Wednesday, June 21, 2023

To Mom

Who would have thought, when years had passed, 
and you had left this world for good,
I'd find such comfort remembering
the way it felt to braid your hair.

To gather thick handfuls away from your nape,
smoothing down all the flyaways, 
then dividing the whole into three separate strands
to crisscross them into a simple plait.

All the while, Mom, your voice is purling
among the sounds of the dining room, 
and your hands are clasped on the table top
while family life flows around us two.

And even though I may not see your face
or really be thinking about you at all,
you are always the unsung focal point:
present, fully embodied, and - for the moment - at rest.

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

How My Children Play, 2022

(7 years) Our daughter loves to draw "photographs": mommas holding babies near stoves with cast iron skillets, huge smiling faces in sudsy bathtubs beside hooks of robes and towels, groups of beaming children vaulting into water parks. Their ages and relationships, hairstyles and fashion choices are chosen and announced with care. She devises hammocks and nests for her "pet" squirrel ornament, placing teacups of water tenderly beside him, then leaving him to rest while she dashes over to coax her live pet bird onto her wrist with his mirror and bell. 

(6 years) Our oldest son engrosses himself in origami folds, games of strategy and patterns, the infinite possibilities (negative numbers!) of a basic calculator he purchased at Goodwill.  He hunches over his allotted thirty minutes of Candy Crush, advancing through the levels with the volume blasting. When not gaming, he dons boxing gloves and dukes it out with his brother in the attic, or fires snowballs in the yard. 

(4 years) Our youngest stages battles between animal figures from his perch on the wooden built-ins that divide the living areas. The floorboards beneath are pock-marked with tiny dents from fallen good guys and bad guys. He zooms his styrofoam airplane ("Far-Flyer") across the room, or involves it in contests of speed and strength against numerous toy foes, or offers it a snack from the toy kitchen. He builds elaborate forts of pillows and blankets and furniture that never quite measure up to his lofty ambitions. 

(29 weeks) And all day and all night the child in my womb practices squirms and kicks, readying himself to enter these chaotic playscapes in his own right. 

Saturday, January 01, 2022

What I Have Learned About Hospitality

Folding others into a welcoming space of genuine love and fellowship is the true hospitality to which I aspire. This cannot be achieved by sacrificing the very qualities of peace and order and attention that make such an atmosphere possible.  This means limiting choices that in the past, wishing to avoid seemingly arbitrary restrictions and refusals, I would permit others to make in our home: small choices that did no harm in their own right other than the cumulative damage of trending us away from discipline and harmony, toward pandemonium and conflict.

This lesson is hard-won, after a year of unstinted hospitality that left us depleted and scarred, and likely did less good to those we welcomed in than we would have hoped. 

Entering a new year, I am first revoking the standing consent that held too many doors open to our guests, thereby allowing chaos and predation to slink in alongside fellowship and compassion. Then I will work to restore a nourishing home atmosphere within my family. After this is reasonably established, I look forward to again flinging open the front door and welcoming. 

But this time I will vigilantly guard the homeostasis of what Sarah Vap calls our "family animal." And that homeostasis is preserved by foundational habits ( rules) of mind and body which encourage us towards virtue and health.  Hopefully I will be able to safeguard these habits with flexibility, warmth, and tact, which will prevent us from lapsing into rigid legalism.

Year's End in Minneapolis

 It was late afternoon of New Year's Eve 2021. I was pouring scalding hot cocoa into thermoses so we could prolong our planned sledding excursion despite the single digit cold, nagging the children into their snow gear. Jonathan, phone held up to his ear, motioned me to him and said in a low voice, "There is somebody hurt in the alley, don't let the kids outside. I will warm the car up." 

We didn't go sledding after all. A fifteen year old boy was killed that afternoon in our alley, his death the third homicide on the block in 2021. 

Yellow caution tape and flashing police cars barred the passage in and out of our drive. A red vehicle with deployed airbags was battered against a garage on one end of the alley, a lifeless body and a handful of bystanders and cops at the other. As we unbundled from our minivan, a woman's keening wail hung in the air for a long minute or two. Jonathan and I shared a wince and herded our crestfallen children into the backyard. 

