The thing is, I don't like pain.
I don't like it, and I don't want it.
I don't like being uncomfortable, either.
I don't even like tags in the necks of my shirts.
Maeve has been sick all week, and after the first fevered night, I wanted to take her to the doctor -- sign us up for the thick pink drink that will end this! My head hurts; I pop an advil. The air thickens, muggy and hot; I turn on the AC. I argue with someone I love; I apologize right away and "fix" it.
These things aren't bad -- advil and apologies in particular -- but they're often (always for advil) efforts to end discomfort as fast as possible.
Every piece of writing I've picked up in the last few weeks -- all by courageous people like Anne Lamott, Dan Allender, Glennon Doyle Melton, Rebekah Lyons -- has said the same thing: don't try to escape pain, but move toward it: resist the urges to mute it, outrun it, find the big mug of something sweet and warm that will lull it to sleep (I've been looking for that mug all day --almond milk vanilla chai is closest I've come...).
I don't even really know what they mean -- stay in the pain -- but I'm noticing what they don't mean. They don't mean race around at top speed all day to accomplish/pursue/acquire and screech into the driveway just as the bus pulls up. They don't mean eat my weight in chocolate almonds, thinking, on some level, that the sweet crunch between my teeth that I "deserve" is going to treat me right into a new state of being. They don't mean check and check and check and check my texts/emails/instagram feed for a hit of being wanted or included in someone else's day. They don't mean veg out at night as soon as the kids are quiet, watch Parenthood and feel the Bravermans' angst/heart-ache/connection instead of feeling my own or lack thereof. They don't mean numb myself into distraction just enough to keep from fully feeling what hurts, to keep me from actively starting on a road of process.
When I was in high school, I got to wear one of those blow up sumo wrestling suits once and smash into my friends, ricochet off their round bodies, and fly onto my back, where I lay like a bug, laughing with my arms and legs in the air as I waited for someone to stand me back up.
I don't want to live that way.
So this month, I am starting to deflate the suit.
I don't really know what that means yet, but I've started to clear some space. When I sit down to work, I love a big clean table. In my house, I usually have to move a lot of whatever it is (cups/chewed pencils/school worksheets/cereal bowls/mail/glasses/Siracha) before I get that table.
So I'm clearing the table, slowly -- the salt shaker, the pepper. I've de-friended some people I most love on Instagram (and offended them) for a bit. I've been spending a lot of time alone, with God, and with a pile of books I'm reading. I'm on a 40 day spending cleanse. I'm sitting in this song (the 23rd psalm that Page CXVI sings so beautifully):
God is my Shepherd, I won't be wanting, I won't be wanting.
He makes me rest
in fields of green
with quiet streams.
Even though I walk through
through the valley of death and dying,
I will not fear
because you are with me,
you're always with me.
In just the last week, the woods have transformed from a webby mass of silhouettes to green breezy screen. I waited for this -- for GREEN to come, for the sound of wind rushing through leaves again, for the freedom of coatlessness. It's hard to stay in winter, to feel cold through a coat, to cross the frozen dirt ground that can't grow anything, to wake to gray. But sometimes we do, and apparently, according to these writers, we have to.
What I hope, though, is that when it ends -- because it always ends -- I see.
Already, only a few weeks into April, I find myself walking out of the house and straight to my car, on with life. Winter is off my radar, and I forget to be knocked over by the sudden life! I forget to be arrested by what can only be called hope, screaming from the branches.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
attention going going (gone)
Yesterday I texted Ben as he de-iced on a runway to tell him I wanted to turn off texting on my phone -- too much, too constant, too demanding. But immediately I realized that wouldn't work because though I might try to announce my non-texting existence to everyone I know, someone somewhere (or several someone's) would still text some child-related information, some bottom-of-the-heart confession, some question awaiting a response that I would miss and he or she wouldn't know I had simply missed it, and there we'd be. There is no away setting for texts (that I now of), which could at least provide clearly communicated break.
