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Category: mother courage

May 11, 2018

hardly invisible…

highest hope

the work of the heart might be imperceptible in terms of its inner churnings, but not for a minute will i concede that it’s any less Nobel Prize-worthy than tense negotiations on some faraway international border.

i write defiantly this morning because in just the last half hour my world has been shaken by a friend i love who is on suicide watch with her son. and for my friend and all who love in ways seen and unseen, all who have run out of words, run out of hope, i say, you are not alone, and we are throwing you every lifeline this old lifeboat has ever known.

i know what it is to be afraid for my children. i know what it is to see some measure of brokenness in their eyes. they’re human, after all, and what human makes it through unscathed?

but i don’t know what it is to have to lock up all the sharp objects, and all the potentially lethal ones too. i cannot imagine how much it hurts to breathe when each and every breath comes dry and hot and not without effort.

this is not the hallelujah mothering day post you might have imagined. life never unfolds by the calendar. not in the places that matter. i worked with kids with cancer, i saw them die on christmas, on birthdays, yes even on mother’s day. i saw them die despite all the prayers and the pleadings of the ones who, in a minute, would have given their own lives — the ultimate pleading, “dear God, take me instead. please.”

that it’s mothering day weekend, and my champion-of-the-heart friend is trying with all her might to simply make it to monday is, in so many ways, the essence of what it means to take on a life beyond measure. i count in my life so, so many glorious souls who mother beyond measure, who love beyond measure (in my book, blessedly, those two things are synonymous, interchangeable, neither one tied to biology).

they are the ones who belong in my great hall of courage. the ones who, hour by hour, stand up to forces that would surely topple any lesser mortal. i know women who’ve watched their baby, their one-year-old baby, be wheeled into brain surgery, and then spent the rest of their days pushing wheelchairs, threading in feeding tubes, chasing down every last therapy that might ease an ounce of some suffering. i know women — and men — who’ve bent low, all but collapsed, to kiss the forehead of a child who has just breathed his or her last. i know others who’ve stood at the bus stop, swiping away tears, as the big yellow bus rumbled away, carrying a child and the bully who taunts.

all of which is to say, in bold sweeps, that taking on love is no greeting-card endeavor. it comes in a thousand million equations, as many equations as there have been humans on earth. no one arrives without a mother, and no one — no one — could make it through infancy, or toddlerhood, or too far beyond, without the tender fierce protections and vigilance of one heart being sealed to and for another. in the world i inhabit, i’ll posit that motherers are indispensable clear through to forever and ever.

pray for my friend, please. pray and pray mightily. pray even harder for her son, a beautiful beautiful child who is finding it so hard to be.

pray for any and all who, day by day, hour after hour, take on the weight of the heart. of carrying one someone across some invisible finish line — staying alive, writing the exam, that the blood test comes clean.

it’s mothering day just around the bend. and every one of us with a heart, we have work to be done. maybe invisible. never ever imperceptible.

here’s a poem that fell in my lap just after i read my friend’s email. it’s titled “invisible work”…

and may your invisible work move the mountains you pray to be moved. no questions asked this week, just blessings and prayers. 
xoxox
 
Invisible Work
Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don’t mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, “It’s hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there’s no one
to say what a good job you’re doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache.”
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.
There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world’s heart.
There is no other art.
~ Alison Luterman ~
27 Comments
February 12, 2016

pulled by heart

lunch

the hour hand had just nudged itself past 5. the tableau out the window was black-on-black. the bedsheets, warm, toasty warm. the soft folds of the flannel, pulled snug against my shoulders, invited one last episode of sleep. all i wanted was one more hour. but then i remembered.

the light down the hall was already splintered through the crack under the door. the soft bells of an alarm were faintly chiming. the whoosh of the shower broke the pre-dawn hush of a house just beginning to rouse. i knew my firstborn was up and getting dressed. i knew he’d soon be barreling into the morning’s bitter cold. the headlights of his little black car would shine down the alley, turn toward the city, to the west side, to the streets where just a week ago a bullet pierced the window of the pre-K classroom in the school where he teaches. the bullet shattered glass. sailed across the room, ramrodded a metal pipe, ricocheted. hit no one. thank God. but the cluster of little 4-year-olds, who by the grace of God had been clustered at that instant on the far side of the classroom, away from the bank of sidewalk-level windows, they heard the blast, the ping, and at last the thud of the bullet dropping to the classroom’s hard tile floor. deadly sounds. sounds that shouldn’t be heard in a pre-K classroom. or any classroom anywhere.