We attempted to salvage the outing by starting a little fire in our yard, chatting with our neighbor over her fence, soaking up the scent of campfire and sipping the mugs of cocoa we'd packed while tiny snowflakes drifted in the failing daylight. 

The lights continued flickering blue and red against the neighbors' houses in the gloaming and long past nightfall. Bursts of automatic gunfire vied with fireworks deep into the night as the city turned into a new year.

So we find ourselves taking stock, the faces of our children and the faces of our neighbors cycling through our minds against the backdrop of gunshots, squealing tires, and neon lights.

Sunday, December 26, 2021

Musings from Mount Moriah

You won't find this recorded in your birthday book your fourth year, though it was the biggest thing that happened to you. It was the week of Thanksgiving, ten days before your fifth birthday, that you finally said you were ready to tell us what was wrong. After a day of explosive rage. After you burst into tears in the hallway following yet another time out and wailed, "I feel sad!", first leaning into my bewildered embrace and then yanking away. After you kept demanding water, saying your tummy hurt, that you were so thirsty, punching whoever was within range of your little fist, unable to keep still. We were so proud that you found the courage to speak.

He was a daredevil nine-year-old who had been living with us for two and a half months. His nerf gun and football skills and cool kid mannerisms made your eyes shine. You couldn't wait for him to return home from school in the afternoon to play racecar games on his computer for you, or include you in a wild neighborhood game of catch, tag, or hide 'n seek. 

Your dad and I had begun to notice how your energy would increasingly surge into combativeness when he was around, how you veered between adoration and hostility in his presence. We supposed you were merely adopting his kinesics, imitating your turbulent hero. Hindsight is heartbreaking. 

The night we moved your abuser and his family out of our attic and into a hotel, you and your dad and little brother went upstairs to play good guys versus bad guys. You led the charge into their quarters, calling, "The most bad guys live in here!"

Aunt Emily tried some play therapy with you. She shared with us that in your pretend world your dad and I are superheroes who always know when something bad is happening. This was supposed to console us, and it did a little, but it also underscored my failure to realize that, in the small but numerous attention gaps that punctuated our home life, something very bad was happening to you. Even your superhero dad, who does 150 pushups five days a week, did not know you needed rescuing. 

Thanksgiving was the following day. Your Poppy and aunt with five of your cousins drove to our afflicted area of Minneapolis to visit. After dinner we decided on a trip to the nearest park.  It was bitter cold. Two underdressed kids, snickering unhappily, were stuffing a third child--mute and stiff--into a trashcan when we arrived. My niece told me she found vomit in the grass at the top of the hill. "I didn't touch it," she added. You fell hard from the top of the play equipment onto your back on the woodchips, sealing the end of a miserable outing. "Of course it had to be him, " your Dad shook his head, carrying you in his strong arms to the van.

But the fact is, my dear, you were better equipped to handle this than almost any child I could have picked at random in our neighborhood.  Better equipped than your abuser, who almost certainly was himself abused at a similarly tender age. Better equipped than the many other children within his circles, boys like him with absent or imprisoned fathers and working moms who barely manage to keep their children housed and fed. In a neighborhood of diseased family animals, ours was sleek and healthy, able to sustain this wound.

It was the beginning of Advent. For the first time I experienced how jarring and even offensive the lamppost wreathes and joymongering billboards could feel to a heart still venom-shocked by an evil thing. 

We marked your birthday with family members who understood that you were struggling with incoherent rage, who looked you kindly in the eye and played card games with you and made you feel seen and loved. You began to fall asleep every night wearing headphones, your birthday Walkman filling your mind with Jesus songs. 

We hung Christmas lights, set up the Jesse Tree with its felt ornaments. On the fourth day of Advent I found myself holding up the ram ornament and retelling to you and your siblings the story of Abraham's call to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah. My memory flashed back to the moment in Aldi several months before when I was bagging my groceries and asking God if I should invite this homeless family into my home. A shout rang out behind me, raising the hair on my forearms : "DO NOT neglect to show hospitality to the strangers!" I thought it was the voice of God directly answering my question, His mouthpiece a preaching weekday shopper with dreads and sunglasses. 

