is neither elegant nor neat.  We have a big indestructible table covered in colored paper and cardboard, markers and crayons, scissors and tape and popsicle sticks and googly eyes.  We have a play kitchen and a lego table, and the floor is often strewn with plastic food and lego blocks and pretend money and a few stray dominoes and other detritus of childhood.  The chaos of that room often makes me cringe and sometimes makes me angry.  Interestingly enough, however, the response the room more often than not garners from visitors (at least visitors of a certain type) is, “This room is awesome!” 

The chaos of the room more accurately reflects the mind of my youngest than any of the rest of us, although all of us are prone to leaving things where we last used them when we get distracted by (or startled into) the next activity.  Gretchen, though, lives in a world of constant imagination, a world with multiple simultaneous plotlines and lots of made-up songs.  During this one late afternoon, she wandered past the lego table and decided to set up a petting zoo.  She built a number of enclosures that were neck-high to the various animals she was going to display.  She built a slide entrance for the visitors, so they could get in but the cows could not get out.  She mounted pretend lights on tall pillars so that the zoo could stay open past sunset.  She surrounded the penguin enclosure with cooling blocks.   The longer she played, the more details she thought out. 

Adam had returned to the play he had started on a previous afternoon.  He took our big tub of plastic animal figurines and sorted them into teams: the snakes, the frogs, the birds, the sea creatures, the wild dogs and cats, etc.  Then the teams competed in a baseball tournament.  He would periodically call out to me the current score.  On the evening in question, the frogs were winning, although the birds, being able to fly, are usually very good at fielding.  Yes, he could have been at real baseball practice then, had I signed him up for fall ball, but I couldn’t help but think that he has many years ahead of him for organized sports and likely far fewer years to make up a new world, to “believe” that the frogs could play the birds and win, to govern the rules not just of the game but of nature and physics as well.  You can’t sign your child up for imaginary play, but you can sign him up out of it.   

Meanwhile, I was making chickpea piccata over mashed cauliflower on a bed of arugula.  We had roasted squash and zucchini on the side and fresh blueberries and wheat-free, dairy-free chocolate chip zucchini cake for dessert.  It took some time, yes, but the end result was the sort of dinner I wish I could get in a nice restaurant but usually cannot.  I couldn’t help wonder if the people whose children are on two or three travel sport teams at a time ever eat that way, much less every night.  Doug commented to me recently that as he stands in line at grocery stores, he compares what most people buy to the food in our cart. (I confess I do the same, in a shamefully self-righteous way.)   Other people, he said, buy a lot of processed food: chicken strips, pizza rolls, crackers, fish sticks.  It’s quick and easy, no doubt, and it doesn’t mess your beautiful kitchen.  Likely, people eat that way because they don’t have time to chop and sauté, to study recipe books, to plan menus in advance, and then to wash several loads of dishes when dinner is over.  Likely, they do not read labels because their children are not allergic to wheat, milk, eggs, tree nuts, fish, and shell fish.   Perhaps they never think about the impact they are having on the environment by supporting factory farming, the over-production of genetically modified corn, and chemically processed and over-packaged food-like products.  Unfortunately, somehow we’ve come to believe that by making such decisions, we are prioritizing our children’s futures—namely, their chances of making the high school soccer and baseball teams—while failing to recognize that such decisions, in fact, only look towards a few years of sports competitions and not the long-term health and survival of the people we claim to love.

That night, I surveyed my messy house: the kitchen covered in dirty or air-drying dishes, the dining room covered in half-completed craft projects and a lego zoo, the family room set up as a baseball diamond with the birds in the field and the frogs lined up in their batting order, the shelves and bags and tables over-flowing with books and magazines and homework .  My kids did not get “ahead” at anything that evening.  Had someone come to our house, they would not have been impressed by either my domestic prowess nor my interior design skills.  For that moment, though, I thought that  maybe by making dinner and making my kids amuse themselves, we all came out ahead anyway.