a week ago, at 2:46 p.m., i got this text from my firstborn:

There’s been a shooting outside school. We are in lockdown, but I am okay, so are my students. Do not call, I don’t want there to be any noise in my room.

a mother’s heart all but stops when she reads those words.

it would be another hour till he called, till i heard the rush of air i knew as his voice. it was over now, he told me.

the children had all been shepherded into the hands of parents. or grandparents. or some adult who’d get them home. he, too, was headed home, he told me. shaken, so shaken by the news of what happened in the pre-K. shaken by the holes in the metal screen and the pane of glass. shaken by the glass that shattered in what looked like a cobweb of shards. shaken by the long hour’s lockdown, not knowing the whole time — as he tried to keep his sixth graders quiet — whether the shooter was inside or out of the building. shaken by footsteps that ran down the hall, toward his classroom, where the door had been locked. shaken by the news that a mother who’d come to school early to take home her young child had stepped out the school’s front door into the direct line of two men with guns chasing down the sidewalk, shooting. the mother threw her little one to the sidewalk, then threw herself — hard — on top. she waited, she’d told a teacher, lay stone still, not knowing if she’d be hit. fully expecting the thud of a bullet to her back. or worse.

monday, my kid came home with word that 46 kids of 180 kids hadn’t come to school that day. parents kept them home. they’re not used to bullets piercing classroom windows. not even on the west side of chicago. he said, too, that the only two white kids in the school, kids whose parents teach there, they’d been pulled. “a social experiment they weren’t willing to risk any longer,” was how he put it.

and then he said, “mom, if i tell you something, promise not to freak out.”

ooo-kay.

“there’s apparently a turf war in the neighborhood, and (school) is in the middle of it.”

and so as you hear those words, as they barely begin to settle onto your eardrums, onto your heart, you somersault into prayer. your every inhale breathes in prayer. your exhale begins the next, an endless loop of prayer after prayer.

you settle yourself down, slowly. over the course of hours, as you turn round and round the heartache, the insanity of it all, as you sift through the shards, examine from all angles. imagine the worst. consider the kids who call those streets home. who can’t leave.

you pray mightily.

and then, yesterday on the front page of the newspaper, there was a story with eery echoes. it was a story that happened last friday, just five hours after the bullet shattered the window of my kid’s school. it happened three miles due south. a bullet — out of nowhere — pierced the driver’s side window of a parked car where a young 25-year-old woman was sitting, talking on her cellphone to her dad in san diego. suddenly, he told the reporters who had called him, she started to say her head hurt, her head hurt. then the phone went dead. the dad in san diego couldn’t figure out what happened. frantic, he called his daughter’s boyfriend, who called her roommate, who ran out onto the street and down the block where she found the woman slumped, near dead. the woman died from a bullet that “came out of nowhere;” two men chasing down the street with guns. the stray bullet — a bullet not meant for her — killed her.

as i sat there reading the news story, tracing the lines that connected her story to the one i knew from my own kid’s school — same day, same short span of hours, same damn  scenario, guns and chasing and flying bullets — i shuddered at the tragedy, shuddered for the father who now told the story, who now tried to explain how — as she sat in her car on her quiet street on her way home from a job where she’d just gotten a promotion, in a city she loved and had moved to after college — he was now burying his daughter, “the only one in her preschool class who could read, a straight-A high school student, a magna cum laude college graduate,” the father told the reporters.

and so this morning, knowing my kid was getting dressed to go back to the school where the pre-K window is now covered in plywood, while they wait for new glass to come, while they all pray for calm in the streets, i yanked back the sheets, and i planted my wobbly feet on the cold wood floor of my bedroom. i shuffled down the stairs, and i opened the fridge. i piled turkey on slabs of bread. i tossed in an apple. i poured a tall to-go cup of coffee.

not for one minute could i send my kid out into the cold, back to school, back to streets where a gang war wages, and not do the feeble things a mama does: i slathered mustard on bread, i folded slices of deli turkey, i tucked it all in the little brown bag he uses day after day. i prayed the whole while. i prayed mightily.

when he tumbled down the stairs, and saw me standing there with my mustard knife in hand, he looked surprised. “mommo, what are you doing here?”

just packing lunch, was all i said. he knows me well, my kid of 22 years. he knew without me saying so that that sandwich was super-packed. stacked with prayer upon prayer. besides the turkey.

