Protection

Last winter I went on a silent retreat and spent a good hour or two pouring out an angry letter to God.  The gist of it was this:

I grew up with the story that my dad cried the first time he held me because one day I was going to leave for college.  Well, the apple doesn't fall far.  Since the day Silas was born, I've wondered about, and at times dreaded, feared and grieved, the fact that these kids will leave.  It's not just that I think I'll be sad, but it's that they'll go out there, where I, their protector, am not, and so many possibly-damaging things are.  I'm a worst case scenario thinker; my brain flashes instant movies of Silas hitting his head on the diving board, or an intruder creeping up the steps at night, or any disaster overwhelming the people I love.  It's always been so.   So naturally, my gut is to protect from these assaults/accidents/injuries as best as I can.

This protection is what I was thinking about as I sat knotted in the corner of a couch pouring into my notebook.  God promises a lot of things, but physical protection isn't one of them.   The famous shepherd psalm says when you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I am with you, not if you walk in a dark valley or when I'm with you we'll bypass the dark valley, but when you're in that valley -- you are going to the valley! -- I am too.

The fact of the matter is I don't want my kids in a dark valley, much less a valley of the shadow of death.  What seemed pretty clear as I sat there writing is that God wasn't going to pull his weight in protecting my kids from that valley's corners -- toxic friendships, undertows, sexual predators, low self-worth, pornography -- so I was going to have a hell of a job.

This is what I railed about as I wrote, furious that since He wasn't going to take care of protecting them, I had to, and frankly, it was too big a job to catch every pop fly and fend of every potential wolf -- what if I missed one, looked down for a minute, squinted in the brightness of the sun?  More to the point, I continued, why would You bring these small, fresh people into the world, birth them into adorable round bodies to let them fall from the nest onto concrete over and over before their wings are strong (or prefrontal cortexes are fully developed)?  What is the point of injuring the small ones?

I know this view is unbalanced.  I knew it when I wrote it down, too.  I wasn't thinking about the goodness, about all the silliness children splatter around a house, about their being adults one day who love, make striking art, ask good questions, feed hungry people.  But that's what fear does; it bores something singular into us until that's all we see.

After the retreat was over, I articulated all of this to a couple of friends, who listened well and gave no answers, and then left my loaded notebook closed and the ache deep down.

Months passed.  School ended.  The kids grew inches between January and July.  Maeve started talking.  I wrestled God in other questions.  I started to sit and be quiet in the mornings.  The tomato plant grew taller than Ben and still gave only three rotten tomatoes.  I read through The Artist's Way again.  I started to play more.  And yesterday, I realized something had shifted.

I'm not sure whether it's Silas's sudden height, his lanky body and the textured hair he pushes ("styles") every-which-way.  Maybe it's how he blasts pop music around the house and sings every word now.  But I think the shift started the spring night I sat on his bed in the semi-dark and talked about the f-word.  Yeah, he knew it already.  He'd seen it written on the mirror in the boys' bathroom, and a friend had told him what it meant (how did that conversation go??).  I asked who had told him, and the moment the question left my mouth, I knew I had to retract it.  He hesitated as I said, you don't have to tell me.  Thanks, he said, and rolled toward the wall with a contented sigh.  In that moment of separateness, I suddenly could see him as a teenage boy lying in his bed wrapped in his own thoughts.  And for the first time, I didn't feel scared.  Funny how we're prepared for things as they come rather than as we worry about them.

This week I started reading a heart-wrenching book called Rare Bird.  It's the story of how a 12 year old boy died in a freak flash flood on a balmy September day.  It's written by his mother.  I'm only a quarter of the way into it, but after reading last night, I went and touched each child's face, climbed in bed with Eden and pulled her against me.  We can't protect these people.

Anna, the mother and author, was as intentional as one can be about protecting her kids.  And then one was gone.  Somehow in the fierce horror, survival looks possible.  As she articulates my most dreaded reality, there is beauty.  And her God still loves.

I woke hours earlier than I wanted to this morning, body stiff and mind racing, and sat outside in the cool morning as it gathered humidity.  The point of all of this -- of raising small people, living without armor, sending our kids into the world wearing only skin, living that way ourselves -- is not protection.  It can't be.  They have to go into the world and get knocked around -- it's the only way they'll have substance.  And they have to walk in death's valley, because that's where they'll learn God actually is with them.

My job isn't to protect them -- it is right now, but protection's not the end goal; that's exhausting and terrifying work.  My job, really, is to pack well for them before they go, to teach them to communicate, to love them, to apologize often, to be affectionate and honest.  And then release them.  That's my job.

