Snapshot #6

Jonathan: "What will you do when you grow up, Florence?"
Florence: "Drink beer and wine...and push buttons on my computer!"

Snapshot #4

Out of the mouth of Bubs:

"Don't you wanna pway jumping scutes upstairs with me?" (An invented name for an invented game involving plastic rings hurled skillfully at the far wall.)

"MOM! Can I hold your hand!" (in a panic whenever we are out walking)

"Here's your pwesent." (singsong voice, proffering a toy wrapped in a towel or blanket or paper)

"My shadow looks like a gwown-up!"

"Let's do our singing books, Fwowence." (each night as they begin the ritual of "singing" through the huge pile of children's books on their bedside table)

"Yeah! We're on the path of LIFE!" (shouted from his bed as I descend the staircase after commending the children for their obedience before tucking them in)

"Cheese-a-most-a-veetos!" (chanted loudly, often, and for no apparent reason)

Snapshot #3

Florence is late in her fourth year of life, my long-legged worrier, my firstborn. Her cheeks react to any exposure to sunshine, even insipid winter light, with a burst of freckles. She and her best pretend friend, Loya, have long conversations while she uses the bathroom these days, and Loya often sleeps in the bathtub, so Florence considerately scrubs the walls during her evening bath to make it nice. Her favorite toy is Baby Babette, who is often sickly, or feeling shy. When it comes to art, Florence prefers to narrate a story while she scribbles densely with various colors. If she does attempt to draw people they emerge as colorful humped ghosts with cicada eyes and, occasionally, hands.  She often murmurs, "I wish I was you, Mom" or "Mom, I wish I was baby Reid" when she sees something enviable in our behavior (checking email, doing dishes...getting a diaper changed). She is drawn to shy, reserved personalities. I think her idea of paradise is a sing-along with her favorite people, or perhaps it's the moments she and her dad sit together at the piano and play "their song" together.

Snapshots #2

After almost two full weeks away from us, Willa and Ruthie were greeted this morning by the snowmen in our front yard holding a crude cardboard Welcome Back sign taped to the handle of our red shovel. No time for breakfast until after everyone had been introduced to the Christmas toys and had an icebreaking quarrel or two over them. A new game was invented involving the three new inflated rubber cows and a colorful half-dozen of children's bowling pins. Three children would straddle their cows and, giggling and shrieking, bounce across the attic floor as fast as possible, racing toward the row of pins set up by the odd kid out. First to crash through the pins won, and surrendered his steed to the pin-setter for the next round. Later on, this wild but organized pastime devolved to the barbaric practice of catapulting the cows over the attic railing and down the steep attic stairs. By the end of the day, however, the cows were dressed adorably in infant hats and fancy scarves, a teacup beneath each snout, and consigned to comfortably watch one of the innumerable shows the older girls like to put on for whatever audience they can muster.

The day was so warm for January that we were able to spend two long stints of it outside, stockpiling and pitching snowballs, constructing snow forts, and trudging around the block and back and forth from front to back yard under the supervision of calling crows and unseasonably frisky squirrels.

Cobbling the pizzas together for our traditional Friday movie night while the older children whined and quibbled underfoot, I did not notice my youngest strewing leftover popcorn across the floors until it was too late.  Having already mopped up two large milk spills from the same party over the course of the day, I knew it was no use crying over this either.

Snapshots #1

There are two snowmen in the yard. Their eyes, blueberries squirted into finger-pokes, have stained the surrounding area a disquieting magenta. Fragments of pine needles and streaks of dirt blight the lumpy contours of their snowy dermis.

If you could have witnessed their creation, the sparkly-eyed concentration invested on them by two earnest children, you might feel the same tenderness I feel as I peek through my window curtains at their grotesque forms.

32

"May our God 
make you worthy of his calling
and fulfill every resolve for good 
and every work of faith by his power,
so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you,
and you in him,
according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ."

2 Thessalonians 1:11-12

Reconciliation

My two year old son confessed to his father at the first opportunity.

"Dad! I almost killed Reid today!" he shouted by way of greeting, my harsh rebuke from hours earlier turned into the day's big headline as he leaped toward my husband's approaching figure.

I recalled hearing my baby's harsh wails from the bathroom just after lunch, racing outside in a panic at their unfamiliar tone, seeing him flailing on the pavement a foot and a half beneath the ledge of the cement stair. I registered Abbott's fleeing form from my periphery as I scooped his brother up. "Did you push him? On purpose?" I demanded, and he answered boldly, "Yeah! I did!"