As I cast my mind back on that moment, my heart twisted with Abraham's bewilderment, for had not following that Voice meant laying our beloved firstborn son on the altar of our obedience? And yet in my bafflement I kept holding onto the soft symbol, telling the rest of the supernatural story. And there was your childish face, sticky with jam, sleep in your eyes, listening to how God so loved the world.

I have been reciting Psalm 103 constantly in my heart since you told us about it. At first, sick with doubt and anger, muttering the words inwardly as one desperate for warmth would rub two dry sticks together. And here is the miracle, my love: those dead words have sparked to life. They have kindled this burden of sorrow on the altar of my heart.  The fire is overwhelming the darkness of doubt and bathing in warmth the bone-ache of anguish. It sends praise incense wafting heavenward.

He heals all your diseases. Your rages are less frequent, happy moments are multiplying. You are reclaiming calm. When your helper inquires during a therapy session if you ever feel angry or sad, you say, beaming and flapping your hands in the air, "Right now I feel really happy." Oh, He renews my youth like the eagle's. 

Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannnot heal. 

Merry Christmas, my firstborn son, the son that I love. 

Happy New Year.

Monday, May 10, 2021

Yesterday was Mother's Day. It hasn't yet been two weeks since the evening that I did not know I was both pregnant and bleeding internally, hours away from an emergency surgery and the end of that inner flicker of life. Before the revelation and the crisis, Jonathan brought our kids to my bedside to wish me goodnight. They sang me original lullabies embellished with elements from the latest chapter of "Prince Caspian," then rode to bed on their dad's shoulders. 

In all the pain and confusion and the little death that followed, the memory of that rambunctious parting kept filling my mind, a heartening memento vivere.

Saturday, May 08, 2021

"But not you, to whom I need to talk"

In three weeks it will be the sixth anniversary of my firstborn's birth, the anniversary of the time my mom dropped everything and entrusted her life to a dicey vehicle the nine hour drive to Minneapolis. She, mother of eight, knew a woman craves her mother over those first exalted and miserable days; that I would need to be mothered a little too. She swaddled Florence, set her under a sunny window to cure a touch of jaundice, smiled and crooned to her staring little face, cleaned my fridge, baked rhubarb pie, hosted well-wishers on my behalf, reminisced comfortably, and chuckled over how much she'd forgotten of her own early parenting days.
This year it grieves me that the potted African violet on my coffee table is still abloom six years later as it was the week of that visit, but my mom has been transplanted beyond reach of all my senses, except memory.

I want you back, I want you here,
even though April’s loss brings on the flowers,
trees forming new buds along each branch.
But there’s no turning back for us,
whose calyx, pistil, ovary blooms in flesh.
And each tree has a different seed: wings, pods, cones.
It’s an old story, . . .replacement, a way back
as a grandchild wears your eyes, your chin, your mouth.
But it’s not you, to whom I need to talk.
I want to call you on the telephone.
A woman is her mother, but alone.
(Barbara Crooker)

Thursday, December 31, 2020

Decade

As another year draws to a close, I sing this textured garment of life rubbing rubbing rubbing against our tender human skin. 

Ten years ago I was preparing to move back to my Michigan hometown from my college town in Tennessee. When I think of that time, my memory unravels a variegated yarn spun of daily moments compressed into vivid composites. My car's engine ticking behind me in the hospital parking ramp's oblique shadows. Scarfing down the day's unsold cafeteria fare on the winding drive up the mountain after work. Inhaling the tar scent of Incline Railway timbers on morning jogs beneath them. Mockingbird song from the Craven House's antebellum wooden porch. That one tight sun-struck curve on I-95. The breathtaking freefall into sky and city alongside Scenic Highway. Coffee steamer and barista banter blurring into white noise around my table while I scribble in my journal at Barnes & Noble. 

