I rub her back in clockwise circles, my hand's length nearly her back's width. Her head is pressed against her pillow, one eye open.
I wonder what she's seeing, and what words accompany the images, if any. I try to remember being that small. She's got the ten-mile gaze which might mean she's mostly asleep but her brain just hasn't remembered yet to pull the shutters of her eyelids. Or, maybe she's replaying the morning, remembering things said. Does she yet fantasize about things she wishes she would have said?
She blinks and her eye refocuses on the rise of the pillow created by the impression of her head against it. The white pillow case must rise like a hill, creating an horizon line from her vantage, the shadows telegraphing its roundness, which she may someday be able to see with a visual artist's eye, in that compressed two-dimensional recognition that it is only color and gradations in color that tell us the shape of the things we see. Touch confirms it, but seeing isn't touch -- a concept that only came home to me when I began to take art classes in college. Seeing is interpretation. Art is translation.
She blinks again and her eye drifts to the bangs from her forehead, falling to the side of her nose. I remember that cozy private den -- the dimensions of space framed by my nose, cheek and hair, and the rise of a pillow. Even recently, lying on my stomach on a sun-warmed towel after swimming in cold mountain waters, I was noticing it -- though it was my arm serving as a pillow. The light's play on that small essential sanctuary of time and space, the curve of the bridge of my nose, the remarkably vast and minute distance between the surface of my eye and the surface of my pillow (or arm), the red shadows cast by the fine strands of hair that rest across the distance -- it's holy.
She blinks again and refocuses on me, discovers I'm watching, and, too late, I close my eyes.
She rolls over under my hand, and when I reopen my eyes, both hers twinkle at me.
I wish I were the mama whose eyes twinkled back at her in conspiracy -- "Let's spend this afternoon together letting life break open before us and amaze us." Instead, I sigh and redouble my efforts to encourage her to close her eyes to dream.
7/23/09
4/15/09
Coming through -- I seem to be
We used to have a block print poster above the desk in the office, before the office became our daughters' bedroom, of a monkey holding a firecracker, his mouth wide open as though he were about to toss it down his throat to his stomach, in which roared a fire. In the left bottom corner were the words: "to be okay"; and in the bottom right corner: "everything's going."
"To be okay -- everything's going."
Intentionally ambiguous. Was everything going to be okay? Or, to make everything okay, did everything have to go?
It's been over two weeks of not even one complete REM cycle due to one or the other of my daughters' chest-cold-aggravated night-time asthma, two weeks of long extra hours for Skip at work, two weeks of both girls testing the power of whining and screaming, last week's spring break for Kay's preschool, this past week my mother's out-of-town vacation, a week of new computer-on-the-blink frustrations, yesterday's throwing out my back, and -- tonight -- an overdue date night thwarted by Kay's onset of the stomach flu...
Sigh.
I'm tired. And, I'm surviving. Tonight, that sort of leaves me in awe.
I'm not super-human. I've been crankier than usual the last few days. I've yelled at my kids to the point of needing to reassure them that I was out of line and that I know they're just being kids and that I love them just as they are. My meals have been big and sloppy, spilling over into terrain I've been able to avoid for nearly 9 months. I feel a little depressed and prone to isolation.
I'm not proud of any of this -- but I'm not mistaking it, either, as anything other than ordinary human frailty, and in that process forgiving myself enough to be able to stay within my own skin. To be here. To ride it. To let myself feel and enjoy the moments of hilarity, pleasure, and comfort, even amid discomfort and unease. To keep large meals from becoming coma-inducing binges or an excuse to eat foods I know will trigger such a binge. To remember to be kind to myself.
That's a new thing in my history as a mother. And it's amazing. I love it.
Coming through -- I seem to be.
"To be okay -- everything's going."
Intentionally ambiguous. Was everything going to be okay? Or, to make everything okay, did everything have to go?
It's been over two weeks of not even one complete REM cycle due to one or the other of my daughters' chest-cold-aggravated night-time asthma, two weeks of long extra hours for Skip at work, two weeks of both girls testing the power of whining and screaming, last week's spring break for Kay's preschool, this past week my mother's out-of-town vacation, a week of new computer-on-the-blink frustrations, yesterday's throwing out my back, and -- tonight -- an overdue date night thwarted by Kay's onset of the stomach flu...
Sigh.
I'm tired. And, I'm surviving. Tonight, that sort of leaves me in awe.