Fear and fury propelled me across the yard, and I seized Abbott's arm and yanked him back into the house. He began to scream and pull away, and our passionate tangle somehow landed us in the kitchen. "No more backyard time till after nap," I snarled, dropping the offender roughly on the kitchen floor and turning my back on him.  "Oh you sweet boy. You okay, buddy?" I crooned softly into the baby's ear.

He was limp and pale now, a goose egg beginning to form on his scraped forehead, a thin paste of blood and gravel under his nose. I checked his eyes for signs of dilation, eased his head into the crook of my arm, and backslid into breastfeeding after a week's effort to wean him.  As he suckled, his eyes fixed on mine. Their clarity and stillness communicated themselves to me. "You're okay, aren't you?" I breathed, reassured. "You're just fine."

In the kitchen, Abbott continued to weep inconsolably. I let my head fall back against the couch cushion and inhaled deeply, willing myself to calm, beginning to feel the familiar pang of regret at how I'd allowed my fury to overcome me.

"Bubs, honey, can you come here?" I called. It took a few efforts, but he slowly dragged over to my side, his siren sobs growing deafening at he approached. I took his hand in mine.

"Shhh, hey, shhhh. It's all right, Bubs. Shhh, I know. You know what? He is going to be okay. He is. Even though you could have killed him, doing that. You must NEVER ever push him that way again. Do you understand? You almost killed him!" My words twisted into rebuke, then accusation, as the memory washed over me again, the knowledge of how easily this could have been a tragedy. I cut myself off, studying the stubborn face, then squeezed the little hand and kissed it. It occurred to me that Reid's wellbeing was not uppermost in Abbott's self-absorbed toddler heart anyway. "You feel bad, don't you, son?"

"I want to go in the backyard," was the only response he could muster, his voice shaking. I understood it to mean, I want this not to have happened.

"I know. After nap, you may again." I cupped his cheek in my palm and smiled. "I promise."

The violence I'd done him hung in the air as palpably as the violence he'd done Reid. I found I needed to go further. "I am so sorry I was rough with you, and mean. It is wrong when mama is rough and mean, just like it is wrong when you are. I'm sorry, Bubs."

He sniffed. "Oh." But he snuggled nearer into the curve of my other arm, and the stubbornness began to seep out of his expression.

I always expected that I'd be ready to forgive my children seventy times seven times. What I didn't foresee was that I would need their mercy so often, too. When I overreach in insisting upon my own way. When I am impatient, unkind, irritable, and resentful. When it seems as though my love does have conditions, obscure to myself as well as to them. My children lack the perspective to view a conflict through my eyes, but I am able to view it through theirs if I try. The effort reveals that my mothering is too often hypocritical, unpredictable, and harsh. So I find myself asking their forgiveness, again and again and again.

And now again.

It is too late to return to the backyard and do it better. Instead, as the outraged adrenaline of conflict ebbs away, I fold them close to me. Our sobered silence dissipates gently into the relief of smiles and then the silliness that in its lack of inhibition is the surest sign to me of our covenant being fully restored.

I hope this unspoken affirmation of covenantal wholeness permeates them in this moment, that it reinforces all such moments from our past, lays the groundwork for all such moments in the future. I hope that they absorb the worthiness of forgiveness, every time, whether they have wronged or been wronged or (in most cases) a little of both.

Wherever this is sought of you in your future life, I pray you give it generously.

Wherever you seek this in your future life, I pray you find it generously given.

Homemaker

Naptime has cast its spell over this Minneapolis home. Firm September breezes comb through the curtains. Between their strokes, sunlight stripes the furniture and the pendulum flickers lightly in its glass case. A goldfinch perches on the feeder through the kitchen window, then flashes its white tailfeathers as it lifts up and away. The crickets are insistent in the weedy side yard at my back.

I have coffee, warm in its stainless steel container though it was brewed shortly after dawn with the children's eggs and toast. It sits on a highchair in the debris of the baby's lunch: stiffening noodles, a puddle of milk flecked by zucchini bread crumbles and cubes of cantaloupe. On the floor the recycling bin has been emptied and disassembled, and a rolling pin crusted with mottled blue and pink playdough leans against a similarly crusted chair leg. A pair of snap-up blue jeans, size 12 month, tangles with the power cord of my laptop nearby, and a lone toddler sandal waits on the coffee table. A thicket of stencils and pencils has overgrown the dining table. Blades of grass and garden scraps leave a trail from the back entry to the counter, where my daughter left a pail of under-ripe cherry tomatoes she'd plucked after breakfast.

Today I attend to this all, but not in the usual way of sweeping and wiping, folding and gathering and re-ordering.