Summertime, and the Living is....

**I wrote this almost two months ago and just now got up the courage to post it.  Tomorrow, or soon, I will tell you what I did about moving up.  Or sideways.

June 5-8, 2012

This feels like a hard confession to write, possibly because I want to be someone other than who I am. I do NOT want to be one of those parents who complain about summer and school being out, especially not at the beginning of the first week of summer vacation. Yesterday there was one hour of school, and by dinnertime I was already dreading the rest of the summer. The whining. The bickering. The constant constantness of children. They talk all the time, keeping me from my own thoughts, and yet they do not add any new information. The talk is just sound, biologically and diabolically designed to be impossible to tune out. It could be used as a form of long-term torture by the government, if amendment VIII to the constitution didn't forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. This morning I went on an almost two-hour bike ride, arriving back home at 8am. By 8:30 I had already sent my son to his room because I just couldn't stand the constant little jabs and insults and taunts directed at his sister. I was reminding myself on my bike ride, to psych myself for another day, that really he's a good kid. Compared to any other eight-year-old boy I've come across, he's really quite kind and focused and gentle. But he's an eight-year-old boy. Boy, oh boy, is he an eight-year-old. And the summer stretches out long long long before us.

So here I am, dreading summer. It doesn't help that my foot--the one on which I had surgery last year--is killing me again, on top of the sprained back and broken rib, of course. The sprain and the break are normal and almost healed. The foot is completely mysterious. I wasted a year of my life on it and then on surgery, and it's not better. So summer is taunting me like an eight-year-old brother intent on making me scream.

But injuries aside, I find myself dreading summer--not the summeriness of summer, but, specifically and horribly, all of the time spent entertaining and meeting the legitimate and made-up needs of children. Yesterday, well before dinner, I was suddenly transported back twenty-some years to before I was old enough to have a "real" summer job and did babysitting/nanny jobs in the summer. I remember one job in particular that was most of a workday watching a little girl named Allison, and maybe her brother, although I only remember the girl for sure. I have nothing in particular to say about the girl. I don't remember her doing anything horrible. I don't remember anything particularly wild or disobedient or difficult about her. She was probably a normal kid, maybe seven or eight years old. The thing I remember is that in spite of her being a nice enough kid, I really did not enjoy my babysitting career. I counted the hours, the minutes even, until I was off duty. And I felt that way about most of my day-time babysitting gigs. The night-time gigs I would count the hours and minutes until bedtime. And in the larger scheme of my life, I was counting the weeks until the job was over, the months until school was back in, the years until I could do something else with my life, something a little more...stimulating?

Fast forward through the rest of high school and college and graduate school and all sorts of interesting classes and "valuable" education, and here I am, stuck in more-or-less the same situation, always busy, always in demand, and at the same time so bored I sometimes consider whether I should beat my skull against the wall just to be doing something else, something at least slightly more interesting. In some ways my current situation is a bit better: there is no ambiguity about what is allowed, or at least less, since I am the one who decides such things, and there is no fear that the children are hoodwinking me that the real parents are OK with such-and-such. I can change the scenery: decide that we ARE running errands or going to a park. Sometimes I can actually talk to another adult if we meet at a park, although, mind you, those conversations tend to be interrupted repeatedly by requests to play on the slides or to push the swings or for snacks. But in many ways, the parenting gig is even more hopeless than babysitting. There is no off-duty coming in a couple of hours. The end of the "work day" means...nothing. And there are no weekends. The job is not going to end, at least not for many years. You don't walk out of the house at the end of the day or week with a pile of cash. When you go on vacation, the kids come too, and they bicker and whine and ask for snacks from the back seat. Worst, though, is the knowledge that this is it. I don’t have some brilliant and interesting career ahead of me.  In spite of my masters degree, I’m not even confident I could get a job if I had time for one.  This is the fulfillment of all of my teenaged fantasies about the future, about the time when I have a graduate degree and a husband and my own life. Joke's on me. I may have a graduate degree, but it turns out the golden era of my adult life is almost exactly like the time when I was fourteen and helping someone else live her life. Only now I don't have dreams of the future to sustain me, and I can't go hang out with my teenaged friends after dinner every night. The truth is that my life is so tedious most of the time that even when another adult arrives I have nothing to say interesting enough to engage in actual conversation. My current situation is so intensely boring that when I desperately dig around for some little tid-bit to offer up in the name of adult interaction, even my most interesting item causes the eyes of my listener to glaze over and elicits little more than an obligatory nod or grunt of assent before the would-be listener's attention reverts to whatever it can find of more interest.  I’ve taken to breaking ribs just to have a conversation topic. Apparently, that’s what I do when I’m bored.

