Urgent, Important, and Bailing our Ships

I am sitting in a big red chair drinking a beer in North Carolina.  We've been here for a long weekend and will leave in the morning.

The girls are tumbling around the rug; ribs are in the oven; my mom is beginning to pack up.  

I almost called off the trip because before we left I realized we were going to miss ten things -- ten!  We were only going away for a long weekend!  They were things like the final soccer game and pizza party, a nursery school open house, BINGO night for 2nd grade, my Miriam's Kitchen writing group -- all things we would have done if we'd been home.

But then, I realized if I left, I wouldn't have to go to TEN things!!!

And that thought hit like a relief and felt worth driving 8-9 hours for.

Being away has been worth it -- brilliant red maple leaves spotting the floor of brown birch, hikes with Eden, the pond high and creek rushing, clouds settled between the mountains in the distance, the sound of rain on the roof, a house full of my mom and girls.  Yesterday I sat on the couch for hours (literally hours!!) and read a whole book while the girls played school in the basement.  I never ever do that.

During Maeve and Eden's school game, Eden, "Ms New," kept sending notes "home for the parents" to invite us to different activities: an open house, a learning hour, a book fair, an art show, a conference, a nature hike.  Each event had a precise start time (9:58AM...) and "came home" on a different color construction paper.  Finally, sitting on the couch, shuffling the stack of notices dictating all the activities about to begin, I had a rush of overwhelm -- it felt like life (she makes a convincing adult).  And then, looking at her 2nd grade teacher writing, I walked to the basement for my organized, in-depth parent-teacher conference where she presented me with a rainbow picture about my wonderful daughter. 

Being here has made me wonder about how to marry the ease of the mountains with the rush of the city. There must be a way...

Many years ago I read an essay called The Tyranny of the Urgent, which talked about how urgent things in life easily trump important things; for example, racing around doing errands and ticking them off the to-do list feels pressing whereas sitting on the floor and having a tea party with Maeve I can push off forever.

Recently, so many things have seemed urgent that I've felt unable to weigh what's important.  I haven't had a sustained conversation -- on phone or in person -- with my best friends for weeks.  I've found myself more often sitting in front of an open notebook page or calendar wondering how to structure my days, what needs to give, what I need to clear space for.  At least once a week I find myself longing to pause the world and spend a few days catching up, even just to do (or fold or put away) laundry (how utterly boring).  

Part of this fullness is having three young kids and no help.  I understand that reality.  Where is our village of co-family living, bonfire meals we all pitch in for, and lots of grandmothers and grandfathers who live in our huts?  That would help a lot.

***

It has taken me two days to write this, and now I am home.  I walked in to the house, with full road trip unload: bags of books and markers, full suitcase, dirty laundry, cooler, bag of groceries -- and dumped it all on the floor.  The table still held the stack of mail/papers/books I had to go through, and the pile of days and days laundry in the basement was unbearable. 

I woke up this morning early to a mad rush to make lunches, look presentable, and get to school for an early morning (not quite as interesting at Ms. New's) parent-teacher conference. 

Welcome home.

It was surprising how overwhelmed I instantly became.  Or more accurately, I felt a small frown settle between my eyes and stay there.  Every task felt a bit too much (and to be fair, I am on the brink of a sinus infection and energy is low, so overwhelm comes easily).  

I felt dazed and at 9:30 in the morning bought myself a Diet Dr. Pepper -- not my usual routine.

This morning, I made plans to go over to my sister's house to hang out with her, her three week old and toddler.  Looking around my house last night and the loads (six? seven?) of laundry that needed to be sorted, washed, folded, taken upstairs, I almost called her to cancel so I could "catch up" (an imaginary term in laundry).  

But then I remembered last winter when my brother was working endless hours and my sister-in-law (I call her my sister, but I see how that makes it look like my brother and sister are married) was in utter overwhelm.  How could I possibly go over and help or keep her company when I am hardly afloat myself?  I kept asking myself.  

But what I realized is that if our ships are sinking -- or foundering, really -- it's better to be up to our knees in water together than separately.  And today, I thankfully could see the important over the urgent, and went over to bail.  And Ben (the magical cleaning fairy that he is) made all the laundry go away.  

Pumpkin Cakies

As soon as pumpkins appear on the scene, my kids start talking about Pumpkin Cakies; they've come to optimize the taste of fall in our house and usually mark Ben's October birthday.

They aren't quite a cookie nor a cake, palm-sized and soft, glazed with maple.  I seem, somehow, never to have shared the recipe here.  Carrie Paschall, a friend from California who just visited DC last week and walked through fall wind with me and ate pumpkin cakies in my brother's kitchen, bridging my worlds, is the one who introduced me to this magic (these, in fact, began our friendship -- they are that good).