It is autumn. The yellow buses again haul their cargo down our street as the naptime hour nears its end. I am in my fourth year of motherhood. I need reminding that paying attention is a way of desiring, a form of prayer. So I wait on the truth of my life here, where my children are absent yet present, and what I have made in this home has found its fulfillment in being unmade. My love for them remembers itself, flickers over every mess with tenderness.

The baby has begun to fuss. Now I am ready to stand, gather him in my rested arms, and begin again.

Embryo

You are trained to look ahead:
Picture bright eyes blinking morning light,
The body soft and warm against your own.

When was the last time you thought of your self
Before you were a ‘he’ or ‘she’
Before your body looked like what you see when you think “Human”,
When you lived cocooned within your mother?

They are everywhere in summertime:
Otherworldly larval things, tadpoles, caterpillars.
You, too, were once as foreign to yourself as they will be.

Now it lives inside of you: a sexless grub-like embryo
that twitches and pulses.
Its body is not like what you see when you think “Human”
But your body, too, once twitched and pulsed,
A sexless, grub-like embryo

Cocooned within your mother as it is cocooned within you.

The Smiling Host

Their feet are freshly scrubbed, and now

Their bellies will be filled--we know how

they feel, those quarrelsome disciples

gathered around the meal.

But what must it have signified to You,

Their humble host, on brink of sacrifice?

A foretaste of what You would win

Your view within the room that night.

To hold each foot, fouled and rough,

And make the reeking flesh come clean.

To watch them chew the broken loaf,

Their bushy beards amassing crumbs,

And cheer their spirits with the wine

That stained their wagging tongues.

The Love that animated Your travail

Must have rejoiced to see them eat their fill.

Now, having as well been purified,

I join my fractious family at Your board.

In remembrance of You we sip, divide

The loaf. Oh let me not be inattentive, Lord,

Nor abstract this full-bodied rite to empty rote.

I begin to see there is no better place

Than here, where by Your favor I am brought.
Here my clean soul can feast upon your grace.
Here I can feel my Savior's smiling face.

Oma

The houseplant you sent home with me,
And called "easy" to keep alive,
Did not stay green.

It needed your plainspoken blend
Of active love and common sense.
Wisdom, I mean.

That was your way. You had the knack
Of calmly keeping things alive,
Mostly unseen

By those who flourished under it
Amidst your cakes and coffee mugs
And china clean.

We now see that, though it may be
A simple kind of daily grace,
It's not "easy."

Cast Iron

Love alloyed your heart to mine,
and since we yearned to stay that way
were poured in that prosaic mold
to have and hold.

Now that ten years have filled and emptied, 

heated, cooled us, 

menaced us with dust and rust,

still we will see the sheen awake

in seasoned iron by the flame 

of daily use,

and that cleaving elemental bond,

no longer new,

still keeps us true in rest and trust. 

From whatever comes our way,
as the days we dwell unfold,

let us make new feasts always,

and have and hold. 

Birth Story

The day before you were born, your dad and I went out to Mother Earth Garden Center and purchased potted plants: Peace Lily, African Violet, Coleus. We didn't know that you'd be born the very next morning, but we knew it would be soon: you were six days past your due date.  I'd been having painless contractions for months, but I did notice that day that they were seizing me more often, lasting longer.  Jonathan, aware of this, teased me about going into labor, and I smilingly brushed the idea off.  "I can still talk through them, " I'd explain.  "Besides, I don't think I've really dropped--do you?  And I haven't lost my plug yet. I definitely haven't had my water break. At this rate, it'll probably be another week!"

Even so, my eyes must have mirrored the sparkle in his as we drove home.

Hours later, Jonathan greeted the news of my first unmistakable harbinger of imminent labor with a droll British accent: "Aha! The bloody show!"  I was so excited, I sent cheery texts to my doula, Andrea, and your grandma: Early labor!  Yay!  

That initial gaiety, unsurprisingly, did not persist.  Around 10:30 pm I began to understand everything I'd read about the uniquely excruciating sensation of true labor: waves of it robbing me of my power of coherent speech--although not, as Jonathan and no doubt every neighbor within a block of our house would attest, my powers of incoherent vocalization.

Your dad was a champion.  He brought me water and pillows.  He called the midwife, Diane, to inform her that labor had begun.  He ran my bath and massaged my back and turned on an episode of "Brooklyn 99", all while timing my contractions.  He cracked jokes to make me feel better.

At several points during the night he noted that my contractions, although still a bit unpredictable, were frequently meeting the standard that meant we should start making for the hospital.