My mom, the re-teller of family stories, has countless times told us and others how she knew I needed to be moved ahead a year in school: I started coming home every day with a new injury.  Once I had wedged myself into a garbage can.  Once I stuck my finger in a pencil sharpener to clean the crayon out of it.  I came home covered in band-aids with scraped knees and bumps on the head and a restless mental hunger that drove me to constant reading and badgering my parents into teaching me long division.  My first grade teacher didn’t find me a thrillingly exceptional student, but my mom, a very good mom, knew.  I was bored.  My physical well-being, not to mention my intellectual growth, necessitated that I be pushed ahead.  I needed a change.  I needed a challenge.  I needed to be using my strengths.

This week, as I sat in the podiatrists office waiting for an explanation on my mysteriously still very painful foot (I don’t feel satisfied that I received a good one,) I fumed about how in the space of approximately two months I’ve sprained my back, broken a rib, gotten two infections, and reinjured my foot.  Mother, I think, it is time to move up a level, to find something else to do with myself, some sort of challenge for my mind before I smash up my body beyond repair and start in on someone else.

When one is in elementary school, moving up a level can be a matter of simple math: in the case of my childhood, I moved from grade two to grade three.  In my current situation, math does not seem to be the answer.  For some reason I don’t think going from two children to three children would work quite as well.  No, it’s far more complicated and involves some difficult choices.  I will have to release some of the blessings of my current life in order to pursue another.  I’ll have to rebuild bridges that, if not burned, have certainly been neglected and fallen into extreme disrepair.

I don’t know what moving on looks like from here.  I only know that something has to change if any of us is going to come out of this summer unscathed. 

Last Visit

The first time my grandma died was in 1995, and since then she has been increasingly unwell. I’ll confess, though, that even before her first death, there has always been a space between my grandmother and my sisters and me.  Unlike my mom’s mom, she was never a very grandmotherly grandmother.  I am sure that as a child I could not have articulated anything profound about my relationship with my grandmother, but luckily I lived in a world where I never had to question whether or not family loved me.  They did, and I never had to think about it.  She was one of two grandmothers in my life and therefore someone who must love me.  She just was who she was.  She and my grandpa moved down to Florida when I was nearing the end of elementary school, so by the time I was old enough to consider who she was, I once again didn’t see enough of her to feel the need to do so.

When my grandfather died in 2001, we discovered just how much he had been taking care of her. She had to be moved to assisted living immediately. She stayed there for a couple of years before it was clear that her mental functions required more specialized help, and I joined my family in cleaning out her apartment and winnowing down her possessions to almost nothing. In the process, we came across some odd but telling things: cards that were labeled and dated but not opened, broken appliances and duplicate appliances. Most poignantly, we found two watches that I had been missing since I was in junior high: watches I cherished and searched for diligently if not frantically for months and months, watches my parents had scolded me for leaving somewhere odd and losing. Because my room had contained the double bed, it was the guest room when we had company, and, apparently, my two favorite watches and who knows what else had gone home with my grandmother even before her stroke. How does one feel about that sort of thing? Lucky for me, this was found when I was an adult, when I had long since replaced the watches, and when I could see the tragedy as clearly as the inappropriateness of her actions.