Pumpkin Cakies

In one bowl combine: 

1 C brown sugar
14 oz canned pumpkin
1/2 C oil
2 tsp. vanilla



Separately mix together:

1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. nutmeg
3/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. cloves
2 1/4 C flour

Stir dry and wet ingredients together and drop spoonfuls onto greased cookie sheets.  
The dough will be thick and sticky -- that's ok.  Also, they won't spread at all so feel free to put them close together.

Bake at 350 for 12-15 minutes.  Top with icing below.

Maple icing:
2 C powdered sugar (it will have a better consistency if sifted)
2 Tbs. soft butter
3/4 tsp. vanilla
5 Tbs. heavy cream or milk  (cream makes this more frosting-like and milk more of a glaze)
1 tsp. maple extract (do not use syrup, it will be too runny)

Mix well and scoop on top of cooled cookies.
(you can also glaze them when they're hot if you want the icing to sink in and become part of the cookie)

ENJOY (you will)

*note*
these don't keep very well for multiple days, especially once glazed -- they still taste delicious but become sticky.  Best to eat them all the day you make them (though it's possible I just haven't found the best way to store them yet)

Weather

When my brother was visiting in August he talked about "the weather of the soul" and how sometimes instead of trying to figure out what's causing our internal "bad weather," we can just watch it and wait it out, because weather always changes.

I'm not very good at watching soul-weather; I'm more of an untrained meteorologist... and I like to control things, especially things inside of me.

At the beach this summer, the ocean was sloppy and crashing.  Ben would have a full vocabulary for the waves -- crumbly or soft, mushy or peaky -- but what they looked like to me was messy.  Even when the sea was glassy in the sunrise, promising, the red flags flapped incessantly, and the lifeguards leaned down to tell us "riptides."  It was is if the tides and wind couldn't quite coordinate; waves drove at each other from opposite directions and spray flew.  Then at some point the sandbar would emerge, and the whitecaps would quiet a bit.  And the next day, they'd kick back up.

I've had some of that red-flag weather, driving along and suddenly seeing that all four tires are flashing on the dashboard near-flat -- the waves start kicking every which way, and the wind is so loud.  And though the gas station is not half a mile away, the thought of stopping, even the thought, feels like too much.

And then some hours later, air and gas refilled, I am playing music and loading girls into the back of the car, handing cheese sticks over my shoulder and balancing their wet canvases on the dashboard, reveling in the leaves that keep raining from the trees.


It's like that: weather.

I have found myself saying "no" to more things than ever -- no to happy hour or dinner, to a speaker I want to hear, a Costco run, coffee, people.

Yesterday a friend reminded me to be gentle with myself.  Why do we need this reminder?  The yoga teacher echoed that fall is tricky, that we need to move slowly into weeks, drink warm things, create routine.  That all sounds pretty right.

So I've been saying "yes" to some other things -- sitting alone in the coffee shop with my computer, making a cup of tea (and another), going to bed.  Pulling into the gas station when I feel like I can't, because it helps hold the day together.

Right now I'm having my own secret happy hour in the corner of the kitchen -- a glass of wine and some cheetos I "bought for Silas."

In comfort-seeking I'm trying to remember which things actually nourish and which just comfort for a second (wine and cheese puffs) -- but they are ok sometimes too.  I'm practicing giving myself permission.

A friend just wrote to me about her "alternate rebellion."  She said she's waking up to how much pressure and guilt she heaps on herself about every little thing (putting something back in the grocery store in the wrong place), so she's striking out against the urge "do everything right": she's spitting gum in the bushes, leaving the hall light on all day and night.  If the store is out of organic milk (which mine is ALL the time), buy regular and keep on.  It sounds minimal, but I think we have no idea how many twigs of guilt we pile on -- and you know what they say about the camel...

This summer I bought my niece a pair of black and white leggings with big pandas all over them, kind of like photographs printed on.  And then I had a crappy day, and they were still on the floor of my room, so I put them on and claimed them.  They're now the pants I wear in the face of gloom.  There aren't a lot of other women my age at the grocery store wearing such pants, but it's like that, it's part of the permission as I weather the weather.

How do you weather the weather these days?  I'd love to know.

September Greys

September.  Usually I dive into the newness and change, the fresh beginning, energized by clean sheets of paper and new pens.  But this year, for the first time, the month settled like fog.  The kids bounded right in -- a first! -- and I settled into a gloom that looked darker each day.