"Abby, I really think we should call the hospital.  We should at least have Andrea drive here."  He was anxious, but I reminded him that first labors typically lasted a whole lot longer. The idea of arriving at the hospital with hours and hours of labor ahead of me so bothered me that I kept putting him off.  "Not yet.  I'm sure we have hours to go.  I just want to be home as long as I possibly can."  So I stuck it out,  on my side in the dark tepid bathwater, moaning loudly through the increasingly powerful contractions.  I didn't admit to myself that half my hesitation was simply because I dreaded the whole process of transitioning to the hospital in my current state.

Turns out, I was IN transition.  When Jonathan finally overruled me and called Andrea, she, hearing my wails in the background, ordered us to call the hospital and get ready to leave.  She was on her way.  Diane was alerted that we were coming.

I suddenly allowed myself to realize that I was well into labor.  Every time I moved position--from the tub to the toilet, pulling my clothes onto my shivering body, stumbling to the living room-- fresh contractions would debilitate me.  When Andrea arrived, she gave me a rushed breath-coaching session that quieted me down significantly, and she and Jonathan supported my failing legs to the car.

It was just after 5 am when Jonathan pulled into the vacant hospital entrance.  I relied on him and Andrea to support me through two more contractions on the walk inside, where a security guard fetched me a wheelchair and directed us to the labor and delivery ward.

I don't think the nurses there believed I was very far along at first.  They showed us into the delivery room and helped me onto the bed.  Jonathan mentioned my desire for a water birth as Andrea continued coaching me through the quickening contractions, and the staff started to set up the pool.  Moments later, Diane and her midwife-in-training Christy entered the room, smiling hugely despite their sleepy faces.

They did my first cervical check, and Diane announced, "She's a 9."  That news accelerated the pace of the room considerably, and filled me with a wash of relief.  Almost there!

I labored on the birthing ball awhile, and then was assisted to the wonderful warm tub with the jets, where my water broke at last.  Christy's face loomed over mine, and she calmly mentioned that it appeared there was meconium in the water.  The birthing pool was going to be off limits.  I didn't even care at that point: another contraction was seizing me.  Your dad's jokes had abated but he stayed nearby, and I found his presence incredibly reassuring.  He and Andrea took turns holding my hands, while the midwives reminded me to breathe, relax, breathe, relax.

At this point all my energy was focused on surviving each contraction.  Between them, I felt my body go limp and could sometimes muster a smile or a nod in reaction to comments or directives.  Then I would feel another starting up, and would summon my reserves to meet it (one at a time, Abby, one at a time) even as part of me shrank, willing it to just please please stop.

By and by it was time for another check.  Back to the bed to suffer the examination, which revealed that it was time to push. I got into position on the birthing stool.  Jonathan sat behind me, supporting me as I strained through each contraction.  They were so much closer together now, relentless, with a new sensation of burning as the pressure increased.  The midwives were smiling and telling me they could see your head.  I could touch it.  I found the strength each time to push harder and harder.  In the next few days I would realize how much this phase had required of me by the soreness in my biceps, but in the moment all my focus and feeling were concentrated on the excruciating work of birthing you.  Labor, indeed.

Fifteen eternal minutes of that, and then you crowned.  The little head I had touched moments before finally pushed out, and the rest of you slid after it, and you were a bright-eyed slippery perfect baby girl out in the world at last.

From the start you were alert and strong, holding your head up and latching immediately to my breast so I didn't even have room in my psyche to worry about the ugly aftermath of delivery, because of the shocking all-encompassing joy that filled every cell in my body.  As all my physicality moments before had been focused on birthing you, now it was completely awash in the experience of holding you, leaving no space for pain or weariness.

This is when the photo documentation can take up my story far more vividly than I can tell it, and I hope you see everything I struggle to say: our joy, love, exhaustion...and your fragile beauty. 7 lb, 4 oz, and 21 inches of sweet sweet human life.

It is six and a half weeks later.  I have healed, and we are a family at home, developing a rhythm around your tiny life that already feels natural.  I reclaim that crushing love and happiness each morning, waking beside your bright-eyed fragrant infant body.

Welcome, Florence Abigail.  You are so worth every bit of it.

February 24, 2015

Tonight is band practice. Exploratory guitar strains and vocal commentary drift through the dim downstairs rooms from the attic above, and I wonder to myself if the stirrings and kicks that pulse just beneath my swelling belly are my child's response to the strange chords and voices.