All of these memories and a thousand like them have a certain texture: solitary, inward, uninterrupted. They are notably devoid of technology, and contemporary me is staggered by its absence, and the consequent absence of politics and pop culture in my life at this time.  I had a company flip phone and a landline, and blogged and emailed on a big stuttering desktop. My unfolding romance livened these outdated channels with the thrill of waiting for a new email to load, of mustering guts to return the missed call blinking on the caller ID.  I kept in an oft-visited compartment in my mind the thought of my early December plane ticket to visit this guy from college I was getting to know. A decade later, a handful of songs from mixes he gave me then still usher me back to that mental chamber of possibilities that haloed my 2010 retreat with a gracious shimmer of newness and nerves. 

I packed my '87 Chevrolet Cavalier, settled my dog in the passenger seat, and drove. 

I had barely unpacked my bags in my childhood home before I was watching Jonathan's Toyota pull into sight through the snow-flecked gloom of MSP airport twilight. He squinted out a foggy windshield that his arm periodically wiped clear as he scanned the curb for the spot where I waited, shivering with cold and excitement. 

The ensuing week I toured rural and urban Minnesota on his arm. On the drive across stubbled fields to the Twineball Museum I giggled over Weird Al's "Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota." We chatted, building Legos, while Nirvana played beneath the alligator wallpaper of his childhood room. I eavesdropped from the church pews while he and the Christmas choir rehearsed their carols, attuning my ear to his voice's steady strain. My city memories are slightly different, less auditory, full of vapor and shine. Watching sunlight wink off the saliva escaping from the cloud of Jonathan's breath while he performatively hocked phlegm at the Mississippi River. Fog filling my glasses as we entered the Minneapolis Art Institute, where we shyly wandered through aisles of art before descending the vast front steps an hour later into winter's enormous sparkle and dark. Jonathan's chandelier-lit company Christmas party that weekend, when the season conspired to deliver a storm that shrank attendance and made for a memorable drive downtown. I can still see the lumberjack of a man who sauntered across our headlight beams in the middle of the street, his shovel spanning his shoulders under fluffy twirls of snow as we crawled along at the speed of his boots. 

Into this setting, a flurry of firsts filled in blanks of experience I hadn't known existed. First interactions with future in-laws and friends, first telling of now familiar anecdotes, first assembling and dining on the famous family enchiladas, first group listen to Peter Gabriel through the fine living room speakers. First Broadway Pizza chair across from Jonathan, first time he debuted a surprise mustache, first twining our fingers, first worship at his side, first sips of coffee together in the white morning glare that follows a night of snows. 

Though I didn't predict that these moments, their texture at this time exquisitely new to me, would eventually become the homespun of my life, I enjoyed wrapping myself in them during my unexpected overnight at the airport that weekend, and over the blizzard-prolonged return journey, the weeks of finding my footing back in Michigan. And they did indeed become my happy quotidian: three Decembers later on a glittery winter morning Jonathan and I were married. Seven Decembers and three children later, we still live in the same large Minneapolis home that welcomed us from our honeymoon. 

Now it is 2020, and I can't relate my love story without thinking of my dad, abruptly widowed after 33 years of marriage. I find myself imagining what it would mean, after being folded year by year into intimate habitude with another, to adjust to the texture of solitude again. The hair cloth rasp of it, symbolized by sackcloth in other times. The gauntlet of significant firsts that he is always facing do not merely fill a blank of life experience, they necessarily pose a stark negative to positives that precede them. 

The loss of my mom changes the texture of my days, too, coarsening and dulling areas that once held great comfort and color. I feel I am wearing cherished memories thin by compulsively reaching for them, swathing myself and my children in them over and over.  How she loved lighting candles, bargain hunting, and the look of snow spuming off the top of the rushing trains at night. Her alto voice strong with praise beside us in the pew. How her head would tilt back when she wheezed with laughter. The way her knuckles creased around the curve of her coffee mug. How her thick graying hair ran through my braiding teenage fingers. 

As another year draws to a close, I sing this earth that wears out like a garment, and all our experiences raveled within it.  

I sing this textured garment of life rubbing rubbing rubbing against our tender human skin. 

To Mom

Who would have thought, when years had passed,  and you had left this world for good, I'd find such comfort remembering the way it felt ...