One morning a friend in her 50's, the kind who sweeps you into conversation and treats you like the only person in the room -- looked me in the eye and said, "what's lost for you this fall?"

I felt the question smack even as I blew it off -- nothing's really lost, nothing big, it's just transition, normal adjustment.  And I kept moving.

The gloom moved from my head and lodged itself in my body --  my back ached, my stomach hurt, and still I had no words for it.  After three days of sleeplessness, tossing and turning, achiness, I prayed that God would help me name the block and move it out of my body.

Later that morning, I sat down and made my list.  I know that every change, even the best ones, bring loss.  But what was lost?  I listed all sorts of things about summer, even the little things that sounded stupid.  Write it all.  I kept the pen moving.  There were the long days and loose bedtimes, the freedom, the togetherness.  I wrote and wrote.  Looking at the list, I saw that what underlay almost everything was protection and control.

Dammit.  I was again grieving the impossibility of protection.

In summer, I was with my kids all the time.  Even during camp weeks, the days were shorter than school days and no work came home.  I knew whom they were with, what social interactions were like; I could even pick and choose those interactions.  There was time to make goals and hit them, to provide the kids with small successes.  I watched one of them in particular bloom into a new identity and confidence that had been lacking.  It was a time of controlled experiments, adventure, of my little birds back up in the nest.

And then school started.  Parents weren't allowed to come to campus the first day to take pictures (which we've done every year) because we're in a holding school and there wasn't enough parking.  We weren't -- and still aren't -- allowed to pick our kids up from school afterwards for the same reason.  Straight off the bat, I felt shoved away from my kids without control.

 After months that felt healing, especially for one of my kids, I suddenly couldn't trot alongside anymore and help the processing.  I had to kiss noses at the bus stop and say things like, you've got this, and then sit at the dinner table and listen to how there's no one to play with at recess, listen to loneliness.

One of my mom's many mantras is children must struggle.  Of course she's right -- a fair bit of life involves struggling, and we've got to have the chutzpa to tackle our way through it and find North again.   But in practice, to standby as our kids try to wiggle their feet into the wrong shoe for three minutes or cry their way through writing a sentence or wander around the playground alone -- it's harder.

So what was lost?  What did I believe in these waves of loss?  Ironically as I was making my list (sitting in church), I was listening to a sermon on whole-hearted living, about how God fills us,  makes us whole, is abundant.  Looking at my list I could see my heart clutching those three kids, desperately wanting to keep them safe, protected from too much exposure, astronomically bad decisions, friends who hurt them, kids who are cruel.  I wanted to keep them "safe" right here with me, summer to fall to winter and on.  I wanted them to stay little.  Because the fact was that I wasn't just sad about their growing up and out, I was scared, too.

You know how there is thinking and then there is background thinking -- the kind of thinking we do semi-consciously, underneath the rest.  Lots of times the background thinking springs from a hunch or feeling, and we don't know it's a bogus foundation until the whole tower topples, and it's exposed.
Well somewhere in the background I was building on scarcity (read this by Brene Brown).  I was believing that things were ok here, but out there, my kids didn't have enough -- not enough of God, of Love, of resilience to tackle what might come. I was moving around on a set where there was no abundance.

It's amazing how afraid we can be without knowing it.

The fact is, it's hard to release our kids, and to keep releasing them.  For me it's been hard at each turn, even the ones I was dying for (please for the love, stop sucking your finger!  start using a fork!  stop clinging to me when I leave!) and then one day they get on the bus and don't even wave.  It's good, but it's loss.  It's hard to release these people we love.

I was talking to a woman the other day who has two daughters in high school (a really cool woman I like to stand near), and I started talking about my pockets of fall grief.  Her whole face fell.  Her oldest leaves for college next fall.  I almost can't breathe when I think about it, she said.  This doesn't stop.

It's hard to let God comfort us when we don't know we hurt.

These days, I'm feeling the hurt, which mostly means I walk around a little more tender and vulnerable than usual, which isn't my favorite.  I've cried in front of more people this month than in a long time because I'm just kind of leaky -- so much for composure.  And when I feel the slip of time moving, hear Maeve's lisp (thith ith delithith), I'm asking God to help me love those times, those little faces and thoughts, instead of grip them, and to remind me that this is not a life of scarcity, even as it changes.

Poem for September

Saint Francis and the Sow

     by Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

After the first week of school

Today, Sunday of Labor Day weekend, I heard a neighbor at our front door and suddenly looked at what I was doing: it was 1:26PM and standing still in my pajamas, I was making school lunches for TUESDAY.  I hid.