I started thinking about this in earnest when I was driving on vacation with Ben in January. I didn't know at first what felt so relaxing, was it being on an island, the chickens on the side of the road, the sea-wind through the windows, the winding coast, the wearing a bathing suit and flip flops in January? Of course it was each of those things, but what I was specifically noticing as I wound along the roads, was the lack of texting, my real sense of vacation came in from not multi-tasking.
What if I lived that way all the time?
Immediate next question, is that even possible?
No, of course it's not REALLY possible to live with three small children and not multi-task. This morning, for example, while I was having a discussion with four other women, Maeve handed me a doll, a shoe, a sock, another shoe, a remote, a book, stole my pen, opened her mouth for yogurt again and again, spit yogurt out, climbed on top of me and put her hands on my cheeks, handed me a giant baby doll again, fished for the pen from under my leg, stole raspberries off of other people's plates etc. I multi-tasked.
But there is tending-to while-doing-another-thing, like this morning, and there is super-multi-tasking like texting while driving; asking Eden how her day was while measuring and cooking, half-listening and never looking at her eyes; talking on the phone while steering the stroller across a busy street with my elbow while also yelling directions to Silas and Eden so they don't get hit by a car -- embarrassing.
I am aware that texting, keeping up with people and information, posting and recording photos/stories/blurbs breeds a sense of productivity: we feel busy; we feel valued; we feel valuable on some level, or we wouldn't do it. But the past couple of weeks what I've most felt is discontent. I've been rushed and been rushing people. I've felt perpetually distracted and constantly interrupted -- just this minute my phone whistled and I picked it up to read a text!!! Seriously??! Case in point.
Sometimes I have lengthy conversations over text -- easier than editing in front of kids or trying to listen and speak over background noise etc. But texted conversations unfold in slow-motion, and I am not 100% engaged the way I would be on a phone call, nor am I clearly cut off from the people around me the way I would if I were speaking. Instead my attention is sawed in half as I stand there half-present to both parties, typing with my thumbs -- raggedy all around.
How many times have I said I am going to put my phone in the back of the car when I drive so I can't reach it, that I'm going to leave my phone in a basket by the front door to be intentional about when I check it, that I am going to... But the fact is, I keep doing the same things I always do, phone on my hip -- or in my hand. I'm like Maeve, yelling out for help as I press send.
I'm reading Ann Voskamp's 1,000 Gifts again, as slowly as ever, and I can't move past chapter four because I want to soak in these words until I live them:
Time is a relentless river. It rages on, a respecter of no one. And this, this is the only way to slow time: When I fully enter time's swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here... Giving thanks for one thousand things is ultimately an invitation to slow time down with weight of full attention...
[W]hen I get angsty and knotted about tomorrow, when I sorrow for what is gone, [my sister's] words always tugging me to stay right here -- 'Wherever you are, be all there.' I have lived the runner, panting ahead in worry, pounding back in regrets, terrified to live in the present, because here-time asks me to do the hardest of all: just open wide and receive.
Time's thundering presence makes me cower when I see it in Silas's kid-boy eyes that harbor so many quiet thoughts, when I hold Maeve's foot and it nearly fills my hand, when I see my dad's knees ache up the stairs. Time takes my breath away. So this idea of slowing it down, of meeting it with full attention, of filling it with thanks so I inhabit the minutes that pass rather than let them blow through me, I want that. I want to speak that last sentence and end it with, "and I am."
I picked up the paper tonight and sat on the couch though it was 5:30 and I had only a vague notion of making eggs for dinner -- an unprecedented move -- and I read. It was radical (but to be fair, it was also Sunday's paper); no one missed me, and no one rushed. I had written in my journal just hours before that I feel frenetic, and there in the paper was this headline: You're Probably too Busy to Read this: on how a frenetic life became a status symbol. The article goes on to say: Somewhere around the end of the 20th century, busyness became not just a way of life but a badge of honor. And life, sociologist say, became an exhausting everydayathon. People now tell pollsters that they're too busy to register to vote, too busy to date, to make friends outside the office, to take a vacation, to sleep, to have sex. As for multitasking, one 2012 survey found that 38 million Americans shop on their smart-phones while sitting on the toilet. And another found that the compulsion to multitask was making us as stupid as if we were stoned."