I'm not super-human. I've been crankier than usual the last few days. I've yelled at my kids to the point of needing to reassure them that I was out of line and that I know they're just being kids and that I love them just as they are. My meals have been big and sloppy, spilling over into terrain I've been able to avoid for nearly 9 months. I feel a little depressed and prone to isolation.
I'm not proud of any of this -- but I'm not mistaking it, either, as anything other than ordinary human frailty, and in that process forgiving myself enough to be able to stay within my own skin. To be here. To ride it. To let myself feel and enjoy the moments of hilarity, pleasure, and comfort, even amid discomfort and unease. To keep large meals from becoming coma-inducing binges or an excuse to eat foods I know will trigger such a binge. To remember to be kind to myself.
That's a new thing in my history as a mother. And it's amazing. I love it.
Coming through -- I seem to be.
3/31/09
Wind
On Sunday evening, I was in Mendocino. It'd been windy all day -- rattling windows, peeling back shingles kind of wind.
I had dinner at a restaurant called "The Ravens" and was nearly alone in the dining room, with a wide view of the bluff above the outlet of the Mendocino River flowing to sea. Scraggly, wind-whipped pines rocked and swayed at the brink of the bluff, backlit by a slow sunset.
As I watched, several large black birds (ravens, undoubtedly) swung by, dipping and veering in the wind. Occasionally they'd attempt to alight on one of the pine boughs, and just as quickly be swept off, their wings flapping rapidly to regain equilibrium.
Perhaps the metaphor is a stretch, but it is lingering. Motherhood is like that wind in my life. It is a force completely larger than me, has a direction and a power that I cannot reign in or control. Truly my choices are limited to these: ride or resist. Neither is going to help me gain control of the pressures at work on me. That isn't an option.
I am a mother, at the whim of the unbearable depth and power of love and responsibility that was my daughters' afterbirth -- and all of the ways it buffets my ego and calls me out of the comfort of my own little cozy conception of who I am and what I'm supposed to be doing. It's beautiful -- exquisitely so. Often pleasurable with a joy that is worth life itself. And yet -- it is a kind of violence sometimes, too.
I can resist that, and flap my wings, expending that energy fruitlessly, fearfully, and exhaustingly. Or I can open them up, glide, and let it take me where it is going. Which is not without its own fearsomeness -- but is, at its most practical, a much more efficient response, and which allows for an exhilaration that isn't possible otherwise.
May I ride the wind like a raven, reminded when I resist with a gentle push from which I can recover with a rapid flapping and another surrender. Over and over again.
I had dinner at a restaurant called "The Ravens" and was nearly alone in the dining room, with a wide view of the bluff above the outlet of the Mendocino River flowing to sea. Scraggly, wind-whipped pines rocked and swayed at the brink of the bluff, backlit by a slow sunset.
As I watched, several large black birds (ravens, undoubtedly) swung by, dipping and veering in the wind. Occasionally they'd attempt to alight on one of the pine boughs, and just as quickly be swept off, their wings flapping rapidly to regain equilibrium.
Perhaps the metaphor is a stretch, but it is lingering. Motherhood is like that wind in my life. It is a force completely larger than me, has a direction and a power that I cannot reign in or control. Truly my choices are limited to these: ride or resist. Neither is going to help me gain control of the pressures at work on me. That isn't an option.
I am a mother, at the whim of the unbearable depth and power of love and responsibility that was my daughters' afterbirth -- and all of the ways it buffets my ego and calls me out of the comfort of my own little cozy conception of who I am and what I'm supposed to be doing. It's beautiful -- exquisitely so. Often pleasurable with a joy that is worth life itself. And yet -- it is a kind of violence sometimes, too.
I can resist that, and flap my wings, expending that energy fruitlessly, fearfully, and exhaustingly. Or I can open them up, glide, and let it take me where it is going. Which is not without its own fearsomeness -- but is, at its most practical, a much more efficient response, and which allows for an exhilaration that isn't possible otherwise.
May I ride the wind like a raven, reminded when I resist with a gentle push from which I can recover with a rapid flapping and another surrender. Over and over again.
2/11/09
In God's Hands
2009, man. It's already been as full as a year for me in many ways.
Yet I'm so glad it's only February. It feels like a year that bodes lots of trouble , but -- and this is the source of my gladness -- also lots of roots-deepening and rich, rich joy.
