pull up a chair

where wisdom gathers, poetry unfolds and divine light is sparked…

Category: mother and son

May 21, 2008

breakfast of champions

the little one was shlurping up the last bit of waffle a la jam, running way behind this morn, when he called out, “excuse me, can i have my sports section?”

he didn’t seem to mind the strawberry dribble running down his cheek. but he did mind when i–the one charged with shushing him out the door and down the sidewalk, somehow sweeping to the schoolhouse door before the whistle blew–did not oblige.

demurred, in fact, with a simple, and emphatic, “no, sweetheart, we’re late.”

still gulping, he protested: “but you can’t interrupt my morning schedule.”

oh. so sorry. hadn’t realized, sir, that what we had here was a routine, a way of being, a moment on which the day depended.

of course i’d noticed that, morning after morning for the last few days, while the rice chex soak up milk, you, my slugger sweet, soak up RBIs and ERAs and all those alphabet equations that long ago and always have escaped me.

but i had not heard the sound of cement drying, and this becoming what it’s been for ages long before you and who knows how long into the beyond: the rite of little boys and sometimes girls obsessed with all things round and flying through the air, cracking off of wooden sticks and diving through the dirt.

you have joined the ranks, my little reader, of those whose day begins with the shaking out and creasing of the pages where all the world’s a horserace or a ballgame or a wobbly putt rolling toward what might be a rodent hole but, in fact, was put there for the purpose of men and women wearing god-awful-colored pants and shoes with little nails jutting out from underneath the toes.

you, too, now scour the front page, search for what you call the headline, the score of last night’s game. and then, you bore inside. you up and rise off your stool or chair, you dive head-first into the somethings you call “the standings.” you report, out loud, all sorts of names and numbers. and by then i’ve lost you, i am sad to say.

just this morning, as i combed the house for keys, ran back for one last swallow of caffeine, you were broadcasting in spanish, no less, spitting out the scores–“quatro to uno,” you barked–for those who cared not to know in english.

quite impressive, little boy. you who months ago could have cared no less for all those scribbles on the page. you who thought you’d never read a number or decipher all the letters crowded there together, a herd masquerading as a word.

in a world where newspapers are whirling at the center of a storm, where few and fewer see the economic sense of printing news on paper and plopping it on your doorstep–such service, and such fear, will we go the way of the milkman and the knife sharpener, those door-to-door deliverers of goods and service, long lost–someone needs to understand the power of the third section from the front. the one marked plainly, sports.

it is from here that whole lives of depending on the news are born, are launched, are set in motion.

i have watched it time and time again. my brothers, four, my own boys, first one, and now the other.

it is reading, yes. but it is so much more. it is learning how in this dog-race world you measure up. it is boiling down the game of running bases to charts and graphs and teeny-tiny type. it is drama on the field–and life–condensed to bare-bone stats.

it is the way a boy with spoon in soggy flakes first reaches out beyond his little world, into that of world beyond.

what’s on the screen at night, becomes his in the morning, there in black-on-white, just beside his cheerios and wheaties, his waffles and his raisin toast.

it is the breakfast of champions, with a splash of milk. and orange juice on the side. hold the pulp, please. pass the syrup.

i find it wholly charming to watch as little boy begins to sift through all the chaos of the world, and claim as his the simple practice of nose-diving deep into the sports page.

at least you get no grass stains sliding into home.

do you make sense of your world through daily rituals? how and when did you learn to order your day through the religious practice of some sense-making routine? do you too have your breath taken away watching little children grow, take on the ways of grownups all too soon?

10 Comments
March 25, 2008

get better box to the rescue

at last, he’s asked for it. that might mean–after a long stretch of nights on the bathroom floor, after middle-of-the-night calls to the doctor when his hot little body started to shake and could not be stopped, after two rounds of mean nasty medicines–he’s finally coming back with the living.

(i should mention right off that this has nothing to do with the ol’ easter story–that most recent mention around here of a return to the living; rather, this is simply the tale of a boy and a bug and a box that seems to hold magical powers.)

it’s the get better box, and it lives on a shelf in his bedroom. way up high, where only a mama on tippiest toes can get at it, where she’ll blow off the assemblies of dust, lay it down at the side of his bed, or the couch if that’s where he’s stretched.

it’s a box that comes out only on days when there’s nowhere to go, and not much to do, except maybe to gauge the rise and the fall of the mercury there on the stick your mama keeps shoving under your tongue.

it’s a box that in our house is the nearest thing to wizardry, imbued as it is with the pure healing powers of trinkets and bits and thingamajigs. like the doctor’s black bag of long long ago, whatever’s pulled out from its shadowy insides is certain to fix you, or at least to distract you till the fever retreats.

it is all part of the witchcraft of healing a child. four tablets of fever-fighters, washed down with the voodoo of playthings reserved for the sickbed.

whatever it takes, is the mantra of grownups charged with the curing of limp, pallid bodies. of mouths that won’t open even for ice cream, mouths that seem only to moan. of foreheads so hot you worry whatever’s inside will be singed.

why, we wring washcloths and lay them on heads. we draw baths at 2 in the morning. we soothe and we coo and we rub. and all that we get, often, is more of the groaning.

until, at last, at our house, at least, that box is unearthed from the highest of heights.

if you cracked open the lid, peeked just into the shaft of light you’ve let in, you would see there before you an inventory of the ordinary: stickers, and play-doh, and puppets to slip on the tips of your fingers. you would see pencils the size of a toothpick, in a rainbow of colors. and small slips of paper to fold, or to scribble upon. you would see a stone rubbed smooth at the edge of a lake. and a feather or two, plucked from the trees, where a disrobing bird might have left them behind.

what you would not see is the incandescence its contents bring to the face of the boy who, at long last, looks up from his pillow with the faint light of joy there in the black hole of his eye.

it is the first sign of hope, and it comes from the box, i swear on a Bible.

just now i hear humming, clear from the couch. where the boy is at play with a whole troupe of puppets. it’s been nearly a quarter of an hour since he last called my name, which given the most recent days in our house, is quite rather a miracle.

the idea was not mine, nor did i have such a cure-all when i was a child. a dear and wise mother i know, one whose charm was, in good measure, the make-believe world she built for her children, she gave me instructions long long ago, and assured me the powers the squat box would bring.

and then, leaning in, she whispered the part that mattered the most, she insisted.