I don't want to live as if I were stoned! The article, worth a quick read, looks at how our culture's view of leisure evolved (or failed to) throughout the 20th century and how our brains are most open to creativity and inspiration when they are most idle, among other things.
It's not just the texting, it's the busyness. We each construct it differently around us -- and hopefully there are some who have resisted constructing it altogether! -- our house of cards, our badge of honor.
I started thinking about this in earnest when I was driving on vacation with Ben in January. I didn't know at first what felt so relaxing, was it being on an island, the chickens on the side of the road, the sea-wind through the windows, the winding coast, the wearing a bathing suit and flip flops in January? Of course it was each of those things, but what I was specifically noticing as I wound along the roads, was the lack of texting, my real sense of vacation came in from not multi-tasking.
What if I lived that way all the time?
Immediate next question, is that even possible?
No, of course it's not REALLY possible to live with three small children and not multi-task. This morning, for example, while I was having a discussion with four other women, Maeve handed me a doll, a shoe, a sock, another shoe, a remote, a book, stole my pen, opened her mouth for yogurt again and again, spit yogurt out, climbed on top of me and put her hands on my cheeks, handed me a giant baby doll again, fished for the pen from under my leg, stole raspberries off of other people's plates etc. I multi-tasked.
But there is tending-to while-doing-another-thing, like this morning, and there is super-multi-tasking like texting while driving; asking Eden how her day was while measuring and cooking, half-listening and never looking at her eyes; talking on the phone while steering the stroller across a busy street with my elbow while also yelling directions to Silas and Eden so they don't get hit by a car -- embarrassing.
I am aware that texting, keeping up with people and information, posting and recording photos/stories/blurbs breeds a sense of productivity: we feel busy; we feel valued; we feel valuable on some level, or we wouldn't do it. But the past couple of weeks what I've most felt is discontent. I've been rushed and been rushing people. I've felt perpetually distracted and constantly interrupted -- just this minute my phone whistled and I picked it up to read a text!!! Seriously??! Case in point.
Sometimes I have lengthy conversations over text -- easier than editing in front of kids or trying to listen and speak over background noise etc. But texted conversations unfold in slow-motion, and I am not 100% engaged the way I would be on a phone call, nor am I clearly cut off from the people around me the way I would if I were speaking. Instead my attention is sawed in half as I stand there half-present to both parties, typing with my thumbs -- raggedy all around.
How many times have I said I am going to put my phone in the back of the car when I drive so I can't reach it, that I'm going to leave my phone in a basket by the front door to be intentional about when I check it, that I am going to... But the fact is, I keep doing the same things I always do, phone on my hip -- or in my hand. I'm like Maeve, yelling out for help as I press send.
I'm reading Ann Voskamp's 1,000 Gifts again, as slowly as ever, and I can't move past chapter four because I want to soak in these words until I live them:
Time is a relentless river. It rages on, a respecter of no one. And this, this is the only way to slow time: When I fully enter time's swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here... Giving thanks for one thousand things is ultimately an invitation to slow time down with weight of full attention...
[W]hen I get angsty and knotted about tomorrow, when I sorrow for what is gone, [my sister's] words always tugging me to stay right here -- 'Wherever you are, be all there.' I have lived the runner, panting ahead in worry, pounding back in regrets, terrified to live in the present, because here-time asks me to do the hardest of all: just open wide and receive.
Time's thundering presence makes me cower when I see it in Silas's kid-boy eyes that harbor so many quiet thoughts, when I hold Maeve's foot and it nearly fills my hand, when I see my dad's knees ache up the stairs. Time takes my breath away. So this idea of slowing it down, of meeting it with full attention, of filling it with thanks so I inhabit the minutes that pass rather than let them blow through me, I want that. I want to speak that last sentence and end it with, "and I am."