As disclosed previously, I am on a 12 Step journey. Recently, I "completed" Step 3 (since it's pretty much a daily, sometimes hourly commitment, it's pretty much impossible to "complete" but I have finished the work suggested by my sponsor through Step 3 -- next up: Step 4, which is a topic fit for another post).
Step 3 is one of the deal-breakers for a lot of people who walk into 12 Step program rooms and then leave them just as quickly. And mostly for this nasty little three letter word: "God."
The Step itself is: "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God."
It's easy, and common, for people to think that "God" means the same thing, in rough enough terms, for everyone who uses it. Usually something along the lines of an omnipotent, omniscient, more or less loving, more or less wrathful, deity who is responsible for the creation of the universe, and who metes out karma with a figurative or literal long pointed finger, more or less justly. I know there are plenty of people in 12 Step programs for whom this God works.
It doesn't for me. I can't understand God that way. But I don't understand God, either -- so then, there's that.
Here's what I have come to understand: I do not have, and cannot obtain, conscious access to the power or strength of character within myself to reliably make the right choices for myself. Certainly where food is concerned, but in a lot of areas of my life. I wish it were otherwise. I do. But take Facebook, as a trivial example. I will futz around on Facebook for hours while any number of things far more important to me are not getting done. I'd like to get those things done. I know that they need to be done. Often I even recognize how easy and more pleasurable they'll be to do compared to working myself up into an anxious tizzy about all the time passing while I "FB," but somehow, whatever mechanism it is that allows other people to choose their actions and implement them without delay is not functional in my life. I've got forty years of experimentation on this in various arenas, and feel quite sound about this claim. I'm not without self-esteem, or the ability to recognize that I have many lovely traits. But the ability to self-regulate obsessive-compulsive behavior is not one of them.
So -- all would be hopeless. I would be certain to die of morbid obesity or some other result of this character flaw except for the very strange fact that it works for me to allow myself to believe that a power greater than me, outside of my mind (or, at the very least, outside any part of my mind that I will ever be able to control), will not only help me to self-regulate if I ask, but wants to. Wants my freedom from obsessions of all forms which divert my attention from the business of living.
I don't ask myself what that something is, really. It kind of makes me nervous to ask -- like peering over a cliff-face down to the bottom of a very, very deep chasm. But I call it God.
And for the last several days, I've been putting my life in God's hands. I have a ritual for it. I gathered a bunch of symbols and photos of the things in my life that mean the most to me and put them in a little sack, and then every morning, and sometimes throughout the day, I pick up that sack and set it in a set of porcelain hands someone gave me a long time ago.
The thing about those hands -- they're so feminine, so graceful and open -- if I am developing my own new understanding about God, I like the image those hands convey.
Yet I'm so glad it's only February. It feels like a year that bodes lots of trouble , but -- and this is the source of my gladness -- also lots of roots-deepening and rich, rich joy.
As disclosed previously, I am on a 12 Step journey. Recently, I "completed" Step 3 (since it's pretty much a daily, sometimes hourly commitment, it's pretty much impossible to "complete" but I have finished the work suggested by my sponsor through Step 3 -- next up: Step 4, which is a topic fit for another post).
Step 3 is one of the deal-breakers for a lot of people who walk into 12 Step program rooms and then leave them just as quickly. And mostly for this nasty little three letter word: "God."
The Step itself is: "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God."
It's easy, and common, for people to think that "God" means the same thing, in rough enough terms, for everyone who uses it. Usually something along the lines of an omnipotent, omniscient, more or less loving, more or less wrathful, deity who is responsible for the creation of the universe, and who metes out karma with a figurative or literal long pointed finger, more or less justly. I know there are plenty of people in 12 Step programs for whom this God works.
It doesn't for me. I can't understand God that way. But I don't understand God, either -- so then, there's that.
Here's what I have come to understand: I do not have, and cannot obtain, conscious access to the power or strength of character within myself to reliably make the right choices for myself. Certainly where food is concerned, but in a lot of areas of my life. I wish it were otherwise. I do. But take Facebook, as a trivial example. I will futz around on Facebook for hours while any number of things far more important to me are not getting done. I'd like to get those things done. I know that they need to be done. Often I even recognize how easy and more pleasurable they'll be to do compared to working myself up into an anxious tizzy about all the time passing while I "FB," but somehow, whatever mechanism it is that allows other people to choose their actions and implement them without delay is not functional in my life. I've got forty years of experimentation on this in various arenas, and feel quite sound about this claim. I'm not without self-esteem, or the ability to recognize that I have many lovely traits. But the ability to self-regulate obsessive-compulsive behavior is not one of them.