“when your little one’s better you must, together, take it outside, lay each ingredient in the sun, and explain that the ills are escaping and pure healing sunlight is being absorbed. it is the ritual, as much as the rarity of the box, that makes it so special,” i remember her saying.

ever since, it’s as much a part of our sickdays, as is the rubberband on the glass of the afflicted, and the folded-up washcloth there on the brow.

i can hardly believe i once wore a nurse’s cap on my head, but never had heard of the get better box. only once admitted to the ranks of motherhood, did a mother i love whisper the surest cure in the books. one so certain to cure, it’s not written anywhere.

until now.

the sad truth of the get better box story is that the mother who first spelled out its magic is now nursing a daughter with very bad cancer. not all the get better boxes in the world seem to be working. so on this day, when her magic is casting its spell here at my house, i wish and pray i had something to offer to her. i send love. i send light. i send prayer. what healing rituals did you grow up with, or have you birthed for your little ones?

5 Comments
March 19, 2008

not too big

any day now, it’ll evaporate.

i’ll look out the window and not see the little boy bundled in snow suit and puffy snow pants, the one too little to know it’s quite little-boyish to pull up that hood, pull it so tight, so only his little boy cheeks, all rosy and round, poke out from the layers of puff upon puff. i won’t see, anymore, how he kicks that one chunk of snow all the way home, from bus stop to house, a 10-minute meander that has him winding and spinning and kicking and scooping and, yes, ykkh, licking that snow.

any day now, i won’t walk in his room to kiss him awake, only to find at the foot of his bed, an old cardboard box he’s made into a house for his little two rabbits, who he’s tucked into bed, maybe read them by flashlight a story, whispered their prayers, then kissed them goodnight.

any day now, he won’t fit on my hip, that perch of old bone that was built, i’m convinced, to hold up a child in tears, or in heartache, or, every once in a while, in deep cuddling mode.

any day now, his legs will get longer, his words will get less of a little-boy lisp. and the occasional lapse into pure make-believe will go poof, will vanish away, overnight.

there won’t be a bear with a name. we won’t set a place at the table for that wild-haired lion named leo. (a cat who insists, by the way, on rice chex topped with bananas, more milk, please; a diet eerily close to the one thing his trainer could eat–and does–morning, noon and most every night.)

any day now, he’ll be all gone, my sweet little boy.

he’ll be replaced by a model less likely, i’m supposing, to give me a rub on my back for no reason besides that he still loves the feel of my skin. he won’t want to climb in my bed and play 20 questions on saturday mornings. and i doubt he’ll hand me the phone and ask me to dial because all the numbers just mix him all up.

so, right now, and right here, i have every intention of cupping it all in the palm of my hand. like sweet and cool waters, there at the edge of the stream on a day that’s unbearably dry.

i’ll suck it all up, suck every last drop, before it slithers away, slips through my fingers and back to the stream, where it rushes away.

i won’t get it again. this water comes once, comes in a rush that at first feels too much, and too hard to swallow, even in gulps. but then as it goes, as it trickles away, down your wrists, down your arms, back to the stream, you feel, already, the parch in your throat.

of late, the pangs come often, come hard. i miss him already. i long for these days, and they’re not even gone yet.

it’s a trick of the brain, a trick of the heart. and it’s not just a trick for the mamas among us. all of us, each, every one, we know what it is to miss someone we love before they’re not here anymore.

i really don’t think i’ve some special equipment here in my brain, the gymnastic button that lets me leap forward in time, and somersault back. it’s all of us, i’m pretty sure, with that human capacity to long and to miss, before it’s the time.

it’s the thing, is it not, that churns deep in our soul, propels us to love and love deeper. to cherish. to know, in our blood, with the swirls of our fingertips even, that what’s in our midst is sacred, is holy, is never forever.

and so, i go through my day with one extra eye. it’s trained on the child growing before me. i reach out and grab when the moments are sweet, and then all the sweeter.

the boy with the bear. the boy who climbs, still, on my lap. takes my hand in a crowd, squeezes it tight. the boy who calls out my name in the night, and awakes curled in a ball in the morning, all flannel and cowboy pajamas, and rosy and toasty, and playing like a ’possum.

it is a hard thing in this world to know just how to ready a child for all that awaits, a planet of wars and digital overload. a world where too many children are bounding toward grown-up, skipping right over the parts that teach them tender is golden, is good, is–in my book–truly essential.

so i stick with the basics, with what i know best, and what i believe with all of my whole. and i let it all play in the slowest of slo-mo.

i relish the old cardboard box, and the chance to tuck in a bunny to bed. i aim for the winding way home. and a sweet little boy in no hurry to harden.

i’ll savor each drop of each day. and know, soon enough, i’ll be ever so thirsty. and my sweet little boy will be big. too big for my hip. but never, my heart. which grows right along with him.

if this old chair has brought me anything, it’s brought me a place to pour out my love affair with my little one. forgive me the days i get sappy. i can’t really help it. see, if nothing else, some day that child will have all these pages to pore over, to read once again how his mother, she loved him. not a bad thing to bequeath, so i’m penning it now, while it’s bright in my eyes. the other thing is that writing about him has made me savor him in ways that might escape me if i was only tangled up in his moments. to write is to step back, make sense, untangle, see clearly. feel the pang right there in the heart. and so it is, and so i write. and you, if you choose, if you care to, you read along.

do you have that gymnastics button in your brain, the one that makes you leap back and forth in time? the one that propels you to a deeper grasp of the fact that what’s before you really is precious, really does deserve your fullest attention? how does it work for you?

and oh, by the way, that ol’ lazy susan is spinning afresh. not quite spring. but fresh, none the less. give it a click.