I picked up the paper tonight and sat on the couch though it was 5:30 and I had only a vague notion of making eggs for dinner -- an unprecedented move -- and I read. It was radical (but to be fair, it was also Sunday's paper); no one missed me, and no one rushed. I had written in my journal just hours before that I feel frenetic, and there in the paper was this headline: You're Probably too Busy to Read this: on how a frenetic life became a status symbol. The article goes on to say: Somewhere around the end of the 20th century, busyness became not just a way of life but a badge of honor. And life, sociologist say, became an exhausting everydayathon. People now tell pollsters that they're too busy to register to vote, too busy to date, to make friends outside the office, to take a vacation, to sleep, to have sex. As for multitasking, one 2012 survey found that 38 million Americans shop on their smart-phones while sitting on the toilet. And another found that the compulsion to multitask was making us as stupid as if we were stoned."
I don't want to live as if I were stoned! The article, worth a quick read, looks at how our culture's view of leisure evolved (or failed to) throughout the 20th century and how our brains are most open to creativity and inspiration when they are most idle, among other things.
It's not just the texting, it's the busyness. We each construct it differently around us -- and hopefully there are some who have resisted constructing it altogether! -- our house of cards, our badge of honor.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Maeve
Maeve, she's a wild rascal these days. She even looks like a rascal most of the time: curls spiraling off her head, smudged face, pen scribbled on her palms and pant legs, chubby bare feet on the cold floors.
Mama, Mama, like a song, and I ignore it because it's the song she sings all day every day.
Maaaamaa! MaaaaaaMaaaaaaa! Still I let it go to squeeze another minute out of whatever I'm doing.
MaaaaaMAAAAA! MAMA!!! MAMAAA!! Urgency in that voice, so I follow it down the hall. The bathroom door is closed, and when I open it, there she is with both hands splashing wildly in the toilet, yelling for me at the top of her lungs.
Or
Mama, Mama, Mama Absentmindedly, Hi Maeve
Maaamaa! Again, Hi Maeve wherever you are
Maaamaaa! MaaamaAAA! I take pause.
MAMA! MAMA! MAMA! I run. She's sitting at the top of the stairs in Silas's room, scribbling down his wall and onto the wood with a Sharpie, waiting for me to stop her.
Even sitting next to me on the rug, I'll hear quietly at my elbow in almost a whisper,
mama... mama... and look down to see her holding my phone with both hands like a confession.
I know I shouldn't do this but this is SO FUN I CANNOT HELP IT!! MAMA! I'M DOING IT! I'M STILL DOING IT! MAAAMAAAA!!!!
Though her vocabulary is still tiny, she has some things to say. Unlike Silas and Eden, who would yank on power cords and rip book pages hidden silently in the house, Maeve yells. It starts like this from some other room:
Maaaamaa! MaaaaaaMaaaaaaa! Still I let it go to squeeze another minute out of whatever I'm doing.
MaaaaaMAAAAA! MAMA!!! MAMAAA!! Urgency in that voice, so I follow it down the hall. The bathroom door is closed, and when I open it, there she is with both hands splashing wildly in the toilet, yelling for me at the top of her lungs.
Or
Mama, Mama, Mama Absentmindedly, Hi Maeve
Maaamaa! Again, Hi Maeve wherever you are
Maaamaaa! MaaamaAAA! I take pause.
MAMA! MAMA! MAMA! I run. She's sitting at the top of the stairs in Silas's room, scribbling down his wall and onto the wood with a Sharpie, waiting for me to stop her.
Even sitting next to me on the rug, I'll hear quietly at my elbow in almost a whisper,
mama... mama... and look down to see her holding my phone with both hands like a confession.
I know I shouldn't do this but this is SO FUN I CANNOT HELP IT!! MAMA! I'M DOING IT! I'M STILL DOING IT! MAAAMAAAA!!!!
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Play Dates (we didn't use to call them this, did we? we just said "play")
Jasmine blooms on our table, a plant I carried home from California tucked into a shoulder bag so we could have it waft through our house again, even in brick and winter. At least this week there is no snow anywhere, and every few days the temperature pokes its head into spring. The world slowly transforms, and I wait.
There are five children in my house right now and miraculously I am sitting at the table writing with a cup of tea. Play dates are a new thing for us. I've had vague angst about having kids over, that they'd be bored, or brazenly speak truth about how messy things look, or say they don't like our house or food, slander me to their parents, and not want to come back (ha!).
