Ambivalence

Sometimes in parenting, I feel so clueless about what to do that I can only laugh.

Or cry.

I have been doing both recently.

One of my children is in a phase of recurrent, amorphous aches and pains.  It is utterly unclear whether these pains are psychosomatic or a systemic illness, if they are a severe food allergy or utterly self-persuasive case of school avoidance.

We visit them most mornings, some afternoons, before church, occasionally in the middle of the night, and always with a long frowning face.

My least favorite experiences parenting is feeling ambivalent -- ambivalence and helplessness being the double whammy.  There are other terrible things, like fury and impatience, but at least if I rage, the storm hits hard, my own shame harder, and apologies heal.  Ambivalence, though, is quiet and slippery; it lingers with a vague sense of unsafeness.

It's been weeks no, even months, that I have been plagued with ambivalence.  What does this kid need -- to be pushed or protected?  A kick in the pants or head stroked and song sung?  When is it all right to stay home from school or get picked up from the nurse's office if there is no visible nor measurable ailment?

With each question I tie a knot until I'm so knotted up, I'm not sure I'll untangle.

This morning after birthday presents and banana waffles (Silas is 9 today!), a morning that seemed all smooth sailing, a fashion crisis and shock of "illness" hit fast and furiously.  Two minutes before the bus arrived, everyone was in a fit of panic.  There was actual pushing children out onto the front stoop, and I think everyone cried.

How to communicate -- you are resilient!  You can DO it!  You can ride through discomfort!  You can arrive at school without your beloved coat, wearing your ski coat instead, and still be intact, beautiful you!  And how do I also listen, nurture, and get kids out the door before the breathy bus barrels past?

These are the questions I'm asking every day.

Yesterday at church, before the service was over, in fact in the middle of a song, the 70-something woman behind me leaned up and started talking loudly.  I was taken aback, gave her a small polite smile, little nod, and turned around.  But she had things to say and kept talking, so I had to turn around again.  I looked at her eyes, and she talked on.  She launched into a story about her daughter, whom she adopted as a teenager -- one of the three children she adopted as a single woman.  This daughter was a prostitute and has been in and out of jail for years.  There were lots of hard times parenting, she said.  You do the best you can.  You can't do everything but you do what you can.  Looking back over the decades, I can see how God never left her; you don't do all the parenting alone.  She said a lot of other things, but those are the words I remember.  She didn't even know my name, but she struck my need.

Today, between bouts of anger at my kid and myself and Ben for not knowing what to do, at this sickness that moves like a shadow, at the exhaustion of these same questions dragging over the months, I am thinking of her words looking back decades.  I'm blind by my own zoom lens right now, stuck at a dead end I can't navigate -- or can't see how to navigate.  But these are months of a decade-long story...  You do what you can.

Haiku

I am sitting at the kitchen table.  On the eve of the first day of spring, the forecast has suddenly swung back to snow (1-3" predicted for tonight!) -- a typical DC thaw.  Tomorrow morning I'm teaching on Japanese forms of poetry for writing workshop, inspired by Rattle's latest issue.  Here's my haiku for the evening:


                      snowdrops to snowfall
                      the weight of a crying child
                      mid-March fevers burn

Growth

I don't know whether it's the long winter; the fact that it's finally giving up; the incessant bursts of snow and frozen ground; the melt and freeze on the front flagstone I finally slipped on yesterday; the rotating pile of snow clothes -- damp and dried -- from box to mountain at the door again and again; the sloshy thaw everywhere; fog and rain and shoes caked with mud; no sign of anything green yet; or just a general funk -- whatever it is, I've been feeling scuzz.

In the past couple of days, exhausted though my body feels, I keep finding myself pawing through everything with a trash bag at my knee: drawers, bedside tables, the shelves in the kids' rooms, the pantry, closets of clothing.

This must be what is called "spring cleaning," a phrase that sounds tidier than the angsty impulse to start again, to make space, to do away with, to throw away the kids' vaguely mildew-smelling mittens for good.

I am feeling that need for making space internally as well.  I'm craving a new season, a new rootedness.  In the midst of my hands making efforts, I've felt my own needs, too, emerging in the thaw.

Something happens in our need.  As winter ends that something seems echoed outside, in the earthy smell as we open the front door.  It's a rawness.  It's a hunger for -- and actual emergence of -- softening -- muddy and lacking control, the mystery of life rich and rooted just beneath the surface.

Last night I was reading Frederick Buechner who said this:

For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond 
the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps 
the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day 
lives who...in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness 
as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel 
of the world... It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but... 
the experience of God's presence.  That is the miracle that we are really after.  
And that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.


Presence in the midst of "the fragrant muck and misery and marvel" -- yes.

Happy

I am sitting outside in a cotton sweater -- !  Snow still covers the yard -- icy, slushy snow, but the metallic smell of thaw is in the air, rising from the creek, seeping into the softening earth.

Maeve, almost 2 1/2, is finally talking!  She fancies herself quite grown up, though it's still hard for the unpracticed ear to identify most words she says.  She doesn't yet know the word "conversation," but daily tells me, talk more, Mama, to ensure our conversation won't end.  There isn't a lot she expresses fluently at once, but she is trying, using all sorts of joiner words like "actually," "also," and "so."  Our conversations often go like this:

Mama? 
yes.
Mama?
yes.
Mama?
YES.
Um.... Mama?  Umm, soooo, Mama.  Ack-y (actually) umm... Mama.  
yes.
My bock! (block).  Ah-so (also), Mama, ummm...
yes?
Mama?