5 Comments
January 23, 2008

seed scatterer

somehow, the other night, i swallowed wholly one of the truest truths of growing a thinking child from scratch.

mighta been one of the hardest ones to swallow, too.

but in the end, i am convinced, i’m one inch closer to a place that’s wiser. even if the getting there was bumpy going down.

you see, somewhere deep inside my head i think i thought that passing on the flames you hold most deeply, dearly, was a matter simply of holding up the wick, turning to the ones we nurse, we diaper change, we spoon feed, we wipe off, bandage, and shuffle on their way. the ones whose ears we whisper into, the ones whose shoes we tie, the ones whose pencil grip we help to rearrange. the ones whose papers we are no longer asked to read, for they are thinking now wholly on their own.

to pass the flame, i thought, was merely this: we turn and touch our kindled wick to theirs. and, poof, the burning light continues.

only, the other night, deep in thought and conversation at the kitchen table, deep in one of those tete-a-tetes that starts out slow, builds, spirals and suddenly is way up high on some perch where air is thin, and grip is slipping, i realized that not all flames are so easily lit from soul to soul.

not when you have, all your life, raised your child to think, to ask, to sift through what he’s told, to make his own only what sinks deep down to a place where what fits is weighed, is looked at from all sides, is held up to the shadow-casting light.

the subject, more or less, was religion. and in this house that’s a subject that comes with many threads. we weave here. we are braiders. we sift for golden strands, we entwine. we understand that some are shared, and some are wholly different, depending on whose birth threads we are holding.

more than religious, though, i am of the spirit. i find God in the scarlet flash of papa cardinal in the snowy boughs. i feel the shiver of the holy spirit when i watch the moon shadow play upon the window panes, and spill onto the bedclothes that bundle up and over my baby boy.

i whisper the hail mary, but i brush away a tear when lost in prayer on yom kippur. i feel the breath divine in hebrew, latin, or plain-old sidewalk talk. i needn’t be in church to know that holiness is near.

and so, it was the burning flame of spirit that i assumed–no, i counted on–i’d pass to my firstborn.

as clearly as he got my curly hair, the dimple of his father’s cheek, i thought the one most precious breath i have, i’d turn and breathe easily, wholly, into my soulful child.

oh, he had it when he was little. looked up at me one night, when he was all of two, and asked, “who puts God to bed at night?”

he had it, just a year ago, when he stood on the bimah, proclaiming the words of the Torah at his bar mitzvah, brought down the house, i tell you, with his grown-up understanding that nearly made the rabbi’s pale.

but now, now he’s taken history for thinking children, he’s heard word of wars fought in the name of God. and philosophies that stretch his mind into interesting new shapes. he is, right now, in this interlude, not so certain anymore.

and as we talked, i ached as the words he spoke fell upon my ears, sifted down to where my soul does all its breathing.

i tell you, it hurt to swallow, and, yes, to breathe.

but he is mine, and that’s unshakable, and, besides, i believe i’ve glimpsed the outlines of that soul. even if, right now, he calls it something else.

late that night, tossing, turning, in the way a mother sometimes does, it came to me, the image of the seeds.

i realized that what we do, in the long, long years of planting, is we are merely sowers of the seed. we scatter all life long, the bits of truth, of hope, the few scant things we know.

we scatter as we turn the words, in conversation after conversation. we poke a fertile nugget deep into the soil as we take our children by the hand, show them places and faces unlike the ones they would otherwise know.

we sprinkle seed through the books we read them when we pull them on our lap, turn pages. and then, years later, leave tucked beneath their pillow, just in case they find a minute for inhaling thought before they fall to sleep.

and after all the sowing, i realized, we can only stand back. pray for rain and sunlight. keep watch on what’s out where we have laid our lifetime’s crops.

hmm, is that a little bit of green, poking through the loamy soil? is that a tendril, reaching for the sky?

we’ll not know the harvest for some time. but we will trust that all the planting, tending, praying, was not in vain.

some seasons, what comes up is rich, is plenty, fills the bins. some seasons, what you put into the ground, isn’t what comes up at all.

but there will be a reaping. and, God willing, it will be more than you had ever counted on.

that’s the way it is when it comes to growing a thinking child. we’ve no flame to simply light their way, only seeds to scatter on their path, and wait–and hope–for blossoming to come.

what hard lessons has parenting brought your way? what, in life, did you set out thinking would be a cinch, only to find it was not the way you’d naively imagined? how have you made peace when the lessons you hoped to teach didn’t sprout in quite the way you’d planted? for those of you who’ve forged this trail already what were moments when you knew, oh you knew, that raising a thinking child held glories all its own. even when their wisdom caught you by surprise?

and by the by, today’s the blessed day of our resident mountain bird, the one who sings as if a warble-throated mama bird. here’s to sweetness, pure light and heart-melting goodness. in song, in deed. happy blessed day, pjv-az.