I've known this always, but fear is loud; it tends to kick up a drumbeat that drowns out a lot of other voices.  When you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, fear no evil, for I am with you.   I didn't realize until right this minute that I'd left out the middle part of that line -- fearing evil.  Evil is scary and none of us gets to live untouched by it.  But it isn't the strongest, and we aren't traveling alone.

Face Down (in a good way)

Last Sunday standing in church singing, tears rose in my eyes and burned as I refused to blink.   I started to think about lunch, about what we'd pick up -- a rotisserie chicken?  Moby Dick's kabobs? and they resolved.

It happened again.
And then a third time before I realized I was choosing to concentrate on the shirts of the people in front of me, their hair, the background to the song lyrics, the tops of the trees through the high windows rather than let myself feel.

Crying involuntarily, in nice clothes, wearing mascara, in a crowd is different than crying in my house or car with a chosen person over a chosen thing, sure.  But what struck me wasn't that it felt inconvenient to cry without tissues in a big room where other people weren't crying.  The thing that struck me is that I was feeling a sudden release from the worries ticking through my mind -- summer's halfway through, have to pick up a prescription, two year old won't stop writing on walls, must be my fault, when will I find time to work on the story I'm writing  -- and I was dodging it because thinking of burritos felt tidier.

Really?

I think of myself as pretty willing to process/emote even when it's ugly.   I have no interest in being a person who can't let go of her composure and sense of control, yet there I was in a sanctuary (def: place of refuge or safety) choosing to avoid.

At this stage of life, mid-life we'll call it now that I know four men who've bought porsches and two who've bought jeep wranglers -- the childhood dreams realized -- I'm finding it pretty easy just to pay attention to what's in front of me.

There's a lot in front of us.

And it takes time to stop and take our own pulse (60 seconds of silence, really).  It takes time to write through a gnawing sense of angst til we hit the root.  It takes time to expose a tender part -- the need we're suddenly struck by, the loneliness of the day, the thankfulness for all the green and smell of sweet grass that saturates us in the rain, the questions about if these rolling days of monotony are enough.  And then it takes more time to reckon and wrestle with the realities.

The other day I walked in from the car and lay face down on the rug.  Even though it is summer, even though this week we've had lazy afternoons lounging on couches reading, that day, in that moment, there were too many needs to meet --
Mom, come on, come get me some cereal.  
I can't,  voice muffled in the rug
You CAN.  
No, literally I cannot.  
But Mom!
You guys will have to take care of yourselves.  
Mom! We need you to COME.
Someone can make the cereal.  
Mom, come ON.
I can only lie here.
Mom!

Someone pulled on my leg.  Someone put a grubby little finger in my eyes to lift my eyelid opened.  Someone tugged my arms, and eventually they wandered away because there really isn't much to do with someone who won't move.  They ate cereal.  They argued and yelled and played nicely and yelled and played nicely and threw a toy down the stairs.  Maeve probably picked that moment to go draw little people in crayon on the wall of her room (I only discovered them last night).  And I kept lying on the floor in peaceful protest.

It takes time even to lie on the floor.  And even on the floor, there's some urgency (or many) still nagging -- the deadline looming, the fact that I've been mixing half and half and skim milk for days for the kids and just need to buy whole milk.

I've been thinking about rest, not just sleep but rest from doing stuff, meeting deadlines, ticking items off a list, incessant running, talking, keeping up.  We need some rest here at mid-life (and quarter-life and three-quarter life) while we watch our face break into creases we didn't expect to see until our 50's (why didn't anyone tell us about the 30's?) and slide into our new cars (porsches, or as the case may be, new minivans).  I need some rest, the playful, real kind.  And when my eyes burn, I need to let them burn and listen, even if that leaves my face smeared and nose red, which it will, because even that -- any sort of admission -- opens a kind of rest.

Today I am resting.   I'm on my way to the bay to visit friends.  A sweet friend is playing with my kids, and even in the humidity there's a breeze and cloudy sky.  Sitting at an outside Starbucks table (I'd imagined a picturesque coffee shop on the water for my writing pitstop, but instead I'm in a strip mall...) I'm tempted to lie down right here and now on the pavement in my new posture of refusal to *go*, and rest for a few.  Maybe I'll wait for the bay...

Camp Thor IV: The Shadow Weeked

Thursday afternoon I dropped Silas off with my brother Max (Ben would meet them there) so they could drive to North Carolina for Camp Thor IV with three other fathers and sons.  As I was leaving, I heard Max tell Silas to put on his pants so they could go tend to the bees, and fifteen minutes later, I got a call saying there had been a little accident.  My first thought was Silas swarmed with bees, but no, he'd sliced his finger with his pocket knife.  Is it bad?  Well, you should probably come.  And I knew Max telling me that, meant I should pull a u-turn right there on the highway.