Maybe it is the term, itself, "play date." Why don't we just say "play" -- the noun and verb that frees up our children and names the afternoon. Instead we have weighty "date" trailing after like an anchor. Last year I attended several "play dates" in which there were pre-made snacks on pretty plates, brand new art kits laid out, and board games already set up -- a date, indeed. For a while after those (traumatizing) dates, I bought that having kids over had to look like that, so we simply didn't have kids over. Somewhere along the lines, though, just recently, I remembered what it was actually like to play with friends, to lie on the basement rug and toss the question back and forth, the list of choices, to tease ideas out of our own aimlessness and play:
What do you want to do?
I don't know, what do you want to do?
I don't know. what do you want to do?
I don't know.
Well, we could draw...
Or play hide and seek, or make a fort...
Or we could go for a walk or...
Bored or not, we wound our way to our own fun, every time, or we got in a fight and went home only to love each other again the next morning. So thankfully, I've been freed from the momentary fear that play dates were, in fact, all about me. It's so much more fun this way. Whew.
There are five children in my house right now and miraculously I am sitting at the table writing with a cup of tea. Play dates are a new thing for us. I've had vague angst about having kids over, that they'd be bored, or brazenly speak truth about how messy things look, or say they don't like our house or food, slander me to their parents, and not want to come back (ha!).
Maybe it is the term, itself, "play date." Why don't we just say "play" -- the noun and verb that frees up our children and names the afternoon. Instead we have weighty "date" trailing after like an anchor. Last year I attended several "play dates" in which there were pre-made snacks on pretty plates, brand new art kits laid out, and board games already set up -- a date, indeed. For a while after those (traumatizing) dates, I bought that having kids over had to look like that, so we simply didn't have kids over. Somewhere along the lines, though, just recently, I remembered what it was actually like to play with friends, to lie on the basement rug and toss the question back and forth, the list of choices, to tease ideas out of our own aimlessness and play:
What do you want to do?
I don't know, what do you want to do?
I don't know. what do you want to do?
I don't know.
Well, we could draw...
Or play hide and seek, or make a fort...
Or we could go for a walk or...
Bored or not, we wound our way to our own fun, every time, or we got in a fight and went home only to love each other again the next morning. So thankfully, I've been freed from the momentary fear that play dates were, in fact, all about me. It's so much more fun this way. Whew.
Rhythm
There is much and little to report. It's been a month of all things: mornings when by 8AM everyone has either screamed or cried, still no one's wearing shoes, and hair remains knotted and unruly even onto the school bus; mornings when lunch has been neatly sliced and packed, backpacks filled, hair braided in tiny brown braids, and we've held hands walking to the bus stop. There have been days I've lain in bed at night replaying the shadows of the day, and moments so much wind has filled my sails I thought I'd burst. Our slippery slate walk has iced and melted, been buried and shoveled and buried again by snow. The kids have had snow days. I had my own snow days, stuck solo in California for two extra days because of east coast weather! And now the bulbs are poking green stalks from the dirt to remind us no matter how frozen the ground is, spring comes.
All year I've kept looking for rhythm for our days, the scaffolding of the week to hang my expectations on, the solid structure beneath all we're doing. What I'm realizing is that the rhythm is more syncopated than I thought. It's more like jazz and less like a march. There is scatting and remixes; I'm starting to come with looser feet.
All year I've kept looking for rhythm for our days, the scaffolding of the week to hang my expectations on, the solid structure beneath all we're doing. What I'm realizing is that the rhythm is more syncopated than I thought. It's more like jazz and less like a march. There is scatting and remixes; I'm starting to come with looser feet.
Monday, February 10, 2014
Winter Continues ; Standing Between Seasons
We live in the Arctic. It feels that way today because my fingers won't get warm and the damp wind gnaws through layers. I went to Silas's school for 2nd grade recess today (have only done this one other time this year), and two boys were wearing shorts -- SERIOUSLY?! Standing there my teeth were cold, and I could feel the wind through my parka.