13 Comments
December 10, 2007

waiting

i kept an eye on that clock. the minute hand seemed to be moving like mud through molasses. or maybe it was up there taking a bit of a snooze.

after all, it was — and i knew this because despite the sleepy part’s insistence otherwise, despite its inclination to give up and quit the one job that it has in this world, it was still telling time — and the time that it told me was that, yes indeed, it was minutes away from the middle, the deepest dark hour, of the night.

and the child i’d last seen a few hours ago, when i dropped him off at the curb in the snow and the glow of a street lamp, well, he was out coursing the roads, the roads getting icy, and i was there in the kitchen thrumming my fingers, pretending to read, but really i wasn’t paying one bit of attention.

my attention, instead, was rather devotedly glued to the hands of the clock and the knob on the door that i was willing to hear make a click.

someone’s home, it would say. the someone you wanted to see is safe now, is here. is back from the place where you have utterly no control. where cars can cross lines and odd things can happen. where outcomes are wholly, eternally, always, left to fat chance.

not home. not there in the view of your eyes where you can be a little more certain — if not utterly 100-percent guaranteed–that all will be well.

and so in the abyss that plunges between those two cliffs — uncertainty and certainty — i engaged in the ancient and timeless art of waiting.

to wait, sometimes, is to be pregnant with hope. sometimes to wait is to dread. but that’s not the case, not really, when it’s a child you birthed who is out in the world, and it’s dark and it’s late and you would like once again to hear the clomp of his feet sloshing snow on the rug in the hall.

to this particular species of waiting, you realize quite quickly, you are quite new, quite unaccustomed. you only just now are getting a taste of the trials that come with the letting out of the spool that, until now, you kept rather close to the palm of your hand.

the art of waiting for someone you love, someone to please come home, is an art that has lost some of its power here in the day of the cellular tether. worried? give a call. can’t find? cell can.

back through the history of time, though, there has been waiting and waiting. penelope waited for odysseus. civil war mothers waited for soldier sons. and now i, a mother whose son had just lost his cell phone, waited for mine.

odd thing, the book that was waiting with me, the book i was allegedly reading, the book whose words my eyes at least glanced at but didn’t take in, not so much anyway, was a book with a passage on waiting.

as the clock ticked ever-so-slowly, i passed over again the letters spilled there on the page.
this time i read:

“waiting, because it will always be with us, can be made a work of art, and the season of advent invites us to underscore and understand with a new patience that very feminine state of being, waiting.

“our masculine world wants to blast away waiting from our lives. we equate waiting with wasting. so we build concorde planes, drink instant coffee, roll out green plastic and call it turf, and reach for the phone before we reach for the pen. the more life asks us to wait, the more we anxiously hurry.”

the author of these words is gertrud mueller nelson, whose book, “to dance with God,” (paulist press, 1986) is a treatise on ritual, and one of those rare books that offers more, plentiful more, with each reading.

she encourages us to practice the art of waiting, the art of delayed gratification. our children, most of all, need to practice and practice, she urges. and this time before christmas, this time when the world is rushing so madly, she suggests in a deep counter-cultural challenge, is the peak time to settle in and make the most of the incubation that begs our attention.

“brewing, baking, simmering, fermenting, ripening, germinating, gestating are the feminine processes of becoming and they are the symbolic states of being which belong in a life of value, necessary to transformation,” nelson writes.

and i listen.

is not the slowing of time, and the quickening of attention, the whole point of our practice here? are we not, day after day, looking to slow the e-z, the instant, the world without pause?

are we not working to learn to cup in our hands, the winged butterfly landed amid his long flight, the holiest waters of life as they’re poured? are we not trying to stop, take a drink, quench the unquenchable thirst?

what then to do with the minutes near midnight, when the child you love, the child just starting to be off on his own, finding his way in the dark, isn’t home yet?

i suppose i could fritter away the slow-moving minutes. picture the car on the side of the road. the children jolting. the call that won’t come.

or, i could sink down to a deeper place in my heart. i could rumble around, think of the ways that he keeps me in stitches. think of the light in his eyes. picture the mop of his curls. remember the rhythm with which he plucked on his big double bass, there at the edge of the stage, when the light happened to shine and catch the tops of his curls.

i could take hold of the minutes of waiting and savor the blessing of beholding the boy who i love. i could practice the art of filling with hope. being pregnant to life and the possibility that requires some time, takes no short cut.

i could simmer some thought, brew a tall pot of ideas. i could ripen to love.

and when the click of the door comes, and the slosh of the very big shoes, i could sigh.

the long wait is over. my blessing spills over the side of the pan, roasting there in the slow, hot oven.

do you practice the art of waiting? do you try to savor the slow road in the interstate world that offers express lanes? in this wintry season of waiting, how do you make the most of blessed incubation?

speaking of this wintry season, i managed to find time to do a little housekeeping here at the chair over the weekend. and what spins on the lazy susan is new, is december, is plentiful. please give it a whirl.

and just in case you’ve been aware of the calendar, as i have, tomorrow is the very last day of our first year. i’ll have some thinks on the year, so please do come back. the coffee will be hotter, the cake on the platter just a little bit sweeter. do stop by for a visit. love, the chair lady

very last thing: bless you to julie for sending me to “the dance with God” in the first place. it was a fine friend while waiting the other night.

5 Comments
August 29, 2007

heart to heart

the little red heart is the size of a button. so is its twin, the other half of its whole.

when the sun peeks in his room, when he bounds out of bed and into his school clothes, he’ll slip his into his pocket. so will his mama. i promised i would.

a heart in your pocket is a very good thing. especially on the very first day, the very first long day, when the time between saying goodbye at the school door, and climbing off at the bus stop, way past lunch in a lunchroom, and scrambling all over at recess, way past standing in lines and marching through halls, past sitting in chairs and reaching in desks. way past finding your name on all sorts of supplies, and even a locker you barely know how to use.

a heart in your pocket is a very good thing.

you give it a squeeze when you need to. you give it a squeeze when you’re sad. or you’re wobbly. or lonesome. you give it a squeeze when you’re certain its powers will work like a cell phone, connect you in magical ways, without even dialing. and the heart on the other end of the line will be there, will know that you’re calling, really she will.

because hearts in the pocket are like that.

they connect you.

and when you are six, and going off in the world, for the very first time really. for the very first time where the lumps in your tummy, and the ones in your throat are so big you think they might choke you. or send you flying to the boys’ room, way, way down the hall, before it’s too late.

the need for a heart, the need for a something, became wholly apparent last night in the dark.

that’s when your heart’s bared. that’s when all that is hiding comes out of the shadows. that’s when your room and your bed get overly crowded. that’s when the things that behave all through the day come haunting. they decide in the nighttime, they want some air time. they want to romp in your head.

that’s when the feet came. tiptoeing down the stairs, around the corner, right to my side, that’s when the words came too: “mama, i need to talk to you about something really serious about school.”

and so, of course, i stopped what i’d thought was important, scooped him onto my lap, and i listened.