Several years ago, when I visited my grandma, she was still in the ward of the nursing home for the confused and mentally unwell. While there, I became convinced that as one begins to lose the edges of oneself, the mental habits of a lifetime become more and more pronounced. An example was a little old woman named Gloria, who I did not know during her normal life but who, I'm assuming, must have been determined to celebrate the joys in life. She came up to my sister and me and said something along the lines of, "It's so good to see you again! I love your hair!" She walked up and down the hallway drifting into residents rooms delighting over this picture or that bouquet of flowers. Most amusingly, she came up to my grandma, who was using a walker and therefore carrying nothing, and said to her, "Oh! Where did you get that cheese?"

My grandma responded, "It's mine!" My sister and I looked around for the cheese in question.

"Well, it looks delicious!" bubbled Gloria, before moving off to admire someone else's imaginary possessions.

It came as a good cautionary tale: when the sense and the details of our daily interactions are eroded away by time or illness, what is the heart that is revealed beneath them? When, someday, I am faced with imaginary cheese, will I compliment it, hoard it, or share it? When my scenery is reduced to a locked hallway, will I admire it or resent it or worry that someone else might take it?

Surprisingly enough, although my grandma seemed not to remember many details about her past life, including some members of her family, during that same cheese walk, my grandma introduced me to an older gentleman in a three-piece suit. "This was my junior high teacher," she told me. The man must have been in his 90s, but he was only at the nursing home visiting friends. To him, my grandmother said, "This is my granddaughter. She's a teacher too." I didn't know that she even knew who I was, much less my current profession, something that had begun well after she seemed to be losing her ability to keep track of such things. I was touched, honestly.

In spite of that moment of recognition, however, I haven't been visiting my grandma, who still lives in that same nursing home about four hours from where I live. My dad and my aunts have reported that she understands and remembers less and less. She doesn't eat. She is too weak to walk and has been moved off the floor with locking doors. She sleeps almost 22 hours a day. She is wasting away to nothing: once taller and far more buxom than I am, she has shriveled down to 82 pounds. Last year they discovered that her body was no longer producing hemoglobin. They gave her transfusions with the hope that it would kick-start her body into producing hemoglobin again, but after repeated attempts, it became clear that this was not going to happen. My dad and aunts enrolled her in hospice.

So I knew that my trip to visit her this spring was probably going to be the last one before I travel out there one more time for her funeral. I was expecting it not to go well. I envisioned that she would not wake up, or, if she did, that she would stare at me blankly. I thought she would have no idea who I was. I was expecting her to be shriveled up and have lost her hair. I was expecting her eyes to be glazed over.  I was expecting neither to recognize nor to be recognized.

When we arrived, however, she was sitting up and watching TV, the only thing she has done with her waking hours for the last decade or two. Her hair was white but still thick and was combed and pulled back in a headband. She was under a blanket, so her body was not really visible. Her color was normal. She looked different than she had when I was child, but she still looked very familiar, somehow. Did she look familiar because one fourth of my genes and the genes of my sisters are hers? Because half of my dad and half of my aunts are her?  Did she look familiar because back when I was a child, she was my grandma? Or did she look familiar because somewhere under there, she still is my grandma? I don't know. The strength of the sense of recognition was both shocking and comforting.

I reminded my grandma who I was, and my parents reintroduced themselves. Then we introduced my children. I told her their names and ages and that they are her great-grandchildren. She said, "Bless them!" Then she said to us all, "You may go now." Her speech was very clear and formal--not at all what I was expecting—but the dismissal was not a surprise. Still, it's anti-climatic to drive four hours for a three minute meeting, especially if the meeting is the first in years and potentially the last of a lifetime.

We all left the room and found a large empty gathering room where the kids could run around and be kids. After a few minutes, I went back in to my grandma’s room. I was told not to be surprised if she didn't remember that my previous visit had been less than ten minutes ago, so I reintroduced myself. This time, without the crowd of people, my grandma looked at me for a moment and said, "You look so beautiful." My eyes filled.