I walked in to find a slumped, red-cheeked boy with a frown to his knees sitting at the table, finger wrapped in gauze and duct taped held above his head.  We drove to a surgeon's office, and I sat holding Silas's cheeks, holding hand-blinders up to his eyes, and whispering to him while the doctor put several numbing shots into his finger, scrubbed it (was the knife clean, by chance? ... I mean, it was backyard stick clean; he was whittling with it yesterday), and put four stitches into the skin of his knuckle.  Just as she was finishing, I felt a wave of nausea, a little lightheaded, and in less than a minute, I'd turned green, eyes rolling, and passed out cold.  Apparently they yanked Silas off the table and hoisted me up, where I lay for longer than the whole procedure had taken, waiting to be able to sit up. Unprecedented.

Friday was easy.

Today is Saturday and while the boys are away, we girls (cousins and aunts) are making yarn wall hangings, banana bread, and having a sleepover while the rain drives against the house.  At least that is what we were peacefully doing until Eden walked in from the deck with wide-eyes: I think one of the chickens is dead.  No, it's probably just sleeping in the grass -- they do sit in the grass.  But her eyes were big and she shook her head.  We all walked outside.  It turned out not one chicken was dead, but three, sprawled on the grass and partially deafeathered.  Somehow, a fox had dug under the fencing and attacked mid-day during the rain and left the bodies.  The fourth and last chicken pecked happily around the yard, apparently oblivious to the massacre that had just happened.

We stood in the kitchen wondering what to do -- scoop up the chickens' bodies that looked plastered to the ground with trash bags and throw them out?  As Sara went out to survey the scene, I picked up the drumsticks and chicken thighs for the hot grill.  Ella, 10, at my elbow, groaned, I'm not eating THAT!!  Riiiiiiiiight. 

But I had to grill the chicken anyway or it would go bad.  As I squeezed out the door, Toulouse, the dog, shot out past my leg rampant with urgency, and within a minute, the fourth chicken was cornered and attacked.  The house spun into chaos -- I was screaming after the dog and to the heavens, Ella and Eden hysterical laughing-screaming in the kitchen, Sara down NEXT to the chicken coop shrieking at the scene, and the two little girls still in the house watching Daniel Tiger arguing with each other like cartoon babies: yes!  no! YES!  NO! YES!!!  NO!!!  YESSSSS!  NOOOOOOO!

Sara has since gathered the dead chickens, and the wounded one is still making broken warbles from under the deck -- we don't know what to do with her but shoot her, so she's still there.

The chicken legs are cooked and plated on the table where no one will touch them.  Sara is showering off the trauma.  The big girls and I are settled on the couch processing, and the little girls continue to argue. 

Go Camp Thor Shadow Weekend.

a poem

This poem from poem-a-day (poets.org) popped into my inbox the other day.
The tone hooks me -- late June extravagance.

Solstice   Tess Taylor

How again today our patron star whose ancient vista is the long view turns its wide brightness now and here: Below, we loll outdoors, sing & make fire. We build no henge but after our swim, linger by the pond. Dapples flicker pine trunks by the water. Buzz & hum & wing & song combine. Light builds a monument to its passing. Frogs content themselves in bullish chirps, hoopskirt blossoms on thimbleberries fall, peeper toads hop, lazy—              Apex. The throaty world sings ripen. Our grove slips past the sun’s long kiss. We dress. We head home in other starlight.  Our earthly time is sweetening from this.

Filled and Full

I'm sitting at the kitchen table, and it's 9:30PM.  I've been tuning out the jet lagged tumult upstairs for quite sometime in hopes that, dazed by their own fatigue, each child will finally collapse.  Two now have.  But Maeve, whose chattered and called for the last hour, just started yelling full voice.  I responded several times with go to sleep!  no more!  But she kept on.  At what point will freshly-asleep Silas and Eden wake up to this?   Maeve, it is time for sleep!  I whisper-yelled, always a sign impatience has started to crawl on my skin.    And then, WIPE MY BOTTON!! (bottom)  She'd been sitting on the toilet that whole time.  So sorry, Maeve.

This afternoon we pulled into the driveway after eleven days away: Santa Barbara to celebrate my beautiful sister, the big family all in a house, her 30th and graduation, tacos at sunset; Costa Mesa for hands in sand, more tacos, looking full-faced at women I love; the Virgina countryside for retreat with a church I love, fireflies and frog catching, such good words. 

I am brimming.  Not even brimming, sloshing with overflow.  

 

Grateful.

May

There were a few things I'd forgotten about May.  In fact, I'd forgotten entirely about May, the lost month between my birthday/Easter and the end of school/Eden's birthday.  