“ i think i’ll be homesick.”

that was round one. before it was ended we’d talked, re-climbed the stairs, re-tucked into bed, re-kissed that soft head.

then came round two.

again, feet shuffling.

this time i was not far from his room. this time the words came in whispers, barely audible whispers there at the top of the stairs, where i promptly sat down.

“i’m nervous about tomorrow. i’m afraid i might vomit.”

the child goes straight for the heart. cuts no corners. softens no blows.

in a word, he took me right back. took me back to the weeks, there were two of them, one in kindergarten, one in first grade, where i too got so sick, so dehydrated, they twice tossed me in the hospital. i remember it vividly. remember the little pink puppet they sent me home with. but i remember other things, too, that weren’t quite so nice. things that still give me shudders.

i know what it is to be so afraid, so rumbly inside that you can’t hear a word, and the room feels like it’s swirling.

i took my boy by the hand. we had us some digging to do.

“we need a heart,” i informed him, as i led him. as if i knew just how to fix this. as if i was a sorcerer and i held the potion that would cure whatever ailed him. sometimes even parents play pretend. because they have to. because sitting there falling apart would not help. would not do a thing.

so we pretend that we’ve all sorts of lotions and potions and balms. we dab cream on a cut, make it feel better. whip up concoctions to take out the sting. we do voodoo and rain dances, for crying out loud. whatever it takes to get over the bumps.

the bump last night called for a little red heart. or a little wee something. something he could slip in his pocket, and know i was there. not down the street, around the corner, four more blocks south.

we dug through my top drawer, the one where i stash all my treasures. there was a rock shaped like a heart, a tarnished old ring, a bunny the size of a quarter. and the two red see-through hearts.

we sifted and sorted. i let him decide. i told him how his big brother, too, used to go off in the world with me in his pocket. explained how it worked. how you give it a squeeze and you know that i’m there. that i’m thinking. and loving. and waiting. for the end of the day when he’ll be home again.

i told him i, too, have him in my pocket. how i too would carry a heart. give it a squeeze. send a signal. all day, back and forth, little hearts would be flying. would be defying all logic and sense, and even some science.

but they’d not ever quit. would not break. not run out of batteries. they are forever.

good thing when you’re six, you know things by heart. and you believe, most of all, the things that your mama, she tells you.

especially at night, especially past bedtime, when all of your insides come tumbling right out. when the house has no noise, and the moon guides your way down the stairs.

that is the hour that’s blessed. that is the hour that mamas and papas and all the people who love you pull out their needles and thread, and even their little red buttons, whatever it takes to stitch you and your heart all back together.

now go to sleep, sweetheart, and when the day comes, just give me a squeeze. and i’ll do the same. we’re as close as two hearts in a pocket.

that’s a promise i’ll keep. i promise.

any butterflies and rumbly tummies at your house? what magic spells and secret potions do you have to chase them away? do you remember your first long day away from home, tucked in a school desk, when you thought your heart would pound right through your chest, and the flip-flops in your tummy nearly did you in? did someone you love soothe you? make you believe you could get over the hump? do you still get butterflies? i do…..