One thing she does quite a lot is interpret and assign feelings.  More often than not, this has to do with her doll, Luckycia (named by Eden, age 3), whom Maeve calls Duckycia:

Duckycia not hhhhhoppy.
She's not happy?
No.  
Why?
Mah eh-bow huhts. 
She's sad because your elbow hurts?
Yesh.
...(one minute later)...
Oh!!  Duckcia hhhoppy!
She is?
Yesh!  Mah eh-bow no huht!

This running commentary hits all of us.  Often when she and I are driving somewhere, and I am lost in my thoughts about where we're going, what I have to get done, someone I want to talk to, a recent conversation -- something -- from the backseat I hear:
My Mama hhhhhoppy.

There is nothing to say to that voice, but yes.  Yes, Maeve, you are right, I am happy.
And suddenly I realize that I am.

A Little Drink: Winter Margaritas

It is sub-zero temperatures here with the windchill, something I've never ever known in Washington.  Schools are opening two hours late tomorrow because of the cold, and today, simply walking from my car to a building made me want to stand in a hot shower for the next hour.  (Sadly, I still haven't showered at all and am just dirty).  It is seriously cold.  I've had countless mugs of rooibos tea and hot water with lemon, and tonight I'm making a drink.

What better in the whipping winds and snow squalls than to have tostadas, tamales, and a Mid-Winter Margarita.


Mid-Winter Margarita
    recipe adapted from Food52
    serves 2 generously or 4 conservatively

4 1/2 oz tequila
2 1/4 oz triple sec
2 1/4 oz fresh lime juice
2 1/4 oz fresh grapefruit juice

Combine in a pitcher or shaker, stir/shake, and serve over ice.
Depending on your taste and the tartness of your grapefruit, use lime juice to either sugar or salt the rim

mmmmmmmm

Unstable (on gratitude and remembering)

Sick here again -- this time with coughs and fevers and mild sore throats.  Windchill has driven temperatures below zero the last couple of days and today it warmed to about 12.  Not our average DC winter.  I have friends who lost power in the wild gusts Sunday, others whose heat broke, and others who are staying in emergency shelters downtown to stay alive.  Any piece of that list offers ample opportunity for perspective.  And throughout the day, I've had some, and have felt grateful.

And then I haven't anymore and have watched myself wing wildly into impatience/fury/dismay at all the long faces and whining voices, headaches, and the deep hearty coughing from every room of the house.  And instead of making tea and stroking hair, I yelled and was flat mean.

Then I locked myself in a room, breathed help over and over, breathed deeply, and came out again.  I remembered we are actually healthy in big ways, and warm, and I'm grateful.  I apologized to each person with words or hugs, and we ate dinner.

Then a friend told me our symptoms sound like the flu and if we catch it in the first 48 hours, we can cut the sickness down by 8 days, but it's snowing steadily and freezing cold and all minute clinics are closed.  So I got mad at Eden for coughing her head off instead of sleeping, Silas for asking me to read, Ben for acting like a know-it-all about the flu and suggesting I do NOT get all three kids out of their bed and drive 30 minutes to a nighttime clinic in the storm -- because really I was panicking over the words "8 more days."

So I locked myself in a room, breathed help over and over, breathed deeply, and came out again.   I remembered we are actually healthy in big ways, and warm, and I'm grateful.  So I said sorry by sidling up next to Silas in his bed and reading.

But the incessant coughing coming from Eden's bed and thought of that continuing for the next ten hours and the tiredness making my eye sockets ache all crept into my monotone reading voice and made me stare hard at the words, so as not to leave this script of kindness I held in my hands.

Now I am alone drinking tea on the kitchen floor.  I've scared Ben downstairs and the others are finally (hopefully) asleep.  I will whisper I'm sorry's into their hair as I make my way to bed.

I'm thinking about gratitude and how though I hover at it -- a humming bird at a feeder -- I dart away at the smallest sound, the tube of sugar water still full and hanging.

This is why I need to lock myself in rooms (every few minutes), to remember, literally, re-member -- have God name me again so I'm whole.  Maybe maturity -- that far off lovely, stable state people speak of -- will mean being able to have that conversation more instantly, to re-member within, and change what's in the mouth (or heart, really) before it tumbles out.  

How Things Happen

The swathes of poison oak are finally fading from our bodies.  The flu has been weaving through the nights, and some small sneaking louse stays relentlessly.  The two year old has swallowed her recent bright language for furious screams, constantly erupting.

Tonight, preparing for writing group in the morning, I rediscovered this poem by Marie Howe, and I, too, remembered, "this is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture/ after gesture..."


From Nowhere

I think the sea is a useless teacher, pitching and falling
no matter the weather, when our lives are rather lakes

unlocking in a constant and bewildering spring.  Listen,
a day comes, when you say what all winter

I've been meaning to ask, and a crack booms and echoes
where ice had seemed solid, scattering ducks

and scaring us half to death.  In Vermont, you dreamed
from the crown of a hill and across a ravine

you saw lights so familiar they might have been ours 
shining back from the future.

And waking, you walked there, to the real place, 
and when you saw only trees, came back bleak

with a foreknowledge we have both come to believe in.
But this morning, a kind day has descended, from nowhere,

and making coffee in the usual way, measuring grounds
with the wooden spoon, I remembered, 

this is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture
after gesture, what else can we know of safety

or of fruitfulness?  We walk with mincing steps within
a thaw as slow as February, wading through currants

that surprise us with their sudden warmth.  Remember, 
last week you woke still whistling for a bird

that had miraculously escaped its cage, and look, today, 
a swallow has come to settle behind this rented rain gutter, 

gripping a twig twice his size in his beak, staggering
under its weight, so delicately, so precariously, it seems

from here, holding all he knows of hope in his mouth.