Today I told Eden that another snow storm is supposed to hit this week. This is Eden who immediately throws on her coat and hat on and plunges into the rain-snow, sleet, sludge-mud, below-freezing-windy snow in the yard and throws herself down to play. Bursting from the back of the car:
NO! I HATE SNOW!!
...I turned my head to see her. You don't hate snow....
No. I like snow. struck by her reaction. I do like snow. laughing I do! But it's too much! I don't want any more right now!! then bubbling hysterics at her own rash reaction -- but really, she was dead on.
I looked up at the calendar the other day and realized it's February. We are into February!! That means March is going to come, and then bursting April! There will be flowers, and sun that's warm, and mild days without coats! I cannot wait!!
In the meantime, I am sitting at the dining room table listening to Silas and Eden NOT asleep, drinking a cocktail, wearing a hat I've had on for hours, wrapped in a giant blanket with my nose freezing. Our heat is broken. The kids are both in my bed currently (soon to be displaced to the floor), and I just sneaked a little space heater into Maeve's room where she sat up sleepily and looked at me before nuzzling her face into a blue elephant.
When I was working on my thesis in grad school, I remember feeling anxious that I didn't have an explicit theme and wondering how my poems would hang together. Just write one of my professors told me, keep writing. You can't help but write your obsessions. And he was right; by the time I finished my manuscript, the poems were strung together by single colored threads.
The same thing happens as we live -- those themes emerge and blast on the horn again and again, or stand right next to us and breathe on our necks until we notice. I lose my breath at the passage of time, the loss of life stages, babies-turned-children-turned people in the world, the way lives arc and suddenly end. Some days I double over under the weight of it. Some days I am in awe. Loss. The powerful constant of loss. My mom says that all change involves loss, even the best changes, and what is life but constant change.
Most of the loss that pierces me is quiet, seeping, subtle: Silas suddenly standing head to my armpit with no bottom teeth; Maeve wearing rubber-soled sneakers and running through the house; Eden writing secret notes in her journal, already so separate; another winter already (and, yes, finally) closing out.
A couple of weeks ago I had a second blood test come back positive for Celiac. Of all the irregular blood tests that could surface, this is a fairly mild one, and yet, it's something. I have no symptoms and will have various follow-up tests and procedures to assess whether I actually have Celiac or am just a carrier (I'm hoping to know by mid-March), but daily I hit that possibility of loss. I know I can live without gluten and have lived closely with friends who've found all sorts of alternatives, but I love fresh bread and butter, a good baguette, Italian bread with olive oil and coarse salt, Alta's chocolate cake, tea & toast with butter, dumplings and mu shu pork (gluten is in a lot of things...), Rubens on rye, Carr's whole wheat crackers, matzo ball soup... I am guessing, from everything I know, that all will remain the same. But I'm learning that everything I know is often just a glimpse.
And so I sit, wearing a giant blanket in the house and savoring buttered toast, waiting for the next season to come.
Today I told Eden that another snow storm is supposed to hit this week. This is Eden who immediately throws on her coat and hat on and plunges into the rain-snow, sleet, sludge-mud, below-freezing-windy snow in the yard and throws herself down to play. Bursting from the back of the car:
NO! I HATE SNOW!!
...I turned my head to see her. You don't hate snow....
No. I like snow. struck by her reaction. I do like snow. laughing I do! But it's too much! I don't want any more right now!! then bubbling hysterics at her own rash reaction -- but really, she was dead on.
I looked up at the calendar the other day and realized it's February. We are into February!! That means March is going to come, and then bursting April! There will be flowers, and sun that's warm, and mild days without coats! I cannot wait!!
In the meantime, I am sitting at the dining room table listening to Silas and Eden NOT asleep, drinking a cocktail, wearing a hat I've had on for hours, wrapped in a giant blanket with my nose freezing. Our heat is broken. The kids are both in my bed currently (soon to be displaced to the floor), and I just sneaked a little space heater into Maeve's room where she sat up sleepily and looked at me before nuzzling her face into a blue elephant.
When I was working on my thesis in grad school, I remember feeling anxious that I didn't have an explicit theme and wondering how my poems would hang together. Just write one of my professors told me, keep writing. You can't help but write your obsessions. And he was right; by the time I finished my manuscript, the poems were strung together by single colored threads.