8 Comments
July 10, 2007

when the phone rings in the night

nowhere in the manual, the one they forgot to send home from the baby hospital, does it mention that 5-year-olds on a road trip for the very first time might wake up in the middle of the night, in some faraway motel room, and start breathing in short little puff-puff-puffs that further in the manual might be diagnosed as hyperventilating.
well, children don’t follow manuals, forgotten or otherwise.
children, when they’re non-fictional, toss and turn, according to the one who dialed the phone in the middle of the night last night, until finally they call out in the darkness, proclaim that their head is hot, and their tummy rumbly, and they want to talk to their mommy.
and so, at 2:38 a.m., the phone rings.
your dream, in which you are chasing baby chickens around your city-girl friend’s apartment–hmm, paging dr. freud, paging dr. freud–is interrupted.
you are, in those murky first few seconds of a middle-of-a-dream phone call, scrambling the synapses in your brain like some combination bicycle lock where the numbers must line up in just the right sequence, trying to figure out, of all the possible things that could be wrong, just what one it is that is precipitating someone to call you when the clock quite clearly is flashing 2-3-8, with a colon there between the 2 and the 3.
then, you hear it. you hear the pathetic little whimpering, muffled through the static of a cell phone, a cell phone far away.
but you are the mother of that whimper, and you’d know it anywhere. you know it now. even in the dark. even bounced from earth to heaven, back to earth, or however it is those dang phones get the whimper to your ear.
you get a minute or two of explaining, deep background from the dialer, and then the whimperer takes phone in hand and holds it back no longer.
suddenly it is 2:42 a.m. and you are hearing no words really, just the sound of sadness. supreme sadness. supreme i-feel-crummy-and-i-am-in-a-comfort-suite-in-the-middle-of-south-bend-indiana.
and you, now wide awake like a mama bear who hears a rustle outside her cave, you are ministering to what ails him, but really you are talking to a silver plastic box, a box with little holes punched in it.
you are not cheek-to-soft-pink-cheek with the little one you love. you are not stroking his brow, the way you always do, the way your mother did to you.
you are doing the very best you can but there are two hours, at least, of city and cornfields between you and the so-sad boy.
and even if you could, even if you jumped in the car right then and there, it would be nuts to head out for the motel just off the interstate, in the middle of a strip mall with a starbucks planted right next door.
so you pretend you are right there. you use your words to fill in the empty space between you and the phone and him. you are clear, and you are full of promise. you get him to slow his breathing, to get a little sleep, and then come home. he whimpers yes, to all of the above.
but, like waves of tummy flipping that will not be quelled, the calls keep coming. updates from there at the faraway sickbed. 2:53, they are moving to the couch. 3:07, it was better now it’s worse.
then, at last, at 3:19, a call comes, telling you the little guy is fast asleep. on the couch. wet washcloth to his head.
and you too, the caller says, should try to sleep.
but you’re a mother, and you’ve been roused, and it might not be so easy to get back to chasing chickens there in your dreams.
the last thing you expected when you laid your head on that old pillow was that you’d be shaken from your sleep by a little boy all knotted in his sheets 110 miles away.
but, really, that’s the part of being a mama that takes your breath away. it is a roller coaster ride without a seat belt. it’s full of yelps and whoops, and heaven only knows what’s around the bend.
it’s messy business. it is groping in the dark. fumbling for the phone. it is, since it comes without instructions, making it up as you go. bumping into walls, but somehow putting one foot in front of the other. at least on a good day.
and the whole time, we are led by one fat muscle that will not stop. will not stop its lub-dub squeezing, letting go.
we mother by heart. and whatever graces are stocked in the pantry by the MotherGod who keeps us from running out of what we need, before we can get back to the store where they sell these things.
we mother, too, with history. lying there, fully awake, i begin to connect the dots. i think of just a week ago, in a tent in the woods, the same little guy was crying for his room. i remember how the summer before first grade can be a little bumpy.
i know, because this is a bend i’ve been around before, that there will be bumps. and even a little guy who, by day, can play a sword-wielding super hero, by night can put down the shield, can bare his tender side.
i think back to all the nights when, as a baby, he went to sleep nestled between his mama and his papa. i think that world will always be the safest, surest thing to his little tiny soul.
and i understand how his world feels topsy-turvy when he’s with his papa but not his mama. and he’s in some air-conditioned motel room. and not the little room at the top of the stairs where the lake breeze blows in.
and so i wait for the sound of the car pulling up to the curb, so i can wrap him in. so i can hold him in my arms and make his world not so wobbly anymore.
is that not the most amazing super power? and i can do it without a sword.
that’s what happens when the phone rings before the light comes.

tell your middle-of-the-night phone-call stories. do you remember longing for your mama in the middle of the night in some faraway unknown bed? do you remember being longed for? how did you make it right? how did you set the world back to where it didn’t feel so wobbly?

and a most blessed birthday to the two girls who both were born to two of my dearest longest-lasting friends. sweet veronika and molly, happy happy happy. to the woods of vermont, and the wilds of chicago, i send the sweetest birthday wishes.

3 Comments
April 11, 2007

thinking in circles

last night, while i scrubbed the onion burn off the bottom of a pan, i dove in deep in conversation with a mind i have known since delivery, which i think was just the other year.

heck, i can close my eyes and see that brain unborn, an ultrasonic skull, white-on-black on screen, the fuzzy outlines of cerebrum, the big black space i once mistook for lack of brain. until the radiologist talked me off the ceiling. i’ve had my eye on that gray matter since way back, in the beginning.

only last night, suddenly flashed forward, we parsed evil versus harmful. evil, he pointed out, is big picture; harmful is far less sinister in scope. next, he told me why he worries about organized religion; he worries that too many are too judgmental. who do people think they are, he asked, judging other people? it simply makes no sense. the God he knows forgives.

then he tossed out this: “people say you’ve gotta be good because you’ll go to heaven. it’s not about heaven,” he said as if that’s plain as day. “it’s about how you’ll impact other people.
“oy!”

not a heartbeat later, he’d moved onto deep forgiveness and i’d moved onto the pan that steamed asparagus.

he circled the sink and me, the boy who’s walked in circles as he thinks ever since he started thinking, which might have been the original day he lifted foot from ground and placed it back again. nearly 13 years, he’s walked circles ’round me; now, i realized as i grabbed for towel to dab at dripping pan, he thinks circles ’round me too.

when all the pots were clean enough, he and i indulged in sweet dessert—even deeper conversation. we retired to the maple table, we pulled up chairs, an after-dishes tete-a-tete all too rare in the world of over-busy, overburdened children. a tete-a-tete that might be required should anyone ever think to license those who sign certificates of birth.

while he ticked through list of one to twelve, a ranking of degrees of evil, each culled from news reports of recent years, i couldn’t help but note how on the days the news had happened, i’d so fiercely blocked him, little thinker, from this very litany of horrors—columbine, timothy mcveigh, the east texas worse-than-lynching death of james byrd, jr., the black man tied behind a pickup truck and dragged down a country road (my thinker’s pick for evil no. 1), and of course 9-11, which unfolded just minutes after i’d put him, then third grader, on a 12-seat van, newborn in my arms, his first solo ride to school on the far side of the city, a ride that, torturously that september day, coursed him through the shadows of chicago’s tallest towers.

back then, not long ago, i’d not wanted him to know the world could hold such hell.

and now, just minutes later, he was almost-man equipped with mind that studied every shade and shadow of every real-life horror story, probed for what it meant well beyond the news. a mind, i couldn’t help but notice, i could drink like desert water for the rest of all my days.