So -- all would be hopeless. I would be certain to die of morbid obesity or some other result of this character flaw except for the very strange fact that it works for me to allow myself to believe that a power greater than me, outside of my mind (or, at the very least, outside any part of my mind that I will ever be able to control), will not only help me to self-regulate if I ask, but wants to. Wants my freedom from obsessions of all forms which divert my attention from the business of living.
I don't ask myself what that something is, really. It kind of makes me nervous to ask -- like peering over a cliff-face down to the bottom of a very, very deep chasm. But I call it God.
And for the last several days, I've been putting my life in God's hands. I have a ritual for it. I gathered a bunch of symbols and photos of the things in my life that mean the most to me and put them in a little sack, and then every morning, and sometimes throughout the day, I pick up that sack and set it in a set of porcelain hands someone gave me a long time ago.
The thing about those hands -- they're so feminine, so graceful and open -- if I am developing my own new understanding about God, I like the image those hands convey.
1/8/09
One of these kinds of days
After slamming the door to their room, after slamming the cabinet doors as I put the dishes in the dishwasher away, after making as much noise as I possibly could to express how completely over my head FED UP I am of today's particularly protracted naptime battle, I found myself screaming at the top of my lungs:
"All that I want is for you to NAP at NAPTIME! All that I need is for you to SLEEP when YOU are EXHAUSTED! IT IS NOT TOO MUCH TO ASK!"
But, of course, it is. I don't know why and it's hard for me to understand how human beings lasted this long when we are so completely aggravating to our parents as children. But today, apparently, it IS absolutely too much to ask.
Unfortunately it is also too much to ask of me, apparently, to suck it up and accept that. Honestly, I'm about ready to slam my head through the sliding glass doors listening to them fight off sleep. Sanity, of course, would be to somehow come to terms with the fact that if at a quarter to three if they aren't asleep then I don't want them to fall asleep, either. But it's just one of those days when I am done with their company. I need a break -- and the only way I can get one is if they stay in there for just a couple of hours and be QUIET.
Thank God these days don't come around often. Because, wow, they are humiliating, exhausting and demoralizing beyond belief when they do.
For right now, the miracle is that I finished my lunch and I'll make it to dinner without any additional food. That's not a small something. But it doesn't make it all that much easier to look myself in the mirror and face how completely outmatched I feel right now, and how sad that is. And how hateful it is to pit myself against my children. Feeling pretty flippin' low about that right about now. And wishing very much that I knew where to draw the resources to be the mother I'm sure everyone else is -- patient and kind, or in charge and controlled. I'm none of that today.
Today I'm at my wit's end, holding the bedroom door shut and insisting that I don't care what they do just so long as they stay in there until I've had a chance to catch my breath.
"All that I want is for you to NAP at NAPTIME! All that I need is for you to SLEEP when YOU are EXHAUSTED! IT IS NOT TOO MUCH TO ASK!"
But, of course, it is. I don't know why and it's hard for me to understand how human beings lasted this long when we are so completely aggravating to our parents as children. But today, apparently, it IS absolutely too much to ask.
Unfortunately it is also too much to ask of me, apparently, to suck it up and accept that. Honestly, I'm about ready to slam my head through the sliding glass doors listening to them fight off sleep. Sanity, of course, would be to somehow come to terms with the fact that if at a quarter to three if they aren't asleep then I don't want them to fall asleep, either. But it's just one of those days when I am done with their company. I need a break -- and the only way I can get one is if they stay in there for just a couple of hours and be QUIET.
Thank God these days don't come around often. Because, wow, they are humiliating, exhausting and demoralizing beyond belief when they do.
For right now, the miracle is that I finished my lunch and I'll make it to dinner without any additional food. That's not a small something. But it doesn't make it all that much easier to look myself in the mirror and face how completely outmatched I feel right now, and how sad that is. And how hateful it is to pit myself against my children. Feeling pretty flippin' low about that right about now. And wishing very much that I knew where to draw the resources to be the mother I'm sure everyone else is -- patient and kind, or in charge and controlled. I'm none of that today.
Today I'm at my wit's end, holding the bedroom door shut and insisting that I don't care what they do just so long as they stay in there until I've had a chance to catch my breath.
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