The same thing happens as we live -- those themes emerge and blast on the horn again and again, or stand right next to us and breathe on our necks until we notice. I lose my breath at the passage of time, the loss of life stages, babies-turned-children-turned people in the world, the way lives arc and suddenly end. Some days I double over under the weight of it. Some days I am in awe. Loss. The powerful constant of loss. My mom says that all change involves loss, even the best changes, and what is life but constant change.
Most of the loss that pierces me is quiet, seeping, subtle: Silas suddenly standing head to my armpit with no bottom teeth; Maeve wearing rubber-soled sneakers and running through the house; Eden writing secret notes in her journal, already so separate; another winter already (and, yes, finally) closing out.
A couple of weeks ago I had a second blood test come back positive for Celiac. Of all the irregular blood tests that could surface, this is a fairly mild one, and yet, it's something. I have no symptoms and will have various follow-up tests and procedures to assess whether I actually have Celiac or am just a carrier (I'm hoping to know by mid-March), but daily I hit that possibility of loss. I know I can live without gluten and have lived closely with friends who've found all sorts of alternatives, but I love fresh bread and butter, a good baguette, Italian bread with olive oil and coarse salt, Alta's chocolate cake, tea & toast with butter, dumplings and mu shu pork (gluten is in a lot of things...), Rubens on rye, Carr's whole wheat crackers, matzo ball soup... I am guessing, from everything I know, that all will remain the same. But I'm learning that everything I know is often just a glimpse.
And so I sit, wearing a giant blanket in the house and savoring buttered toast, waiting for the next season to come.
Saturday Morning
What I would most like to do right now is sit here and write this with my hot cup of tea. The weeks of winter-below-freezing (rare in Washington) finally broke yesterday, and the kids could run outside during recess for the first time in what feels like ages (they don't go out when it's below freezing -- is this crazy? what do Minnesotan kids do?)!
Last winter, waking with a few-month-old and standing by the kettle in the cold kitchen with Silas at my elbow, I learned to love the morning skies that seep rosy through bare tree branches. They are different than spring's skies, or summer's, feel more generous blooming behind all that gray. Many mornings I think of all the people living outside in this city who watch the light come up like that each day. Some Friday mornings at Miriam's Kitchen we talk about the sunrises, and unlike most everyone I know, one man named Robert, when he's missed it, says, 'what did it look like?' and wants me to describe it exactly.
Today is Saturday -- no rushing, no leaving, no packing lunches. Saturday in no stage of life has felt more like a freebie. As well as staying in sweat pants for hours, Saturday also means screens in the morning, and Silas right now is downstairs playing Super Mario brothers. As he walked down the wooden steps he said over his shoulder, I wish you'd come play with me. And then he was gone. Play wii. I have yet to do this since we bought it off craigs list in December. It would be so different than savoring this house-silence at the kitchen table. But sometimes it's worth being unexpected to love someone, and so I go for Silas -- Silas and Super Mario Brothers...
Last winter, waking with a few-month-old and standing by the kettle in the cold kitchen with Silas at my elbow, I learned to love the morning skies that seep rosy through bare tree branches. They are different than spring's skies, or summer's, feel more generous blooming behind all that gray. Many mornings I think of all the people living outside in this city who watch the light come up like that each day. Some Friday mornings at Miriam's Kitchen we talk about the sunrises, and unlike most everyone I know, one man named Robert, when he's missed it, says, 'what did it look like?' and wants me to describe it exactly.
Today is Saturday -- no rushing, no leaving, no packing lunches. Saturday in no stage of life has felt more like a freebie. As well as staying in sweat pants for hours, Saturday also means screens in the morning, and Silas right now is downstairs playing Super Mario brothers. As he walked down the wooden steps he said over his shoulder, I wish you'd come play with me. And then he was gone. Play wii. I have yet to do this since we bought it off craigs list in December. It would be so different than savoring this house-silence at the kitchen table. But sometimes it's worth being unexpected to love someone, and so I go for Silas -- Silas and Super Mario Brothers...
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