i shook my head, although he didn’t see me shaking. how, i wondered, did we get to here so fast? how is it that all those bedtime prayers, and all those late-into-the-night conversations, the ones where tears were wiped, the ones where stories told and questions asked sometimes felt like brill-o to my heart, how is it that while i was keeping watch, i swear i was, he had unfolded from little thinker of big thoughts into this mind, this soul, who, as i watch, is sharpening that tool, the way a carver sharpens knives, so he can use it to try to rid the world of what he sees as evil and injustice.

there are not, it seems, too many moments when you freeze the frame, see what’s taking shape before your very eyes. not on-stage moments. not graduations. not holding up a torah, or taking first communion. but right there, at the kitchen sink and just beyond, at the same maple table where you once set your elbows and launched a life of asking big fat questions.

there are a million moments along the road to that maple table and the parsing of degrees of evil that are, simply put, not a lot of fun.

there were fevers when the mercury shot to 105. and back at the beginning, weeks of rocking him beside the tub with the water running hard, something about the rushing sound that soothed (hmm, wonder if that’s why he now takes showers that could go on for hours).

there were schooldays when i heard all about how he’d stood alone on the playground, or perched on the roof of the climbing house, keeping watch on all the other children playing games without him.

and then we up and moved in the middle of fourth grade, and he endured a whole semester as the new kid from the city, the kid who in a town where baseball truly mattered, barely ever got on base, and swung at nearly every ball.

but sitting at that table, watching how he thinks, realizing that i was talking to a soul i couldn’t have designed to be more nourishing to my own soul, i couldn’t stop the warming down my spine: i’d do it all, all over again. in a blink, please sign me up.

it is perhaps the sweetest after-dinner morsel i’ve tasted in a long, long time: half an hour being circled by my firstborn child.

might i mention that it is exceedingly hard to write about how you love your growing-up child. i groped my way through the dark just now. i do it not to say how wonderful he is–that’s not the point at all. i do it to hold up the fact that here we are, some of us, in the very blessed front-row seat, watching the spectacle of true creation. it is almost unspoken, shared perhaps in pillow talk, the truth that what we’re watching takes our breath away. this is, i hope and pray, a place where we can whisper out loud the things not spoken often elsewhere. it is majesty, in rawest form. and though it’s hard as heck to put words to God’s most divine creation, i thought it worth a take. this, after all, is life in roughest draft. as always, i pull in close, i would love to hear your thoughts…

and while you’re at it, please, keep my blessed friend susan and her mama in your prayers. they could use a few today.

4 Comments
April 9, 2007

into the woods

leave it to the italians. they have a name for today. they call it “pasquetta,” or little easter.

why, they wonder, after all the deprivation and darkness of lent, the shadow that burst, finally, into light, into the unbridled exuberance of easter, why, they wonder, why pack it up like so many leftover baskets, and tuck it on the shelf ’til next year?

mais non, they would say if they were french. but, of course, they say it in italian. dag nab it, is what they mean, though, again, they don’t say it quite that way.

those smart italians, they do a very smart thing: they grab one of those baskets, they pack it with leftover yummy things from easter, and they take to the woods. specifically, they set out in search of a watery place.

water, on pasquetta, is key. there is, depending on your level of gusto for this little easter, some splashing involved.

in fact, all over europe today, there are folks splashing. they are not being mean to each other. as a matter of fact, they are partaking of the little easter blessing.

in hungary, apparently, boys knock on doors. girls answer. boys splash girls. girls invite them inside. they feast. they send boys home with wildly painted easter eggs.

on easter tuesday, the girls return the favor. they knock and splash.

it must be riotous, all this knocking and splashing and heading to the woods with your leftover pink and green eggs.

but, besides the fact that it’s quaint, there is, it seems, something rich about the european approach to little easter. to all of life, perhaps, but certainly to little easter.

it is about taking linear measure of time, peeling back the ordinary, extracting mystery and sacred, raising simple hours into the realm of the extraordinary. it is about pushing away the rock of workday expectation, exploring the cavern of the deep unknown, the unexpected. reveling on a monday.

because a friend i love has been telling me for months i need to, have to, must not sleep until i read, “to dance with God,” (paulist press, $14.95) a poetic, eye-opening 245 pages on family ritual and community celebration written by gertrud mueller nelson, i finally cracked the cover over the weekend.

she is very wise, this deeply jungian, deeply spiritual woman, who in 1986 wrote this book while living in california. she says this of what she calls “holy time out”:

“holes are created in time through the creation of holidays–or, indeed, holy days–where the ordinary and everyday stops and time is set apart and not used. every seventh day (sabbatical) since the story of creation is a day of being, a ‘day of rest.’ that is what a feast is. the feast has its origin and its justification in its dedication to celebrating and worship. it belongs to the gods.”

she goes on to tell us that plato, of all thinkers, put it this way: “the gods, taking pity on mankind, born to work, laid down a succession of recurring feasts to restore them from fatigue and gave them the muses and apollo, their leader, and dionysis, as companions in their feasts–so that, nourishing themselves in festive companionship with the gods, they should stand again upright and erect.”

the feast–or holy day–then, is, “the very act which makes the transition from crawling beasts to the upright and conscious human,” nelson writes, “a transformation which makes what is human equal to and a companion (comrade) of the gods.”

i don’t know about you but we don’t spend a whole lot of time around here even noticing feast days, let alone packing our baskets and heading to the woods.

apparently, gertrud does. she says that on easter monday she always let her children stay home from school. they went off to church early in the morning, but then they took off to the woods, often to a marshy place. through binoculars, they watched the water birds, the mating birds, doing their springlike thing. they inhaled the woods, the little tips of tender green budding on all the branches, turning the gray of winter woods into the lacy green of early spring.

getting wet, she says, was always part of the picnic. back to the baptismal waters, and the holy sprinklings, that are so very much a part of easter.