This final week of February marks the first week of my third trimester.   It has been a long and difficult month, but interspersed with a handful of happinesses.  Mimosas and Mexican baked eggs by candlelight the morning of Valentine's Day, before I left for work.  Jonathan in his Mr. Burger trucker hat and blue flannel shirt, improvising a goofy song on his bass guitar for the baby after dinner.  The installation of tile and a toilet in our gutted bathroom at long, long last.  The first house show for Flowerstalks, and the first time our home has been fit to host since last September.  Yellow tulips somehow making the dining room come to life.  Today's wonderful stroll with Jeremy through the frozen marshes bordering the Rice Creek trail, cattail rushes tossing the sunshine just ahead of us and rattling brightly in the breeze: the only time of year when one can safely trudge through swampland.

And each day the thrilling pulses and flutters of new inscrutable human life lifting me out of myself, into wonderment and joy.

A Welcome For Willa
New-minted infant, Pioneer,
no matter that under this sun
is no new matter.  You are new.
You have only now begun
as an inimitable self to know this place.
Familiarity will grow, and with it an
attendant tendency to bear contempt
for earth's redundancy and imperfections.
Contend against this inner bent.
Happily apprehend
that one convention of this world
is irrepressible renewal.
The song of the lark: five notes unfurled
day after day, that bless us yet.
And more than that:
The first secrets remain intact
and potent still to dazzle and confound.
Let long acquaintance make you fond,
but not complacent.  Living thus, you'll do your part
to keep this ancient garden green
and ardor kindled in your heart.

"And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years."  -Willa Cather

"Men expecting yet another sun / To do the shapely thing they had not done"

YEAR'S END
(Richard Wilbur)

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I've known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

"The word fantasy remains ambiguous, standing between the false, the foolish, the delusory, the shallows of the mind, and the mind's deep connection with the real.  On this threshold it sometimes faces one way, masked and costumed, frivolous, an escapist; then it turns, and we glimpse as it turns the face of an angel, bright truthful messenger..."

Ursula K. LeGuin's "Things Not Actually Present"

November morning

Ah, and today I did.  I woke in the light, went for a long walk with my dog.  Of course, the lapidary azure days of late October have already hissed away, and it's almost mid-November.  My section of Minneapolis begins increasingly to resemble the neighborhood I fell in love with my first days of marriage almost a year ago: the skinny trees, the frostbitten lawns and windy alleys, the pearly grey sky with streaks of shouting blue.  In this wintry monochrome setting all pops of color gladden the heart.  In a similar way, slow mindful mornings like this rejoice my soul in the whirling monochrome of my busy days.  Waking in the light.  Bundling into my winter coat and mittens.  Watching Janie snuffle ecstatically at the edges of lawns and curbs and the trunks of trees, and then leap ahead, tail wagging, to the next big smell.  Inhaling the coffee scent in my cozy home upon our return from an indulgently lengthy walk.  Warming my fingers in the sudsy kitchen sink before settling into my devotional time at the dining room table with my coffee mug and a slice of jam and toast.

I know.  Even now time is escaping.  Ten minutes and I'll be driving to job one of two, and before I know it, the day will be over and I'll be returning to bed.  And no more waking in the light, not for awhile.  But waking in the dark, leaving my groom asleep in our bed, walking the stunted half-block with Janie before I grab my things and drive to job one of two, seeing the stars and being a part of the fellowship of early risers on my city block, each of us with our cars fuming to warmth on the curb...that is a different sort of gladness.  The gladness of diligence and stewardship, of building a life, of earning my keep and my sleep.  It is part of what made today such a delicious gift.

Day by day, I'm keeping my difficult balance in this beautiful world.  Singing as I go.

"Letter To Gail"--Or, as I would subtitle it, "Variation On The Book Of Ecclesiastes"

Barbara Crooker

You write, "Where has the fall fallen?"
and how time is escaping, leaking like a hiss
from a blue balloon.  Outside, the sky
is that lapidary azure of mid-October.
You rush from meeting to board room,
while each day the leaves shift
in color and tone, red-orange, green-gold.
When you turn, they've already fallen.
You write that you would like to stop working,
but phone messages and faxes pile up on the floor.
This air, so cold and clean you could bite it,
like an apple.  All of our stories have the same ending.
Still, we drone on, little bees, drive while listening
to voice mail, drinking take-out coffee, trying to do
too many jobs in too few hours.  You say you'd like to wake
up in the light, go for long walks with the dog, not answer
the phone for months.  Outside the window, the unreachable
sky, the burning blue fire.

"God is of a kind to love the world extravagantly, wondrously, and the world is of a kind to be worth, which is not to say worthy of, this pained and rapturous love." -Marilynne Robinson