as i closed the door behind him, as i told him i loved him, called out,”be safe,” i traced a sign of the cross onto the back of his thick winter coat. it’s all i could do.

it’s the truth of motherhood, or one of them anyway: we’re armed with so very little. especially when up against a world of flying, piercing, life-taking bullets.

yet we don’t abandon our station: we rise before the dawn, we shuffle down the stairs, we do what little we can. we pack a lunch, with a motherlode of prayer.

we are pulled by heart out of slumber. we are pulled by heart into prayer. deep into prayer.

what will we do? what can we do? is there any way out of this insanity that spills blood on the front seats of cars, on front porches, and playgrounds, and too many sidewalks and streets in this city?

38 Comments
May 15, 2014

strong women: a reflection on mothering

mother's day mass

the church i most call home — old st. pat’s in downtown chicago — the one that long ago told my beloved mate and i — he, jewish, and i, catholic — that “it’s the same God. different language. go for it.” and that has blessed and been home to our two boys, raised at the front lines of the jewish-catholic dialogue in a sunday family school that steeps jewish-catholic children in both their faith traditions. that beloved church asked me to step to the altar last night, at the annual mass for mothers, and speak from the heart, to give the meditation after communion. the theme, simply: strong women.

so pull up a pew, and listen in. this is what i said, huddled behind the lectern, tucked alongside a great tall statue of the blessed virgin mary (who i believe kept my knees from shaking, and whom i nearly knocked over with one of my sweeping broken-arm gestures. egad!), with a barricade of trumpeting potted easter lilies rising in a thicket between me and the flock of gorgeous women who filled the pews. with one deep cleansing breath, here goes:

I think maybe I thought it was going to be like babysitting. Only without having to peek out the window to see if the grownups were pulling in the driveway. And without having to race around the house — in the two minutes between the crunch of the tires in the drive and the turn of the key in the back door — hiding evidence of the pillow fight that made the little darlings — oops! — an hour late for bed.

And, maybe I thought, when it was your turn to be the grownup, at least you got to pick the names of the little rascals you’d be watching.

For the next 20 years. And then some.

Nope, no one could have truly clued you in, into this life leap that catapulted you into motherhood. No one could have sounded loudly enough the early warning system. No one could have made you believe, no matter how many times they whispered it in your ear: This will be the hardest wholesale rewiring of who you thought you were in the world. And it will test your every instinct for survival, for faith, for long-distance endurance.

Fact is, you were hardly alone — though you might have felt you were stranded on a godforsaken island — when, in those early days, you were totally flummoxed by the wee swaddled bundle, the one who weighed in at less than a sack of flour, for crying out loud (oh, and, yes, it did that too — cried out loud. Till you were certain the cops would be called, and you’d be revealed as not-ready-for-licensing in the maternal department).

Who would have feigned surprise, if, once or twice — or 100 times a week those first couple weeks — you’d strongly considered returning said bundle to the delivery room that delivered that babe in the first place?

After all, in the deep darkness of those late noisy nights, you’d figured it out, hatched your escape route: Come the next inky twilight, you’d just mosey back to the maternity ward, drop the squawky bundle at the nurse’s station, attach a post-it note that read something along these lines: “So sorry. This is way more than I ordered. You really should find someone better suited to the job. I’m afraid I’ll break/scar/ruin (insert your own disaster verb here) the little sweetheart.”

But then, in the next instant, when those matchstick-sized fingers curled into the fleshy folds of your neck, or clung to your breast as if you were the life raft (which you were), or when you inhaled a whiff of that newborn baby scalp, or marveled at the chubby thigh that was dimpled — and delicious — from the get-go, you surrendered all over again.

You felt that hot streak of mother love rise up from deep down inside, and you knew — even though you had not one clue how — that you were in this for the long haul.

And: There is no turning back.

No turning back from the toughest job you’ll never get fired from. Even when you swear to your best best friend that you really blew it this time.

No turning back from the job that promises to test all the parts of you that you were proud of, and all the other ones you’ve always known you were sorely lacking.

No turning back from the closest you might ever come to knowing what it means to be the first-response rescue squad, to save the gosh-darn day (even if all that means is that you find the lost cellphone just before you toss the dirty jeans into the sudsy washtub). To be the one and only who can soothe sobs, make the hurt go away, quell the queazy tummy.