Let's just say the first week took me by storm.

I was prepared for most things: both school supplies and classroom supplies from the lists; kid angsty-ness that might rise up, daily lunches (sort of prepared for this), the new bus times, back to school zucchini bread (best zucchini bread ever), mimosas with the neighborhood parents etc.

As it turned out, there's been no child angst: both kids have left each morning with a spring in their steps, early to the bus each day.

What I must not have been ready for was myself or the rest of the week and moving parts.  I'm still not sure what happened but I fell out of the week on Friday with my head spinning and in a toxic state.  There were some hormones involved, yes, and this is a time of mass transition which historically I feel to the bones, yes.  I also went to Maeve's first preschool opened house (she is a little person who can say things like "I felt a widdle nuh-vuss" and not a baby, it turns out), and fevers systematically flattened each of us for a day or two throughout the week.  Though backpacks were organized, there were still several mornings of being able to find only one shoe, and the lunches seemed to take all morning for me to pack.  My sister was in town just this week which meant swallowing a lot of first-week-of-school-mother-guilt and leaving for a Redskins game and dinners and a day trip to the bay.  And then she left, which, as usual, left has left me aimless and wallowing, at least for today.

So today I stayed in pajamas.  My excuse was Silas, who has the fever now.  We stayed home from church and sat on the couch for hours reading an E. Nesbit story in our pajamas (parts of which I am still wearing here at 9:05PM and will likely sleep in again) until lunch.  Eventually Maeve took a nap and in a moment of calm, I found myself making lunches -- like readying armor -- to stay ahead of the week.  It felt pretty normal until the guy across the street knocked on the front door suddenly exposing my two-day-ahead-lunch-making neurosis with his very presence. Fortunately, Ben fielded the visit, I stayed in the kitchen (and the lunches are done and in the fridge).

On the Road

Earlier in the day, I would have written this:

As soon as Ben arrived (night of the third day), this road trip took a sharp turn for the worse.  It's not his fault, but it's happened.  There's a kind of power-focus that kicks in when traveling solo with kids on a trip of one's invention because the only option, really, is to be fun-survivor-road-warrior or why bother; the leader alone sets the tone.  So it was.  We pounded up 95 to New York and saw family, through Connecticut and Rhode Island, to Cape Cod with the best oysters and friends (and a great white shark attack that closed the beach where Silas swam exactly four hours after we left!), and on to Boston.

Then the partner arrives.  Suddenly the two year old's whining and clinging to my leg is unbearable because she's done that for there days already and standing right next to me is a strong and refreshed other strapping parent who could hold her.  Alone, yes my eyes felt heavy while driving narrow tree-lined highways, so I chewed gum, crunched ice and made phone calls, but now that the partner is here and takes the wheel, I sit as passenger vaguely irritated and feeling my exhaustion.  

So that happened.  Then, simultaneously, the kids went batty at bedtime, breaking the we-are-a-team-of-adventurers tone into much snapping and threatening; Maeve woke on the wrong side of the bed and never righted, throwing herself on the pavement all over Boston in protest of life and breath; tiredness caught up with all of us and shot daggers through our tones; we ran a toll because I messed up the EZ Pass (all I've been doing this trip is properly paying tolls up the arm of New England); and we got a parking ticket.  

And then we left Boston, where perhaps all the kids learned is that the Boston Tea Party involved violence and wasting tea (Eden thinks this is hilarious); Bunker Hill was actually the hill one over from the battle; Mary Goose, buried in Boston in 1690, may have written the Mother Goose fairy tales, or not; and during his time at BU, Ben had a skunk living under his front steps and dropped an organic chemistry class in that building -- gesturing as we drove -- "you can drop classes? what even does that mean??" -- interest in college began.  

But now it is 9:15PM.  I have been exiled from my room at the Fairfield Inn with strict instructions to sit in the 80's carpeted lobby and have a cup of tea until the kids are asleep (the wildness continues because somewhere in this place there's a pool!)

The afternoon mellowed: Maeve fell asleep as soon as we pulled out of the city, and Silas and Eden, chums these days, listened to books on tape (do we still call them that? -- on CD, not the same ring).  We wound through New Hampshire and Vermont, skirting traffic -- one of Ben's talents -- and even ended up having a little front seat conversation.  We ended our drive in Burlington eating flat bread and wandering among street performers until it was nearly dark.

If I were in my dark room right now shushing people, this whole page would be italics.  But instead I'm in the business center (an indent in the lobby wall that has a computer) drinking Cozy Chammomile, which wouldn't be possible if Ben weren't here.  Good thing he came.