I didn't know quite what to say to my grandma, who has had no interests for decades and whose interests from long ago do not in any way intersect with my own. I told her about being a runner. I told her that I am a stay-at-home mom. To this, she said, "I sure do love you."

For that moment I would have driven twice as far with twice as many children.  The trip was suddenly more than worth it.  Those few minutes alone with my grandmother redeemed the last two decades of personality disorder and estrangement.

I could be cynical and question how sincere this declaration really was, given that she doesn’t actually know me beyond perhaps being able to identify who I am and how I am related to her and that immediately afterwards my identify if not my presence was forgotten in my grandma’s desire to be moved to her bed.  It could very well be that she just knows that if someone comes to visit saying she is your granddaughter, even if you don’t really remember her, and if she fits your notions of beauty and feminine virtue, you must love her.  Maybe she had enough social savvy to know what to say or to know that hearing those words was I had come.

Then again, even if my cynical suspicions were to prove accurate—if one could ever find a way to prove anything regarding the mysteries of love and the human heart—those few moments were still worth the drive.  Even if my grandma saying she loved me was little more than conditioned response or the fulfillment of how she knows things ought to be, I think it still has value.  The love between the two of us is not sacrificial.  It’s not something we ever put into some grand action or even some mundane routine.  It probably wouldn’t be enough love to live on, if that was all I had.  But it’s not all I have.  Not by a long, long measure.  Two children sat in a car for four boring hours across featureless Indiana and never complained or criticized the trip because they knew it was important to me.  My husband did the driving all weekend, and he also never questioned the worth of spending money and two days of vacation.  My parents came on the trip as well and stayed at the same hotel and swam in the pool and took us to dinner.  Two cars full of love carried me into my grandma’s small room to hear those words, and that’s saying nothing of the love I left back home and scattered across the country in the form of friends, past and current, and more family.  In such a case, a little more love feels like enough.

Years ago, I had thought that my grandmother’s personality, at its most elemental core, was about her things.  How sad, if that had been the truth, given that each time she slipped farther and farther into her illness, she was moved from smaller to smaller abode, stripped, in the end, of nearly everything but a few trinkets that decorated her tiny nursing home room.  But in the last trip to visit her, I was forced to reconsider this assessment.  At the previous visit, years ago, only two things had seemed worth comment: her things (even the imaginary ones,) and her granddaughter.  Perhaps I should have thought about the fact that she wished to share me with others rather than the fact that she wished to hoard her imaginary cheese and squirrel away my watches.  Maybe, it counts for something that on my last visit to her, weeks before her death, she said to me, “I sure do love you.” 

What exactly that word “love” means has been debated by far more eloquent writers than I and in far more controversial settings than the one of which I write.  For me, the statements come down to a belief that whatever the word meant to my grandma, she meant it when she said it to me.

My grandma died on Saturday.  She had been unwell for so very long that the news was more a fulfillment of the inevitable than such news usually is.  And, truthfully, it doesn’t change a thing about my daily life.  I will confess that I too seldom even paused to think about my grandma asleep in her small room, or watching a TV show she couldn’t quite follow.  But her death still feels like a loss. There is one less person tying me to the past, anchoring the roots of my family tree, providing a clue to what makes me who I am.  With her life over, it seems like it will be far too easy to forget all about my grandma, about the twang in her speech, the bite in her remarks, the sound of her laugh.  But it’s not all gone.  I think maybe, if she were able, she would say that something good survives.

About ten years ago, when we were already quite aware that my grandma was slipping, we gathered at my aunt’s house during Christmas break.  My grandma commented that having seven grandchildren was a good showing for one lifetime.  When all but a small remnant of her had already fallen away, I’m glad I had the chance to hear from her lips again that she knew what was truly valuable.

Rest in peace, Grandma.  I love you too.