Here’s a little noticed omission: If you flip through the dictionary, and dawdle in the M’s, you’ll find the definition for Motherhood severely lacking. You’ll find no mention of the resilience that’s required, or the capacity for your heart to triple in size, exponentially, year after year.

You’ll find not a word about the long nights of courage when the little numbers on the thermometer keep rising, and all you can do is walk in circles, draw the bath, climb in and pray.

You’ll read nowhere about the cavernous hours you spend pacing as the minute hand on the clock ticks round and slowly round, until the click at the door — the one you begged the heavens you’d hear before your heart pounded through your chest — the click finally comes.

You won’t see mention of the tossing-turning nights, the ones when you lie awake, playing and replaying the playground scene, the one your little one tearfully spilled into your arms, as you tucked him goodnight and he told you why he can’t go back to school. Ever.

No, motherhood in all its nooks and crannies can hardly be charted for all its dips and inclines, its shadows and, yes, its radiant graces.

To be a mother is to sign on for life. To take your seat in the front row of a love affair — a heart-to-heart entanglement — that unspools from inception, and knows no pause.

Some days, yes, you’ll be the teacher. But, more often, you’ll be the one who’s soaking up lessons you’d otherwise never have had the guts to tackle. And your little person, so often, will be the one who’s spilling wisdom, speaking truth, and doling out humility by the cupful.

Truth is: You thought you were loving to the outer limits of your heart, then, one dark afternoon you’ll never forget, you held your breath for one long hour while the doctor read the CT scan that would tell you if your kid’s spinal cord was severed, and during that hellish 60 minutes you’d already decided, so help you God, that you’d be the one to give him bed baths the rest of his life, and to sit by his pillow reading Hemingway and Twain and Homer and Joyce till the end of time, if that’s what it came to. And when the all’s-clear sign comes, you drop to your knees and swear to God you will never for an instant take for granted the messy kid who cannot, for the life of him, pick up the killer piles off his bedroom floor. And whose beautiful mind is the one piece of him you were not willing to surrender. Not even in your hour of deepest darkness.

And then, too soon, the day will come when you leave that kid on some leafy college quad, or watch her board the flight to boot camp, and your knees will shake, and your heart will feel like its cracking — so much so you’re tempted to drive to the ER, because maybe, you think, this is a real live heart attack, this pain that’s piercing through your chest — and you walk away — more alone than you ever knew you could feel — and you wonder where all the hours went, and if you taught the kid everything you really should have made sure she knew. And did you tell her often enough: I love you, just the way you are.

And you think back over the fevered nights, and the dawns when the retching at the toilet would not end. And the tears spilled over mean words hurled on the playground. And the countless negotiations you endured — bargaining for one more hour before curfew, one more text before lights out, one more bite of broccoli before you’re allowed up from the table.

And you ask yourself — how in the world you did it?

And you take a census of this woman you have grown to be, and you realize who you are is mightier than the fiercest wind, and tenderer than a balmy April’s breeze. You’ve weathered tornadoes of the heart, and sailed on interludes of giggles and long walks squeezing hands.

You’ve stood up to bullies and talked down the coach who tried to cheat your kid. You’ve defended and pleaded and apologized for the wrongs your kid did not intend. You’ve gone woozy when you spied the gash in your kid’s head, and held him down with kisses as they stitched him back together. You’ve melted into tears when the stranger called to thank your kid for sticking up for hers — in front of an entire lunch table, God bless him.

And you’ve gotten up in this blessed beautiful church to tell anyone who’d listen: The holiest job I’ve ever done, the one that soared my heart to heights that I’d have never known, the job that took my broken self and made me whole, it’s the sacred call to mothering.

And it is for the strong of heart. So help us Mother God. Amen.

the boys above, of course, are the boys i so love — a baker’s-dozen years ago almost….

i bring this to the table on one of those days — there are so many, aren’t there? — when it takes every ounce of every strength we didn’t know we have, to be all that we need to be for the children we so love. blessings to all who mother in all and every form…..

quick note: i just changed the title above (used to be “a reflection for mothers”), because i believe in all my heart in the distinction between mothers, a defined set, and mothering, a verb that includes all who mother in all its many many forms. to me mothering means to nurture, to embrace, to scaffold the ones we love, so they can find the wind beneath their wings. men mother. women mother. women of all ages. i’ve seen little girls mother.

so here’s the question: how would you define mothering? 

17 Comments