immediately, i found all of this a notion i could warm to: an excuse for picnic. tromping through the woods. stopping time for one more day. stealing children from the classroom, for the sake of exuberating spring (i know, i know, it’s not a word, but i just made it one, so now it is).

so last night, well past sleeping time, i tiptoed in the dark to the bedside of my almost-man-child, the one who loves the woods and who also had just flicked out the light when he heard me coming up the stairs. i told him my little easter idea. at first, he broke out in a grin (he turned the light back on, that’s how i know that), but then he thought about the school day, and thought, not even for a lunch hour picnic could he leave the load at hand.

oh, well, i sighed. fact is, we might have done our little easter backwards. we had taken to the woods already, on big easter. taken kosher-for-passover-for-easter picnic to the woods, in our glorious mixing of religions. it seemed the place to be, the woods that is. for all the reasons up above.

but still, i think, i might take the little one on a pasquetta picnic. or maybe in the twilight, i’ll take my boys by the hand, and take them off to where the gods urge us to recline. just one more day, a holy day.

a holy day for splashing in the woods. i think i like this little easter.

all right, all you wise people, do some of you already know and do this little easter? have you been splashing away for years without me? and what of the notion of not confining the holiday to one day, but extending exuberance? might we do well to weave more holiness and more exuberance into our ordinary time? are the italians, and all the europeans, not onto something? something much larger than little easter?

photo credit: my sweet will. taken on big easter. we both spotted the moss island amid the marsh; my camera said it was busy reclining and couldn’t be bothered, so will came to my rescue, once again.

p.s. it’s monday, the lazy susan spins afresh…

4 Comments
March 22, 2007

questions without answers

hands loosely on the wheel, old blue wagon gliding to a stop, i was blankly looking through the rain-splotched windshield when the little voice behind me shot me this:

“mama, when we die, what will happen? will the world start again?”

he barely gave me time to gulp, time to gather thought, compose an honest answer, when the rat-a-tat continued.

“well, will i die?

“will you?

“when will dada die?”

i could not keep my eyes on the road. i turned and locked on his. he was looking up, looking my way, searching me for answers.

i gave him my best shot. told him straight. yes. yes. and, oh, honey, we don’t know.

all three appended with this attempt at reassuring: not for a long, long time.

then i launched into heaven 101.

praying as i went.

how, i ask you, in the middle of a ho-hum drive to home from hockey, did the most essential questions come popping from his mouth? why not something simple, like, mama, can i have macaroni for my lunch?

macaroni, i could handle. knock that sucker, kaboom, clear out of the park.

camus and sartre, hiding under hockey jersey, i could only fumble, hands barely groped at bat.

it is, i swear, the deepest privilege of being a mama or a papa, or a someone who breathes in sync with little people. being the first pair of ears to hear these questions as they leap from child’s soul. to witness from front row the human mind expand, go deeper, gather goods to last a lifetime.

it is self, unedited. it is child’s quintessential work, exploring the unknown. making sense of everything from how the dandelion blows to what happens when i am no longer. asking giant questions of the universe, and aiming them, first shot out, at the original sounding board of life.

in the case of my little boy, that would most often be me, the one who birthed him, nursed him, rocked him through his early, howling bedtime hours. as i’m still the one he’s with the most hours of the day, i’m pretty much the moving target on which he throws his thinking-child darts.

out of the blue, left field, in the middle of a meatloaf, the questions, they come hurling. there is no agenda in a child’s mind, no timetable for when a question comes. in the seamlessness of mind and soul, the question’s posed in the midst of its creation.

you never have a clue, never get a notice, that your very breath might soon be sucked away by the tender beauty, the monumental power, of the unexpected puzzle of the hour.

it is, for all of us who spend the day in striking distance of a child’s heart, the often-unrepeated script. the lost dialogue you can never seize again. it unspools so suddenly, so without ceremony, you can sometimes only hope that you’ll remember. but then the business of the day shoves the thought aside, and no matter how you try, you can’t retrieve the words, or the magic of the moment.

sure, we sometimes hear the silly lines. used to find them tucked in the pages of the reader’s digest. nowadays, they come in fwd emails, alleged collections of the darnedest things that children say. i often laugh then hit delete.

but what about when the script comes tumbling forth in real time, and you’re the only one who hears. you’re the one who gets to fill in blanks, connect the dots, pick a or b or c, all of the above. take a stab at the deepest truths known to humankind.

because the job i do each day, the job besides the ones i do at home, is to scribble madly, gather quotes, listen closely to each and every word and how it’s said, i have a rather unstoppable inclination to reach for pen whenever quotes unfurl.

especially ones that nearly make me wreck the car (although you might argue that scribbling while trying to hold the wheel only enhances the chance of body shop in my offing).

of all the wise souls i have quoted, and i have quoted many, i don’t think that any lines have done as much for stealing breath as the ones i’ve caught while stirring, steering, scrubbing curly hair.

the jottings that i jot, long ago from thinker 1 and now from thinker 2, are in fact a first-hand record of the unfolding of a child’s soul, even when the questions are hard to hear, the answers hard to come by.

lest you misguidedly surmise that all are thick and dense and heavy, here’s the one he lobbed my way, just yesterday, just an hour after heaven 101, spooning—yes, it’s true—macaroni in his hungry mouth.

“mama,” he began his latest theory, “i think when food goes down there’s like a theme park and it goes down a roller coaster.” uh huh, i utter, in the middle of my swallow.

“is there like an exit for the bad food,” he asks, pointing to his neck. “does it go this way or this way?” he wonders further, making motions east and west from just above that hockey jersey.

i am starting to think, now jotting my own thought, that perhaps the recent lack of sleep (see “the trouble with sleep,” 03.21.07) is doing wonders for my budding thinker.

what are the questions without answers at your house?

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