Well, May is wild! -- wild with growth, the month of true spring, each week a new series of blooms erupting from ground or tree; and wild with movement as school kicks up all the fun its withheld all year -- field days and field trips, popsicle parties, presentations, projects.  Suddenly there are more papers to have signed and shoved in folders, more hours to appear at school, to stand places and cheer for kids, to list words they have to spell or check stories that are to be finished and illustrated.  The pace was head-spinning and what I heard myself exhale all month as we coasted into parking places two minutes before was we made it, because by the skin of our teeth we did, over and over.  In May every entrance and exit was a feat of organization -- bags locked and loaded by the door for pool or field or class, uniforms washed or at least shin guards found, and matching socks to cover them.  And all the while, mounting anticipation of June, summer.

June.

The warblers arrived, the trees turned summer green, and June burst over the mountain.  It smelled good, tasted good, and was gentle to the eyes. 

                                -my side of the mountain

The smell of late May into early June is intoxicating, deep pockets of honeysuckle hanging low, mowed grass, rain-stirred earth.  All of May it has felt like this, like June was crouching just on the other side of the mountain waiting to burst.  

It has come! 

The heat is rising from the pavement and mugginess settling into the air. 

Thunderheads pile up in the afternoons.

We all exhale.

Tomorrow is the last day of school for the kids.  We are remembering whom we want to thank, the people who have carried them through this year, sometimes at a wrestle, sometimes with ease.  Silas will bake his pound cake-for-teachers this afternoon, the one he claimed as his own in 1st grade and  always loves to give.  And Eden will draw pictures of girls wearing necklaces winking, and use all sorts of adjectives like humorous and encouraging.  And then, just like that, another school year will end.  

Pound Cake for Teachers (Cream Cheese Pound Cake, from Orangette.blogspot.com)

      makes 2 loaves

3 cups flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temp

8 oz cream cheese, at room temp

3 c sugar

6 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 325.

Grease two loaf pans (can also line with parchment, easier to remove)

Whisk together flour, baking powder, salt.  Set aside

In a stand mixer, combine butter and cream cheese; beat til soft and fluffy.

Add sugar and beat 2 more min.

Add eggs one at a time, beating well, and add vanilla.

Reduce to low and add flour mixture in three doses, beating just to combine. 

Bake ~55-60 min, or until golden and knife comes out clean.

Let cool in pan before removing.

Be at Peace with Spring (even though homelessness sucks)

Class at Miriam's today was not the usual reading and analyzing, jockeying for witticisms, reading our work aloud.  Today we sifted through a stack of poetry books to find poems to write on index cards and share (poem in your pocket day). There was lots of chatting and conversation, and I ended up locked in conversation with someone I've loved sitting next to for a year and a half. Today I watched him spin out -- a narrative of grief and injustice and he contorted into someone I'd never seen.

Driving home I wrestled with despair, with the deeper-than-grief I'd seen on his face and felt in my chest, with my utter helplessness, with how complicated we humans are.  We can face nothing without our interpretation -- so many realities layered like films in any given moment as we all watch from our own set of eyes.

My head spun with questions, all the same questions I'd pelted God with when I went to the park week after week and day after day -- What is the point?  I have nothing to offer!  I'm just as thirsty as everyone here!  What good is it for any of us?  What difference does it make?  What can I do to help?  I can't do ANYthing to help.  These wounds are too deep.  The system is too broken.  I don't know what to do!  What did YOU do??

And as always, almost obnoxiously, happens when I shout these questions, the answer quietly sifted in through my outrage:  I went to people, and I loved them. And though that does not resolve the heinous stories that pour out of the shelters on 2nd and D, nor fix the fact that there's no ready housing for a 75 year old homeless man who can't quite care for himself and has psychological needs, nor so many other bleeding problems, it was enough to quiet me down because it was true.

As I climbed Massachusetts Avenue, I passed a billboard that said be at peace with spring. It was a Claritin ad, but it struck like a good word.  Be at peace.  Be at peace as the huge towering trees wait, still bare to the bone.  Be at peace with buds that show no sign of petal. Be at peace with the wet slick concrete, the puddles, the dripping gutters, tiny crocuses in the old grass.  Be at peace.  

There is so much landscape-wrenching change in spring. The rain pounds.  The air is still cold, shivery and uncomfortable. The mud tracks our steps. Bulbs pierce the ground. Branches are punctuated by buds.  Buds bloom wide enough that every one of their petals fall.  Leaves push in, tiny and tender, waving and exposed. 

Spring.  It is a battle to fend off winter. It is a battle to live life on the other side of barrenness.

Be at peace with spring.
Be at peace with the battle for life, with the hope of another round.